Religion as a Sense of the Absolute
In Moral Man and Immoral Society , Reinhold Niebuhr (pp. 52-54) discusses the value of religion to the moral sphere:
"Essentially religion is a sense of the absolute. When, as is usually the case, the absolute is imagined in terms of man's own highest ethical aspirations, a perspective is created from which all moral achievements are judged to be inadequate. Viewed from the relative perspectives of the historic scene, there is no human action which cannot be justified in terms of some historic purpose or approved in comparison with some less virtuous action. The absolute reference of religion eliminates these partial perspectives and premature justifications. There is no guarantee against the interpretation of the absolute in terms of faulty moral insights; and human vice and error may thus be clothed by religion in garments of divine magnificence and given the prestige of the absolute. Yet there is a general development in the high religions toward an interpretation of the divine as benevolent will, and a consequent increase of condemnation upon all selfish actions and desires. In investing the heart of the cosmos with an ethical will, the religious imagination unites its awe before the infinitude and majesty of the physical world with its reverence for the ethical principle of the inner life. The inner world of conscience, which is in constant rebellion against the outer world of nature, is made supreme over the world of nature by the fiat of religion. Thus the Bechuana regarded thunder as the accusing voice of God and cried: "I have not stolen, I have not stolen, who among us has taken the goods of another?''(Quoted by W. E. Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 235.) And Jesus, in the sublime naïveté of the religious imagination at its best, interprets the impartiality of nature toward the evil and the good, which secular reason might regard as its injustice, as a revelation of the impartial love of God. The religious imagination, seeking an ultimate goal and point of reference for the moral urges of life, finds support for its yearning after the absolute in the infinitude and majesty of the physical world. The omnipotence of God, as seen in the world of nature, invests his moral character with the quality of the absolute and transfigures it into holiness. Since supreme omnipotence and perfect holiness are incompatible attributes, there is a note of rational absurdity in all religion, which more rational types of theologies attempt to eliminate. But they cannot succeed without sacrificing a measure of religious vitality.
"The religious conscience is sensitive not only because its imperfections are judged in the light of the absolute but because its obligations are felt to be obligations toward a person. The holy will is a personal will. Philosophers may find difficulty in transferring the concept of personality, loaded as it is with connotations which are derived from the sense limitations of human personality, to the absolute. But these difficulties are of small moment to the poetic imagination of religion. It uses the symbols derived from human personality to describe the absolute and it finds them morally potent. Moral attitudes always develop most sensitively in person-to-person relationships. That is one reason why more inclusive loyalties, naturally more abstract than immediate ones, lose some of their power over the human heart; and why a shrewd society attempts to restore that power by making a person the symbol of the community. The exploitation of the symbolic significance of monarchy, after it has lost its essential power, as in British politics for instance, is a significant case in point. The king is a useful symbol for the nation because it is easier for the simple imagination to conceive a sense of loyalty toward him than toward the nation. The nation is an abstraction which cannot be grasped if fitting symbols are not supplied. A living person is the most useful and potent symbol for this purpose. In religion all the higher moral obligations, which are lost in abstractions on the historic level, are felt as obligations toward the supreme person. Thus both the personality and the holiness of God provide the religious man with a reinforcement of his moral will and a restraint upon his will-to-power."
Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics - religion-online.org
Reinhold Niebuhr (c. 1932, 1960; 2002). Moral Man and Immoral Society. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
|
