Welsh Journals

Transcendental Religion. By Professor D. Miall Edwards, Ph.D., D.D. I have read the Vicar of Dolfor's new book* with great interest. It is a really able and original piece of work, subtle in argument, independent in thought, obviously sincere in spirit, but alas to me far from convincing. I have nothing but admiration for the author's ability, but I find myself differing fundamentally from the views he enunciates concerning phil- osophy and religion. His kindly review of my own book, The Philosophy of Religion, in the Welsh Outlook about a year ago had already prepared me to expect considerable differences between the views I would find in this book and my own, but the differences are even greater than I had anticipated. Nevertheless, I am deeply grateful to Dr. Thomas for this philoso- phically challenging book. It is a great service to force one to re-examine his first principles, lest one become stale and self-complacent in his thinking. I. I will first try to give a brief summary of Dr. Thomas's book, though that is impossible with- out doing injustice to an argument which is already most compressed. He builds up a closely-reasoned philosophical argument to prove the necessary failure of philosophy to supply a rational basis for religion. inasmuch as religion is concerned not at all with this present world of time and change but with a transcendental or eternal realm of reality into which philosophy cannot enter. He attempts to show "that the world as built up by philosophical speculation does not contain anything in the nature of ultimate values, that it is through and through contingent and relative, and that in no way can it give satisfaction to man's desire for the abiding presence of God and the eternal stability of his own soul" (p. 21). God cannot be, as intellect- ualists maintain, the perfection of the Good, the True, the Beautiful, for these are not ultimate or eternal but are penetrated through and through with relativity. The Good, the True, the Beautiful, are categories of the mind which are determined by man's activities in relation to this temporal world, but man does not relate himself to God through the same activities by means of which he relates himself to this world. All the values recognised by philosophy are human, temporal, ephemeral, fabricated by man for the purpose of establishing relationships with this present world, a world which is dominated through and through by change and decay. Dr. Thomas is evidently obsessed by the great fact "The Non-Rational Character of Faith," by the Rev. E. E. Thomas, M.A., D.Litt., author of "Lotre's Theory of Reality" (Longmans, Green and Co., 1925; 6s., 118 pp). of death, which not only puts an end to all individuals in turns, but will quite possibly some day annihilate the whole human race with all its accumulated capital of values. Philosophy therefore in basing religion on these values makes it rest on very insecure foundations. But before he comes to discuss the three great values, the author discusses the idea of "the soul." The soul, he maintains, is not at all the same thing in philosophy as it is in religion. For philosophy it is that which lives and draws its sustenance from man's varied relationships to the world. Scientific method and philosophical speculation cannot sustain their interest in the soul beyond the point at which its activities cease to have reference to this world- But for religion the soul lives in those relationships which man is able to establish between himself and God. If we follow the scientific and philosophical method of inquiry, the mind of man is found to be rooted in the material world and to be wholly dependent on that world, therefore it cannot have independent and abiding being. The author now proceeds to discuss in turns the nature of Truth, of Goodness and of Beauty. Truth, he maintains, is wholly relative to the particular nature and the needs of minds, depend- ent on them for its very being, passing away for ever if by any chance minds should cease. Here as often the grim shadow of death falls on the mind of our author. "Who knows but that one day man may be swept from off the face of the earth and all his knowledge perish with him?" (p* 51). The view that philosophical truth is relative and ephemeral is maintained first in relation to the world of existence and then in relation to the world of events or history. In both cases truth is dependent on minds, "built up out of the soul's own mortal nature" (p. 57). "Philosophy cannot reveal truth residing in existence as a self-subsistent whole, nor can it find any great objective guiding principles moving through events and constituting the truth of all that happiness" (p. 68 f.). The same temporality and relativity are found in the ideas of Goodness and of Beauty. The whole idea of Good as distinguished from evil is. alien to religion and is derived from a philoso- phical, not a religious, criticism of life. Moral principles are not final but relative to the chang- ing circumstances of life. But "the good of religion fcmly becomes real by being cut away from life and all its details" (p. 81). Beauty, again, is essentially sensuous, born of man's attitude to the physical universe, realised in his ordinary activities in relation to his surroundings. There is thus in it nothing supramundane or eternal. There is no "realm of beauty beyond the things of time" (p. 95). "There is no trans- cendent quality of beauty coming down from some far away realm to impregnate with its living power the things of earth" (p. 97).