What complicates the danger and difficulty of such a position, with
its confusion of natural and human values, and its rationalizing
and secularizing of theistic thinking, is that it has its measure of
reality. All these observations of naturalist and humanist are half
truths, and for that very reason more perilous than utter falsehoods.
For the mind tends to rest contented within their areas, and so the
partial becomes the worst enemy of the whole. What we have been doing
is stressing the indubitable identity between man and nature and
between the Creator and His creatures to the point of unreality,
forgetting the equally important fact of the difference, the
distinction between the two. But sound knowledge and normal feeling
rest upon observing and reckoning with both aspects of this law of
kinship and contrast. All human experience becomes known to us through
the interplay of what appear to be contradictory needs and opposing
truths within our being. Thus, man is a social animal and can only
find himself in a series of relationships as producer, lover, husband,
father and friend. He is a part of and like unto his kind, his spirit
immanent in his race. But man is also a solitary creature, and in that
very solitariness, which he knows as he contrasts it with his social
interests, he finds identity of self, the something which makes us
"us," which separates us from all others in the world. A Crusoe,
marooned on a South Sea island, without even a black man Friday for
companionship, would soon cease to be a man; personality would forsake
him. But the same Crusoe is equally in need of solitude. The hell of
the barracks, no matter how well conducted, is their hideous lack of
privacy; men condemned by shipwreck or imprisonment to an unbroken and
intimate companionship kill their comrade or themselves. We are all
alike and hence gregarious; we are all different and hence flee as a
bird to the mountain. The reality of human personality lies in neither
one aspect of the truth nor the other, but in both. The truth is found
as we hold the balance between identity and difference. Hence we are
not able to think of personality in the Godhead unless we conceive of
God as being, within Himself, a social no less than a solitary Being.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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