DYNAMITING THE MORAL WORLD

New Zealand Tablet, 30 October 1919, Page 11

DYNAMITING THE MORAL WORLD

•)J • i ; Y (By Daniel A. Lord, S.J., in America.) '■"TJ The question of Shakespere's religion will for all time delight the sophomoric debater. tl : But "whether Catholic or not, Shakespere was heir of a Catholic principle which is the motif of his greatest tragedies, the principle of personal responsibility. It is a free step deliberately taken which starts -his Macbeth and his Lear down the sharp incline toward destruction. In this he differs from the old Greek tragedians whose heroes were overshdowed by a compelling fate, a fearful and inexplicable Ate which plunged them struggling and protesting into final ruin. Our modern dramatists do not believe in the Greek fate; but, on the other hand, many, of them write as if they did not believe in the power of free-will. In place of the* traditional conflict of wills, we have among the moderns contests of. the individual with environment, heredity, his own fierce passions, economic conditions, and the will is ultimately displayed as powerless in the face of' the foes arrayed against it. When the hero, or more usually the heroine, falls, wo do not blame • or pity; we merely accept the inevitable. The denial of* free-will is not an unimportant bit of dramatic machinery nor a piece of fine philosophical cobweb spinning. It is one. of those denials which, if logically followed out, would shake the foundations of the universe. For centuries men, have been trained, when trained at all, to fight against the allurements of what under accepted morality was called sin. Youths were taught to stand firmly against their own personal wishes and inclinations where a higher duty to God or country or fellow-men was in question. The wishy-washy principle of our sentimental novelists that a man or woman must follow every whim and fancy, especially in matters of sex, never made any man lay down his life for his country or caused any woman to pluck from her heart a guilty passion. The line of least resistance has not been the road leading to heroic glory. Precisely by accepting the things that bring physical and mental anguish, precisely by resisting the attractions that almost tear the heart from the breast have heroes and saints attained their eminence. And all this is swept away in a denial of freewill. For if a man has no free-will, he must of his very nature follow the line of least resistance. Chemical and physical forces cannot act otherwise. When Jack and Jill fell down the hill, they probably, in an unwritten sequel, picked themselves up and, broken crowns notwithstanding; went up for a second pail of water. But tho spilled water, taking the line of least resistance, flowed with iron necessity -to the foot of the hill and stayed there. It was not free to mount after the clumsy pair. Send an electric current through an iron and a copper wire, and. you can measure with mathematical accuracy the percentage of the charge that will flow through each; and the greater amount will always flow through the copper wire. Without free-will man can no more avoid the line of least resistance than can water or electricity. The logical consequence of this denial of free-will would startle any but the most wilful dogmatist. There are moments in each man's life when everything inside of him and outside of him seems to fight for an object he knows he must not touch. Every fibre of his nature cries aloud for it; a malignant chance has thrown it in his way; he can take it while avoiding the consequences which attend most wrong-doing. Yet one faint, blurred, sometimes almost inconsequential factor Kitchener's picture in the "Unfinished Story"— him back; that and a sense that the power of choice, is in his own hands. Suddenly some philosopher whispers that he is not free, that he must follow the line of least resistance. Who can doubt in such a case whither leads the line of least resistance? Who can blame him if the conviction that he is not free sends him whirling toward the longed-for object? - . ' After all, why should he not Without freedom of will, it is ludicrous nonsense to talk of responsibility for one's acts. The parrot is not responsible for its hairraising profanities the lightning is not blamed when it blasts a mother with her week-old baby nor praised when it brings the usurper's palace crashing about his throne. Unless a man who does evil is free to do good, unless the saint who lays down his life in a leper colony is . free to stay at home with his feet in carpet slippers, the wifebeater and the saviour of his country, the betrayer of innocence and the Sister of Charity; the murderer and the martyr, Nero and St. Paul, Lucrezia Borgia and Joan of Arc, Benedict Arnold and Washington differ in - no moral essential. On the .'contrary, since 'the dawn of history, men have been sendingto. prison, the lash, and the gallows fellow-men for the thefts, the arsons, and the

murders for which whole r criminal code, from preamble to fin clause is a! vast and hideous hoax at the expense of human nature. I _ Just what the world would become were "all men suddenly to a throw? over their-l sense of responsibility is -a I picture no imagination^cares ito attempt. Even were itl true a thousand times .'that this free-will is a vain delu-| sion, men would be t forced in self-defence to use this I delusion to r build up in themselves and in others a" sense I of personal responsibility- Without it the sins 'of Sodom 1 and the crimes of Caligula would write themselves with 1 terrifying iteration into the ordinary History of the world. 1 It is pitiable, beyond words to see philosophers "teaching young people a doctrine which is applicable to life only I in so far as from it one learns how hot to live; ." It is hard 1 enough for youth to■ fight back the hot surgings of passion, to close eager eyes to the fascinating sin : which beckons so alluringly, even >, when he % feels, that should he consent heis personally responsible for the evil that. will follow. If, on the contrary, he is told that wild oats are the necessary fruitage of life's springtime, that broken hearts and blighted hopes are the inevitable wreckage %$:; passion's resistless ■'■ flood, it is madness to blame .him for -flinging : to the winds this hampering delusion of personal responsibility. ..,.-.-.- ►= ■ ..-.-,?- : ->;/._/•_.;; : -\vv-—\■•.-->.'--.',.' If tho professors of such a philosophy really practised their creed, the gaol not the" classroom 1 would be their proper habitat. Happily, if they are; moral men, they really ■ prove throughout their lives .; the truth that, man is distinguished from soulless matter and from the ■- brute creation precisely in this, that ■. he deliberately chooses the things which are hard and rejects calmly .;? and coolly the line of least resistance. A very : large portion of their lives, like the life of every mortal, is spent in learning by sheer force of will to control the natural impulse;! banned by morality or by the necessary conventions of civilised society.. Certainly the hard, patient life. of a student is incomparably less attractive to young blood than a free, self-indulgent existence; yet they have chosen the student's life largely because, being so hard, it-leads to the fame which they have set as the goal of their ambitions. They feel a thousand times in their lives the desire for rest and comfort and luxury ;• yet they set 'all aside" because it impedes them on their way to their goal. And though man clings with an almost" insuperable longing to his own life, few of them would hesitate, should their country call them, to lay down that precious life for the sake of a national peace and prosperity which they will never enjoy. Free-will lies so deeply at the root of" our moral life that its destruction would send our universe reeling. Good and evil, innocence and guilt— burden of so much of our literature, the scales in which we weigh our associates —-are terms which without it become as meaningless as the gibbering of apes. Deny it as he may, the philosopher of slave-will could not avoid the penitentiary, retain the friendship of a single individual, merit a lino of praise from an educational journal or the warm handclasp from a grateful pupil, unless he was constantly giving the- lie to his own doctrine by an incessant use of personal freedom. He never argues more strongly for free-will than : when he employs it to dynamite the moral world. In the matter of free-will as elsewhere, Shakespere was writing out of the great heart of human kind! ,VThe modern dramatist bases his dramatic thesis on the morbid; the pathological, the neurotic individual ;• Shakespere drew his men and women from all time. And Shakespere was right. When the warning bell for "the final curtain on each, man's life is sounded, the protagonist, looking backward through his little play, will -see that he it was who?determined whether life should end as a comedy or a tragedy. Environment, heredity, passions were with him, acting on the stage; but it was his free-will that wove them into their fitting parts in his life's drama and wrote the final lines. ~ < \ _ : <:-;;i"-'.iii , -." a ■

■•"], ;i.• _,...-.. The foundation stone will be' laid on November 2. The contract price is £27,500, of which only half is ; yet A Jj . in hand. St. Mary's will be the finest Gothic church in the North "Island, and a matter of pride for the Catholics of Wellington-Archdiocese. The amount of money-required to complete the 'building is large, but large too- is.the generosity of the .Wellington^ Catholics, .'-' with whose - co-operation ■we L ; are (sure' that Father Mahony will be able > : . a couple of -years hence to announce-the consecration of the new St. Maryis free,„ of ,debt and encumbrance.week we will .publish a detailed description of the beautiful building here outlined. "- '■' : ,- ; S-M ■:%.' i : . ' f s "*"*'s'*l£ > * -. ' " : .*i'i-'- ■;'-'■" ' '.:■■■-&■-* Mi f y \V . j?- '-f ..2 ' .'l'j 4-lv -.'' : '.'■'. ■■'•••• : '.'"'' I 5--: - .% ; i_ : ..