Macmurray: Fear & Hope-Natural and Christian

Throughout his publications,1 Macmurray regards fear as the fundamental problem of human life. Curiously he ignores hope, as far as I know, which seems to be the obvious antidote. I shall now summarise his account of fear, then comment on it and finally sketch a complementary account of hope with the aid of Gabriel Marcel.

 

  1. Macmurray on fear

  In brief his account of fear can be summarised as follows:

  1. All humanity suffers from a fundamental fear of death.

  2. It is the root of all our troubles.

  3. In particular it issues into a fear, anxiety or resentment in relation to others and Nature and thus it isolates us from them and makes them seem as enemies to ourselves.

  4. Our salvation must therefore consist in overcoming fear and re-integrating ourselves with others and Nature.

  5. Only religion can do this.

  6. And its answer is, ‘perfect love overcometh fear’ (1 Jn 4:18), which Macmurray often quotes, and thus we must strive to love each other. Love gives us faith and evokes a similar response in others.

   2. I shall now comment on each point in turn.

  1. The fundamental fear of death: It is true that we have an inherent fear of what can harm what we care about, and could not survive without it, and that we soon become aware of death, so that we fear situations in which our and others’ lives are in danger. But do we carry a fear of death with us all the time?

  2. Fear the root of our ills: Macmurray seems both to admit the need for salutary fears, such as that of the mother whose child is running across a busy road,2 and also to suggest that they too should be overcome.

  3. Its result in isolating us from others and Nature: Even if we do have such a fear, it is not the only disorder of the heart nor their only source. Lust, greed, envy and sheer malice are equally poisonous and need not issue from of fear.

  4. Moreover there are other ways to overcome fear while still experiencing it:

    1. Courage and endurance: the ability and determination to face the object of fear and to act despite it, whether to try to prevent or defeat it, or to endure it;

    2. Hope that even if what we fear will happen, things will be well some time afterwards.

    3. Apathy: the apatheia of Hellenistic sages and the complete detachment from desire of the Hindu and original Buddhist schools, so that atarexia, imperturbability, is achieved by the former, and release from the cycle of birth and rebirth and thus suffering, by the latter pair. These are the world-and-life views of those who despair of this world and of finite existence altogether. It seems as if Macmurray’s invocation of ‘perfect love casteth out fear’ could easily be interpreted as simply not caring about death, just as the Stoics came to regard it as something ‘indifferent’3 and as Epictetus said, ‘What harm is it, just when you are kissing your little child, to say, “Tomorrow you will die” or to your friend similarly, ‘Tomorrow one of us will go away, and we shall not see one another any more”?’4 But a totally apathetic person, without emotions and desires would be unable to act, as Max Scheler described such a woman who could act only when told to do by other persons or the clock.5

  5. Religion as the only cure for fear. It depends upon what one means by ‘religion’. The one thing which is common to all religions and what they are ultimately concerned with, is what each conceives to be its ultimate good. That of the Buddha was a negative one, release from suffering by total self-annihilation, which is what he logically meant by ‘Nirvana’ although he refused to specify it. Macmurray regards religion, or at least his version of Christianity, to be the attainment of ‘community’, by which he meant friendship. Although he quotes I Jn 4:10, ‘Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us’, Macmurray seems strangely silent about God’s initiatives and grace and expects us to save ourselves by our own efforts and others by our example. Some of us at least heed the words of the Psalmist: ‘Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help’ Ps. (146:3). Indeed, in a Christian perspective, a form of pride is one of the two unforgivable sins precisely because both will not accept the need for God’s grace: this fatal pride says either ‘I do not need to be saved’ or ‘I can save myself’. The other fatal sin is ultimate despair, to which we shall return in a moment.

  6. Macmurray is right to stress love and thus the magnificent Chap. 13 of First Corinthians, which sets out what Augustine called the ordo amoris, taken up by Pascal and Max Scheler, and foreshadowed by Plato in the Republic, whereby all the other virtues are specific expressions of love, and vices are denials of it. Yet while seeing faith and trust as expressions of love, Macmurray ignores St Paul’s other prime expression of it, hope (I Cor. 13:13). And to hope we now turn.

3. Natural hope

Corresponding to the salutary natural fears that we need, there are corresponding hopes. When we embark on any course of action, we implicitly have some trust in powers to see it through and hope that we can succeed, though in some extreme cases a sense of honour may urge us to undertake what we know to be hopeless. Despair is complete hopelessness regarding something of great importance and urgency, such as life itself.

This points to an implicit natural hope regarding life in this world irrespective of the present state of affairs. For if we were completely helpless and hopeless, or saw life as totally meaningless, we would be paralysed, sunk in total despair and have suicide as the only option. Such is the ultimate conclusion of the world-denying and world-fleeing world-and-live-views mentioned above, although, to its credit, original Buddhism taught and practised sympathy with our fellows and was a missionary movement.

Likewise, all those who hold life really to have no meaning at all, are left with having no point in doing anything, and Sartre well describes the fruitless cycles of distractions, vain searches for meaning and attempts to hide the meaningless of life from ourselves, and the impossible aims we try to pursue, above all that of uniting the being in itself and the being-for-itself, which if it were possible would be God. I have discussed the meaninglessness of life in my ‘The meanings of life and education’.6

Yet suicide is a rare recourse, otherwise few of us would be alive today, given the harsh conditions in which many of our ancestors lived for thousands of years and the sufferings which others have endured in plagues, famines and wars. Suicide is confined to societies in which an aristocratic and military class has a code of honour which demands it in times of disgrace, dishonour and defeat, and strangely, in the present age with comforts and opportunities that previous never imagined let alone enjoyed. Yet only Marcel seems to have considered its significance,7 while the fundament hope can be illuminate with his aid.8

4. Marcel on the two forms of hope

Marcel distinguishes two forms of hope corresponding to those of belief: ‘I believe..’ and ‘I hope...’ as distinct from ‘I believe that ...’ and ‘I hope that’. The latter pair I shall call ‘everyday’ or ‘pragmatic’ belief and hope. Such hopes consist of a wish for something desired plus a belief that it can or will be realised. They can be diluted almost to indifference. Indeed, we may add, today the word often means merely the wish that the desired object may be realised. Otherwise they rest on a calculation of probabilities. As noted above they have their proper and necessary place in human life, just as do everyday or pragmatic fears, directed to objects that we wish not to be realised but believe that they will or are likely to unless there is some way of avoiding or preventing them.

Expressions of such hopes tend to be prominent in times of hardship and trial, as in the 1930s and during the war: witness Vivan Ellis, hit song ‘Spread a little happiness as you go by’, and, of course Vera Lynn singing ‘There’ll be blue birds over/ The white cliffs of Dover’, 'We'll meet again, and ‘It’s a lovely day tomorrow’. But, of course, for many it wasn’t. The most poignant song about hope is Richard Strauss’ ‘Morgen’, in which the music and the singer belies the words, because we know all too well that morning may never come or will bring suffering.

But the former pair are absolute ones, not based on any calculation or inference from facts. In times of trial absolute hope is directed to salvation and in darkness to a light as yet unperceived. Thus, in terms of one of Marcel’s important distinctions, they are not problems to be solved, as are pragmatic hopes, but mysteries to be explored. With such hopes we overcome despair, especially the utter despair, which the Scholastics call ‘acedia’, misrendered as ‘sloth’, that says, ‘I cannot be saved’ or ‘There is no salvation’. Thus we experience, in another of Marcel’s important distinctions, the security of being and not the insecurity of having.

I have suggested above that human life in this world depends upon an implicit hope that, despite its heartache and thousand natural shocks, life will still have meaning and be worth living. This is what, adding to Collingwood, I call a ‘global absolute preposition’ which applies to the whole of life as distinct from the ‘regional’ ones which apply only to specific activities and which he mostly discussed. This hope is, or is very close to, an absolute hope. It has often been sustained by belief in a life and world beyond the grave but better than the present ones. Yet in ancient Israel, Greece and Rome the dead entered Sheol or Hades, a shadow world where they knew not God, and certainly in Israel, by a hope for a better life in this world, not so much for each individual, but for the community of Israel itself. Even in New Testament times the Sadducees denied the resurrection.

But Marcel is surely right in saying that ultimately absolute hope arises when all human and limited ones are ruined, and that it can be only a trust in an absolute Being, an omnipotent creator and ruler of all things, who, I add, loves with perfect love what he was created and so opens the way to a life that far transcends what we now experience, even if it were without defect, harm, suffering and sorrow. There is a certain truth in those who, like Heidegger, argue that death gives meaning, of a sort, to a life that at best would still be one thing after and another and would never really satisfy us.

I shall close with a summary of a story I heard some 30 years ago on the BBC World Service, and an example of absolute hope from Baron von Hugel.

A man who devoted his life to angling woke up in a strange but 5-star hotel. After a hearty breakfast the manager approached him and gave him rod, line, bait and flies and a lunch basket and showed him where he could enjoy fly or coarse fishing. He set off in great hopes. The weather was exactly right, warm but overcast, and the fish provided good sport: not too easy nor always impossible to catch. His lunch was worthy of Fortnum and Mason, and he returned more than satisfied to a first class dinner and a sound night’s sleep. The following days were the same as the first, after a while he felt bored. So one morning he asked the manager if he could try something else. ‘No, sir’, was the reply. ‘Always angling for you’. ‘Oh, Hell!’ he exclaimed. ‘Precisely, sir!’

One of von Hügel’s examples of the supernatural in daily life is an ordinary Roman Catholic woman who was dying in a hospital.9 Although, her family, whom she dearly loved, were in danger of, or now experiencing, various serious troubles, she was not troubled neither by fears for them or herself, so strong was her faith and hope in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

Notes

  1. Philip Conford provides a very useful selection of passages from Freedom in the Modern World,Creative Society, Persons in Relation and The Philosophy of Jesus: See John Macmurray on Self and Society, Chap. 13.

  2. Reason and Emotion, pp. 21-2.

  3. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, I 11.

  4. Discources, III 28, quoted in A.A. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life, p. 238

  5. ‘On the meaning of suffering’, in ed. M.S. Frings, Max Scheler: Centennial Essays, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1974, pp. 156-7. George Santayana imagined a such a person and drew the same conclusions, The Sense of Beauty, New York, Collier Books, 1961, p. 25.

  6. Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 25, No. 1, 1991. See also my forthcoming 'Some 

  7. The Philosophy of Existence, trans. M. Harari, London, Harvill Press, p. 14.

  8. ‘A sketch and phenomenology of hope’ in The Existential Background of Human Dignity, Harvard University Press, 1963. pp. 29-47.

  9. Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion, London, Dent, Vol. I 1921, Vol. II 1927.