If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
(Emerson, "Brahma")
Martin Luther King is gone.
The departure of this great American who was one of the "universal men" of modern times and till yesterday modern America's greatest theologian of social action, means the departure of a hero. His sudden exit in the saddest circumstances conceivable has snapped something asunder -- something difficult to describe -- and created, at the same time, a very deep concern in the heart of every thinking person in today's mad, mad world.
And, yet King's end came in Spring. Significantly, on the eve of his final going, he prophetically spoke of having "seen the mountain top" and of having shed all fears. He was set free from fear and worry because he had nothing to fear. He was that rare phenomenon -- "an honest man," the "noblest work of God," to Carlyle's judgment, "a nation's greatest asset," to Emerson's.
King will go down in history as America's famous and foremost leader of the modern civil rights movement. His character and calm restraint contrast most tellingly with an age which is peculiarly prone to violence. To many people throughout the world Martin Luther King stands as the happy and high standard of what bold, nonbelligerent enterprise could and did achieve. But few realize that King had a philosophical turn of mind that persistently sought like Mahatma Ghandi speculative ground for his civil rights activities. He never forgot the great maxim of Paul Tillich: "I may not like you but I must love you," nor St. Augustine's wise words: "We are our LOVE."
King's convictions were nurtured by four major intellectual movements. These are the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch, presently undergoing a revival on account of some theologians connected with the "God is Dead" movement; Protestant Neo-Orthodoxy as it has been defined and domesticated by Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich; the Personalism taught at Boston University while King worked on his doctoral program; and the nonviolent (ahimsa or satyagrah) philosophy of love forged in the smithy of the soul by Mahatma Gandhi.
King was raised a fundamentalist. For him, man was "a sinner in need of God's forgiving grace." In King's terms this meant "Christian realism," as he put it in Strength to Love (New York, 1963). But he rejected the original Lutheran emphasis on man's corruption. God is "the curer of the ravages of sin," ultimately.
At Crozer Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he spent three years, King's fundamentalism was modified when he read Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis. For a time he became a liberal "convinced of the natural goodness of man," as he said in "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence" (Christian Century, LXXVII [Apr. 13, 1960],439.)
In time, influenced by Niebuhr, he came to quarrel with the Social Gospel stance mainly over the view of man's nature. He accepted Neo-Orthodoxy. Quoting Tillich on sin as separation, King thundered: "Isn't segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?" ("The Negro Is Your Brother," Atlantic, CCXII [Aug. 1963],81.)
Reading first in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, later Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre, and finally writing his doctoral dissertation on Tillich, King became convinced that, to some extent existentialism "had grasped certain basic truths about man," as he said in Christian Century (LXXVII, 439). He pondered over the existential concepts of angst, conflict, estrangement, fragmentation of man's world, finite freedom, etc. He even became an "existential prophet."
But King rejected the Communistic view of man as a producing animal governed by economic forces and the fundamentalistic tenet that man is a "helpless invalid."
The belief that institutional forms might themselves suffer from a collective guilt led King to declare in the Hebraic tradition that God judges societies as well as individuals. He felt that America, the greatest nation, the New World's symbol and hope, had fallen under the divine condemnation. He felt that men of good will could play a crucial role. The could collaborate with God and "speed up the coming of the inevitable." ("Facing the Challenge of a New Age," Phylon, XVIII [Apr. 1957],31.)
Similarly, King felt that the church today must realize that it is neither master nor servant of the state but rather its "conscience." If it does not, it "will become an irrelevant social club." (Strength to Love, p. 47.)
On the universal plane God conquers "the evils of history." Sympathetic with Whitehead's principle of concretion, Wieman's theory of integration, or Tillich's idea of Being-In-Itself, King felt that history speaks through the Cross in terms especially of "God and his kingdom of love." Thus King was much more than "a latter-day Hegelian," as Lerone Bennet, Jr. has called him in King's biography What Manner of Man ([Chicago, 1964], p.11). He accepted "providential history" but not the Southern view (e.g. of Rev. T. Robert Ingram, Essays on Segregation) that the Bible enjoins separation of the races and that the black man is descended from Ham.
Ultimately, King believed in Personalism taught him at Boston University by Edgar S. Brightman and others. This made him hostile to materialism and non theistic humanism but receptive to Aquinas's primary and secondary principles of natural law, although knowledge of tertiary principles (dueling, say, or divorce) contain leeway for ignorance (vide Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 94, a. 2, etc.). On precisely these grounds, King justified his breaking of some laws. With Augustine he argued that unjust laws are no laws, "not rooted in eternal and natural law" (Atlantic, CCXII, 80.)
King said: "Man-made laws assure justice" perhaps, but "a higher law produces love" (Strength to Love, p. 22). Love here is neither eros or philia but agape, originally the early Christian fraternal meal but now "redemptive goodwill for all men." (Strength to Love, p. 37.) "God is love," King wrote in his imaginary letter of St. Paul to American Christians.
At Crozer, King came to despair of even love. But then he was electrified by a lecture of Mordecai Johnson, President of Howard University, on the life and teachings of Gandhiji. He came to see that the doctrine of love was a potent weapon for the Negro struggle. In other words, "Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method." He found, too, precedent in H. Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited (1949) and Adam Clayton Powell's Marching Blacks (1945), both using non-violence, which King reread during the Montgomery boycott.
To King's judgment, Jesus was the greatest revolutionary, who brought peace as the "presence of justice" to replace the pharisaic notion that peace is the "absence of tension." Did not Jesus say: "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword."
From Gandhi and Nehru, King borrowed the notion that the American Negro might be given preferential treatment to atone for injustices and sufferings inflicted on him. This was the way to avoid "costly chaos." This was the way to achieve unprejudiced equality, a dream to which he gave [poetic] expression in his Washington speech of 1963 and the speech delivered on the occasion of accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.
This rather long segment is part of an intended tribute to Rev. King, which appeared in the Journal of Negro History in 1963, attributed to Mohan Lal Sharman. I originally prepared the piece as a small contribution to the celebration of Dr. King's birthday. The history of this piece, unfortunately, takes me in a different direction.
Funny how often that happens.
Stay tuned for more about the 1963 tribute by Mohan Lal Sharma.
