M. M. Mangasarian

“ Man reaps as he sows, and no gods are necessary to enforce cause and effect. If Nature's laws defy the power of man, do they bend or break when gods command? Pride, shame, intemperance, greed, hate—these can never lead to happiness, all the gods to the contrary. Nor can all the powers of heaven and hell turn self-restraint, moderation, justice, contentment, courage, love and peace, into demons of hell. Nature is sound; Nature is all-sufficient, and in Shakespeare Nature occupies the stage so completely as to leave neither room nor necessity for any other power. ”

“ People are supposed to turn their thoughts heavenward in that hour, and to show anxiety about their souls. It is then, we are told, that a sense of the world to come takes irresistible possession of the mind. The last words of the dying are recalled to show how, upon the brink of the grave, as the earthly sun is sinking, the heavenly lights begin to appear. But Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet confront death without any thought of a future reunion, which is very remarkable considering their youth and their fondness for one another. ”

“ Yet this transitoriness of man, instead of diminishing, enhances his value, and makes love, friendship and truth all the more precious. Life would not have been so great a gift, if it were unending. Love, the greatest of all blessings, shines upon the dark brow of death "like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear." ”

“ If religion is one's philosophy of life, it is at home everywhere, but if it is only one's beliefs concerning dogmas and rites, then the pulpit is its exclusive sphere. Shakespeare was silent on religion of the kind Gervinius has in mind, not because "his platform was not a pulpit," but because he had no such religion to express. A man's religion is his philosophy of life, in accordance with which he shapes his conduct and interprets human destiny, and surely Shakespeare was not without such a working-religion. ”

“ As truthfully as the great Voltaire, the glorious Shakespeare, poet, philosopher, historian, could say of the founders of isms, and the inventor and maker of gods, "they have troubled the earth, and I have consoled it." ”

“ When we come to examine the construction of Shakespeare's plays, we shall find that it is as decisively along rationalistic lines as the atmosphere which permeates them. Gods and ghosts fleet across his stage, but they have no perceptible influence upon the order or drift of events in Shakespeare's world. The center round which Shakespeare makes the universe revolve is—man! This represents a radical departure from theology. The change from the contemplation of God to the study of man is the Renaissance in a nut-shell. ”

“ She does not care to live if she can not protect innocence and virtue, beauty and goodness against hate and envy. And this from a woman whose character was not above reproach! How admirable is the seething passion in her human soul compared with the dumbness of the almighty gods!
By the mouth of another frail woman Shakespeare passes the same criticism upon the current conceptions of divine providence. When young Juliet learns that Romeo has killed her cousin, for which rash act he has been banished for life, thus blighting her dearest hopes, she cries:
Can Heaven be so envious? ”

“ It is by observing the frequency and emphasis with which certain views and expressions occur and reoccur in an author, and the consistency with which they are given the preference, that we may be able to generalize as to his philosophy or religion. As Shakespeare's works are neither a treatise on theology nor a manual of philosophy, our only means of discovering his attitude toward the problems of life and destiny is by reading, as it were, between the lines.
A great mind can neither sophisticate nor suppress its earnest convictions. ”

“ Shakespeare seems to ask, "is the Heavenly Father whose tender mercies are over all his children?" What does God do for man? In what sense would a mother and her children, foully murdered, have been worse off, if there had been no Providence? ”

“ Everything happens in a natural way, and from natural causes. Romeo's rashness and Juliet's impatience leave room for no mysteries as to their fate. There may be, or there may not be, a God, but to explain this tragedy it is not necessary either to postulate or to deny his existence. Shakespeare steers clear of the occult powers that are supposed to preside over human destiny, and never once does he cross their paths or enter the circle of their influence. Consider, for example, the conduct of his Romeo and Juliet in the presence of death. ”

“ It almost betrays a deliberate effort on the part of Shakespeare to prevent these ardent lovers, dying ere the budding rose of love had opened, to even dream of a life beyond where they may forever live and love. ”

“ In Shakespeare we find both the religion of superstition—addicted to the belief in ghosts, spirits, miracles, visions, and revelations past and present—and the religion of sense, namely, the elimination of the supernatural from human affairs, and the exalting of Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, with Truth as the greatest of the three, as the highest possible ideals of man. ”

“ What does God do with his powers if he will not interfere to save men such as Othello from committing ignorantly so heinous a crime? Again he stammers out, "Are there no stones in heaven but what serve for the thunder?" ”

“ But the naturalism of the poet as opposed to the supernaturalism of the religion of his day is further brought out by the free and uninterrupted operation in his plays of the law of action and reaction, of cause and consequence. It is no angel of heaven, as we read of in Scripture, that exalts or strikes down the people in Shakespeare's world; but by their own acts they rise or fall. ”

“ No less in truth, than life.
The concluding line—and delight no less in truth than life—we have no hesitation in pronouncing as the most beautiful sentiment in Shakespeare. Malcolm says not a word about his Christian beliefs, without which "no one can be saved." Once more we call attention to the fact that there are in Shakespeare, as there are in Voltaire, nearly all the terms of church and creed, but the underlying philosophy of the poet is, if we may depend upon the above extracts and examples, unequivocally rationalistic. ”

“ This is a strong criticism of the popular fancy of a "Father in Heaven" who broods over his children as a hen over her young. Unlike the preachers of the conventional faiths, Shakespeare sought to divest people's minds of dreams and fairy stories, that they may learn to cope with reality. ”

“ It may surely be learned from Shakespeare that "man had had" many superstitions, and also that there was in our world the worship of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Such a report would not leave the inhabitants of a strange planet in the dark as to whether or not "man had had a religion." ”

“ The religion of not a few of the best minds has been of the above type; and surely, to a reasonable man the Catholic who denies that the Protestant is a Christian, or the Trinitarian who excommunicates the Unitarian is not more sectarian than the philosopher who denies that Goethe, Tennyson, Voltaire, or Shakespeare, had any religion at all because they did not have his religion. ”

“ This is the answer to the charge that the critic takes away people's comfort when he takes away their "religion." On the contrary, he helps them to replace the shadow with the substance. Men will do more for themselves and their world if they realize that if they do not, no other power will. Man becomes a god when the place is vacated by the idols.
But if there is still any uncertainty about Shakespeare's religious philosophy, we recommend the careful perusal of the scene in Macbeth between Macduff, Malcolm and Rosse. ”

“ Santayana proceeds to qualify his statement by deploring what he calls "the absence of religion in Shakespeare." He fears that if Shakespeare were our sole interpreter, "the archaeologists of that future age, or the cosmographers of that other part of the heavens, after conscientious study of our Shakespearian autobiography, would misconceive our life in one important respect. They would hardly understand that man had had a religion." ”

“ This very agnosticism, as the expression of a courageous, honest and rational protest against revealed religions, is a religion—more manly, certainly, than the popular religions, because while the latter are imitative to a large extent, the former is unconstrained and personal. ”

“ In this same play, the poet has once more described his ideal man, and there is more of the pagan about him than of the Christian. Living in a community which regarded faith as the greatest of virtues, without which no amount of moral excellence could avail anything, Shakespeare draws a picture of his saint which is the very antithesis of Christian ideals. Malcolm asks for the respect of his fellows for his character, not for his religion. ”

“ It is not possible for anyone who believed in orthodox Catholicism to express with such emphasis and lucidity a sentiment like the above. Moliere could never have placed the praying mendicant in the light he does, nor invoked the name of humanity to a man who did all his begging in the name of the deity, had he been a consistent Catholic. Equally conclusive are the following Shakespearian lines in one of the historical plays, on the denominational sympathies of the great poet: King John instructs the Cardinal to bear this message to the Pope of Rome ”