The Conflict Between Heart and Head

from "A Study of History" by Arnold J. Toynbee, 1952

"Christian and Islamic theology was a presentation of
Christianity and Islam in terms of Hellenistic philosophies,
and Hindu theology was a presentation of Hinduism in terms
of the Indic philosophy, while Mahayana was a school of
Indic philosophy which had converted itself into a religion
without ceasing to be a philosophy at the same time.

The philosophies, which were already hard-set systems of ideas 
when the rising western religions had to reckon with them, had once
been dyanmic intellectual movements; and in this youthfull stage of 
life and growth - which was comparable to the growth stage of
modern science - the Hellenic and Indic philosophies had
encounters with the pagan religions which the Hellenic and Indic
civilizations had inherited from primitive man.

At first glance it might look as if these two precedents were
reassuring. If Manknid had survived two past encounters between
Religion and Rationalism, was not that a good augury for the outcome
of the current conflict? The answer was that , in the earlier of
these two previous encounters, the current problem had not arisen,
while in the later encounter it had recieved a solution which had
been so efficatious for the purposes of its own time and place
that it had survived to become the crux of the problem confronting
the twentieth-century Westernizing world.

In the encounter between a dawning philosophy and a traditional
paganism there had been no problem of reconciling Heart and Head
because there had been no common ground on which hte two organs could 
have come into collision. The pith of primitive religion is not
belief but action, and the test of conformity is not assent to
a creed but participation in ritual performances. Primitive religious
practive is an end in itself, and it does not occur tothe practitioners
to look beyond the rites that they perform for a truth which these
rites may convey. The rites have no meaning beyond the practical effect
which their correct execution is believed to produce. Accordingly,
when, in this primitive religious setting, philosophers arise who
set out to make a chart of Man's environment in intellectual terms
to which the labels "true" and "false" apply, no collision occurs
so long as the philosopher continues to carry out his traditional
religious duties; and there can be nothing in the traditional rites
that could be incompatible with any philosophy. Philosophy and 
primitive religion encountered on another without colliding, and at
least one conspicuous apparent exeption to this rule takes on a 
different complexion under closer scrutiny....

A new situation arose when the higher religions came on the scene. 
These higher religions did, indeed, sweep up and carry along with
them a heavy freight of traditional rites that happened to be
current in the societies in which hte new faiths made their first
appearance; but this religious flotsam was not, of course, their 
essence. The distinctive new feature of the higher religions was 
that they based their claim to allegiance on personal rvelations
held to have been recieved by their prophets; and these deliveries of
the prophets ere presented, like the propositions of the philosophers,
as statements of fact, to be labelled "true" or "false". Therewith
Truth became a disputed mental territory; henceforward there were two 
independent authorities, prophetic Revelation and philosophical
Reason, each of which claimed sovreign jurisdiction over the 
intellect's whole field of action. Thus it became impossible for
Reason and Revelation to live and let live on the auspicious
precedent of the amicable symbiosis of Reason and Ritual. "Truth",
it now seemed had two forms, each claiming an absolute and overriding
validity, yet each at odds with the other. In this new and excruciating
situation htere were only two alternatives. Either the rival exponents
of the two now coexisting forms of Truth must arrive at a compromise
or they must fight it out intil one party or the other had been
driven from the field.

In the encounters between Hellenic and Indic philosophy on one side,
and christian, Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu revelation on the other,
the parties had arrived at a peaceful accomodation in which Philosophy
had tacitly consented to suspend the exercise of rational criticism
against the deliveries of Revelation in exchange for being allowed
to reormulate the phrophets' messages in the sophists' language.
We need not doubt that the compromise was made in good faith on both
sides, but we can see that it contained no real solution of the problem
of the relation between scientific and prophetic Truth. The would-be
reconcilliation of the two kinds of Truth in terms of the new mental
dicipline called Theology was no more than verbal, and the formulae
consecrated in creeds were doomed to prove impermanent because they
left the equivocal meaning of Truth as ambiguous as thay found it.
This pseudo solution of the second conflict had been handed down the
generations to become more of a hindrance than a help...

The true solution could not be found until it had been recognized
that the same word "truth", when used by philosophers and scientists
and when used by prophets does not refer to the same realities but is a 
homonym for two different forms of experience.

...
For more than two hundred years the churches had been seeing science 
capture from them one province afer another. Astronomy, Cosmogony, 
Chronology, Biology, Physics, Psychology, had each in its turn been 
siezed and reconstructed on lines incompatible with the established 
religious teaching, and no end of these losses wa in sight. As some 
eccliastical authorities saw the situation, the only remaining hope 
for the churches lay in complete intrasigence.

This "die hard" spirit had found expression in the Roman Catholic 
Church in the decrees of the Vatican Council of A.D. 1869-70 and in
the anathema pronounced against Modernism in A.D. 1907. In the 
domain of the Protestant Churches of North America it had entrenched
itself in the 'Fundamentalism' of the "Bible Belt". It was similarly
manifested in the Islamic world in hte militantly archastic
movements of Wahhabism, Idrisism, Sanusisism, and Mahdism. Such
movements were symptoms, not of strength, but of weakness. They made
it look as if the higher religions were rding for a fall.

The most serious symptom was that, in professedly democratic and
professedly  Christian countries, four-fifths of the religion of
five-sixth of the population was, in practice, now the primitive pagan
worship of the deified community concealed under the fine name of
patriotism.

pg 112 - 119, 1952, Toynbee
  Toynbee.txt

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