The Age of Anxiety

Both these books are, in a sense, about the same things – the progressive loss of simplicity and confusion of ethical values belonging (though by no means peculiar) to the present age. Mr Yarnold argues that if we are good Christians we will be less likely to exterminate ourselves. He advocates repentance –

Granted the ability to wage war with thermo-nuclear weapons, granted also the fact of human freedom, and the continuous repudiation of the law of God, the end is logically inevitable. The one thing which conceivably can alter the present movement of human history towards its climax and ultimate judgment is the fact of Christ. The way of repentance is always open . . .

Men like Mr Yarnold argued in the same way at the time of the Lisbon earthquake and the time of the Black Death. What does he require of us? Individual prayer and repentance? Very good. A huge collective conversion of any one or all of the thousand or so Christian denominations? Hardly. Protest marches against the Hydrogen Bomb? We have them already.

Professor Niebuhr’s essays are disturbing. In his able analysis of American social life, Christianity and Judaism, the American Negro problem, he tends to accept too readily the relativism of the religious anthropologist. Vigorous, persuasive, erudite, conversational; he is like a climber on a precipitous mountain who from time to time jettisons his spare boots, his bar of chocolate, and his sleeping bag, to make the ascent possible. One fears that the ice axe will go next:

Clearly (he writes), the life of the community requires the give and take of competitive striving, the calculations of justice and the mutualities of family and community for its proper order and health. Any offer to solve these collective problems by the hope that sacrificial love will change the stubborn nature of men and shame other people into the goodness which the saint has achieved, is bound to be reduced to sentimentality in the end . . .

He would, it seems, wholeheartedly approve of the via media of Pandit Nehru, and reject as ‘impractical’ the difficult sanctity of Mahatma Gandhi. Yet it is Gandhi, not Nehru, who still obscurely moulds the conscience of India. Professor Niebuhr divides too sharply the natural and supernatural spheres, evidently daunted, like Mr Yarnold, by the Gorgon’s head of human sinfulness.

1960 (209)