IN the present Part of this Study we are trying to gain some insight into the relation between Law and Freedom in History; and, if we now return to our question, we shall find that we have already reached an answer. How is Freedom related to Law? Our evidence declares that Man does not live under one law only; he lives under two laws, and one of these two is a Law of God which is Freedom itself under another and more illuminating name.
The ‘perfect law of liberty’, as Saint James calls it in his Epistle, is also a law of Love; for Man’s freedom could only have been given to Man by a God who is Love in person, and this divine gift can be used by Man for freely choosing Life and Good, instead of Death and Evil, only if Man, on his side, loves God well enough to be moved by this responsive love of his to commit himself to God by making God’s will his own.
Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine.
1
‘History is,… above everything else, a call, a vocation, a dispensation to be heard and responded to by free human beings—in short, the interaction of God and Man.’ 2 Law and Freedom in History prove to be identical, in the sense that Man’s freedom proves to be the Law of a God who is identical with Love. But this finding does not dispose of our problem; for, in answering our original question, we have raised a new one. In finding that Freedom is identical with one of two codes of Law we have raised the question of the relation in which these two codes stand to each other. At first sight the answer would seem to be that the Law of Love and the Law of Subconscious Human Nature, which both manifestly have jurisdiction over human affairs, are not only different but are contradictory and even incompatible; for the law of the Subconscious Psyche holds in bondage souls whom God has called to work with Him in freedom. The more searchingly we compare these two ‘laws’, the wider the moral gulf between them seems to be. If we appraise the Law of Nature by the standard of the Law of Love and see through Love’s eyes all that Nature has made, behold, it is very bad.
Ay, look: high Heaven and Earth ail from the prime foundation:
All thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain. 3
One of the conclusions that have been drawn by human spectators of the moral evil of the Universe is that this chamber of horrors cannot be any God’s handiwork. The Epicureans held that it was the undesigned outcome of the fortuitous concourse of indestructible atoms. The Christian, on the other hand, finds himself compelled to choose between two other alternatives, both of which are grievously disconcerting: Either the God who is Love must be the creator of a manifestly ailing Universe, or the Universe must have been created by another God who is not the God of Love.
The heretic Marcion at the beginning of the second century and the poet Blake at the beginning of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era both adopted the latter of these alternatives. Their solution for this moral enigma was to attribute the Creation to a god who was neither loving nor lovable. While the Saviour God won souls by love, the Creator God could only impose a law and exact savage penalties for formal breaches of it. This melancholy task-master god, whom Marcion identified with the Mosaic Jehovah and whom Blake names Urizen and nicknames Nobo-daddy-, would be bad enough if he performed his duties competently according to his own limited lights; but notoriously he fails to do so, and his failure must be due either to incompetence or to malevolence. Obviously there is no intelligible relation whatever between the World’s sins and the World’s sufferings.
While Marcion is on strong ground in affirming that Creation is bound up with evil, he is on weak ground in denying that it has anything to do with goodness and love; for the truth is that God’s love is the source of Man’s freedom, and that a freedom which gives vent for Creation thereby opens the door to sin. Every challenge can be regarded equally as a call from God or as a temptation by the Devil. Marcion’s vindication of God’s love at the cost of denying His unity is wider of the mark than Irenaeus’ vindication of the identity of the Creator and the Redeemer at the cost of identifying with one another two epiphanies of the Godhead which are morally irreconcilable from a human standpoint. Moreover, the testimony of Christian experience to the truth of a logical and moral paradox has been strikingly vindicated by Modern Western science. The travail of striving to reconcile two irreconcilable epiphanies of God, which had tormented the minds of saints and scholars, was declared by at least one school of latter-day Western psychologists to have already tormented a Subconscious Psyche in an antecedent struggle through which the future saint and scholar’s moral personality had been originally acquired at a stage of early infancy in which God’s future place in the Soul’s universe had been occupied by the infant child’s Mother.
‘As the baby begins … early in the … second year of post-natal life … to draw a distinction between itself and outer reality, it is the Mother who comes to represent the external world and to mediate its impacts on the child. But she dawns upon its growing consciousness under two opposite aspects. She is the child’s chief object of love, and its fountain-head of satisfaction, security, and peace. But she is also Authority, the chief source of power mysteriously set over the child and arbitrarily thwarting some of the impulses along whose paths its new life quests outwards. The frustration of infantile impulse generates anger, hate, and destructive wishes—what the psychologists generally style aggression—directed against the thwarting authority. But this hated Authority is also the loved Mother. The infant is thus faced with the primal conflict. Two irreconcilable sets of impulses are directed towards the same object, and that object is the centre of its surrounding universe.’ 1
Thus, according to one psychological theory, the conscious moral conflict of maturity is subconsciously anticipated in early infancy; and in the infantile, as in the adult, struggle a spiritual victory exacts its spiritual price. ‘Primitive Love conquers Primitive Hate by saddling it with the burden of primal guilt’; 2 and psychology thus endorses the Irenaean anti-Marcionite Christian finding that Love and Hate, Righteousness and Sinfulness, are indissolubly linked with one another through the chain of Creation :
‘Without a mother, no strong love focused on a personal object; without such love, no conflict of irreconcilable influences, no guilt; and, without such guilt, no effective moral sense.’ 3
1 Tennyson: In Memoriam , in the Invocation.
2 Lampert, E.: The Apocalypse of History (London 1948, Faber), p. 45.
3 Housman, A. E.: A Shropshire Lad , xlviii.
1 Huxley, J.: Evolutionary Ethics , the Romanes Lecture, 1943, reprinted in Huxley, T. H. and J.: Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943 (London 1947, Pilot Press), p. 107.
2 Ibid., p. no.
3 Ibid.