The Great Agnostic
Page 12
For Ingersoll, evidence-based science did not occupy a separate category from the greatest works of painting, sculpture, literature, and music: all were glorious evidence of the best human achievements, rendered even more precious because they were the products of natural evolution and human inspiration rather than supernatural creation and divine design. Unlike his more conservative contemporaries, whose reverence for the arts and artists did not include many of the masterpieces of the preceding half-century (Beethoven, who died in 1827, just made it into the conventional Victorian–Gilded Age pantheon), Ingersoll actually enjoyed and supported the art of his own time. He revered Whitman above all contemporary American poets and novelists, because his work gave a powerful, distinctly American voice to humanism and the “religion of the body” (another phrase Ingersoll used frequently). Ingersoll turned most often to Shakespeare when he wished to offer an emotional vision of human possibilities unencumbered by gods and ghosts. He often described Lear’s soliloquy, on finding a place of refuge on the heath, as “the greatest prayer that ever fell from human lips.”3
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your unhoused heads, your unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? Oh, I have ta’en
Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may’st shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
To Ingersoll, that prayer embodied his secularist creed. He did not, however, regard acts of kindness and generosity, on an individual or a social level, as salvation-seeking deeds of self-abnegation, self-sacrifice, or atonement for sin mandated by religion but, on the contrary, as the surest way to attain a happy life for oneself.
Ingersoll delivered one of his most important and timely speeches citing Lear’s soliloquy in New York, before a meeting of the American Secular Union on November 14, 1886. Only a month before, defendants in the socially polarizing Haymarket Square case—unquestionably the political trial of the century—had been sentenced to death. Tensions between rich and poor, always simmering beneath the surface of Gilded Age progress, had never been closer to the boiling point in the United States. On the evening of May 4, 1886, Chicago police arrived to disperse a peaceful assembly of workmen demonstrating on behalf of the eight-hour day, but a bomb (of unknown origin) was thrown, and police opened fire. Seven police officers and an unknown number of demonstrators and onlookers were killed, and eight of the protestors were indicted for murder.
Ingersoll himself had been asked to participate as counsel for the defense but declined because he felt that his antireligious reputation could only work against the defendants. He advised the defense team to “get a lawyer of national reputation who is a pillar of the church and who can cover these men with his conservative life and character.”4 Later, Ingersoll would plead for a commutation of the sentences with the Republican governor of Illinois, his old friend Richard Oglesby. The governor commuted three of the sentences to life imprisonment, but five of the defendants were executed. Oglesby’s successor, John Peter Altgeld, a Democrat, would review the evidence and end his bright political career by pardoning those still in prison. It was against the backdrop of anti-labor passion generated by the recent trial that Ingersoll asked the Secular Union’s upper-middle-class audience, “Is the world forever to remain as it was when Lear made his prayer? Is it ever to remain as it is now? I hope not. Are there always to be millions whose lips are white with famine? Is the withered palm to be always extended, imploring from the stony heart of respectable charity, alms? … Are the rich always to be divided from the poor,—not only in fact, but in feeling?”5
Ingersoll rejected the dictum, as widely preached in his time as it is now, that religion is the foundation of morality and that there can be no morality without religion. In Ingersoll’s view, religion served only to provide supernatural explanations of and sanctions for conditions—whether decent or indecent—produced solely by the interaction between human beings and nature. The religion that had so recently been used to justify slavery, Ingersoll reminded his audiences, was every bit as powerful as the religious argument against slavery, and “thus sayeth the Lord” was used to isolate “the stony heart of respectable charity” from true exposure to “what wretches feel.” Any morality that contradicted reason, nature, and the evidence supplied by this world, and relied instead on fantasies about another world presumed to lie beyond nature (and therefore beyond proof of any kind) would collapse as soon as fear of punishment was removed.
Ingersoll saw religion, not reason, as the cause of both the ascetic and traditional Christian idea that natural passions must be the enemy of virtuous moral conduct. He spoke frequently about this subject, particularly regarding the Pauline view of woman’s body as a snare that diverted man from higher pursuits and the love of God.
Ingersoll’s most biting commentary about Christian asceticism, however, appeared in an acerbic piece of literary criticism on Leo Tolstoy’s embrace (if it can be called that) of chastity, poverty, and misogyny in “The Kreutzer Sonata,” first published in 1889. Tolstoy’s extremely long short story would not have been appropriate material for a popular lecture in the 1890s because few Americans, even the most educated, would have read it. In Tolstoy’s jeremiad, the protagonist declares, “Sexual passion, no matter how it is arranged, is evil, a terrifying evil with which one has to struggle, and not encourage as we do now. The words of the Gospel about the one who looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already refer not just to the wives of others, but precisely and especially to one’s own.”6 To Ingersoll, this didactic writing—from the author of the masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina—offered dismal evidence of the impact of religious fanaticism on even (or perhaps especially) the greatest minds; he considered Tolstoy’s transition from writer to prophet of the joys of poverty and self-denial a cautionary example of religious extremism as the enemy of human achievement and progress.* In “The Kreutzer Sonata,” Tolstoy had some nasty things to say about music as well as about sex and women as the enemies of morality in a work that advocates celibacy for both women and men—even within marriage. (It should be noted that the wife in “The Kreutzer Sonata” has an affair with an accomplished violinist, which naturally prompted Tolstoy to equate music with sexual debauchery.) Ingersoll observed that Tolstoy objected not to ordinary music “but to great music, the music that arouses the emotions, that apparently carries us beyond the limitations of life.” Music, like sexual passion, generates powerful emotions, and by the time Tolstoy wrote “The Kreutzer Sonata,” he had become convinced that emotion is invariably at odds with duty and morality. Tolstoy and other religious ideologues had it exactly backward, Ingersoll argued. “Take emotions from the heart of man and the idea of obligation would be lost; right and wrong would lose their meaning. … We are subject to conditions, liable to disease, pain, and death. We are capable of ecstasy. Of these conditions, of these possibilities, the emotions are born.” In a passage that displays the influence of both science (especially Darwinian evolution) and a love of earthly pleasures, Ingersoll wrote:
We are conditioned beings; and if the conditions are changed, the result may be pain or death or greater joy. We can only live within certain degrees of heat. If the weather were a few degrees hotter or a few degrees colder, we could not exist. We need food and roof and raiment. Life and happiness depend on these conditions. We do not certainly know what is to happen, and consequently our hopes and fears are constantly active—that is to say, we are emotional beings. The generalization of Tolstoi, that emotion never goes hand in hand with duty, is almost the opposite of the truth. The idea of duty could not exist without emotion. Think of men and women without love, without desires, without passions! Think of a world without art or music—a wo
rld without beauty, without emotion.7
Ingersoll argued that unreasonable supernatural beliefs were the result not of malice (though they were sometimes used maliciously by evil men) but of ignorance. “Our fathers did they best they could,” he acknowledged. “They … thought that sacrifices and prayer, fasting and weeping, would induce the Supernatural to give them sunshine, rain and harvest—long life in this world and eternal joy in another.” This God was generous to his favorites and relentlessly punitive to his enemies, and man was suspended between the two faces of God “like a mouse between two paws.”8 Primitive humans should be viewed with pity rather than censure, because they knew nothing of the natural causes of disease; of earthquakes, floods, and lightning; of physical or psychic pain and could therefore do nothing but call upon the supernatural to save them. But there was no excuse, in the state of evolution man had reached by the late nineteenth century, for clinging to superstition as the only explanation for and answer to problems that could be solved by human effort. Here Ingersoll’s disdain for myth fused with his emotional and practical optimism. He looked at his own time and saw discoverers, inventors, teachers, and scientists slowly taking the place of clerics. These developments led to his vision of a rich (in every sense of the word) future:
The popes and priests and kings are gone,—the altars and the thrones have mingled with the dust,—the aristocracy of land and cloud have perished from the earth and air, and all the gods are dead. A new religion sheds its glory on mankind. It is the gospel of this world, the religion of the body, of the heart and brain, the evangel of health and joy. I see a world at peace, where labor reaps its true reward, a world without prisons, without workhouses, without asylums for the insane, a world on which the gibbet’s shadow does not fall, a world where the poor girl, trying to win bread with the needle, the needle that has been called “the asp for the breast of the poor,” is not driven to the desperate choice of crime or death, of suicide or shame. I see a world without the beggar’s outstretched palm, the miser’s stony stare, the piteous wail of want, the pallid face of crime, the livid lips of lies, the cruel eyes of scorn. I see a race without disease of flesh or brain, shapely and fair, the married harmony of form and use, and as I look life lengthens, fear dies, joy deepens, love intensifies. The world is free. This shall be.9
This level of optimism, which would begin its long decline on the blood-soaked battlefields of Europe only fifteen years after Ingersoll’s death, is bound to seem archaic to anyone aware, as Ingersoll of course was not, of the real events of the twentieth century. Had he been able to see into the future, I think he would have concluded that Nazism and Stalinism had taken on all of the imperviousness to evidence of traditional religions and were therefore indistinguishable from any other form of blind faith.
This conjecture is based not only on my admiration for Ingersoll the freethinker but on his early recognition that science too was capable of veering into dangerous territory if its practitioners began to consider themselves infallible and therefore exempt from responding to the challenges of those outside their priesthood. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ingersoll’s position on vivisection, which drew considerable criticism from those who considered themselves devotees of reason but clung to the irrational belief that science could and would be used only for good. Ingersoll warned of the ways in which science might be wrenched out of its proper position as the servant of humanity and used by powerful torturers as the servant of their omnipotent delusions—as nothing less than a new and evil form of faith. He described vivisection as “the Inquisition—the Hell—of Science” and physicians who would cut open conscious, living animals in order to “study” their pain as sadists who “would not hesitate to try experiments with men and women” simply to gratify curiosity.10 Science was not a new God, and science—like religion—must be tested and judged by its results. Quoting distinguished surgeons, Ingersoll argued that surgical techniques had improved in his century not because of “the heartless tormentors of animals, but by the use of anaesthetics.”11
Thus, vivisection was both cruel and scientifically worthless.* Even if the practice yielded some nugget of useful knowledge, though, Ingersoll insisted, “Brain without heart is far more dangerous than heart without brain” (see Appendix A).12 To understand this man of the nineteenth century who anticipated the twentieth century, it is vital to realize that when he used the word “heart,” Ingersoll did not mean antirational passion but the capacity for empathy that encompasses reason and emotion as allies rather than enemies and has emerged over ages of the evolution of the human brain.
VII
Death and Afterlife
You had better live well and die cursing than live badly and die praying.
—RGI, “The Death Test”
In the summer of 1899, intensifying pain in his chest and shortness of breath, caused by the heart disease he had lived with for many years, forced Robert Ingersoll to end his career as a lawyer and lecturer. His last two public appearances were concerned, in different ways, with the rights of women. In early June, ten weeks before his death, he made his impassioned statement, in a speech in Boston before the American Free Religious Association, about the need for women to possess the means to control their own bodies and decide for themselves whether they wanted to marry or become mothers. Later in the month, he appeared in his last court case, in which he represented a widow challenging her husband’s will on grounds that he had concealed the true value of his assets. The opposing attorney expressed skepticism about whether a seventy-five-year-old man—the age of his client when he became engaged to his fifty-five-year-old future wife—could have truly been in love. (The stenographer’s notes do not make clear exactly why the attorney thought the depth or shallowness of a man’s love had any bearing on the validity of his will.) “I do not know what his experience is,” Ingersoll said of the opposing counsel’s cynicism about the possibility of love in old age, “but I hope no fate like that will ever overtake me.”1 Then Ingersoll retired from the public arena. He and his wife spent the last month of his life at the home, overlooking the Hudson River near Dobbs Ferry, New York, of their elder daughter, Eva, and her husband, railroad magnate Walston Brown. Mrs. Ingersoll’s sister, Sue, and her husband, Clint Farrell, who would publish the definitive twelve-volume edition of Ingersoll’s collected works, also lived with the Great Agnostic during his final weeks. The Ingersoll and Parker families were unusually close for in-laws; Mrs. Ingersoll’s father had been a well-known freethinker in Peoria, and the family was related to Theodore Parker, a leading Transcendentalist, abolitionist, and reform-minded Unitarian minister in Boston during the two decades before the Civil War. But Robert had an extra reason for wanting the company of relatives while his own time was running out. He was well aware that after the deaths of nearly every important critic of religion, including Paine and Voltaire, the press and clergy circulated rumors that the “infidels” had either committed suicide in remorse for the unforgivable sin of denying the existence of God and the authority of his church (not that the clerics agreed on which church actually possessed divine authority) or had, at the last minute, renounced lifelong antireligious beliefs and begged God for forgiveness. Ingersoll wanted his wife, daughters, and in-laws to bear witness to his rejection of the supernatural even in the face of impending death.
Ingersoll died on July 21, 1899 (coincidentally, the day of Ernest Hemingway’s birth). According to his obituary in the New York World, Ingersoll had spent the previous evening playing billiards with his brother-in-law. Having a cigar on the porch and looking toward the Hudson, he turned to Farrell and remarked, “This is a beautiful world.” The next morning, after having breakfast with his family, he took a nap in his bedroom, with his wife watching over him. His sister-in-law came upstairs as he was about to dress for lunch and offered to bring up a tray so that he and Eva could eat together in the bedroom. “Oh no, I do not want to trouble you,” was his last sentence. Sue Farrell made some joke, and Ingersoll l
aughed, closed his eyes, and died without further comments. The details are known because Eva Ingersoll and her sister gave the information to the press to counteract the already swirling rumors that Bob Ingersoll had either committed suicide in a fit of despair over his misspent life or called for a minister or a priest on his deathbed.*
Ingersoll would have particularly liked the headline over his obituary in the Chicago Tribune, “Ingersoll Dies Smiling.” And he would probably have taken just as much pleasure in a paragraph in his New York Times obituary, which identified what was apparently a shocking character trait—no-strings generosity to his wife and children—in a nineteenth-century paterfamilias. “He earned great sums of money, both as a lecturer and a lawyer, but he let them go like water,” the Times reported with an air of disapproval. “It was his habit to keep money in the house in an open drawer, to which any member of his family was free to go and take what he wanted.”2 One suspects, since all newspapers were wedded to the generic “he” at the time, that what really shocked the obituary writer was the fact that all of the members of Ingersoll’s immediate family were women, and it was a “she,” not a “he,” who had been accorded such reckless access to cash. The obituary also noted that Ingersoll was “a constant student of Shakespeare” (presumably to his credit) but added that Shakespeare’s works “occupied the place in his home where, in most of the homes in this country, the Bible rests” (presumably to his disgrace).