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C l a s s i c A p o l o g e t i c s
THE BEGINNING AND END OF MAN: PART 1
By RONALD KNOX
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This Rock
Volume 4, Number 8
 August 1993 
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THE theory of evolution has its own evolution through
more than a century of scientific controversy; its own variations,
now elicited by the need of adaptation to a changing environment in
philosophical thought, in religious and even political history, now
consisting of imperceptible modifications immanent in the process;
and through it all runs, like a principle of natural selection, the
iron law of inductive experiment, testing and winnowing the theories
of yesterday and relegating what it has discarded to the fossil museum
of the past.
The whole theory is only a theory still. But so far as concerns the
general issue between the rival views of creative evolution and of
special creation, of types fixed for all time and types merging into
fresh types, it is enough to say that, whatever corroboration it may
receive, the evolution theory neither detracts in any way from the
sense of grandeur with which God's creative work must affect all thoughtful
minds nor promises to give any answer to the age-long "Why"
that underlies all our modern cries of "How.".[This essay
is the first half of a booklet published in 1921 by the Catholic Truth
Society of London. In the preface then-Fr. Knox noted that "The
following considerations formed the substance of a course of sermons
delivered at Our Lady of Victories, Kensington, in October 1920, shortly
after the pronouncements of an Anglican Canon on the Fall had aroused
some interest in the newspapers. The text of the sermons has been
slightly abbreviated, but no further effort has been made to edit
them except insofar as the written word must necessarily differ from
the spoken. The writer claims no specialist knowledge on any branch
of natural science nor any originality for his views; he has simply
attempted to turn the light of common sense on a subject which only
calls for such treatment because so many of us are still content to
be hypnotized by catchwords." This reprinting preserves the whole
of Msgr. Knox's text; the only changes have been the regularization
of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.].
But when we come to the position of man in this baffling system of
creation, should we not expect that biological science, in proportion
as its guesses arrive nearer at the truth of things, would illustrate
in fresh lights the profound distinction there is between man and
beast, the inherent fitness of man to lord it over the universe that
has been made, it would seem, for his pleasure?
We all know that biological science does nothing of the sort. On the
contrary, it has given us an undignified race of animals, not indeed
as our ancestors--that is a misstatement--but as a sort of
poor relations with a common ancestry in the background. And, while
it admits that man is the nobler, because from the biological point
of view the more complicated, type, and that the specific differences
between the lowest type of humanity and the highest beast are significantly
large, it is not prepared on that account to spare our feelings.
There may have been a series of animal types representing a slow gradation
between ape and man, which have perished, according to the Darwinian
law, only because their mixed characteristics did not qualify them
to survive--types, you may suppose, that had just not enough tail
to clamber up a tree when attacked, just not enough brain to dig themselves
in behind it. Man's title to live would thus, after all, be little
better than an accident. Or, on the Lamarckian view, this noble and
complex structure, the human body, may have only been called into
existence through generations of struggle, by an automatic response
to the exigencies of our environment.
Whatever more modern reconciliation or rehandling of these views be
the dominant hypothesis, it is at least clear that on the evolution
theory man's physical structure is not the sudden miracle of intrusion
upon nature that our ancestors have deemed it; the human race has
made good only on the same terms as the other dominating species,
and by weapons analogous to theirs; and, if man has become lord of
creation, it would seem that he has won his position as the optimists
say Britain won her Empire--only in a fit of absent-mindedness.
We cannot even say that it was the human intellect, as such, which
secured the triumph. Rather, it may have been an instinctive movement
which called forth the first complications of our psychology, even
the first elements of our civilization--a movement as instinctive
as that which turned the beaver into an architect and the hunted stag
into a strategist.
If it can be proved, so far as such matters are capable of proof,
that man's early development is thus parallel with that of the brute
beasts, is there anything left to us in virtue of which we can call
man the master--not merely the highest product, not merely de
facto the tyrant, but by God-given right the true lord and master
of creation? There is.
Run "instinct" for all it is worth; show how man's delicate
sensibility in a thousand directions is but the hypertrophy of such
instinct; collect whatever instances you will of inherited tendencies,
of herd-psychology, and the rest of it--you still come up against
a specific difference between man and brute which eludes all materialist
explanation: I mean the reflective reason.
When your attention, instead of being directed toward some object
outside yourself is directed toward yourself as thinking or toward
your own thinking process, that is the work of the intellect, that
is man's special prerogative. When Adam awoke in the garden, we dare
not guess what monstrous forms of animal life, what wealth of vegetation
our world has forgotten, his eye may have lighted upon. But we do
know what was his strangest adventure, because it was an adventure
he shared with none of his fellow-tenants in Paradise. His strangest
adventure was when he met himself.
Here at least, wherever else you trace continuity, discontinuity begins.
The difference between dead matter and living, the difference between
unconscious life and life that is sensitive, are not more absolute
than the difference between the living thing that can feel and the
living thing that can reflect upon its feelings The phenomenon of
the intellect, considered in itself, is not subject to any material
laws or susceptible of any material explanation. As a mere matter
of psychological analysis this phenomenon, whatever we make of it,
is an intrusion upon the brute creation, a sudden epiphany of the
immaterial world within the material horizon.
Man is the object of his own thought, and in the direction of that
act he borrows nothing whatever from his material surroundings. There
you have the casket in which the secret of man's identity is locked
up, beyond the reach of all biological speculation.
And it is because the impressions man receives through his senses
are not simply isolated impressions that die and pass, are not simply
stored up by a pigeonhole system of unconscious association, but related
and digested in his thought by the work of the independent, organizing
intellect, that man is master of creation still.
He alone is the spectator of all time; him alone the music of the
spheres has for audience. The buffets of experience from without are
no longer mere chisel-blows that blindly fashion the evolution of
the type; they are transmuted into terms of spiritual experience and
become part of the individual history, with its loves and hates, its
hopes and despairs, its outlook upon eternity.
The same intellectual quality, which is philosophic proof that man's
spirit is immaterial, is at the same time the index of man's place
in the scale of being. He alone, of things visible, is related to
the universe as self-conscious subject to object; but for him, the
panorama of creation would, for its own tenants, be like a cinema
played at St. Dunstan's Home for the Blind.
Is man a development of the beast? Why, certainly. Did you not know
that you were a brute once? That when your bodily frame first came
into existence, you had no right to be thought higher in the scale
of creation, more precious in the sight of God, than the unborn young
of an animal? We did not need Weismann to tell us that one acquired
characteristic cannot be inherited, the characteristic of being a
rational creature.
We knew that God first formed man of the slime of the earth--of
one kindred with the beasts that perish, and only afterwards, only
when God breathed into his face the breath of life, did he become
a living soul. And if it should prove that our bodies, this slime
we were formed from, is part of a coherent system of gradual biological
evolution, we are still, as intellectual creatures, the enfant
terrible of natural history, a cuckoo's egg in the nest of bewildered
creation.
Man is the pivotal creature; the spiritual and the material have their
liaison in him. No discovery of science can abase man's dignity, so
long as his mind rests in that truth and his will in that high ambition.
The Will
It must be obvious to anybody that a man's actions
are in great part determined for him by conditions for which he is
not then and there to blame; sometimes, for which he is not to blame
at all. Suppose a man is born of an unhealthy stock, so that he has
a morbid strain in his very blood; suppose him brought up in a home
and among companions whose influence over him is all evil; suppose
that by a long course of vicious living he has fallen into fixed habits
of self-indulgence.
When that man tosses off, with already trembling fingers, the last
glass of drink that nerves him to go out and commit a murder, can
we really call his action free? Does it really differ in kind from
the instinctive fury with which the madman turns against his captors
or the lion falls upon its prey?
The answer to that is a blinding, overpowering conviction of the human
conscience. We believe the actions of the lower animals to be determined
for them, wholly and completely, by instinct and by training and by
circumstance, even when they seem most faithfully to parody the deliberate
decisions of man. Sir William Watson, for example, describes a collie
dog out for a walk with his master:
"Shall we take this path or that? It matters not a straw. But
just a moment unresolved we stand, and all his personality, from ears
to tip of tail, is interrogative. And when, from pure indifference,
we decide, how he vociferates! How he bounds ahead! With what enthusiasm
he ratifies, applauds, acclaims our choice 'twixt right and left,
as though some hoary problem, over which the world had puckered immemorial
brows, were solved at last and all life launched anew! "
We know, most of us, those mannerisms of the brute, and yet we can
see through them and laugh at them. But when we consider the actions
of man, we think, we talk, we behave--even in the most solemn
circumstances, when life and death depend upon our behavior--as
if man had a will and must be held responsible for what he does.
I do not say that whenever a man acts freely he is conscious at the
moment of free action. On the contrary, it generally feels at the
moment as if the motive which induces us to act as we do, rightly
or wrongly, were a tyrannous influence from which we cannot escape.
But when the action is complete, whether it is our own or that of
another, we do get the sense that, if the agent had wished, he could
have acted differently--"I oughtn't to have said that,"
"He had no right to behave as he did." That means that the
action was not determined but free, and we testify to our belief in
the responsibility of the human agent whenever we think of reward
or of punishment.
It is fatal to be misled into explaining away the concepts you find
in your experience. "After all," people say, "what
do we mean by a reward? Isn't it simply a bribe to make people do
the same again, just what we do when we give a dog a biscuit to make
it do a trick? And a punishment," they say. "Isn't it simply
a threat to prevent people doing the same thing again, just what we
do when we hang up dead moles on a barn door, to teach the other moles
not to come rooting about our property?" That isn't true. We
bribe animals, we threaten animals, but it is only men that we punish
and only men that we reward.
I am a schoolmaster. Supposing there are three boys in my form who
don't know their lesson. One of them says he really worked his hardest,
but couldn't make head nor tail of it, and I'm inclined to believe
him. The second forgot, simply forgot, that any lesson had been set.
The third, it is clear, has simply been slacking. Well, it may be
that in the interests of discipline I make them all write out the
English of the lesson three times.
But in the case of the first I am simply doing it for his education,
so as to impress on his memory what he has failed to impress on it
for himself; in the case of the second, I am simply correcting him;
I don't blame him for his forgetfulness, but I'm going to give him
a lesson which will make him less forgetful in future. It is with the
third and only with the third--the boy who could have done better
than he did--that my action can be properly described as punishment.
But of course your modern psychologist will think that all this is
a very superficial analysis. "Are you quite sure," he says,
"that you've diagnosed your feelings rightly? In the last few
years we've come to know much more about the curious little kinks
and twists which are to be found in the make-up even of a sane, ordinary
mind. Sometimes we can explain these things--a shock, for example,
experienced in boyhood, may make a man nervous about fire or afraid
of the dark or something of that kind; the impression left by the
experience has lingered on in his subconsciousness long after, it
may be, the actual memory of the incident has passed from him.
"Since our minds are so curiously constructed, may it not be
that the conscience you tell us of is, after all, one of these illusions?
That the scoldings and the whackings and the standings in the corner
which have been inflicted on us when we were young have produced in
us the illusion that we are responsible for our faults, when really
our actions were all determined by heredity, by environment, by instinctive
movements? After all, you priests (they tell us) come across plenty
of scrupulous people who think some action of theirs was voluntary
when in reality it's quite plain that it wasn't. If we can make such
mistakes once, why not always? If we are sometimes wrong in thinking
that we acted freely, isn't it possible that we are always wrong?"
The answer to that is, No. The human mind cannot simply invent, cannot
think without having the material for its thought supplied to it by
experience. And if the doctrine of determinism is true, and there
has been no such thing in all human history as a free act, then the
very idea of free action is one the human mind could not have conceived
for itself. I quite admit that, knowing in your experience what it
is to sin, you may sometimes through scrupulousness give a wrong label
to this or that action and suppose it to be a sin when it was really
only a mistake. But you couldn't even wrongly suppose it to be a sin
if there weren't such an experience as sin or if that experience had
not been felt by the human race.
I can mistake Mrs. Brown, whom I know, for Mrs. Smith, whom I know,
but I can't mistake her for Mrs. Jones, whom I don't know--even
a wrong judgment must somewhere have a basis in reality. If you break
your hostess's best sugar-basin by some quite unavoidable accident,
you have a feeling at the time that is very much like the remorse
you feel after committing a guilty action. That's a mistake. But you
couldn't mistake your feeling for remorse unless you had learned,
somehow, to attach a meaning to the word "remorse."
I don't mean to say that, when you have thus vindicated the freedom
of the will, the problem of free will is an easy one, even in psychology.
We say, "What motive induced you to be so cruel?"--do
we then imply that our motives, our estimates as to the good and the
harm, apparent or real, that will result from our action, are tyrants
that force us into doing what we do? Why then, we are determinists
once more: Motives have swayed our action from first to last, and
there is no room left to put anything of ourselves into it. Or do
we mean that, having weighed up the motives for and against the suggested
action, we then proceed to choose our course quite independently of
them--that our actual choice is determined by nothing
whatsoever?
Why then, the freedom of our actions is meaningless; it is at the
last moment a mere whim, a mere caprice, that is the explanation of
our action. Neither of those two positions will do. Just as there
is no explaining of the way in which subject and object interact upon
one another in our knowledge, so there is no explaining of the way
in which our will and the motives which inspire it interact upon one
another when we choose between two courses of action. It is a mystery,
and we must bow to it.
But this we can say, that any philosophical theory which tries to
persuade us that what heredity, and environment, and education, and
habit have made of us, that we are and always will be; that there
is no room left for the free action of the human soul, no chance of
retrieving the past and making good once more; that, consequently,
men cannot, just as animals cannot, be in the true sense rewarded
or punished for their actions, but only bribed into repeating their
good actions, or deterred from repeating their bad actions--such
a philosophical theory, I say, is false to the whole of our moral
experience and inconsistent with the first principles of Christianity.
It may be easy enough to accommodate it to the dark, fatalistic religions
of the East or to Western imitations of them, but the religion which
Jesus Christ founded appeals to man as a free agent, responsible for
the use he makes of his opportunities and for the choice of his eternal
destiny. Even the lost souls in hell have this dignity, that they
are where they are of their own choice.
The Fall
The book of Genesis gives us a picture of man at
his first beginnings as a prince exiled from his heritage. Science,
dealing with the same period, gives us a picture of man as a baby,
first groping his way, then beginning to find himself, then growing
and developing by gradual upward stages into the self-appointed dictator
of a world that has bowed to his cunning. Let us understand that the
issue here is not concerned with a mere question of historical fact.
We do not expect science to deal with questions of historical fact.
When the biologists started out to give us an account of our origins,
we did not expect them to discover for us the remains of rudimentary
legs in the serpent. When we sent the archaeologists exploring, we
did not expect them to return in triumph with a fossil apple, bearing
unmistakable marks of a bite on each side. If there were any contemporary
records by which to assess the value of the story of Genesis, it would
be to the historian, not to the sciences, that we should look for
guidance. Nor are we likely to quarrel with the man of science if
he discovers, or if he conjectures, that the earliest human creatures
of whom he is able to find any traces were degraded bushmen instead
of half-heroic beings. It was Rousseau who believed in the "noble
savage," the unspoilt child of nature from whom our civilization
has degenerated. Christianity did not expect man, after the Fall,
to be such a character as that. Whatever gifts Adam possessed in the
time of his innocence that were superior to yours and mine were forfeited,
absolutely and finally, by the Fall, and it is no news to us that
our civilization, where it is true to itself, has left Cain and Lamech
behind.
In fact, our position is not that of people who suppose that the story
of our race involves an early degeneration from a high to a low standard
of morals or of culture. The failure of Christian doctrine to fall
into line with the theories of the evolutionist lies deeper than that.
This is where the quarrel lies. If the story of the Fall is true,
then the human conscience--and since we are all sinners, the
human consciousness of sin--must be present in man from his very
first beginnings.
However much our moral standards may have changed in their particular
application--as, for instance, in the setting of a higher value
on human life--man has always had the power to realize that he
is sinning when he sins and the knowledge that such conduct is contrary
to the law of his Creator and the terms of his creation. But if human
history is to be brought into line with the whole history of animal
life on our planet, then we should expect that the knowledge of God
and the consciousness of sin developed gradually in man's soul, just
as certain capacities--the capacity, for instance, to stand upright
on two legs--would be supposed to have developed gradually in
his body. And, further, those keener moral perceptions ought somehow
to have been developed by him in the course of his struggle for existence,
in answer to the needs of his surroundings, or as the title by which
the race continues to persist in a world the weakest goes to the wall.
Now, supposing that divine revelation had told us nothing at all about
the dawn of human experience and that we were left entirely to the
guesses of the biologist for information about our earliest past,
what sort of theory should we construct for ourselves? Something,
I suppose, like this--that man when he first won his right to
survive knew no restriction upon his actions except such as mere instinct
provided; he had no theory of controlling his desires, no sense of
cruelty or of injustice; that he lived as beasts live, the blameless
child of unrestrained instinct. Gradually he found that his opportunities
for gratifying his desires had outrun the limit within which he might
safely indulge them. Disease followed or, if not disease, at least
an enervated constitution, or mere worldly caution taught him the
first elements of orderly conduct:
"Philosophers deduce you chastity or shame, from just the fact
that at the first whoso embraced a woman in the field threw club down,
and forewent his brains besides, so, stood a ready victim in the reach
of any brother savage, club in hand; hence, saw the use of going out
of sight in wood or cave to prosecute his loves."--so Bishop
Blougram read in his French book.
Further, when instinct or common sense warned our forefathers that
it was more conducive to the general happiness if they lived in tribes
and in village settlements than if they lived isolated on the one-man-one-cave
principle, it began to be seen that life in a community involved some
give-and-take in matters of gentleness and of honesty. A rude compact
that if you stopped stealing your neighbor's eggs he would stop clubbing
you over the head would have in it the germs of what we call law and
order. And gradually, as these advantages came to be more clearly
seen, and even drawn up in some code of law, gradually, as the younger
generation became accustomed to the idea of self-control and of observing
your neighbor's rights--when all is said and done, you can do
a great deal by beating a boy--there would grow up in some dim
region of the human consciousness the sense that what medicine discouraged
and what law forbade was not only insanitary, not only illegal, but
positively wrong.
That is a very pretty picture; the chief disadvantages attaching to
it are that it isn't true; it doesn't explain what it set out to explain,
and it is quite out of harmony with the whole of Christian morals.
It isn't true--that is to say, there is not a shred of evidence
for it--and our friends the anthropologists, who make it their
business to throw what light they can upon the principles of primitive
human society, have lately given up this attempt to explain away morals
as taking their origin from mere worldly convenience. They will tell
you on the contrary that some sort of religion or "magic"
comes earlier in human society than the making of laws for purposes
of practical convenience. The social contract is out of date.
And it doesn't explain what it set out to explain. The sense of distinction
between good and evil, between right and wrong, is something totally
different from the sense that such and such a thing is harmful or
that such and such a thing is contrary to the welfare of the community.
Once again, I quite agree that if you have got the idea of right and
wrong in your head, it is possible to have a false conscience, to
mistake what is really indifferent for something wrong, and vice versa.
But if you don't start with some general idea of right and wrong in
your head it is impossible to see how it is ever going to get there.
There may be precious little difference between the degraded savage
who's got very little conscience and the beast that has got none at
all. But the difference, such as it is, is definite and absolute.
And it's quite out of harmony with the whole of Christian morals,
for it means that virtue--the observance of the distinction between
right and wrong--is simply one of the weapons which have enabled
the human race to survive. Justice is simply a means to prevent the
human race exterminating itself by quarrels, continence simply an
expedient to save it from physical degeneration. If that were all
virtue is, then we should have to say that the death of our Lord on
Calvary had taken that code of morals and written across it in letters
of blood, "Cancelled." The law of biology is that he who
loves his life shall save it; the law of Christ is that he who loves
his life shall lose it.
It is the deliberate doctrine of our Lord and Master that there is
no survival of the fittest in the heavenly economy, that the unfittest
to survive in this world is the fittest to survive through all eternity
with God. There is no room for arguing over it; if natural morality
is simply a sort of protective shell which the human race has formed
around itself for its own preservation, then Christian morality, the
morality of the Sermon on the Mount, is a diseased and pernicious
growth, and ought to be cut away.
But after all, why should we expect the history of human morals to
follow the lines laid down for it by the fancy of a few dogmatic evolutionists?
We have seen that the human intellect is not and cannot be an incident
in the course of natural evolution, but is a sudden intrusion upon
the natural order of things.
We have seen that mankind has again wandered aside from its proper
evolutionary orbit by being found in possession of a will that is
free to choose and responsible for its choice. If this be so, surely
it is clear that the history of the human conscience will be altogether
outside the course of ordinary biological happenings, that the human
conscience, too, is not a gradual growth in us, but a sudden intrusion,
part of a different order of creation.
True, we couldn't know that man was created innocent and has fallen
from his innocence. Philosophy wouldn't determine the point for us,
though our whole experience of the moral struggle in ourselves, the
conflict between the law of sin in our members and the law of grace,
is such as befits the condition of beings that have fallen from what
they once were.
But philosophy does say to biological science, "Stand aside here."
And while it stands aside, divine revelation steps in and shows us
what we once were--were for an infinitesimal moment of history
and shall never be again. God made man right, and he hath entangled
himself in an infinity of questions. What wonder that man is a come-by-chance
in the system of creation, if the very earliest incident in his career
is indeed the story of an arrested tendency, a divine purpose thwarted?
Msgr. Ronald Knox (1888-1957) was a convert from Anglicanism.
Skilled in the classics, he was a prolific writer best known for his
high satire, his detective novels, and his singlehanded translation
of the entire Bible from the Vulgate. Many readers consider his New
Testament to be the most beautiful rendering in modern English. One
literary commentator, in remarking upon Knox's abundant talents, said
it would suitable for his tombstone to record simply that he was the
translator of the Bible and the author of The Viaduct Murder.
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