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CHAPTER XIII

GRAVEN IMAGES IN MODERN DRESS

       They that fashion a graven image are all of them vanity; and the things that they delight in shall not profit. - Isaiah 44:9

       In its examination of the worship of reason the previous chapter developed the inner dynamics which involve all idolatry in self-defeat. The present chapter will apply this principle to a number of other contenders for the hearts of men. Of all contemporary false gods, none is more seductive than that which goes by the name of “idealism.” Its advocates can be so persuasive. “Now that God has been made obsolete by modern knowledge,” they argue, “why not salvage Christianity’s abiding gift to the world, its lofty ideals, by dissociating them from the baggage of ancient superstition?” In other words, we cannot really be sure whether there is a God or what he is like. But we can be sure about ideals. How much more realistic, therefore, to base one’s religion on them.

       This proposal has been so widely accepted that in many people’s minds the words “idealistic” and “religious” have become synonymous. Yet it does not differ essentially from the one which confronted the prophets. It is simply a modern variation on the old, old theme, “Let us transfer our faith from God and put it in something else.” The following pages will show how this most plausible kind of idolatry is subject to the same fate as the worship of Reason. When made absolute, ideals, too, visit the worshiper with the opposite of what he had expected.

TWO ELUSIVE VIRTUES

To begin with an illustration familiar to everyone, the virtues of humility and unselfishness provide a perfect example. No one can consciously cultivate humility for its own sake without at the same time becoming proud of it. The same is true of unselfishness. Like true humility, it is a by-product of something else - of love. The real problem is not, how can I be humble or unselfish? but, how can I love my neighbor as myself? When the attempt is made to bypass the real problem, to construct a facsimile of real love by imitating

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some of its external coloring, then these two ideals turn into their contraries. Self-conscious humility becomes the source of pride, and cultivated unselfishness becomes a subtle instrument for dominating others. No one has discovered more convincing evidence of this than the psychiatrist. As Erich Fromm expresses it:

The “unselfish” person “does not want anything for himself”; he “lives only for others,” is proud that he does not consider himself important. He is puzzled to find that in spite of his unselfishness he is unhappy, and that his relationships to those closest to him are unsatisfactory. . . Analytic work shows that . . . he is pervaded by hostility against life and that behind the facade of unselfishness a subtle but not less intense self-centeredness is hidden ....

       The nature of unselfishness becomes particularly apparent in its effect on others and most frequently, in our culture, in the effect the “unselfish” mother has on her children. She believes that by her unselfishness her children will experience what it means to be loved and to learn, in turn, what it means to love. The effect of her unselfishness, however, does not at all correspond to her expectations. The children do not show the happiness of persons who are convinced they are loved; they are anxious, tense, afraid of the mother’s disapproval, and anxious to live up to her expectations. Usually, they are affected by their mother’s hidden hostility against life, which they sense rather than recognize, and eventually become imbued with it themselves. Altogether, the effect of the “unselfish” mother is not too different from that of the selfish one; indeed, it is often worse because the mother’s unselfishness prevents the children from criticizing her. They are put under the obligation not to disappoint her; they are taught, under the mask of virtue, dislike for life.¹

TOLERANCE

       Another example is the ideal of tolerance. Tolerance is certainly a desirable virtue, but it can only be made absolute on the assumption that no conviction is any more true or false than any other. And this assumption itself quickly leads to the end of tolerance. The challenge of a Hitler confronts its followers with an impossible dilemma. Either, in loyalty to their god, they stand petrified while Hitler unmasks it, or else they must forsake their idol and become intolerant of intolerance. Their embarrassment becomes acute when they are asked why they resist Hitler. Since for them all convictions are relative, why is his any less valid than theirs? On their own principles they can only fight him because they do not happen to like him. The reason why they do not like him is his utter lack of principle. In

¹Erich Fromm, op, cit., pp. 132f.

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opposing him without any principle of their own, therefore, they do the very thing which they abhor. Their idol has betrayed them into precisely the sin from which it promised deliverance.

       The twentieth century is noteworthy for two things. First, it is the century of relativism. The mark of the enlightened man is the axiom that all standards of truth and goodness are relative to the individual or to his culture. The idolatrous nature of this formula becomes especially apparent whenever it is promulgated, not on its merits at all, but in order to provide a rationale for tolerance. In plain words this amounts to the subordination of the question of true-or-false to an ulterior motive. Even though the motive is the lofty one of tolerance, it has nevertheless been made into an idol. The result is exactly what the prophet would predict; namely, the second characteristic of our age, absolutism. Relativism always invites absolutism. Since no man can be without some standard of truth and goodness, then the denial of any objective criterion simply constitutes the first step toward the declaration, “My good is the good.” By what argument can such a claim be refuted? By none, if all standards are relative. Thus does tolerance, both in theory and in fact, sign its own death warrant.

HUMANISM

       Another favorite is humanism. Man himself is elevated to the top of the cosmic ladder. The deification of man has pervaded nearly every aspect of recent culture. In the philosophy of Auguste Comte the God of Christianity is explicitly replaced by Humanity. The same conviction is expressed by Swinburne’s lines, “Glory to Man in the highest! for man is the master of things.”²

        This deification of man, however, is mocked by the grim facts of contemporary life. This is the century of the degradation of man. The theme of so much current, agonized poetry, for example, is precisely the dehumanization of our age. T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and W. H. Auden’s The Unknown Citizen have become classic laments at the transformation of the glorious vision of Renaissance man into the pathetic spectacle of bewildered and apologetic John Doe. The apotheosis of man in theory has resulted in his degradation in fact. What is this but a repetition of the ancient story? Man has again fallen for the serpent’s stratagem: “Ye shall be as gods.” In

²Cited by Reinhold Niebuhr, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 3.

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trying to take over the role of God he has brought only humiliation upon himself.

       The crown with which modern man proclaimed himself king was science. But this crown has turned into a hangman’s noose. For science regards man as it would any other animal. It converts the children of God into test-tube fodder. This process has reached the point where our novelists imagine that they are derelict in their duty if they fail to depict human life as morbid and despicable. It has become “unrealistic” and “escapist” to suggest that it can be meaningful or ennobled or joyous. In the words of Nicolas Berdyaev:

The image of man has been shaken and has begun to disintegrate after it was revealed. This is going on now in all spheres. Dehumanization has penetrated into all phases of human creativity. In making himself God man has unmanned himself . . . . The new world which is taking form is moved by other values than the value of man or of human personality, or the value of truth: it is moved by such values as power, technic, race purity, nationality, the state, the class, the collective.³

Such is the bitter surprise which the idol of humanism has in store for its worshipers.

COMMUNISM

       This discrepancy between humanism’s theory about man and his actual plight in the modern world partly explains the magnetic appeal of one of the most virulent of all idolatries: Communism. This man-eating monster is not always recognized as an idealism. Yet the tremendous personal sacrifices it exacts from its disciples are demanded in the name of the brotherhood of man and prosperity for all. It has attracted so many sensitive idealists precisely because it promises to translate the impotent oratory of liberal humanism into concrete fact. The words of the “Internationale” struck such a responsive chord among men who yearned for a world of fraternity and equality that some are still unable to recognize their sickening contradiction by the facts of Soviet life.

       The way in which conversion to Communism corresponds, point by point, to the biblical analysis of idolatry has been beautifully illustrated by a book with the appropriate title, The God That Failed.⁴

³Nicolas Berdyaev, The Fate of Man in the Modern World, translated by Donald A. Lowrie (New York: Morehouse Publishing Company, 1935), p. 22.

⁴Richard Crossman (ed.), The God That Failed (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).

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It is a soul-searching analysis by six former Communists and Communist sympathizers of the way in which the devotee falls prey, body, mind, and soul, to this false god. His scruples are silenced by its very idealism; his eyes are blinded by its clever lies; and finally, if he ever does wake up to these continual betrayals, he either escapes with his life or becomes a sacrificial victim.

       At first glance it is difficult to realize that Communism really is idealistic in its appeal rather than a cynical design for world dominion. Seen from the inside, however, it still claims to be on the side of equal justice for all, especially the oppressed and exploited. As Louis Fischer eloquently recalls:

The Bolsheviks glorified the common man and offered him land, bread, peace, a job, a house, security, education, health, art, and happiness. They championed international brotherhood . . . . They proudly liberated Poland, Finland and the Baltic countries from Russia’s rule. They renounced the Czar’s special privileges in China and his spheres of influence - with its oil concession - in Persia. The oppressed of the world, and the friends of the oppressed, accordingly saw Soviet Russia as the herald of a new era .
       . . . A thrill shot through humanity.⁵

       It was the very nobility of the Communist ideal that induced sensitive souls to give it their unreserved allegiance. In terms of the biblical understanding of human freedom this commitment was “religious” through and through. Arthur Koestler confirms this in the following words:

New light seems to pour from all directions across the skull. The whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubt and conflict are a matter of the tortured past - a past already remote, when one had lived in dismal ignorance in the tasteless, colorless world of those who don’t know. Nothing henceforth can disturb the convert’s inner peace and serenity-except the occasional fear of losing faith again, losing thereby what alone makes life worth living, and falling back into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.⁶

       Richard Wright makes exactly the same testimony: “With the exception of the Church and its myths and legends, there was no agency in the world so capable of making men feel the earth and the people upon it as the Communist Party.” Whereas the two preceding state-

⁵See Richard Crossman, op. cit., p. 199.

⁶Ibid., p. 23.

⁷Ibid., p. 155.

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ments are reflections by the disillusioned, they are perfectly corroborated by lines from the diary of André Gide, written in the days when he still believed in Communism:

My conversion is like a faith. My whole being is bent towards one single goal, all my thoughts - even involuntary - lead me back to it. In the deplorable state of distress of the modern world, the plan of the Soviet Union seems to me to point to salvation .... And if my life were necessary to assure the success of the Soviet Union, I would gladly give it immediately. I write this with a cool and calm head, in full sincerity, through great need to leave at least this testimony, in case death should intervene before I have time to express myself better.⁸

       Having allowed Communism to become the keeper of his conscience, the convert can easily be persuaded, out of loyalty to his new faith, to suppress his own sense of right and wrong. Of all the disclosures in the book, none is more poignant than the vivid account of how men of sincerity and good will permit themselves to be blinded. In Arthur Koestler’s eloquent words:

There is always a supply of new labels on the Cominform’s black market in ideals.

        Every single one of us knows of at least one friend who perished in the Arctic subcontinent of forced labor camps, was shot as a spy or vanished without trace. How our voices boomed with righteous indignation, denouncing flaws in the procedure of justice in our comfortable democracies; and how silent we were, when our comrades, without trial or conviction, were liquidated in the Socialist sixth of the earth. Each of us carries a skeleton in the cupboard of his conscience; added together they would form galleries of bones more labyrinthine than the Paris catacombs.⁹

       The main burden of the book is its account of the process by which the six authors awoke from their gruesome nightmare. In every case the awakening occurred as a result of the eventual realization, despite their own efforts to shut their eyes and stop their ears, that this god was a fake. Under the banner of lofty ideals, and undoubtedly courageous deeds, it had enticed millions of unsuspecting persons of good will to their death - physical, spiritual, or both. Louis Fischer traces his own disillusionment to the gradual and belated discovery: “In place of idealism, cynical safety-first. In place of dedication, pursuit of personal aggrandizement. In place of living spirit, dead conformism, bureaucratic formalism, and the parroting of false clichés.”¹⁰

⁸Ibid., p. 173.

⁹Ibid., pp. 71, 74. My italics.

¹⁰Ibid., p. 217.

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One is tempted to formulate the rule: The loftier the ideal which one deifies, the ghastlier the ultimate outcome.

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALISM

       But Communism is by no means the only political god that will fail. There is another closer to home, one which in itself is certainly the finest instrument thus far devised for giving political implementation to Christian principles: democracy itself. Because the Church has often failed to see this, and because powerful Christian spokesmen have in time past unfortunately sought to obstruct its growth, the present discussion will undoubtedly be labeled an attack upon democracy.¹¹ In fact, of course, it is the exact opposite. The question is merely raised whether democracy, as one of man’s greatest blessings, will turn into its opposite if made an end in itself. If there is strong evidence that it will, then the present discussion is in democracy’s interest. This will not prevent hysterical cries that this book is antidemocratic, but it will at least establish that they are hysterical.

       Although Americans have not yet succumbed to the temptation to deify democracy, this kind of irrational reaction is an alarming symptom. Instead of discussing the issue on its merits, some writers immediately resort to the Communist technique of impugning the motives of anyone who raises the question. In a recent pamphlet entitled “Democracy and Clericalism,” for example, one author declares that anyone who argues that “morality can exist only on a dogmatic theological basis” is seeking to use the prevailing tensions in our country to serve his own ends. Charges like this are a sure symptom of idolatry. The relation, if any, of morality to theology is one which can and should be settled on its merits. To charge one side in the argument with ulterior motives is a convenient way of evading the issue. The same author brands discussions like the present one as an attack upon “those who defend democratic ideals as enemies who seek to establish democracy as a rival religion. These are vague, meaningless statements but they are dangerous because they exploit primitive fears and confuse the average person into thinking that he is against religion to the extent that he believes in democracy as a moral

¹¹For an accurate account by a convinced Christian of the predominantly negative attitude of Christianity toward democracy in the past, see James H. Nichols, Democracy and the Churches (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1951).

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way of life.”¹² The substitution of epithet for argument is a sign of idolatry at work.

       One does not have to look far to uncover the inner logic by which the idolization of democracy entails its doom. Democracy is really only a procedure for the controlled expression of the will of the people. When this mere procedure is made ultimate, when there is no higher criterion of truth and goodness, the result is the sanctification of the popular will. Truth is reduced to a matter of majority consensus, ascertainable by public-opinion polls. If the majority is always right, then dissent is automatically wrong. This view has already found a foothold among us. A committee of Congress recently advised the tax-free philanthropic foundations to be “chary of promoting ideas, concepts, and opinions forming material which runs counter to what the public currently wishes, approves, and likes.”¹³ Such advice provides a rather miserable contrast with the aims and convictions of our founding fathers. Nevertheless, it was recently given the halo of scientific authority by a social psychologist when he said:

Adjustment means a state of mental health, which condition becomes synonymous with the American concept of living . . . to adjust means to accept the existing values and to accept that which is viewed as unalterable reality. Adjustment therefore means blending into the group without showing any signs of deviation.¹⁴

Does this have a familiar ring? Where else is “deviationism” the cardinal sin? Fortunately not all social scientists have succumbed to this idol. Dr. Robert Lindner recently denounced “the rot-producing idea that the salvation of the individual, and so of society, depends upon conformity and adjustment.”¹⁵ If America ever does adopt the view that the majority is always right, then, in the name of democracy, we will have stifled individual freedom in a strait jacket of conformity. We may still call it “democracy,” but it will no more deserve the name than the so-called “people’s democracies” of eastern Europe.

       One of Communism’s most transparent hypocrisies is its use of the slogan of world brotherhood to disguise its imperialistic ambitions. It

¹²Agnes E. Meyer, “Democracy and Clericalism.” The Ware Lecture, published by The American Unitarian Association, Boston, 1954.

¹³As reported in the New York Times, January 7, 1955, p, l2.

¹⁴Jurgen Reusch and Gregory Bateson, Communication (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1951), p. 129.

¹⁵Reported in Time magazine, December 6, 1954, p. 65.

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thus works hand in glove with another idol, one which the prophets had continually to oppose: the perennial god of nationalism. This idol has an especially strong attraction, as Reinhold Niebuhr has pointed out, for two reasons. On the one hand, it is enough bigger than the individual to give him a sense of disinterested self-sacrifice, even though it may in fact be merely the servant of collective egotism. On the other hand, it is sufficiently concrete and intimate to evoke a strong emotional response. Hence no false god offers a more constant temptation than nationalism, personified, as it often is, by Caesar or Führer And hence the unerring insight of the prophet into both the nature of this idolatry and its futility:

Say unto the prince of Tyre, Thus saith the Lord God. Because thine heart is lifted up and thou hast said I am a God, I sit in the seat of God, in the midst of the seas. Yet thou art a man, and not God, though thou set thine heart as the heart of God. By thy great wisdom and by thy traffic hast thou increased thy riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches. Therefore thus saith the Lord God: Because thou hast set thine heart as the heart of God, behold, therefore I will bring strangers upon thee, the terrible of the nations. And they shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom, and shall defile thy brightness. They shall bring thee down to the pit, and thou shall die the deaths of them that are slain in the midst of the seas. Wilt thou yet say before him that slayeth thee, I am God? But thou shalt be a man, and no God, in the hand of him that slayeth thee. (Ezekiel 28:2,5,6-9.)

       It is not only Communism which plays into the hands of a national god. Democracy, too, when made an idol, can serve the same purpose. When the mere process of democracy is made ultimate, then there is no higher criterion by which the results and direction of the process may be judged. Anything a given nation does is then automatically justified, provided only that it is a democracy. This means that to differ with such a nation over matters of policy is to be wrong by definition - not merely incorrect, but morally derelict; that is, undemocratic. What complicates present American relations with India, for example, is the fact that, although Prime Minister Nehru is undoubtedly mistaken in his estimate of Communism, some United States spokesmen, by impugning his motives, make it impossible for him to discover his error. This only drives a potential ally further in a direction which would ultimately be disastrous for both countries.

       The surest sign of nationalistic idolatry is the identification of truth with a given nation’s mood of the moment. As Hitler put it, “Whatever serves the German people is right.” The consequence of this is

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the equation of honest difference with malevolent or treasonable intent. To describe the present paragraph as antidemocratic or anti-American, for example, would simply provide an exquisite illustration of this point. Heaven forbid that Ignazio Silone’s observation of the Communists should ever apply to America:

What struck me most about the Russian Communists, even in such really exceptional personalities as Lenin and Trotsky, was their utter incapacity to be fair in discussing opinions that conflicted with their own. The adversary, simply for daring to contradict, at once became a traitor, an opportunist, a hireling. An adversary in good faith is inconceivable to the Russian Communists.¹⁶

       A very simple test will determine whether our own country ever falls into such an ominous condition. Do we say that a thing is American because it is good, or vice versa? The former case implies a standard transcending national limits by which a particular thing may be judged good and therefore incorporated into American life. In the latter case, whatever happens to be American is “good” by definition. This would be idolatry wearing the mask of patriotism. There was a day when a patriot could write, “America, America, God mend thine every flaw.” We will know that that day is over when this hymn is censored on the ground that it asks God to engage in un-American activities. It would then be too late for warning. Instead, the ancient prophecy will come true once again:

How much she [Babylon; read “any idolized nation”] hath glorified herself and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her. For she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her. (Revelation 18:7,8.)

       Communism, being idolatrous in its very nature, will inevitably fan the fires of nationalism. Democracy, on the contrary, since it is only a method, albeit a precious one, need not become an end in itself. On the contrary, it can become a chosen instrument in the service of the true good and thereby not only save itself but brighten the hopes of mankind as well. In these momentous times the course of history for hundreds of years to come hinges upon whether “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - that government of the people, for the people, by the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

¹⁶See Richard Crossman, op. cit., p. 101. My italics.

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THE GOOD THAT I WOULD

       The inner necessity by which a deified ideal betrays its worshiper provides the clue to the famous and much misunderstood exclamation of St. Paul: “The good that I would, I do not. And the evil which I would not, that I do.” ( Romans 7:19.) This has frequently been construed as an expression of the view that sin is intrinsic to human nature. It is then paraphrased as: “The conditions of human existence are so impossible that no matter how clearly I see and desire the good, any attempt to translate it into action necessarily corrupts it.” Such an interpretation fits naturally into the “tragic view of life,” according to which any supposedly “good” action entails an equivalent amount of evil, so that the “good that I would” automatically turns before my eyes into the “evil which I would not.”

       As it stands, St. Paul’s statement is susceptible to this interpretation, but it is equally amenable to another, very different construction, one consistent with the whole context of biblical thinking. On this interpretation it is simply a perfect description of the result of making an idol of any ideal. It is a classic expression of the bewilderment of the idolater on discovering that his best intentions have been perverted by the false god for purposes he never intended.

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