Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Will Herberg

American Jewish Writer, Intellectual, Social Philosopher, Sociologist of Religion and Scholar

"Democracy is predicated not on faith in man but on the conviction... that no man is good enough or wise enough to be entrusted with irresponsible power over his fellow-men."

"To suggest the process by which I and perhaps others found our way out of Man- ist materialism and power-worship, I will paraphrase the words used recently in derision by a well-known writer, himself an unreconstituted Marxist, to describe an experience in some ways very like my own. In trying to discover what went wrong with economics- he says-they (that is, people like me) came to politics; but politics revealed that it was tainted; and so they strove to cure the taint of politics with ethics; but ethics alone could not withstand the taint either, and so they went on finally to religion."

"Man is homo religiosus, by 'nature' religious: as much as he needs food to eat or air to breathe, he needs a faith for living."

"Ultimately all idolatry is worship of the self projected and objectified: all idolization is self-idolization."

"The attempt made in recent decades by secularist thinkers to disengage the moral principles of western civilization from their scripturally based religious context, in the assurance that they could live a life of their own as "humanistic" ethics, has resulted in our "cut flower culture." Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now-severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die. So with freedom, brotherhood, justice, and personal dignity — the values that form the moral foundation of our civilization. Without the life-giving power of the faith out of which they have sprung, they possess neither meaning nor vitality."

"No responsible thinker will venture to foresee human conditions within history in which faith will be so perfectly realized in love that law can be dispensed with and all action take rise in spontaneous freedom. "

"The transcendence of law in love is the divine imperative that confronts every man in his relations with his fellow men but it is an imperative that only the most sentimental utopianism can identify with the realities of social life at any stage of history."

"The moral crisis of our time cannot, it seems to me, be identified merely with the widespread violation of accepted moral standards, for which our time is held to be notorious. There has never been any lack of that at any time;… this, indeed, is our time’s challenge to morality; not so much the all-too-frequent breakdown of a moral code, but the fact that today there seems to be no moral code to break down…To violate moral standards while at the same time acknowledging their authority is one thing; to lose all sense of the moral claim, to repudiate all moral authority and every moral standard as such, is something far more serious."

"The attempt made in recent decades by secularist thinkers to disengage the moral principles of western civilization from their scripturally based religious context, in the assurance that they could live a life of their own as "humanistic" ethics, has resulted in our "cut flower culture." Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now-severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die. So with freedom, brotherhood, justice, and personal dignity - the values that form the moral foundation of our civilization. Without the life-giving power of the faith out of which they have sprung, they possess neither meaning nor vitality."

"The attempt made in recent decades by secularist thinkers to disengage the moral principles of western civilization from their scripturally based religious context, in the assurance that they could live a life of their own as "humanistic" ethics, has resulted in our "cut flower culture." Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now-severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die. So with freedom, brotherhood, justice, and personal dignity — the values that form the moral foundation of our civilization. Without the life-giving power of the faith out of which they have sprung, they possess neither meaning nor vitality."

"Modern society has not rid itself of religion, as it fondly believes; it has merely replaced the historical religions by a host of idolatrous cults struggling for possession of the soul of man."

"The absolute imperatives calling to perfection acquire their potency precisely through the fact that they transcend every actuality of existence. They are regulative, not constitutive, principles of moral life; they cannot themselves be embodied in action but they operate as the dynamic power within it. And these regulative ideals serve “as principles of criticism of existing conditions. And they serve, next, as principles of guidance in the struggle for better conditions.”"

"Even the saint in his humility, does he not exalt himself in the pride of his humility?"

"The resolution of the heart-rending, existence shattering conflict between what we know we ought to do and that which in fact we do do is possible only on the religious level, on the level of repentance, grace, and forgiveness. At this point, ethics transcends itself and returns to its religious source and origin. "