Arts and Letters

Paul Elmer More was born at St. Louis on December 12, 1864, and died at Princeton, New Jersey, March 9, 1937.

He took the degree of B.A. at Washington University in 1887, and received honorary degrees from Glasgow, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Princeton. Although his entire life was devoted to scholarly research, his official connections with academic life were brief. For one year he was Assistant in Sanskrit at Harvard and for two years Associate in Sanskrit at Bryn Mawr.

For five years before the war he was Literary Editor of The Nation in New York, when that periodical was conservative.

Doctor More belonged to the most select class of the intellectual élite, to a class smaller relatively in the United States than in any European country. I hasten to explain that I mean by this that for most of his life he had no professional occupation; he was not a university professor, he was connected with journals in an advisory editorial capacity only for a comparatively brief period; and he never earned his living by belonging to any kind of organization. He was an independent scholar, completely untrammelled, free from committees and all the complicated machinery of education. He loved learning for its own sake and might never have produced so many books if it had not been that he also loved humanity with equal passion; so that he felt it necessary to give to others the results of his learning and meditations.

Doctor More was one of the most learned men in the world; at a time when there are so many short cuts to information, and when many are content to know only enough of a subject to conceal their ignorance from others even less fortunate, Doctor More always wrote from profound and thorough knowledge. He was a scholar in Sanskrit and in some other Oriental languages; he was a first-class scholar in Greek and Latin, and of course at home in the principal modern European tongues; he was familiar with the history of human thought from the dawn of philosophy to the latest contemporary conjecture; he was prodigiously well read in English literature and was not, like some great scholars, illiterate in everything after 1850, but was well acquainted with the novels, poems, plays, and essays of living writers.

His long series of volumes called the Shelburne Essays were penetrating and brilliant illustrations of literary criticism at its best; founded on thorough knowledge, displaying qualities of sympathetic insight and gentle irony, and sparkling with wit and humor.

The range of his mental interests is shown by the fact, that although his heart lay in the study of philosophy, metaphysics, and theology, he wrote a biography of Benjamin Franklin, who, disgusted with the uncertainties of those studies, said that he quitted them for others more satisfactory.

Doctor More was one of the greatest living authorities on the history of the early Christian Church; and during the last twenty years of his life, Christian faith held complete possession of his heart; for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. And there is not the slightest doubt that the most precious treasure in his mature and in his closing years was his belief in the Incarnation, which he had come to believe after a long early period of agnosticism.

The series of books he wrote beginning with the year 1917 and continuing to the last moments of earthly consciousness, for he corrected the proofs of his latest publication on his deathbed, were concerned with the highest and the deepest thoughts that can enter the human mind. These books were Platonism, The Religion of Plato, The Christ of the New Testament, Christ the Word, The Demon of the Absolute, and The Catholic Faith.

Although these works were original and profound, they were written in a language so clear that they could be understood by any men or women of fair intelligence, even if they were themselves without formal education.

For I happened to be intimately acquainted with an old man in Michigan who had spent most of his life since boyhood on the Great Lakes as a sailor, rising from the humblest position to that of Captain; for many years he had been a sea-captain and now in a comfortable old age, he had retired. He had had only a very little schooling; and was as near to the position of a self-educated man as one could very well be. In the middle watches of the night on many a voyage he had reflected on many things; and in his last years he read many books. One day I came upon him as he was absorbed in reading; and to my surprise, I found that the book that held his attention so closely was Christ the Word, by Paul Elmer More. I expressed to him my own delight in that book, and Captain Ludington replied, "On the subject of religion, More is my favorite writer."

The two little books—little in size—that he produced in his last years, The Sceptical Approach to Religion (1934) and Pages from an Oxford Diary, which appeared immediately after his death, are masterpieces—masterpieces in thought, in learning, and in expression. The former is an attempt to see how far the human intellect can rise to a belief in God and in the divine order of the world, without any special revelation or mystical intuition; it is the finest work of the kind I have ever read.

The latter consists of meditations that filled his mind in many hours of happy solitude during a winter in Oxford; these pages are confessional in their religious belief, with a frank consideration of obstacles; but they are fortunately also a confession of the tremendous passion and of the emotional excitement that filled his whole being.

For just as I believe that there are in the world no commonplace persons, but that those who seem to us commonplace seem so because we are ignorant; so I believe that there are no great research scholars who are really coldhearted, no matter how lacking in demonstrativeness their manner may be. Doctor More was often called cold; and he considers this curious misapprehension in that last little book—and almost laughs aloud at its ineptitude; for his heart was a furnace of emotion.

He was not a good lecturer, not a good public speaker; this may have been because he was not a professional teacher, was not accustomed to facing college classes, was not used to oral expression; and I can see how those who heard him speak in public may have believed he was both arid and glacial.

But even as those who explore hitherto unexplored regions in the remotest places of the earth, do so because they prefer excitement to security, so there are solitary thinkers whose minds, advancing far out on the distant frontiers of human thought, find such enterprises filled with wild emotions; for, as Henry James said, "there are no adventures like intellectual ones."

The mind of our great philosopher was true to the central fact of religion. The greatest contribution of Christianity to the world, he said, was Hope. With an absolutely sure instinct for the significance of religion, he felt the fatal error made by many clergymen and theological schools today was the substitution of social propaganda for spiritual regeneration. Even as science is powerless to save the world and has fallen into a bankruptcy more desolating than any financial depression, so no new system of economics or change in political government can either redeem mankind or renew the individual.

His books are among the most important of modern times, for they show how a fervent religious belief can not only be accompanied with intellectual self-respect, but can have its foundations in thought. Doctor More was a living example of the statement of Thomas Aquinas, that the faith of a man is better than the faith of a child.