The First Corbishley Memorial Lecture - 7^th March 1977
Intellectual Rearament
by Lord Halisham of St Marylebone PC KG CH FRS

I have two preliminary tasks, which I hope, will command universal acceptance. The first is to acknowledge with respect and gratitude the various distinguished persons who have come to honour us with their presence. If I do not mention them individually, I hope they will realise that the reason is that within such a distinguished company discrimination would be invidious. The second is to pay a small tribute to the memory of the man my long and happy friendship with whom is probably the cause of my being asked to deliver the first of these Corbishley lectures set up under the auspices of the Wyndham Place Trust.

Religion ought to be the great cementing influence in human brotherhood. Instead, experience has taught us that all too often it has brought not peace but a sword. In spite of the prophetic utterance of the Founder of our religion, this is a scandal. In the midst literal sense of the word, and perhaps it is a mark of divine judgement that now we find all religions threatened either by indifference or open hostility, hostility in the name of some adverse ideology, or indifference in no name at all but in consequence of the absence of any coherent understanding or attempt to understand the totality of things. We may treat this as the result of our former ill-treatment of one another. Remembering that religion is largely concerned with imponderables and value judgements unverifiable except by experience and reflection, we have to learn that our own beliefs are not necessarily weakened, but may possibly be enriched by contact with other traditions. Love of one’s own is not necessarily hostility to the other than one’s own. Nor is amicable and charitable discussion with others necessarily a form of disloyalty to one’s own understanding of the truth.

But this brings me both to the tribute I must pay to his memory and to the main subject of my discourse here today.

Top

It seems a very long time ago - in fact when my adult life was just beginning - that my beloved, but tragic, friend, Richard Best and I received invitations to take a meal at Campion Hall, then situated in St. Giles, hard by the Lamb and Flag. The invitation in fact came from Father D’Arcy. I do not know on what principle Richard and I had been selected. But, whatever it was, so far as I was concerned, it was a happy choice. For it meant the beginning of two friendships which remained unbroken until last year when in each case they were terminated by death. One was with Father D’Arcy himself, to whom I have acknowledged my debt elsewhere. The other was with Tom Corbishley, then like me reading Mods. and Greats, and attending the same lectures as myself. Like all lasting friendships, each was of infinite value, and that with Tom, in whose memory this lecture was established, ended only within days of his death when he lay in his last illness at the hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth in my former constituency of St. Marylebone. In this respect at least I am a suitable choice to deliver this address. In almost every other respect I would have disclaimed the honour as being unworthy of it, so unworthy indeed that the invitation came at a time when I had taken the decision, for the time being at least, to accept no further public engagements. This, however, must be an exception since it has given me the opportunity of avowing my debt both to Tom Corbishley himself and to the Society of Jesus of which he was such a distinguished member.

This brings me straight to the subject matter of my lecture. It is, of course, as inevitable as my English speech that I shall speak largely in the idiom of my own creed, because that is the language I understand. I believe, nonetheless, that the message which I wish to convey is universal. It is based on an analysis, as objective as I can make it, of the intellectual climate of our times. I believe it is as true for Protestants as Catholics, for Jews or Christians. It may be, though I hope it is not so, that the religions of the East that take the wheel as their symbol, in contrast to the linear view of human destiny inherent in the Jewish and Christian scripture, might find it alien. I hope this is not so because what I am trying to do is to make a plea for the re-establishment of what has been called the philosophia perennis, that is to say, the wisdom which is available to the human race by the proper use of our natural gifts. But whether it be so or not, I wish to plead for a concerted and coherent attempt on the part of the religiously minded section of mankind to identify the intellectual presuppositions underlying religious experience and, having identified them, to defend them as part of the common heritage of the human race, intellectually respectable and not merely emotionally consoling.

Top

I am, of course, aware that there are humble and sincere souls in every religious tradition who go on practising their faith from generation to generation taking their inspiration from on high, not seeking to ask, still less to answer, questions about ultimate truth which they find baffling and sometimes even dangerous. I do not find such an attitude, where it exists, unreasonable. Life is a mystery, and nothing is more mysterious than the nature of the divine. There is, therefore, nothing inherently unreasonable in an attitude of mind which takes its starting point in revelation or tradition, or both, soaks its whole being in the study and pursuit of the recommended literature and virtues, and seeks nothing else to guide it from childhood to the grave. Countless devout and holy souls have lived and died in this way. and, since I believe that they have the truth within them, the last thing I would do is to depreciate, or to criticise, still less to ridicule, those who still find it possible to do so.

However, happily or unhappily we live in a generation, for some at least of whom to continue along such lines is not possible. To such, questions, once asked, do not allow themselves to remain unanswered. When it is said to them that life is inherently mysterious, they may reply either that this means that it is unintelligible, which is false but easy, or, which is true but dangerous, that the fact that it is mysterious does not mean that we must not try to understand it, for, at that point, they may embrace too quickly the false generalisation, the facile answer, the popular simplification which become so fatally attractive. Thus we find ourselves confronted with the two great spiritual dangers of the modem world. The first is the policy of drift, which takes its root in the belief that there is really nothing which can be known about ultimate things at all, and that there is no possible coherent view of the universe in which can be found a rational plan of life. The second seeks satisfaction in the facile over-simplification, which snatches at some ideology that claims to explain everything in terms of an inadequate and superficial model of human experience.

Top

The first danger, I believe, invariably leads to shipwreck because it affords no protection to the disappointments, the temptations, the experiences of despair and injustice which are the common lot of man. But both are fatal to Society. Society requires the cement of shared values to hold it together: in the absence of these it must collapse into a jumble of individual actions. We are apt to underestimate the harm done to humanity by false oversimplifications. Have we not seen the Infinite suffering imposed by false ideologies, be it of Hitler, or Stalin, or the weirder themes which seem to be springing up like weeds in the hotbeds of intellectual rubbish created by some of the dictatorships in the newer nations. All these tend to impose solutions contrary to common sense, and because they have to be imposed in order to make them accepted, resort to the hideous tortures, and the mass cruelties which have been the hall mark of twentieth century tyrannies even more than the despotisms of the past.

My plea is for the reconsecration of common sense, the development of natural philosophy, not as an alternative to religion, but as the necessary intellectual framework on which those whom I have described as finding traditional piety unacceptable without an intellectual justification can base a return to religious practice and the conscious pursuit of virtue which goes with it. I sometimes think of labelling this approach ‘intellectual rearmament’, and my argument is that the religious portion of mankind should devote some part at least of the intellectual energy hitherto reserved for theological controversy to the rehabilitation and defence of the philosophia perennis, the common background of belief which the cultivation of reason can engender.

Top

At this point, I am sure, I shall be faced by two objections from opposite points of view. I shall be told that a purely intellectual approach to the problems of life is neither possible nor inherently desirable, that philosophy is not, and cannot hope to be, a substitute for religion. With this view I agree wholeheartedly, but I hope already to have established that I am not challenging it. All I am seeking to establish is that, unless religious people are prepared to put down intellectual roots, and justify their beliefs and practices as at least rational even if not necessarily demonstrable, they will not merely fail to convince the sceptical members of our generation whose reactions to simple piety I have tried to describe, but they will, in the end, find that religious practice and belief will itself wither away, like a flower in a vase that is cut off from the soil. What is not consciously defended as rational will not indefinitely be able to present itself as true.

Top

From the opposite point of view, any attempt to reassert the importance of natural theology, the phiosophia perennis, or, in jurisprudence, natural law and natural justice, is met with an amused incredulity based upon the supposed diversity of beliefs about such matters among civilised and intelligent mankind. This is supposed to show that the exercise is doomed from the start. I do not myself understand why this should be so. When my grandfather died there was found an unfinished letter on his desk addressed to one of his young proteges who had confessed to religious doubts and difficulties. I will not attempt to quote it exactly or in toto. But what my grandfather was saying in effect was that it did not require very deep understanding to know instinctively that truth was better than falsehood, beauty than ugliness, justice than injustice, right than wrong. There are standards of value not capable of verification by measurement, observation or experiment. These are not propositions which can be verified like the boiling point of water, or Archimedes’s principle, or demonstrated like a theorem of mathematics. But instinctively we know that an attempt to deny them by means of hard instances, or known differences of opinion even about fundamental questions is a mere exercise in mystification, and whether we go to the Hebrew prophets, or the New Testament, or the Sanskrit Scripture or the philosophers of Greece and Rome for guidance, though we shall always find differences striking enough, we shall find also resemblances far more striking. It is these resemblances rather than the differences which the philosopher will find it difficult to explain, except upon the hypothesis that the value judgements of mankind are not purely subjective but based upon some sort of objective validity. People may claim as a general proposition, that aesthetic or moral judgements are no more than emotional noises, expressing at the best nothing more objective than personal preference. But if this were true, it would be perfectly acceptable to put the last five of the ten commandments in reverse without making nonsense, advocating for instance murder, theft, adultery, perjury, envy as a rule of life, or to contradict the beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount, claiming blessings for the warmakers, the arrogant and the wealthy. We all know that this is impossible. It is also impossible plausibly to propose cacophony as preferable to music, or to deny the facts of natural beauty, or the virtues of courage, integrity, and self sacrifice. The business of the philosopher is to explain the known facts of human experience and not to contradict them because they fail to fit easily into some over simplified model of the world. Whether or not we can fit the world into a logical framework, the philosophia perennis is, I believe, an existent fact and the business of philosophers is to explain it, not to explain it away. At the lowest level remains a hard kernel of human experience. At the highest level the philosophia perennis is more like the beginning of Ariadne’s thread, a clue leading its follower out of the labyrinth of mystification and despair, of sophistry and false hypothesis into which modern man has fallen.

Top

In order to make my own contribution to this I approach the question from four separate angles. The first three are philosophical. The fourth is historical. From the philosophical viewpoint, I start, like the greater part of Western thinking, with the theory of knowledge. We must undermine the popular belief that by itself the world of experience is self-explanatory in terms that are observable, calculable or measurable. This error has been engendered in part by the known triumphs of physical science in our own age. But it is not itself scientific. Indeed, it has no scientific support at all. Science itself is concerned of course with the observable, the measurable, and the calculable, and is based on the postulate that organised and coherent observation, measurement and calculation will lead to an intelligible and coherent whole. So it can and so it does to an increasing and to an ever more spectacular degree. But there is nothing in scientific thinking which either denies or has the right to deny the existence of facts and experiences which may themselves be rational but remaining nonetheless outside the field of the observable, measurable and calculable. Indeed, the postulate itself is an imponderable of just such a kind. So for example is the concept of infinity. So is the existence of all human experimentation of the sentient and intelligent observer. So, in the purely empirical field are the logical implications of the verifiable fact of the second law of thermodynamics, or the irreversible nature of the time sequence. These are all facts of experience which indicate the presence within reach of understanding of another type of reality in which the intellect, where it can be invoked at all, plays a part outside the field of pure observation. Neither pure materialism (whatever that may mean in the presence of biology or even nuclear physics) nor pure determinism have a philosophical leg to stand on in the presence of scientific progress.

Top

The second of my points of departure lies in the field of value judgements. If we abandon the verifiable as the sole area of objective knowledge, we have to come to terms with this new field of human experience. I have tried to indicate why it is impossible to explain these value judgements simply as emotional noises of personal preferences. Admittedly they are not verifiable and therefore incapable of objective proof in the sense either of the mathematical theorem or the scientific experiment. But, unless it were acceptable to believe, which I have tried to show that it is not, that the world of reality is confined to the veritable, this need cause us no alarm. Nor need it cause us concern that opinions about the unverifiable differ. There are inherent differences of degree in which the students of music, art, ethics, politics, law or religion are interested in, or can penetrate the subject. It need not surprise us that the disinterested, the superficial, or the slipshod cannot understand the discourse of those who have given a lifetime of passionate and devoted study to any subject. Nor can it be expected, in the light of the inevitably metaphorical language in which men are compelled to express insights in the field of value judgements, that even the most advanced students will always agree either in their conclusions, or in the technical language in which their conclusions are embodied.

My third point of departure lies in the more practical world of politics and jurisprudence. It is not, I believe, difficult to show that the subject could hardly exist at all if there are not to be made certain assumptions about the nature of man inconsistent with determinism in any form. These assumptions include at least a belief in free will which enables a man to choose rationally between different options of conduct. Law is not simply a matter of sticks and carrots and the process of enforcing it is not simply analogous to the art of the animal trainer. The very notion necessitates some theoretical justification for the imposition of compulsion by secular authority either by the direct application of force, or the indirect persuasion of a system of rewards and punishments. Law and respect for the law are as much an appeal to reason as to fears and hopes of punishment and reward. The sanctions and rationale of the law are complementary. The rationale justifies the sanctions and the sanctions enforce the rationale. Such a justification inherently resides in the existence, independently of compulsion, of an objective system of values, and at the same time some kind of relationship, no doubt of a sophisticated and complicated kind, between the system so understood and the courses of conduct so prescribed. But having said this, we have restated in terms against the legal positionists, the necessity for some kind of natural justice and natural law, and against the determinists a conception of man as a responsible creature endowed with free will.

Top

Obviously the area which I have attempted to chart is not merely wider than can be covered in a single lecture, but one which no single person, let alone myself, could ever hope to traverse alone. My own life has been devoted largely, if not entirely, to the conduct of purely practical affairs, on the business of earning my living in an enthralling and highly competitive profession, in the Army, in politics, even for a time in farming. But it is here, perhaps, that my fourth angle, the historical perspective, takes over. Wholly insufficient as my own intellectual apparatus and experience must be seen to be, it must be clear that none of us who attempt this path need to be ashamed to rely on the philosophical and religious experience of the past. Seventy years is much too short a time in which to achieve universal wisdom. The intellectual giants amongst us - the Galileos, the Newtons, the Darwins, the Einsteins, the Rutherfords, the great doctors of the Church, the Jewish Rabbis - may, indeed, make significant steps forward in advancing human knowledge and speculation. But even they, as in their moments of candour they are frank enough to admit, feel themselves like children playing on the shore of the vast ocean of reality. The rest of us, whose capacity and experience is so much more limited, must surely be glad rather than sorry to stand on the experience of the past, rejoicing in the tradition we have inherited, regarding it as something not static but dynamic, not dead but living, constantly developing, revising, evolving, and enriching itself as the result of the labours and insights of even the most insignificant amongst us. Christians would, I think, begin at this point to speak in terms of God the Holy Spirit. But, for my present purpose, it is enough to talk in terms of the evolving experience of human kind. The philosophia perennis is not something given once and for all, incapable of change, unsusceptible of development. In the form in which it has come down to us in the West it is a living tradition of civilisation, which has had its geniuses, its saints and its martyrs. It has its roots deep in the experience of Greece and Rome, and the religious history of the Jews. But it has not stayed quiescent from ancient days, and it is not quiescent now. What it needs now is a more conscious awareness of its presence amongst us all.

In reasserting this I feel sure that I would have had, at least in part, the approval of Tom Corbishley in honour of whose memory this lecture has been given. He was, in his own person, a great apostle of ecumenism within, and of eirenic discussion without, the confines of the Christian Church, in some ways even more so than myself. But such discussion, such charitable sharing of philosophical and religious experience, is possible only on some such assumptions as those which I have been bold to make today. In some ways Tom was more distrustful than I of the emotions in his approach to religion and religious experience. I have heard him speak, for instance, in terms far more disrespectful than I would dare to employ, of the charismatic manifestations in his own church and in others. He had not much use, either, for such movements as Moral Rearmament in which I have always had friends.

Top

But where I think that Tom would have agreed with me, at least up to a point, is the feeling that the Christian religion in particular, but indeed religion in general, if it is to survive as a coherent fighting force in the modern world, needs to be hedged about and fortified by a strong body of philosophical and intellectual beliefs based on the natural reason which can persuade its adherents that what we are doing, the worship we practise, the ethics we advocate, even to some degree the political beliefs we profess, have a solid foundation in rationality, a rationality more complete and intelligible and explicable of more facets of human experience than any competing system. To do this [believe it is essential to resurrect and refurbish the idea of the philosophia perennis, a belief in natural law and natural justice, a view of humanity restoring to man his sense of responsibility by reinforcing his instinctive belief in free will, a conscious adherence to the tradition of freedom under law which alone can make -tolerable the idea of civil government.

Men everywhere are longing for a rule of life which makes sense, which enables them to revert to the traditions of their ancestors without confining themselves within absolutely rigid categories, which enables us to evolve in the future without being false to the wisdom of the past. Such a tradition is, I believe, available to us if those of us who share it will have the courage and conviction to set it forth. We must not allow ourselves to be driven back to the catacombs or the ghetto. We must go out and fight on equal terms against the intellectual enemies present in mankind, the unreason of the barbarian who believes too much too easily, and the unreason of the over sophisticated who finds life so complicated that he has ceased to believe anything at all.

Top