BL 50 Ctf UC-NRLF LO :> LO 00 O Religion in the University F. M. CORNFORD ' AMBRIDGE ; : ' : - PRICE TWOPENCE 8Lso Religion in the University. A meeting of the Heretics was held in Trinity College, on Wednesday evening, October 25th. Mr. C. K. Ogden, the President, briefly introduced Mr. Cornford as a Heretic whose record in the past rendered him peculiarly qualified to speak to the Society on topics which it had tended to leave in the background since the stir created by the pamphlet of the late Master of Emmanuel " Prove all things." Mr. Cornford said that, having been invited to speak about religion in the University, he wished to say what he thought clearly and candidly, without (he hoped) hurting the feelings of any individuals. The religion recognised by the University was, of course, Anglicanism, a local form of Christianity. A religion consisted of three factors : Theology, which meant a nuclear creed, with a philosophical superstructure built upon it ; Ritual, which meant certain prescribed actions related to the objects of belief ; and finally, an emotion, often called Faith a thing which has a way of eluding official recognition. Theology is recognised by the institution of professorships with tests. These tests reveal the difference between theology and other sciences. In theology the premisses are matters of faith propositions which you are not allowed to question. In other sciences to upset the fundamental notions is regarded as the highest achievement ; in theology it means persecution and expulsion. The articles of faith are partly metaphysical 621 propositions, such as the existence of a God with certain attributes, the doctrine of immortality, etc. ; partly certain alleged historical facts with metaphysical implications, such as the Incarnation and the Resurrection. How could an article of faith be defined? It was a proposition (i) for which no reason could be given (for if a reason could be given, it would be accepted by anyone who accepted the reason), and (2) which you are disapproved of or even punished for openly disavowing. The first of these characteristics is not open to objection ; since all philosophies must start from some indemonstrable propositions. Only it is dangerous to include among the premisses historical propositions, because they are the sort of statements for which we commonly require some proof. The second characteristic is the one which distinguishes theology from philosophy or any other science. The philosopher holds himself bound to question his premisses ; the theologian is not allowed to do so. The University sanctions this prohibition by imposing tests for theological teachers : whereas if anyone offered to endow a professorship of physics on condition that the holder should never contradict Newton's Principia, the offer would be firmly declined. This protection of certain beliefs is inconsistent with the ideal of a University, whose main function is to advance knowledge and discover truth. Religion is a world-wide phenomenon with a legion of different forms, the study of which is one of the most important branches of human knowledge. It is peculiarly .difficult to pursue this study dispassionately, because religion is a product of the collective mind and affirmed by it, and we are all either rebelling against that collective consciousness or trying to crush such rebellion. The University ought to stand abso- lutely clear of all dogmatic systems. The worst thing it can do is to endorse a particular sect, and so bias inquiry either for or against a certain set of beliefs. To do so is to poison and obscure the intellectual atmosphere, and to foster passion where there should be no passion but curiosity. By uphold- ing the creed of a minority of Englishmen as peculiarly respectable, it encourages what Mr. Chawner in his courageous pamphlet called the * conspiracy of silence ' the notion that it is * bad taste' to question that creed, and dangerous to upset the minds of young men by discussing it freely. The first step needed is the abolition of tests for all teaching posts ; and the appointments must be taken out of the hands of people professionally pledged to any beliefs. In practice, there is reason to think that not only theological professorships are subject to tests, and that sometimes tests are secretly applied in making College appointments. It is certainly possible for a small college with an Anglican majority to close its ranks, and not appoint anyone on its staff who is not a member of the Church of England. It is alleged that this has occurred more than once recently ; and whether that is true or not, the thing is undoubtedly possible. The only remedy is to take all teaching appointments out of the hands of Colleges. With regard to Ritual, the Colleges maintain Anglican chapels and officials whose duty it is to persuade or compel attendance at them. To this system all the same objections apply, as well as others peculiar to it. It is not the business of a University or of a College to maintain one form of creed. If they had an Anglican chapel, they ought also to have a mosque, a Hindu temple, a Baptist chapel and so on, with an official attached to each. Either that or none at all. It would be said that there were historical reasons : but there is no such thing. There are historical causes, but they are not reasons. In practice, the system was a mild and gentlemanly attempt to repress complete freedom ot thought and inquiry, by slight hindrances, trivial fines, and social pressure. Ritual is a powerful means of suggestion, working by the emotional appeal of early associations, and the extraordinary beauty of some parts of the Liturgy. This emotional stimulant is valued as having the effect of tiding young men over a critical period in their lives, when they ought to be overhauling all their beliefs, till they leave the University to earn their living, and have no time to think about beliefs at all. It is to a certain extent successful, in inducing some to go on conforming when their faith has really gone. It is difficult to understand how a religious person can desire to produce this outward conformity, which perilously verges on hypocrisy. If it were now for the first time proposed to introduce this regulation, the very men whose office it has been to carry it out would have been the first to see how irreligious it is. The worship of God either is based upon an illusion, of all human illusions the most venerable and pathetic, or, it is of all human duties the most solemn and awful. In either case it ought to be taken seriously, and absence from Christian worship should not be put on the same level in the scale of punishments with staying out too late at night or making a noise in the court. If the threat of a penalty has any effect at all, it can only operate as supplying a motive for performing the action prescribed. Does anyone, whether he be Christian or not, desire that anyone should ever attend a religious service in order to escape being gated ? Yet unless we desire this, we must admit that the penalty never has a desirable effect ; and some will not stop short of the assertion that its effect must always tend to be injurious. There is no escape from this argument. We have to consider only the case of those whose attendance is caused by the threat of punishment to whom, in fact, the threat makes the difference between attendance and non-attendance. How can any religiously-minded man view with complacence a congregation of men, nominally assembled for the worship of God, of whom some are present because they would be punished if they were not ? One who had no other reason for being absent from the Chapel Services might find enough in this to prevent him from ever taking part in religious worship conducted under such conditions. If you enter a College Chapel you will hear someone declaiming in an artificial voice these words among the most moving in all literature from the parable of the Prodigal Son : u I will arise and go to my Father " ; and at the same time you will see a marker pricking off the names of those whose feeling, as they enter, these words are supposed to express. The pious builders of one of the college chapels quaintly inscribed upon its eastern front an unfinished legend. The words of it were used by Jesus when he made a scourge of small cords to purify the Temple of God of an abuse which some may think a less outrage upon religion than the abuse of Christian worship for purposes of discipline. If the sentence were completed thus : u My house shall be called the house of prayer, but ye have made it a place of detention," what answer could be made ? Turning next to a forecast of the future of religion, the speaker said that ritual, which obviously hangs by theology, might be put aside. As for theology, a Heretic is one who thinks that theology can be remodelled. Heretics are constantly doing this, and when they are successful, their heresy becomes the orthodoxy of the next generation. The process means the reinterpretation of the superstructure, and the dropping of outlying parts, keeping a certain core intact though what this core is it is difficult to ascertain in Protestant communities. The weakness of Christian theology lay in the fact that its core contains two miraculous events, and what is immediately deduced from them the Incarnation and the Resurrection. This is a weakness because proof of these events may fairly be demanded, and is in fact offered. The Incarnation is becoming discredited because it has been linked with the Virgin Birth a thing which clearly could not be proved, and which would not now be thought to establish anything further, if it were proved. He ventured to prophesy that the Incarnation, as it used to be understood, would gradually cease to be believed, and Anglicans would insensibly become Unitarians. The Resurrection would perhaps last longer, because it was associated with the hope of immortality, which is strong in many minds ; but its miraculous character and the absence of any proof that would bear examination would sooner or later prove fatal. What would then be left ? Something very like the theology of Christ, who seems to have reduced theology to two old Hebrew doctrines that God exists and is the Father of man. To have effected that simplification, sweeping away all the overgrowth of ecclesiasticism and Pharisaism, was Christ's great service to Jewish religion ; it marked him as the arch- heretic and rebel of his time and country, and he paid for his heresy with his life. Will theology succeed in reducing itself again to this ? Perhaps that is not possible, unless another prophet as great as Christ should arise, and that seems im- probable. If, on the other hand, theology clings to its super- structure, it is likely to involve theism itself in its own wreck. In any case students of comparative religion would by that time probably have been able to trace the continuous history of the representation of the divine back from its present forms to its primitive origin in notions very different from anything theists now wish to believe in. The main lines of this evolution are already becoming clear. There is no gap, no sudden revelation. Some people think that this will make no difference ; but experience seems to show that even a rough knowledge of the history of the idea is generally enough to make the student see that there is no ground for supposing that the idea has at any stage of its development corresponded to anything real. Theology is already taking its place as a branch of anthropology. What would be left then ? To most believers the prospect is blank ; to unbelievers, who have travelled that road already, it is hopeful. Every- thing that has been of real value in religion would be left faith in that other sense, the emotion which makes men do noble things, which in art as well as in religion has fashioned one splendid form after another, and then when the form became too fixed and narrow and conventional, has broken it and flung it aside. This passionate energy is an inalienable and indestructible part of man's nature. Not all the sceptics and intellectualists and cynics in the world can touch it or hinder for more than a moment the sweep of its course. When a form of religion or of art is disintegrated, the faith that is released flows off into other things. To set free this force from any form that would confine it is to serve humanity. Why is it that this spirit is destined to snare itself in the very shapes and images it moulds ? Why must religion become entrapped in ecclesiastical formalism ? Why must art be caught in the snare of beauty ? The question was too profound for him to attempt an answer. Partly, no doubt, it was because the form was an external definite thing which hypnotises the mind, is easily imposed, and is moreover soon linked with innumerable personal motives of people interested in maintaining it. But just because it is external, it must crystallize and sooner or later be shattered by a new impulse of the spirit that made it. Here we have no continuing city ; and if we seek one to come, we may be sure that it will not be eternal. The spirit of man will go on its way with songs, and everlasting sorrow as well as everlasting joy upon its head ; and the burden of its most triumphant song will always be : ( My soul is escaped like a bird out of the snare of the fowler ; the snare is broken, and we are delivered.' 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. CD 1962 LD 21A-50w-4,'59 (Al724slO)476B H m O > o <: General Library University of California Berkeley