The Neo-Orthodoxy of Niebuhr

THE NEG-ORTHODOXY OF NIEBUHR DAVID A. STEWART AMONG other exponents of nee-orthodoxy, Reinhold Niebuhr asserts the old conviction that God is creator of the world, above the contradiction of reason, both life and form, and the source of all existence. It is the divine spirit in man that enables him to place a meaning on life and on the world · around him, for man must in some sense be detached if he is able to comment on the meaning of life. Man is like a passenger in a ship who cannot observe that the rpassenger in the seat opposite him is moving because all the passengers are in the same boat; in order to observe the motion of that boat and of the passengers in it, an observer must be elsewhere, perhaps on the shore or in another ship. In the same way everyone who extracts a meaning Jrom life must have a detachment from life itself. To observe cause, sequence, and purpose, a man must somehow be able to view them as things apart; it requires a capacity of freedom which is greater than reason in order to make judgments above that reason. From the same source a man is able to detect evil which he finds to be located in the human will. Every judgment of good or bad presupposes an origin which is above good and bad. Sin actually is promoted by man's refusal to admit his limitations and by his ambition to be more than he is. Sin is the wrong use of the freedom which has its source in God, for though man is .an individual, he is not self-sufficient. When he presumes to make himself sell-sufficient, he sins in refusing to acknowledge the source of his life and his freedom. The demands of Christianity arise from an uneasy conscience. The uneasy conscience tells a man that he has misused his freedom and has thus committed .sin. Whereas Freud rates extreme guilt, remorse, and anxiety as neurotic traits to be destroyed in the interests of maturity and of a well-ordered society, Niebuhr believes the guilty and remorseful conscience to be a genuine and necessary religious experience intimating one's relation to God. The Christian view of life rests on the paradox of admitting man's origin in God and of admitting, too, the central role of sin in human living. But this paradox is cleared when man realizes that his consciousness of sin is a recognition of God in judgment. The man who refuses to accept God is forever torn between the demands of his reason and the demands of his physical nature. This is the situation one faces, for example, in Freud who argues for both reason and the natural impulses so that it becomes difficult to decide whether we shall be reasonable and suppressed, or emotional and confused. The Christian regards egotism and the will to power as the essence of sin, whereas Hobbes and Freud accept them as normal, requiring only to be harnessed by reason or social organization. Niebuhr believes that Marxism with all its faults has at least the merit of reacting sensibly against the 347 348 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY rationalism of Hegel ·and against the whole tradition from Descartes to Kant which tended to glorify the rational man. Though. Niebuhr is aware of the great achievements of modem psychology , he cautions us to remember that modern psychology has grown out of the scepticism of Hume. He points to William James, the main disciple of Hume.· Both master and disciple were determined to destroy the idea of the unity of mind. James thought that states of consciousness are all that psychology needs for its task; the notion of a principle of unity with all its metaphysical uncertainty is impractical and superfluous. Modern psychologists in their attempt to be natural scientists have neglected to see that "an object which has both surface .and depth cannot be correctly interpreted in terms of one dimension when it has in fact two."1 While psychology stays in the strictly experimental field it deals with dimension only, but when it traffics in the depths of personality, it...