Pragmatic Piety
Furfey, Paul Hanly
PRAGMATIC PIETY By PAUL HANLY FURFEY PROBABLY few of us have read many saints' lives without a certain mixture of feelings. We honor them as the perfect exemplars of the Christian life; yet we...
...And the result, contrary to expectation, is altogether delightful...
...However plausible this logic may appear, there is one fact which refutes it unanswerably, positively, finally...
...The virtues can only be appreciated properly when they are taken all together, when meekness tempers courage and courage tempers meekness, when mercy takes the sting from justice and justice strengthens mercy...
...and without superlative courage there cannot be superlative meekness...
...This somewhat obvious fact seems altogether to escape the critics of Christian morality...
...but history tells us they were charming...
...Without courage there can be no meekness...
...We look upon a man as a weakling if he neglects to stand up for his rights, yet the saints took a perverse joy in doing precisely that...
...and the saints were quite as ready to preach the word out of season as in season...
...and that entertaining philosopher uses it brilliantly in his critique of sanctity...
...The most insupportable of bores is the one who persists in introducing religion irrelevantly into the conversation...
...Logic tells us the saints ought to have been bores...
...Meekness does not mean turning the other cheek when one does not dare do anything else...
...One thinks of Jeanne d'Arc and the rough French troops, of Francis de Sales and his converts, of Paul and the elders at Ephesus, of Bernard with Europe at his feet...
...The saints had these qualities in a superlative degree...
...Varied types of holiness, yet all equally lovable in the eyes of their contemporaries...
...As a clue to the answer consider the Christian virtue of meekness...
...But those who really knew the saints were almost always wholly fascinated...
...The case is quite different when a saint turns his patrimony over to the poor and becomes a voluntary beggar...
...And so with the other Christian virtues...
...yet we wonder whether this very perfection did not rob them of a certain human quality which we look for in our friends, whether it did not render them a little too bright and good to be human nature's daily food...
...There is something to be said for this view...
...But the distinctive thing about the saints was that they did not stop at one virtue...
...The liturgy celebrates a saint as one "qui potuit transgredi et non est transgressus...
...James is right in theory...
...and the saints never for a moment lost their overpowering consciousness of sin—never for a moment relaxed their grim spirit of mortification...
...A good moral code ought certainly to work well in every-day life...
...If one submits because one has to submit it is no virtue...
...It is merely parallel to the slinking of the cur before the stick...
...Now the peculiar glory of the saints is that they had just this balance...
...For meekness is a virtue and virtue implies freedom of choice...
...Meekness means submitting when one has strength and courage enough not to submit, if he so chose...
...but the facts are all against him...
...They turn the fires of their criticism on one virtue at a time...
...James's pragmatic test is really a very good rough test of value, if one does not push it too far...
...They were passionate enough to be pure and daring enough to be meek...
...Uriah Heep and Francis of Assisi are worlds apart...
...Certainly any virtue run wild rapidly degenerates into a vice...
...But the Christian code, when one carries it out to its logical conclusion as the saints did, unfits a man for the give and take of our common lot...
...So runs the argument...
...For the contemporaries of the saints, who knew them intimately, found them altogether charming...
...Meekness, then, depends for its very essence on the presence of the opposite virtue, or rather the complementary virtue, of courage...
...That is the precise reason they were saints...
...This leaves us facing an interesting paradox...
...Forgiveness is not particularly attractive in a man who has not sufficient strength of character to enforce his rights...
...It is also the reason why their friends found them delightful companions...
...We find certain qualities distasteful to our friends...
...Critics of Christian morality have been quick to seize upon such considerations, none perhaps more effectively than William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience...
...The saints were admirable in their place, no doubt, but weren't they possibly a bit difficult socially...
...The saints had enemies but they were men who did not know them well, or who had selfish reasons for disliking them...
...Poverty is not ad437 mirable in one who is too shiftless to make a decent living...
...And it is the reason why Christian morality is so triumphantly pragmatic...
...We dislike people who are gloomy and over-serious...
Vol. 5 • February 1927 • No. 16
