Note (return) — CHAPTER THREE Eating, Drinking and Being Merry

But the positive defect of humanism is more serious. It likewise proposes to rationalize those supersensuous needs and convictions which lie in the imaginative, the intuitive ranges of experience. The very proposal carries a denial of their value-in-themselves. Its inevitable result in the humanist is their virtual ignoring. The greatest of all the humanists of the Orient was Confucius. "I venture to ask about death," said a disciple to the sage. "While you do not know life," replied he, "how can you know about death?"13 Even more typical of the humanistic attitude towards the distinctively religious elements of experience are other sayings of Confucius, such as: "To give oneself earnestly to the duties due to men, and while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them may be called wisdom."13 The precise area of humanistic interests is indicated in another observation. "The subjects on which the Master did not talk were ... disorder and spiritual beings."13 For the very elements of experience which humanism belittles or avoids are found in the world where pagans like Rabelais robustly jest or the high spaces where souls like Newman meditate and pray. The humanist appears to be frightened by the one and repelled by the other; will not or cannot see life steadily and whole. That a powerful primitivistic faith, like Taoism, a sort of religious bohemianism, should flourish beside such pragmatic and passionless moderation as classic Confucianism is inevitable; that the worship of Amida Buddha, the Buddha of redemption and a future heaven, of a positive and eternal bliss, should be the Chinese form of the Indian faith is equally intelligible. After a like manner it is the humanism of our Protestant preaching today from which men are defecting into utter worldliness and indifference on the one hand and returning to mediaeval and Catholic forms of supernaturalism on the other.