Witter Bynner
From Philosopedia
Bynner, Witter (10 August 1881 - 1 June 1968)
Bynner was a poet who wrote Journey With Genius: Recollections and Reflections Concerning the D. H. Lawrences (1951).
With Arthur Davis Ficke (under the pseudonyms of Emanyek Morgan and Anne Knish, he wrote Spectra (a hilarious hoax in 1916 that parodied free verse).
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On Humanism
On the subject of the various connotations of humanism, Bynner in 1956 wrote the following:
- I am almost as hesitant about subscribing to the tenets of any humanistic group as I should be toward the tenets of any deist group. All in all, I am definitely on the side of the humanists in that I feel mankind and its troubles and attainments to be itself a process of deity-experiencing both the pains and the beauty of growth.
- I am certainly not persuaded that there is an all-wise, all-good, and all-powerful deity running the show. . . . Nursery games - or actually harmful indulgences - are what most adult religious doctrines and practices seem to me now. In Christianity especially - or what it has come to be – I can only feel the individual’s shelving of responsibility and acceptance of a god’s sacrifice to be even more sadistic and morbid than the succession of sacrifices in earlier religions. And to brand procreation of life as the original sin is certainly to blame not man but God as the original sinner, the first procreator; while certainly the doctrine of virgin birth is as morbid as anything in history.
- But I devote too much space to only one of the mythologies–in making my point that man should be rid of them all except as more or less interesting fiction. China’s is the only great culture which has had resurrection. Immediate aspects of its return are deplorable; but I believe that, still strong behind them, the humanistic foundation of China’s life survives, as recorded in the teachings of Confucius and still better in the sayings of Lao-tzu.
- By now it is clear that my stand is with and for “Naturalistic Humanism,” except that I would not call it “born of the modern scientific age.” Besides and after the two great Chinese I have named, I would list, as influential in forming my humanistic faith, Lucretius, Shakespeare, John Keats, George Meredith, Walt Whitman, and Bertrand Russell.
Hart Crane
A. L. Rowse in his Homosexuals in History (1977) mentions that Hart Crane “did not care for the professionalism of accredited homosexual circles, rather deploring . . . a poet whom I recognize as an acquaintance of D. H. Lawrence,” obviously a reference to Bynner. Later, when Crane attempted to overcome his alcoholism and waterfront sexual escapades during which sailors would beat him up, Crane married the former wife of the alcoholic writer, Malcolm Cowley. Bynner intuitively predicted the marriage would not work, that the two inevitably would drink and squabble, that Crane would never be able “to do any work in such a hurly-burly.” As worded by Rowse, “On his way back to New York he dropped quietly into the sea, his work unfinished.” What Bynner learned was that in 1932 Crane was aboard a ship and had, suddenly and without warning, jumped overboard, calling out, “Goodbye, everybody.”
On Skepticism
One of Bynner’s poems was “The Reading of Books”:
- Till the final word may be farewell to evil and to good,
- Make the Hubbard’s cupboard your hermit-call,
- God’s beard your babyhood.
- For the Bible is a Mother Goose, when all is said and done:
- So read them both and make good use of what they tell you, son.
Credo
In the 1950s, Bynner wrote some book reviews for The Humanist. He also transmitted to Warren Allen Smith his “Credo,” adding that “This Credo, mostly as it is, was set down in my twenties. In my seventies I find little reason to change it.”
- CREDO
Most formalized religions have been engendered in the assumption of a more or less personal God, the creator and control of life. But the latest religion is as baffled as was the earliest by the question, What and why was the Beginning of God? By assuming a God, we only place the mystery a remove away. We beg the question. Humanity, moreover, has equipped Godhead with perfection and omnipotence; and then it has accepted the basic impossibility that out of perfection and omnipotence can come the creation, in humanity at least, of imperfection, frailty, ignorance. We attempt to explain the paradox by attributing to the Godhead perfect motives beyond our comprehension; but the fact that we remain poor uncomprehending victims of witnesses of injustice and barbarity supposedly concocted in heaven for our good, the very fact that we suffer by not understanding, is an imperfection or an impotence which no such explaining can explain. So the religions impose still other paradoxes on our conception of the Godhead. They direct us, for instance, to pray to Him for defence and benefit, although such prayer infringes upon God’s all-wisdom and contradicts the orthodox doctrine of our ignorance as to what is good for us. Truly faithful or logical acceptance of a perfect God would exact of human beings complete acquiescence and inaction. If Perfection stood all-powerful, what judgment or action by us would be necessary?
The western world has dramatized the difficulty by having us try to cast out imperfection as with the help of a Father. Even Christ kept, in his own personality, something of the old Hebrew authority of a father, which probably accounts in part for the Trinitarian doctrine. But Christianity has acknowledged more than it realizes of a deeper Christ when it calls its God the son of man, approaching therein an Oriental concept of the evolution of God through all life. When Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is within us, he would seem to mean that we are members not only of one another but of inherent perfection. His latest considerable group of interpreters have met the basic issue another way. Sensing the weakness of the ancient idea that evil can be co-existent with a perfect God, they have denied the existence of evil except as a human illusion. They try to bolster the perfection of God by foisting the mistake of imperfection upon us, although we are parts of God: a perfect whole with imperfect parts. They attribute “error” to the handiwork of a perfect Creator: their God, without need of making mistakes, yet errs through us. It is still the error of trying to believe in an already perfect God.
This historical conception of a personal God, of a force outside us, wholly powerful, was sure, moreover, to become for the human individual a conception of his own image given power over his fellows. It is this persistent conception which has caused and sanctioned wars and blind obedience, jealousies and woes. And of a part with the conception of fixed divine identity has been the conception of fixed human identities.
No life can be individual and separate in the sense that it can exclude other lives or can be life at all if it cease to grow and change. Only as it becomes consciously inclusive of other lives and included in them can I think that it becomes conscious of the spirit of life at large.
An individual’s vanity, his wish to proceed in some later existence with the same separate personality he has had here, seems to me an obstacle of pain and untruth against the way of life. Are we strictly what we mean when we call ourselves individuals? Are we not many people inside ourselves? Do we not begin compact of many ancestors? Do we not add to these still other lives from lovers, friends, and books? If identity survive, does death conclude its bounds? Must one’s separate soul continue at the age of ten, twenty, or sixty, according to the date of the body’s death?Is the spirit to be moulded by the happening of death into an endless fixity?
Surely if we are to continue in consciousness, it can only be as we realize all life to be our final and very self. Experimenting, suffering, learning with God in His growth toward that perfection which is in His blood and ours, a man becomes mankind and mankind God. The meaning dawns in life, in hope, in thought, in deed. If evil come, or error, it is not as something which might be prevented by an existent omnipotence, it is not some discipline which omnipotence visits upon us in a cryptic tyranny of justice; it is as something in the growing experience of God. And by use of evil, as by use of good, it is God as well as ourselves who can lose or gain. You, no less than any man and no more, except by degree of realization, may be coexistent and coeternal with God.
Happiness consists in the consciousness and use of that existence. A hint of the sweetness of such faith, such possible consummation, is given your body through its dissolving union with the body of one whom you love. Even though the fruit of such union seem to be a furtherance of separateness, the desire of lover for lover is a desire to enclose and to be enclosed, an urge and ache for oneness. And with the separation of bodies by death may come still more strongly the realization of oneness, the penetration of peace through chance and change, the gradual integration. For
- . . . who shall be my enemy
- When he is I and I am he?
Such rumination may, of course, be only one more happy guess; but, without the morbidity of most religions, it is a stimulus to responsible and helpful living, a human or divine faith like that of Mark Twain’s child, found in her diary after her death, that there may be “a heaven or something better.
Correspondence
See the extensive correspondence with Warren Allen Smith.
{CE; CL; HNS; WAS, 11 April 1956}
