William Hamilton

On Doing without Knowledge of God

It should be apparent from the foregoing why humanism in general, literary or philosophical, means very little to us. Perhaps the time for it will come again, but at present we feel very remote from the serenity and harmony it represents. To us it seems that the selfcomplacency of man implicit in humanism has scant foundation nowadays. Mankind today is in poor shape. Any portrait of modern man, if at all faithful to the original, cannot but be deformed, split, fragmentary-in a word, tragic. Our problems are limited in range. We are neither believers nor atheists, nor are we sceptics. When the premisses of metaphysics and even of history are uncertain and open to question, the moral sense is forced to extend its scope, taking on the additional function of guide to knowledge. There is a concreteness in it, moreover, which saves us from abstract moralism.... And many of those who belong today to no church and no political party are in a similar spiritual condition. What is left in the end? There are, it seems to me, a few Christian certainties so deeply immured in human existence as to be identified with it. Anyhow I do not think I have the right to speak of faith, but only of a certain trust. This trust is founded and turns on something more than the compassion of Albert Camus. It is founded on the inner certainty that we are free and responsible, and it turns on the absolute need of finding a way towards the inmost reality of other people . . . Humbly we must confess that we have no panacea. All we haveand it is a great deal-is this trust that makes it possible to go on living. The sky above us is dark, and this small circle of light barely enables us to see where to place our feet for the next step. This amounts to saying that the spiritual situation I have just described admits neither of defence nor of arrogance. Frankly, it is merely an expedient. It resembles a refugee encampment in no-mans-land, an exposed makeshift encampment. What do you think refugees do from morning to night? They spend most of their time telling one another the story of their lives. The stories are anything but amusing, but they tell them to one another, really, in an effort to make themselves understood.