Arts and Letters

My first reaction, in undertaking to speak about Reinhold Niebuhr, is one of dismal inadequacy to the task. I did not know him really well. I could count on the fingers of one hand, I suppose, the times I have talked with him in anything more than a casual way. He left an enormous literary legacy—twenty-odd books, hundreds of articles and speeches. Of all this I have read only a small part. Only a very competent and patient intellectual biographer would be able to sift through all of this and to give us a rounded picture of the entirety of Niebuhr's work.

And yet I have to recognize that despite this inadequacy of preparation, it is not wholly without reason that I should be asked to speak to his memory today. I regarded him during his lifetime, and continue to do so, as the greatest of my own teachers—as the man whose thought and example have exerted the greatest influence on my own view of life. It is not unjust, I suppose, that a pupil conscious of such a debt should be asked to speak to the qualities of the teacher to whom that debt was incurred.

Reinhold Niebuhr was not a literary artist. He was a reader and an admirer of poets and held the art in highest regard, but he was not himself a poet. His work was inspired by too severe an intellectual discipline—by too much agony of self-questioning, by too firm a determination to spare himself nothing of the complexity of the dilemmas with which he grappled—to leave room for any extensive preoccupation with problems of form. This does not mean, of course, that he wrote badly. It means merely that he did not write for literary effect, and that the beauty in what he did write—and beauty there was, indeed, in it—lay less in the cadence of the prose than in the power and consistency and the immense moral earnestness of the thought.

Niebuhr was also not, as was often supposed, a theologian. He was a man of profound religious faith, an ordained minister of the Evangelical Synod of North America, at one time a pastor in a working-class district of Detroit, and for many years a commanding figure on the faculty and administration of Union Theological Seminary in New York. I doubt that any less sanctimonious man ever wore the clerical cloth. And for many of us his greatest contribution was made in a quality that I can describe only as that of a religious philosopher and spiritual anthropologist—a profound student, that is, of the moral nature, and the moral dilemmas, of the human individual and human communities. At the heart of his philosophy there lay the uncompromising recognition of the essential ambivalence of man's nature—of the extent, that is, to which all of man's behavior, even his most noble undertakings, even his most exalted flights of rational insight—tended to be corrupted and distorted by the insidious impulses of self-love: vanity, pride, self-congratulation, thirst for admiration and praise, love of power. Evil, in Niebuhr's view, had to be recognized not as something external to ourselves, not as something to be attributed simply (and I use his words) to "the sloth of nature or to the defects of foe or competitor," and not, above all, as some sort of regrettable misunderstanding in nature which science and enlightenment might be expected some day to correct; evil had rather to be recognized as something internal to ourselves, as something built into our imperfect nature, something not fully eradicable by our own insight or effort, and therefore a real and permanent force in human affairs.

And it was in this tragic corruption of man's nature that Niebuhr saw the meaning of the ancient concept of original sin. He had no disposition to deny the bitterness of the dilemma this corruption posed for all those who were strong enough to take account of it. But this was a dilemma, he believed, which could be deprived of its sting, and meaning be thereby restored to man's existence, precisely by the recognition of the predicament from which it flowed, by the humility that this recognition implied, and by faith in the ability of a power outside our lives to understand, and to forgive, what we, being inside them, could never fully understand and were not sufficiently detached to judge.

It was from these ingredients that there flowed Niebuhr's passionate rejection of all that was extravagant and vainglorious in the pretensions of nations and political movements as well as of individual men. It was not, he pointed out, just man's virtue that was corrupted and imperfect. The same was true of his freedom; and this went for communities as well as for individuals. Confronting the age-old dilemma of free will versus predestination, he maintained that men were partly free and partly unfree—partly the creators of history, but partly, also, the creatures of it. Because they were partly its creators, they could not deny responsibility for the historical consequences of their own behavior; but by the same token, because they were partly the creatures of history, they must not arrogate to themselves the claim to a perfect understanding of it or to the ability to mold it according to their hearts' desires. No statesman, he pointed out, was capable of foreseeing entirely the historical consequences of his acts; and it was because of the tendency of statesmen to ignore this fact, and to claim for their behavior a prescience and a power they did not possess, that the relationship between their proclaimed intentions and their actual achievements was frequently so ironic.

In the light of these perceptions, Niebuhr rejected not only all utopian and messianic political movements, such as the great totalitarian ones which promised to produce paradise in our time, but all those other tendencies, including some that were prominent in American liberalism, which professed to see in the process of popular enlightenment or in the workings of modern science some sort of total redemption of humanity from the miseries and failures that had beset it in the past. All these tendencies appeared to him only as further manifestations of man's persistent blindness and arrogance. Like Leo Tolstoy, he had more confidence—and he said this many times—in the instinctive common sense of simple people, where the congenital foibles of human nature were generally given their due, than in all the ambitious schemes of social or political change by which proud men attempted to rationalize and to justify the seizure and exercise of political power.

I cannot say to what extent Reinhold Niebuhr was aware of the greatness of his own insights. He was too deeply sensitive to the dangers of the sin of pride to indulge himself in any extravagant admiration of his own handiwork. He considered, in fact, that it was precisely the strongest people, and precisely those reputed to be most wise, who stood in the greatest danger of being taken by this particular sin of pride. He thought that it was precisely for these people—the strong and the wise—that access to God's mercy would prove, in the end, to be most difficult. He recalled in one of his writings the Biblical injunction: "Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom; let not the mighty man glory in his strength." And I think I am not far wrong in regarding this injunction as something that lay at the very heart of his philosophy.

I doubt, in fact, that he would have been inclined to assign to our judgment of him here a much greater value than to his own—a somewhat greater one, perhaps, because the factor of vanity is less involved when one talks about someone other than one's self, but not much so. He might, on the other hand, have been pleased to know that his teachings had given to many other people a clearer sense of their own condition and had strengthened them in the faith and the spirit of humility by which alone, as he saw it, the limitations of that condition could be transcended.

Reinhold Niebuhr's faith was a strong one; but it was not so strong as to be above trial. Whose faith is? One finds in his writings occasional outbursts of something very close to despair in the face of the cruelties and abominations of this brutal century. "Do not the strong men and nations," he once asked, "regard their will as the source of law and their own interests as the criterion of rights? Is there any sovereignty over history strong enough to overcome this rebellion against the moral content of life? And is there any love great enough to give meaning to the life of the innocent victims of the cruelties and contumelies of proud men and nations?"

This was of course the ultimate question, the most terrible one that could be asked; but it never went for long unanswered in the great affirmative power of his faith. There was such a love. He knew it. It had once been demonstrated, to his satisfaction and to that of millions of other men. In that love, as he saw it and believed in it and as he shared, I am sure, in the bestowal of it, he saw the means of reconciliation for us all with the predicament he perceived and described so clearly: with the ineradicable corruption of man's virtue, with the tragic limitations that rested—could not fail to rest—on his vision and his freedom.