After Further Thought

Princeton's Professor Walter T. Stace, 65, is a kindly and reflective teacher of philosophy, with an imposing academic reputation. In 1948 he wrote a scholarly article for the Atlantic Monthly, called "Man Against Darkness," expressing his pessimism about religion. Said Professor Stace: "There is, in the universe outside man, no spirituality, no regard for values, no friend in the sky, no help or comfort for man of any sort."

The burst of reader response tore a few holes in the professor's ivy. Publicly and in a flood of angry letters, he was denounced as an atheist or worse. Walter Stace, an Englishman, was shocked. He had never fancied himself an out & out enemy of religion. As a young man, he had studied briefly for the ministry while at Dublin's Trinity College. In 20 years as a British colonial officer in Ceylon, he had formed a lively admiration for Buddhism and the Hindu religions.

Since then Stace has thought through a personal conflict which his article only partially illumined--one between his intellectual "antireligious" belief and "a fundamental religious feeling" retained since childhood. In a book published this week, Time and Eternity (Princeton; $3), he shows the other side of the coin which he held up to his readers 3 1/2 years ago. He calls it "a defense of religion"; more exactly, it is a philosopher's admission that there is a God independent of nature --although experience of Him need not be tied to a religious creed.

The Devil Laughs. "Religion," Philosopher Stace begins, "is the hunger of the soul for the impossible, the unattainable, the inconceivable . . . Either God is a mystery or He is nothing at all." Stace holds that God is such a mystery that any attempt to reason about him, e.g., to prove that God is the Creator of the Universe, is doomed to fail. "To ask for a proof of the existence of God is on a par with asking for a proof of the existence of beauty . . . If God does not lie at the end of any telescope, neither does He lie at the end of any syllogism."

Stace rejects any literal interpretation of religious belief: "The devil* laughs with joy when he finds that the saint takes his beliefs to be facts, because he knows that he has then an easy prey." His reasoning, which sometimes runs through pretty deep water, is that an Infinite God can have no connection with the natural order of things, since everything in the universe or connected with it must by definition have some limitations of time or space.

In Professor Stace's substitute for theology, God and man live in entirely separate worlds--an "eternal order" and a "natural order." Man cannot discover the eternal order by his reasoning power, or through any system of belief. He can only experience it. "The mystic," writes Stace, "lives in both orders"; all men, however, have within them a consciousness of God which needs only to be developed. This sense of the eternal world, which Stace calls "moral intuition"--plus the testimony of the mystics--has given man his sense of moral values, which a purely natural explanation of the universe cannot account for.

Utterly Other. Philosopher Stace is happy that most modern Christians (except Roman Catholics) tend to play down the rational proofs of God. "Attempts at proof not only fail of their own purpose and so do no good to religion, but . . . they positively degrade it. For their effect is to drag down the divine and the eternal from their own sphere into the sphere of the natural and the temporal."

He concludes: "The lesson of the futile struggles of philosophers to solve their contradictions ... is that for which mystics have always contended, that the Ultimate cannot be comprehended by reason. And this is the same as saying that God is utterly other, that the mystery and incomprehensibility of God are absolute and irremovable, that all religious language is symbolic and not literal."

* Philosopher Stace, to be sure, uses "the devil" in a purely metaphorical context.

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