Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion

Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion The Florida Bernard Shaw Series Copyright 2002 by Stuart E. Baker. This work is licensed under a modified Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. You are free to electronically copy, distribute, and transmit this work if you attribute authorship. However, all printing rights are reserved by the University Press of Florida (http://www.upf.com). Please contact UPF for information about how to obtain copies of the work for print distribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the University Press of Florida. Nothing in this license impairs or re- stricts the author’s moral rights. Florida A&M University, Tallahassee Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers Florida International University, Miami Florida State University, Tallahassee University of Central Florida, Orlando University of Florida, Gainesville University of North Florida, Jacksonville University of South Florida, Tampa University of West Florida, Pensacola The Florida Bernard Shaw Series This series was made possible by a generous grant from the David and Rachel Howie Foundation. Edited by R. F. Dietrich The Florida Bernard Shaw Series is devoted to works of and about Shaw, Shaw’s literary production, and Shavian topics of interest. While supportive of traditional approaches, the series also aims to encourage scholars with new critical paradigms to engage Shaw’s works. Pygmalion’s Wordplay: The Postmodern Shaw, by Jean Reynolds (1999) Shaw’s Theater, by Bernard F. Dukore (2000) Bernard Shaw and the French, by Michel W. Pharand (2001) The Matter with Ireland, second edition, edited by Dan H. Laurence and David H. Greene (2001) Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts, by Stuart E. Baker (2002) Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion A Faith That Fits the Facts o Stuart E. Baker University Press of Florida gainesville · tallahassee · tampa · boca raton pensacola · orlando · miami · jacksonville · ft. myers Copyright 2002 by Stuart E. Baker Printed in the U.S.A. on acid-free, TCF (totally chlorine-free) paper All rights reserved 07 06 05 04 03 02 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baker, Stuart E. (Stuart Eddy) Bernard Shaw’s remarkable religion : a faith that fits the facts / Stuart E. Baker. p. cm.—(The Florida Bernard Shaw series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–8130–2432–3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Shaw, Bernard, 1856–1950—Religion. 2. Religious drama, English—History and criticism. 3. Rationalism in literature. 4. Religion in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR5368.R4 B26 2002 822.'9129–dc21 2001043729 The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida. University Press of Florida 15 Northwest 15th Street Gainesville, FL 32611–2079 http://www.upf.com For Jalma, who made it possible. This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword by R. F. Dietrich ix Preface xi Introduction xv I. Foundations of Faith 1. A Creed for Living: A Faith That Fits the Facts 3 2. Realism 18 3. The Will and Its Responsibilities 39 II. A Guide to Art and Life 4. A Playwright’s Progress 73 5. Major Barbara 123 6. Ethics, Economics, and Government 147 III. God and Science 7. The Marriage of Science and Religion 185 IV. A Peroration 8. Catching Up with Shaw 235 Notes 245 Works Cited 251 Index 261 This page intentionally left blank Foreword “I believe because it is absurd,” said Søren Kierkegaard, speaking for all those who think a religious belief unworthy unless it can’t be proved and is even contrary to Nature. After all, they reason, the gap between God and man is so great that it must require a “leap of faith” to bridge it. But in an age of science such as ours, in which the gap has perhaps lessened, there are many who think that such leaps of faith may be from the factual to the factitious and therefore too often dangerous and destructive, both to the individual and to society. To those looking for a faith that better “fit the facts,” Bernard Shaw for half a century offered a fascinating, seemingly new religion that attempted to answer the need for up-to-date factuality in its being based on evolution. Shaw’s remarkable departure in theology, in fact, tempted some to try to explain his artistically and prophetically expressed religion in more conventional and literal terms and even to con- vert it into something more systematic and analytical, something more akin to formal philosophy and theology. The latest, and I believe most successful, attempt to explain and update Shaw is Stuart Baker’s Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts, which is all the more valuable because it shows the increasing relevance of Shaw’s religious insights to this age of, on the one hand, fundamentalist backlash and rising religious intolerance and, on the other, a nihilistic rejection of all religion. Baker presents Shaw as an original religious thinker, perilously assert- ing the unity of knowledge in the face of the dialectical tensions of the day between the extremes of skepticism and blind faith, naturalism and super- naturalism, materialism and spiritualism, summarized as the conflict between science and religion. The peril was in this “jesting apostle’s” often inviting misunderstanding and sometimes outright hostility in the rather reckless and playful way he expressed himself. Shavian speech was typi- cally a high-wire act, balancing between trying to make do with language x Foreword as he found it and creating a new speech of his own that lacked familiarity. Our language often betrayed him in either case. For example, in arguing that religion must become scientific and science must become religious, he often found himself trapped in the sorts of semantic snarls and quandaries that our jerry-built but imperious language inevitably throws us into, and thus he was misunderstood by both scientists and the religious, the two camps he was trying to reconcile. Another cause of misunderstanding was in his sometimes being too free with language, too creative with it, for the tastes of many. Although Shaw said that “there is no question of a new religion but only of redistilling the eternal spirit of religion,” this redis- tiller renewed the archetypes of religion in such paradoxical and ironic language that he appeared to the convention-bound and literal-minded as “antireligious,” which defeated his own purpose. Thus Shaw became one of those prophets without honor in his own time who seems to need the help of explainers, translators, and updaters to make his case. I think you’ll find that the case has never been made better than in the following, in which Shaw once again comes alive as a religious teacher, and perhaps none too soon. R. F. Dietrich Foreword xi Preface The seed of this book can be found in an essay I published in 1989 called “Shavian Realism.” I first developed and described there the ideas pre- sented (very differently) in the first three chapters of this book. It occurred to me at that time that an understanding of Shaw’s “manner of looking at the problems,” as Warren Sylvester Smith put it, was really the key to understanding Shaw’s religious or metaphysical views and, moreover, was the secret to understanding why those views were so valuable. I had planned to write another essay explaining this insight, which seemed to me at the time to be rather simple and straightforward. For Shaw, as for others of his time, realism meant the courage to see things as they are, not as one might wish them to be, but most self-declared realists had their gazes fixed rigidly outward, on the material, scientifically observable world; Shaw insisted on the reality of that which was within, on the irre- ducible reality of human will. He contrasted realism with “idealism,” which projected our desires and fears onto abstract entities outside our- selves and thus evaded the pain of accepting responsibility for our own natures. Shaw’s religion, I realized, was founded on the realization that the reality within was ineluctably nonmaterial and teleological, that realism inescapably entailed the recognition that “will” is an inherent aspect of the universe, and that we are all manifestations of that will. I imagined that this simple and straightforward idea could easily be expounded in a brief essay. I could hardly have been more naive. As simple as Shaw’s views in some sense are, they are so heterodox, so utterly at odds with the received, in- grained assumptions of our time, that a forthright exposition is met with bewilderment and often hostility. The core assumption of scientific materialism, that the universe is nothing but a giant machine performing its gyrations without point or purpose to the end of existence is accepted without question by most contemporary intellectuals regardless of the many other differences between them. The postmodernists’ disdain for the xii Preface notion of “progress” and their contempt for “essentialism” both derive from the belief that the universe is fundamentally without value or purpose.

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