Lord Gifford's Legacy; E. Opitz

By splitting his endowment four ways, Lord Gifford intro duced an element of competition into the intellectual scene. Four The Reverend Mr. Opitz of the Foundation staff is active as a lecturer and seminar leader. 36 separate committees, each having access to the finest scientific and philosophical brains in the world, vie with each other to bring the most prestigious lecturer to the local campus. And the scholar nominated for this post is put on his mettle. The appointment itself is a high tribute to his attain ments, far outranking any honor ary degree, and the realization that he is to address an audience loaded with distinguished scholars is just the stimulus needed to bring out a man's best efforts. William James never wrote any thing more fascinating than The Varieties of Religious Experience, The Gifford Lectures for 1901 1902. Arthur Stanley Eddington, astronomer at the University of Cambridge, has made some last ing contributions to certain ab struse questions in astronomy and 1966 LORD GIFFORD'S LEGACY 37 physics, but his reputation in the world of literate men endures with The Nature of the Phy.sical World, The Gifford Lectures for 1927. Philosophers, scientists, the ologians, and men of letters have trekked to Scotland, for the past three-quarters of a century, and our intellectual heritage is vastly enriched as a consequence.

Adam Gifford was a jurist and judge. He was born in 1820, son of a man who had risen from humble beginnings to become treasurer and master of The Mer chant Company. His mother was an independent thinker who in structed her children at home un til they were sent off to learn Latin and Greek - at the age of eight! Adam later attended Edin burgh Institute and in 1849 was called to the bar. Seventeen years later he was Sheriff of Orkney and Zetland, and in 1870 was made a judge. He took his seat in the Court of Sessions, the su preme civil tribunal, as Lord Gif ford. The Giffords were a pious fam ily. Adam's father was an elder in the United Secession Church and a zealous Sunday school teach er. This oddly named denomina tion had been formed the year of Adam's birth by the fusion of two dissident bodies which had seceded from the established church in the eighteenth century. It was based on the princi pIe of voluntary association, and it bred men given to independent thought and action, unwilling to take things for granted; men like Lord Gifford.

The Gifford Lectures The private life of Lord Gif ford is no concern of history, but the terms of his will are in the public domain. The Gifford L.ec tures are in the realm of natural theology, the discipline which seeks to trace the nature, mean ing, and direction of the cosmic purpose by pondering the relevant evidence, and by reasoning hard and long. "I wish the lecturers to treat their subject as a strictly natural science, the greatest of all possible sciences, indeed, in one sense, the only science, that of In finite Being, without reference to or reliance upon any supposed spe cial exceptional or so-called mi raculous revelation. . . ." These words have a distinctly old-fash ioned ring, for natural theology is out of favor, for the moment, among the popular philosophers and theologians of our day. Much hinges, of course, on the connotations of the word Hnatu ra!." Human nature, strictly speak ing, is not "natural"; it is a culti vated or learned thingsuperim posed on a biological substratum.

The piety "natural" to Lord Gif38 THE FREEMAN March ford was that of the Scotch Cov enanter strain, not that of some aborigine, and this faith is evi dent in the opening words of the will: "Having been for many years deeply and firmly convinced that the true knowledge of God and the felt knowledge of the relations of man and of the universe to Him ... is the means of man's highest well-being .... " But so con fident was Gifford of the ability of the unimpeded human reason to attain vital truths that he laid down no qualifications for the lec turers except unimpeachable com petence and integrity: The lecturers appointed shall be subjected to no test of any kind, and shall not be required to take any oath, or to emit or subscribe any declara tion of belief, or to make any promise of any kind'; they may be of any denomination whatever, or of no denomination at all (and many earnest and high-minded men prefer to belong to no ecclesiastical denom ination); they may be of any reli gion or way of thinking, or as is sometimes said, they may be of no religion, or they may be so-called sceptics or agnostics or freethinkers, provided only that the "patrons" will use diligence to secure that they be able reverent men, true thinkers, sincere lovers of and earnest inquir ers after truth ....

Four of the Gifford Lecturers have been Americans. William James of Harvard University has been mentioned above. His book, he tells us, "would never have been written had I not been honored with an appointment as Gifford Lecturer." The lectures immedi ately prior to James were deliv ered by his Harvard colleague, Josiah Royce, resulting in a huge tome entitled The W orold and the Individual. Harvard has not won the nod again, and we note that the recent paperback edition of Royce is introduced by Professor John E. Smith of Yale University! A quarter of a century was to pass before another American was invited to lecture, and this time it was John Dewey. His ten lectures, half the customary series, resulted in the book, Quest f or Certainty. I had a semester seminar on this volume, which disqualifies me from commenting impartially! Reinhold Niebuhr lectured at Edinburgh in the spring and fall of the fateful year, 1939. To those of you who know only the Niebuhr who charges wildly about the political arena, and who is forever making dubious pronouncements on eco nomics, be advised that there is an other Niebuhr or, more precisely, another and more important facet of the same man. The lectures were published in two volumes as The Nature and Destiny of Man, and they are brilliant. They are hard reading, occasionally disputatious, but bracing.

1966 LORD GIFFORD'S LEGACY 39 Scot/and l s Contribution Scotland has never lacked phi losophers. Adam Smith, it will be recalled, taught moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. His like number at Edinburgh until 1941 was the late A. E. Taylor whose Gifford Lectures published in 1930, The Faith of a Moralist, remains my favorite of kind. This nearly 900-page treatise by the great Platonist is a modern phil osophical classic, but it has none of the jargon philosophers employ when they talk to each other. Lord Gifford stipulated that "the lec tures shall be public and popu lar..." and most of the speakers have tried to comply. But "natural theology," the-stipulated subject matter, is intrinsically difficult, and "popular" in this context means only that the writer has taken pains to be lucid; none of these books is easy reading. Taylor, incidentally, is one of the few moralists who is aware that the term "value" in ethics does not have the same connotation as the word "value" in economics. When the economist speaks of "values,"

he is not referring to moral norms, but to the degree of consumer preference for this' item over that which issues in the pricing of eco nomic goods. w. MacN eile Dixon taught Eng lish literature at the University of Glasgow for more than forty years, retiring in 1935. He was called abruptly out of retirement upon the death of philosopher Emile Meyerson, the 1935 choice, and delivered two courses of lec tures. T he Human Situa,tion is a far-ranging and beautifully writ ten book. Most of the other Gif ford Lectures are books to wrestle with; this is a book to live with and live by. It has a poetic quality found only rarely in conjunction with deep thought. The Human Situation, appro pria tely enough, is bounded on the one side by theology and on the other by physiology. The lecture series immediately prior to ,Dixon was delivered by the eminent Eng lish churchman who later became Archbishop of Canterbury, Wil liam Temple. Nature, Man and God floored me at first exposure in a seminar course, and I still find it hard going; but it is a great book. Following Dixon came Sir Charles Sherrington, the eminent medical man and physiologist, with Man on His Nature. "Individuali ty would seem to be through com plexity an aim of life," says Sher rington, thus continuing a stress which runs like a thread through the Gifford Lectures - an empha sis on the individual person and his latent possibilities.

Sherrington worked after the manner of the historian and es pecially the scientist, reasoning 40 THE FREEMAN inductively from a" body of data. The other approach is deductive reasoning which seeks to draw out the full implications from a seem ingly simple axiom or observation. This is the approach of the Cam bridge philosopher, W. P. SorIey, who began his series of lectures in 1914; Moral Values and the Idea of God is one of the finest examples of sustained logic in the language. Most philosophers, Sor ley notes, frame a theory of the cosmos, and then from their meta physics derive an ethic. But it is a fact that men at every cultural level do make moral decisions and cannot avoid doing so; therefore, any theory of the cosmos which fails to include the fact that men make choices according to their understanding of right and wrong is to this extent based on incom plete data. Sorley starts with the axiom that human experience in cludes valuations and judgments based on moral factors, and 510 pages later he has extracted all the meat and juice from this idea.

An English churchman, the Bishop of Woolwich, recently made quite a stir on both sides of the Atlantic with a thin thing called Honest to God. The old metaphors aren't what they used to be, the Bishop appears to be saying, and never were! It is our bad habit, he points out, to think and speak of God as being "out there." Spatial metaphors are misleading, true, but then the Bishop - influ enced by Freud and depth psychol ogy - declares that God is "in here." This appears to continue a spatial metaphor, or at least a di rectional one. Man is a symbol using animal, not only in his re ligion but in his science. A sym bol is a thing standing for some thing else, and if we mistake it for the thing it signifies, the con fusion is compounded. The noted Hellenist, Edwyn Bevan, explored these matters with characteristic thoroughness in his Lectures, pub lished as Symbolis'm and Belief. When this book was repTinted in this country in 1957, the event passed unnoticed.

liThe Honor Is Very Pleasant" It would be interesting to go be hind the scenes with the Gifford Lectures and watch these men re act to their task, but such auto biographical data is not available, except where personal journals and papers have been made public, as in the case of the late Dean lnge. William Ralph lnge was a classical scholar as well as a theo logian, and his articles in the \veekly press put his name before a wide public. His Gifford Lec tures on Plotinus, the great pagan philosopher of the third century of our era, is still the standard work on the man. The offer came 1966 LORD GIFFORD'S LEGACY 41 to lnge on March 13, 1917, and the full journal entry reads, "A letter from Lord Haldane. The University of St. Andrews has de cided by a unanimous vote of the Gifford Committee to offer me the Gifford Lectureship. I shall have to break up my book on Plotinus into lectures, but this I can do easily. The honor is very pleasant."

The invincible calm of these Eng lishmen! we say. But go back in the Dean's journal. A 1908 entry reads, "My wish now is to write a modernised defense of Plotinus' philosophy of religion, which I think would make a good book for the Gifford Lectures, if I am ever invited to give them." That hope was nourished for nine years be fore being consummated. One would also like to know vvhat goes on at a meeting of the Gifford Committee. Why, for in stance, should a lectureship cen tering on natural theology be of fered to a man who denies the very idea of natural theology even if he is the world's most fa mous theologian? Karl Barth opened his lectures with these words : "It can only be to the good of 'natural theology' to be able once again to measure itself as the truth - if it is the truth! - by that [Barthianism] from which its point of view is the greatest of errors. Opportunity is to be given to do this here." The wraith of old Gifford must have squirmed at this, trying to learn what natural theology is from a long and in volved discussion of what it is not!

Why was the unsympathetic Barth given the nod when men of the stature of Henri Bergson, F .C.S. Schiller, Alfred North Whitehead, and C.D. Broad went untapped? Two other names come to mind: Bertrand Russell and Friedrich von Huegel. The former might have been written off as a head line hunter; and as for the latter, well, no Roman Catholic delivered the Gifford Lectures until 1947, when the eminent historian, Chris topher Dawson, produced the im portant work published as Religion and Culture. Dawson's second set of lectures appeared as Religion and the Rise of Western Culture. The high repute of Dawson's work needs no touching up from me. The Unfinished Task Mention of von Huegel raises another question. His major work is a huge two-volume study of The Mystical Element of Religion. Mysticism receives more than pas sing attention at the hands of many of the lecturers, but not one of the series is devoted entirely to this subject, as perhaps the most important facet and feeder of natural theology. Von Huegel would have been up to such a task; likewise Rufus Jones, the Ameri42 THE FREEMAN March can Quaker; likewise Evelyn Un derhill. Mention of this last name reminds us that no woman has yet delivered the Gifford Lectures.