Prophet for a Secular Age

...The fear of death prompts men to complete life falsely and to express their frustration in lust for power, envy of one another, and a sense of false security in material comfort and power...

...He summed up his argument in one mighty sentence: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible...

...Our political naivete betrays us into sentimentality, and sentimentality always looks like idealism from an inside perspective and like hypocrisy from an outside one...

...And, as his frequent references to Kierkegaard show, he had much sympathy with the current of thought that found expression in modern existentialism...

...Why is Niebuhr so little heeded today...

...In letting politics thus affect philosophy, we were following the path Niebuhr himself had taken two decades before...

...Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...He never mistook his own ideas for absolute judgments...

...see, for instance, the caricature of his thought in books like Christopher Lasch's The New Radicalism in America and Alan Lawson's The Failure of Independent Liberalism (both of these works have other merits...

...Tormented by injustice at home and by a ghastly war abroad, people assumed the unalloyed goodness and virtue of spontaneous man, began an indiscriminate application of simple moral judgments to complex political situations and argued for the instant solubility of human problems...

...the dislike of monism and absolutism...

...Half a dozen years later he added, with incredible prescience, "It would be tragic, as well as ironic, if the tolerance and modesty which we learned or had forced upon us in the peculiar conditions of Western life should become the basis of fanaticism and immodesty in our international relations...

...he was well aware that even Christianity itself could become "an instrument of partial and interested perspectives" and be used for "essentially idolatrous purposes...

...Believing that man's best insights were fragmentary and that no person or institution had final answers, Niebuhr strongly reasserted in his later years his commitment to "the values of the liberal tradition, such as the freedom to subject all historical and dogmatic statements to rigorous inquiry, and the spirit of toleration in dealing with one's opponents...

...Thus I perceived in Niebuhr a considerable affinity with William James...

...One remembers in so many conversations through the years the sparkling play of his marvelous human qualities????the trenchancy, the humor, the inexhaustible curiosity, the passion, the generosity, the sweetness, the grandeur, all contained in an energy so overpowering that he seemed never to be able to sit still...

...in due course, Niebuhr discovered in his friend Erik Erikson's elaboration of ego psychology a convincing scientific formulation of his own theory of human selfhood...

...I was looking the other day at an article of his entitled "Awkward Imperialists," where he saw technologism and moralism as the distinctive qualities of American empire...

...But he was too tired to engage himself in one more struggle against illusion...

...After hearing Niebuhr preach one summer Sunday in the community church at Heath in the Berkshires, Frankfurter said, "Reinie, may a believing unbeliever thank you for your sermon...

...And that recognition of the mysteries of existence which distinguished James so sharply from Dewey facilitated the development of Niebuhr's Christian pragmatism...

...While The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness was a somewhat enigmatic title, the subtitle offered a lucid description of the book: "A Vindication of Democracy and A Critique of Its Traditional Defense...

...We have a puritan penchant for oversimplifying moral and social problems...

...There is often the danger in an account of a man's thought of overlooking the man behind the thought...

...why did men and women who felt that their own lifetimes were all they had learn so much from, and adore so much, a man who could write, "Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime...

...Besides throwing doubt upon the reliability of the person thus examined, it prompts me to view the ephemeral character of all our convictions...

...He did not feel, for example, that religion invested him with special authority...

...But when some years later I returned from the War and came to read The Nature and Destiny of Man, I found there an interpretation of human nature and history that gave a coherent frame to my own groping sense of the frailty of man and the inscrutability of events...

...As he once put it, "Honesty, or freedom from self-deception, is a more important instrument of justice...

...Life," he wrote, "continues to be fragmentary and to be challenged by death no matter how powerful men become...

...So too, for all his rejection of what he considered Freud's biological determinism, Niebuhr assimilated much of the spirit of Freud...

...He showed that the Christian conception of man????A being curiously composed of good and evil, plunged into the flux of time, yet transcending it????not only was more true to the facts of history but provided a more reliable basis for the theory of democracy...

...It is another paradox that the Christian realism for which Reinhold Niebuhr stood should be somewhat in eclipse at a time when history would seem more than ever to have vindicated the Niebuhrian analysis...

...Yet he assimilated so much of the spirit of James????the sense, for example, of the universe as streaming, provisional, unfinished, unpredictable...

...here also his affirmation of the relativity of human ideals and perspectives had analogues to James's radical empiricism...

...This again helps explain his appeal to the secular age...

...and, reflecting on his career, one cannot escape from a central paradox in his own life and influence: why this passionate, profound and humble believer should have had so penetrating an influence on so many non-believers...

...And another surely is the curious impression that has arisen in a new generation of Niebuhr as some sort of rigid and embattled cold warrior...

...No one else in Protestant pulpits seemed to talk about the sinfulness of man or the grace of God...

...As his intuitive grasp of politics and society found coherent expression in the Augustinian approach to history, so his natural modesty, his natural openness of mind and heart, were confirmed by his overwhelming sense of the nakedness of man against the glare of eternity...

...Our power is derived from our engineering ability, and we erroneously assume that the same genius which created it can wield it...

...Such evidence as is available certainly does not encourage the faith that we shall develop a political genius equal to the responsibilities thrust upon us by our imperial power...

...When I find neo-orthodoxy turning into sterile orthodoxy or a new Scholasticism, I find that I am a liberal at heart, and that many of my broadsides against liberalism were indiscriminate...

...But if they were not dependent on his religious belief, they were fulfilled by it...

...is Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at the City University of New York...

...We have come into our position of authority too suddenly to adjust ourselves to its responsibilities...

...And again, reflecting on his own intellectual development: "It becomes so apparent that one was incredibly stupid in slowly arriving at a position which now seems valid but which required all the tragedies of history to clarify in one's own mind...

...The church, he observed, consisted both "of those who have never been shaken in their self-esteem or self-righteousness and who use the forms of religion for purposes of self-aggrandizement, and of the true Christians who live by 'a broken spirit and a contrite heart.' " "The worst corruption," he said, "is a corrupt religion...

...He acted within history but never forgot that ultimate perspectives lay beyond history...

...This paradox can perhaps be illuminated by personal experience...

...why did so many agree so vitally with Niebuhr up to the point, so to speak, where God came in????when this was for him the decisive point...

...but, to a greater degree than anyone I have ever known, Niebuhr was a man whose humility was not theoretical but authentic...

...In the light of the mass totalitarian movements of the era, in the light of Hitler and Stalin, placid assumptions about the goodness and perfectibility of man seemed less persuasive...

...And in the meantime we will all be sustained and inspired by the life of a most remarkable man????A man who, as much as humans can, embodied transcendent qualities of wisdom, grace and love...

...Our best chance for survival," he wrote in 1955, "lies not in our courage or our resolution so much as in our modesty and patience...

...It also embraced a good many men and women who lacked much in the way of emphatic or vivid religious belief...

...Although history oscillates in its needs from one generation to the next, I am sure Reinhold Niebuhr was everlastingly right when he wrote in 1944, "The preservation of a democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove...

...Niebuhr thought democracy both worth defending and defensible, but he thought also that history had rendered its traditional defense exceedingly vulnerable...

...I have a negative reaction," he said in 1966, "to the negative interpretation of youthful irresponsibility...

...Niebuhr replied, "May an unbelieving believer thank you for appreciating it...

...Historical Christianity, once surely a luminous and majestic faith, appeared to have degenerated into fundamentalism and revivalism, religious modes compounded equally of obscurantism and hysteria...

...We are too much the engineers," he wrote...

...As for liberal Christianity, it appeared indistinguishable from secular liberalism except in its lesser rigor and greater sentimentalism...

...the flow of books and articles in these twilight years showed that his intellectual force was un-dimmed...

...We make simple moral judgments, remain unconscious of the self-interest which colors them, support them with an enthusiasm which derives from our . . . still influential evangelical piety, and are surprised that our contemporaries will not accept us as saviors of the world...

...More fundamentally, the Niebuhrian analysis, with its complexities and nuances, its ironic and tragic dimensions, was apparently out of phase with the felt need for impassioned moral judgment in the '60s, when the pressures of the time made many, particularly among the young, seek the relief and release of moralism...

...But there is no such danger here...

...In particular, he never forgot the presence that liberal Christianity had tried so hard to abolish????that is, the presence in life of death...

...even if radical theology had not yet proclaimed the death of God, few of us had much doubt about the death of the church...

...and those of us who were guided by his light evidently failed to relate the ideas of moral realism in an effective way to the crisis that produced the rebirth of political fantasy...

...In the years after the War Niebuhr played a decisive role in the liberal politics of the United States, giving more time than he could afford to Americans for Democratic Action, combating the Utopian illusions that led some of good will to see in Stalin's Russia something very like Brook Farm, resisting at the same time all the efforts to absolutize a transient historical conflict and convert a contest among states into a holy war...

...The question remains: Why did this theologian????And we may call him that, though he disclaimed the term himself????communicate with such power to a secular age...

...All that finally mattered for him was the revelation of the human predicament and the divine mystery in the Bible and in the life and death and resurrection of Christ...

...and one cannot ascribe Niebuhr's political wisdom to his theology alone...

...One remembers him above all restlessly pacing the floor, throwing out ideas, jokes and challenges...

...This impact derived no less from his powerful application of Augustinian analysis to secular questions...

...or whether this understanding was prompted by the refutation of the liberal and Marxist faith by the tragic facts of contemporary history...

...The children of light must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice...

...People had to believe and had to act...

...Here Niebuhr disengaged democracy from its familiar foundation in optimism about human nature, as he disengaged the pessimistic view of human nature from its familiar alliance with authoritarianism...

...the belief in the reality, within limits, of human freedom and will...

...his mind was never closed and his work never finished...

...The doctrine of original sin served as a metaphor for man's innate tendencies toward self-regard, self-deception, aggression, and domination...

...He was a liberal at heart...

...With his sensitivity to historical pressures, Niebuhr regarded the anguish behind the insurgency with warm sympathy...

...Describing his early days at Union Theological Seminary, Niebuhr said it was "a full decade before I could stand before a class and answer the searching questions of the students at the end of a lecture without the sense of being a fraud who pretended to a larger and more comprehensive knowledge than I possessed...

...There are those who assert the fallible and self-serving character of man in the most dogmatic and authoritarian style...

...He was simply one of those men who, whatever their ontological beliefs, had to a rare degree the gift of political diagnosis...

...Conceiving man in the Christian tradition as neither brute nor angel, recalling with Pascal that he who would act the angel acts the brute, Reinhold Niebuhr gave tragic and immemorial truths a new power for a secular age????A power, I believe, to which the secular age, after a fresh debauch of illusion, must return...

...As in the '30s, Utopian, perfectionist and moralistic illusions began to spread, especially among the young...

...One felt in Niebuhr so acute an awareness of the darker tendencies in contemporary thought, so acute an awareness of the way, in Walter Lippmann's phrase, the acids of modernity were dissolving the ancestral creeds, that it almost seemed as if he, too, must have been greatly tempted by existential despair...

...No problem bore more heavily on the mind and conscience of the West in the '30s and '40s than the problem of whether democracy was worth defending against the various totalitarian challenges...

...Students of the Vietnam war should note that this brilliant piece was published over 41 years ago????in May 1930...

...In my own case, as a student of Perry Miller, I was lucky to have received instruction in Calvinism, at least in its American forms, and thus to have acquired some sense of the psychological realism that might exist beneath an exotic and often repellent terminology...

...What many of his admirers have yet to learn from him is why that vantage point is necessarily or peculiarly Christian...

...Still, Niebuhr did not permit humility to inhibit clarity and force of expression, any more than he permitted his sense of the moral precariousness of human striving to sever the nerve of action...

...My political interests and activities," he told us in his Intellectual Autobiography, ". . . were the sources of my first disillusionment in nineteenth-century religion," and he wondered "whether the criticism of both liberal and Marxist views of human nature and history was prompted by a profounder understanding of the Biblical faith...

...For Niebuhr's constituency did not include only neo-orthodox Protestants, or Protestants in general, or Christians in general, or Christians and Jews...

...No one who knew Reinhold Niebuhr will ever forget him...

...These corruptions are rooted in the very center of personality and can therefore be uprooted only by a radical change at the heart of personality...

...but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary...

...Another is perhaps that his fugitive writing was frequently a response to concrete events and situations and therefore seems now part of another age...

...Looking back, one cannot but feel that part of Niebuhr's influence on his age was a product of his capacity to show how the most piercing contemporary insights had their precedents in historical Christianity????or, to put it in an opposite way, in his capacity to restate historical Christianity in terms that corresponded to our most searching modern themes and anxieties...

...This included those whom the philosopher Morton White once suggested should form an organization called Atheists for Niebuhr, and those for whom the great historian of Puritanism, Perry Miller, spoke when, acknowledging the force of Niebuhr's philosophical vantage point, he noted, "I encounter scores who comprehend it on wholly naturalistic grounds...

...for in one sense he was deeply immersed in these struggles if, in another sense, he strove for perspectives beyond them...

...My generation grew up????or at least I grew up????with a pervading sense of the irrelevance of organized religion...

...His temperament and his faith were thus mutually reinforcing in producing his remarkable personal combination of modesty and strength...

...And students of Niebuhr should note that this analysis was made before his theological evolution was complete...

...Nor was it merely the extent to which the anguish of modernity informed his Christianity that accounted for his impact on the secular age...

...His last years saw in American society a somewhat surprising resurgence of attitudes he had fought so effectively in his polemical days...

...Niebuhr's diagnostic skills were thus rooted in intelligence and personality...

...Obviously one does not have to assent to the West-minster Confession in order to accept????or to write?that sentence...

...When i first went, rather skeptically, to hear Reinhold Niebuhr preach at Harvard ????this was in the late '30s????i was rather more impressed by the energy of his oratory than by the substance of his argument...

...It is true that one cannot find many references to James in his writings, and it is true, of course, that he saw in Dewey's version of pragmatism a central source of liberal illusion...

...Soon, too, the politics of the '30s began to raise questions about the adequacy of conventional liberalism as a system of historical explanation...

...Even after illness cut down his public activity, he remained to the end of his life a wise and magnanimous counselor in whom the miserable frustrations of the body only ministered to the greatness of the soul...

...This is the meaning, I imagine, of the celebrated exchange Felix Frankfurter records in his reminiscences...

...what was essential was always to combine "moral resoluteness about the immediate issues with a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning and judgment"????Always, in short, to include in action the possibility of error...

...One reason is surely his years of comparative inactivity following his stroke of 1951?inactivity at least so far as lecturing and preaching were concerned...

...It was an entirely secular time...

...A salient aspect for Niebuhr of the Christian notion of original sin was man's "unwillingness to acknowledge his finiteness...

...but self-righteousness remains the plague within us all...

...The disguises of egoism are manifold...