朗讀練習-The Importance of Living, Chapter 2 part 1 EP 1

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Chapter Two
VIEWS OF MANKIND
I. CHRISTIAN, GREEK AND CHINESE
There are several views of mankind, the traditional Christian
theological view, the Greek pagan view, and the Chinese Taoist-
Confucianist view, (I do not include the Buddhist view because it is
too sad.) Deeper down in their allegorical sense, these views after all
do not differ so much from one another, especially when the modern
man with better biological and anthropological knowledge gives them
a broader interpretation. But these differences in their original forms
exist
The traditional, orthodox Christian view was that man was created
perfect, innocent, foolish and happy, living naked in the Garden of
Eden, Then came knowledge and wisdom and the Fall of Man, to
which the sufferings of man are due, notably (1) work by the sweat of
one’s brow for man, and (2) the pangs of labor for women. In
contrast with man’s original innocence and perfection, a new
element was introduced to explain his present imperfection, and that
is of course the Devil, working chiefly through the body, while his
higher nature works through the soul. When the “soul” was invented
in the history of Christian theology I am not aware, but this “soul”
became a something rather than a function, an entity rather than a
condition, and it sharply separated man from the animals, which
have no souls worth saving. Here the logic halts, for the origin of the
Devil had to be explained, and when the medieval theologians
proceeded with their usual scholastic logic to deal with the problem,
they got into a quandary. They could not have very well admitted that
the Devil, who was Not-God, came from God himself, nor could they
quite agree that in the original universe, the Devil, a Not-God, was
co-eternal with God, So in desperation they agreed that the Devil
must have been a fallen angel, which rather begs the question of the
origin of evil (for there still must have been another Devil to tempt
this fallenangel), and which is therefore unsatisfactory, but they had
to leave it at that. Nevertheless from all this followed the curious
dichotomy of the spirit and the flesh, a mythical conception which is
still quite prevalent and powerful today in affecting our philosophy of
life and happiness.1
Then came the Redemption, still borrowing from the current
conception of the sacrificial lamb, which went still farther back to the
idea of a God Who desired the smell of roast meal and could not
forgive for nothing. From this Redemption, at one stroke a means
was found by which all sins could be forgiven, and a way was found
for perfection again. The most curious aspect of Christian thought is
the idea of perfection. As this happened during the decay of the
ancient worlds, a tendency grew up to emphasize the afterlife, and
the question of salvation supplanted the question of happiness or
simple living itself. The notion was how to get away from this world
alive, a world which was apparently sinking into corruption and
chaos and doomed. Hence the overwhelming importance attached to
immortality. This represents a contradiction of the original Genesis
story that God did not want man to live forever. The Genesis story of
the reason why Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden of
Eden was not that they had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, as is
popularly conceived, but the fear lest they should disobey a second
time and eat of the Tree of Life and live forever:
And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one.
of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his
hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for
ever:
Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of
Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the
garden of Eden cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned
every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
The Tree of Knowledge seemed to be somewhere in the center of
the garden, but the Tree of Life was near the eastern entrance,
where for all we know, cherubims are still stationed to guard the
approach by men.
All in all, there is still a belief in total depravity, that enjoyment of
this life is sin and wickedness, that to be uncomfortable is to be
virtuous, and that on the whole man cannot save himself except by a
greater power outside. The doctrine of sin is still the basic
assumption of Christianity as generally practiced today, and
Christian missionaries trying to make converts generally start out by
impressing upon the party to be converted a consciousness of sin
and of the wickedness of human nature (which is, of course, the sine
qua non for the need of the ready-made remedy which the
missionary has up his sleeve). All in all, you can’t make a man a
Christian unless you first make him believe he is a sinner. Some one
has said rather cruelly, “Religion in our country has so narrowed
down to the contemplation of sin that a respectable man does not
any longer dare to show his face in the church.”
The Greek pagan world was a different world by itself and
therefore their conception of man was also quite different. What
strikes me most is that the Greeks made their gods like men, while
the Christians desired to make men like the gods. That Olympian
company is certainly a jovial, amorous, loving, lying, quarreling and
vow-breaking, petulant lot; hunt-loving, chariot-riding and javelinthrowing
like the Greeks themselves—a marrying lot, too, and having
unbelievably many illegitimate children. So far as the difference
between gods and men is concerned, the gods merely had divine
powers of hurling thunderbolts in heaven and raising vegetation on
earth, were immortal, and drank nectar instead of wine—the fruits
were pretty much the same. One feels one can be intimate with this
crowd, can go hunting with a knapsack on one’s back with Apollo or
Athene, or stop Mercury on the way and chat with him as with a
Western Union messenger boy, and if the conversation gets too
interesting, we can imagine Mercury saying, “Yeah. Okay. Sorry, but
I’ll have to run along and deliver this message at 72nd Street.” The
Greek men were not divine, but the Greek gods were human. How
different from the perfect Christian God! And so the gods were
merely another race of men, a race of giants, gifted with immortality,
while men on earth were not. Out of this background came some of
the most inexpressibly beautiful stories of Demeter and Proserpina
and Orpheus. The belief in the gods was taken for granted, for even
Socrates, when he was about to drink hemlock, proposed a libation
to the gods to speed him on his journey from this world to the next.
This was very much like the attitude of Confucius. It was necessarily
so in that period; what attitude toward man and God the Greek spirit
would take in the modern world there is unfortunately no chance of
knowing. The Greek pagan world was not modern, and the modern
Christian world is not Greek. That’s the pity of it.
On the whole, it was accepted by the Greeks that man’s was a
mortal lot, subject sometimes to a cruel Fate. That once accepted,
man was quite happy as he was, for the Greeks loved this life and
this universe, and were interested in understanding the good, the
true and the beautiful in life, besides being fully occupied in
scientifically understanding the physical world. There was no
mythical “Golden Period” in the sense of the Garden of Eden, and no
allegory of the Fall of Man; the Hellenes themselves were but human
creatures transformed from pebbles picked up and thrown over their
shoulders by Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha, as they were coming
down to the plain after the Great Flood. Diseases and cares were
explained comically; they came through the uncontrollable desire of
a young woman to open and see a box of jewels—Pandora’s Box,
The Greek fancy was beautiful They took human nature largely as it
was: the Christians might say they were “re-signed” to the mortal lot.
But it was so beautiful to be mortal: there was free room for the
exercise of understanding and the free, speculative spirit. Some of
the Sophists thought man’s nature good, and some thought man’s
nature bad, but there wasn’t the sharp contradiction of Hobbes and
Rousseau. Finally, in Plato, man was seen to be a compound of
desires, emotions, and thought, and ideal human life was the living
together in harmony of these three parts of his being under the
guidance of wisdom or true understanding. Plato thought “ideas”
were immortal, but individual souls were either base or noble,
according as they loved justice, learning, temperance and beauty or
not. The soul also acquired an independent and immortal existence
in Socrates; as we are told in “Phaedo,” “When the soul exists in
herself, and is released from the body, and the body is released from
the soul, what is this but death?” Evidently the belief in immortality of
the human soul is something which the Christian, Greek, Taoist and
Confucianist views have in common. Of course this is nothing to be
jumped at by modern believers in the immortality of the soul
Socrates’ belief in immortality would probably mean nothing to a
modern man, because many of his premises in support of it, like reincarnation,
cannot be accepted by the modern man.