NEW FAILURE OF NERVE
15
There is a simple moral homily that can be tortured out of
this oxymoronic language but it is completely spoiled by Niebuhr's
theology.
What Niebuhr is telling us is that every effort, every move–
ment of man in warding off evil or achieving good, leads him to
"the sin of imperialism in action." Whether we are selfish or
righteous, the tincture of sin is present. For we absolutize the
relative, dogmatize insight, eternalize the fleeting, take the part
for the whole. Man deludes himself into believing that he sees
the infinite from a finite perspective, and that he transcends self–
interest and selfishness in his conceptions of impartial justice.
All of his ideals, including his God, he makes in his own image.
In his struggle to achieve his limited ideals, as if they were abso–
lute, he consequently is guilty of fanaticism whose evils may be
not less than those he set out to rectify. Man must therefore
accept some supernatural standard to curb the conflicts of partial
truths, each claiming to be the whole truth.
What is here correctly perceived as a problem still remains
a problem, for Niebuhr's solution is stultifying. The conflict of
absolutes is to be settled by appeal to another absolute which on
Niebuhr's own theology is necessarily injected with human fini–
tude! This is a romantic and violent solution of a human predica–
ment already violently distorted to begin with. Niebuhr writes as
if
all men were naturally romantic theologians, victims of a fan–
tastic logic according to which, if God did not exist,
they
must
be God. He ignores the entire tradition of scientific and naturalistic
philosophy that has never claimed divinity for man nor infallibility
for his judgment. The doctrine of original sin turns out to be
nothing more than the discovery that man is a limited creature.
But this is no more justification for believing he is essentially
evil than that he is essentially good. For these are qualities that
depend upon the use man makes of his limitations. Naturalist
philosophers have urged men to understand the causes of their
limitations, so that by reducing the margins of ignorance and
increasing their scientific knowledge, they may be less limited.
The whole enterprise of scientific method with its self-corrective
procedures cuts under the dogmatism, absolutism and fanaticism
of Niebuhr's theological man at the same time as it gives us con–
clusions that are sufficiently reliable to overcome some specific
limitations. Niebuhr would frighten men out of their mistaken
