A Good Life in a World Made Good: Albert Eustace Haydon, 1880-1975.

A Good Life in a World Made Good: Albert Eustace Haydon, 1880-1975

by Creighton Peden, Peter Lang Publishing, 312 pages, $78.95

IN THE COURSE of a long and fruitful career, Eustace Haydon was both a Baptist and a Unitarian minister, and the co-author, along with Roy Wood Sellars of the original Humanist Manifesto (1933). After retiring from his professorship in comparative religion at the University of Chicago where he taught for more than twenty-five years, he became the Leader of the Chicago Ethical Society. Today, with the conflict between science and religion re-awakened on left and right, Haydon's effort to integrate them without compromising their separate identities is worth our consideration. He gives us a picture of how religion can evolve creatively and honestly in a scientific and secular culture. A Good Life in a World Made Good: Albert Eustace Haydon, 1880-1975 introduces humanists, Ethical Culturists, liberal religionists, and freethinkers to the life and work of a genuine humanist pioneer.

Author Creighton Peden, Callaway Professor Emeritus at Augusta State University and president of the Highlands Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought, has played a significant role in keeping the work and ideas of the "Chicago School" of religious naturalists available to all of us. His books on Henry Nelson Weiman, Francis Ellingwood Abbott, William James Potter, Alfred North Whitehead, and on the Chicago School itself are a permanent resource for the scholar, the student, and not least of all for both adherents and critics of modern humanism. This book--and the three volumes of Haydon's lectures and papers that Peden has also edited--deserves a place in the library of anyone interested in the origin and development of critical naturalism.

Peden introduces his subject with a brief sketch of Haydon's early days, his birth in 1880, his childhood and youth in Brampton, Ontario, his work with the YMCA--a relationship he maintained all his life--and his vocation as a Baptist minister. Ordained in 1903, Haydon lived the busy life of a journeyman minister for nearly a decade, preaching to his own congregation on Sunday mornings and, Peden notes, "three times--three different sermons--for the Presbyterians:' Haydon was and remained all his life a charismatic speaker and teacher.

Beginning in 1898 Haydon courted and later married Edith Jones, a cousin by marriage and the daughter of a successful Brampton businessman. The Haydons had three sons and their marriage lasted until Edith's death in 1949.

Seperated by the duties of a rural preacher, Eustace and Edith carried on their courtship by letter and by occasional visits home. In his letters, we see the later Haydon starting to emerge. For example, he writes to Edith, "I have told you my thought before. 'God became man that man might become God" I preach that man rises to divinity... What else does this mean? 'Till Christ be formed in you" 'Now are you sons of god.'" Mixed with the sentiments of two people in love, Edith's thoughtful replies encouraged Haydon's religious exploration and indeed his move away from Christianity.

After completing his Master of Arts degree in 1907 at McMaster University in Toronto, Haydon began his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. At the end of his first year, needing a regular income, he became minister of the First Baptist Church in Saskatoon with the understanding that the congregation would allow him theological freedom. Moreover, the church would be open "to all Christians and not insist upon immersion." A charge of heresy by a disgruntled minority of the congregation was decided in Haydon's favor by a vote of two hundred to ten. Yet his theological discomfort was growing more visible.

With World War I raging, Eustace and Edith had to decide whether he would join the Canadian army as a chaplain. But age, academic temptation, and family responsibilities led him back to the University of Chicago where he graduated magna cure laude in 1918. His dissertation theme was "The Conception of God in The Pragmatic Philosophy" His teachers were Scribner Ames and Irving King and his references were to William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, and F.C.S. Schiller--the founders of pragmatism. Evolution and functional psychology replaced theology. Edith commented to a friend, "he is deeply infatuated with comparative religion" On the death of George Burman Foster, Haydon was appointed an instructor in comparative religion. Appropriately, his office was in the Divinity School while his appointment was to the Chicago faculty.

Nearly forty years old, Haydon began the new career. His interests emerged: the religions of Asia, the need for the next move in religious evolution, the centrality of democracy in making that move and, above all, the insights offered by the modern sciences. Over and over again, Haydon called for a new synthesis of religion and science aiming to achieve a good life here and now. After World War II and the creation of the United Nations, Haydon--exhibiting the exuberance of war's end--set an international frame around his social idealism. Reflecting his pragmatism, he described humanism, the modern religious successor to that tradition, as "the shared quest for the good life."

Haydon, a prodigious writer, speaker, and reviewer, authored a number of books, more than a hundred articles, lectured at Hebrew Union College, and delivered a number of radio talks including a yearlong series on humanism for the Ethical Society in 1949 and 1950. He remained all his life a preacher, teacher, and scholar--and, incidentally, an ardent golfer. He was also an active and critical Chicago citizen.

Writing in the present tense, Peden sets Haydon's humanism in context throughout the book, as here:

   By 1926, a second generation of humanists is
   emerging, mostly concentrated in Chicago at
   Meadville Theological School, which was affiliated
   with the Divinity School of the University of
   Chicago. It is to Haydon's classes that these young
   theological students are drawn. There they are
   confronted with a functional view of religion,
   humanly created in a variety of forms in the quest
   for a satisfying life. Haydon also plays another role
   in the life of this second generation of humanists
   as he urges them to establish the Humanist
   Fellowship in 1927. Haydon encourages the
   Fellowship to begin publishing the New Humanist
   [predecessor to today's Humanist magazine] in
   1928.

Several of Haydon's book titles reveal the humanist direction of his thinking: The Quest of the Ages (1929), Man's Search for the Good Life (1937), and Biography of the Gods (1941). The last of these three is revealing. Haydon intended the word "biography" literally. He had moved religion from theology to anthropology, history, and psychology.

Peden deliberately allows Haydon's life, thought, and language to shape the book. Consequently, I miss hearing Peden's own voice on Haydon. After all, he experienced the Chicago School and Haydon's Chicago milieu personally. I am left with several questions unanswered: How did Haydon fit with the Chicago School? How did his colleagues view his work? What was his contribution to religious scholarship? There are hints of answers to each of these in Peden's book, but I don't feel they are answered sufficiently.

All too often humanism is presented without its passion and without its roots in biography and history. Ironically, this results in a fleshless humanism, a dehumanized humanism. Against this, Peden offers a rich and dimensioned portrait of a fascinating and little known humanist original. I was left asking for more--not so much of Haydon's texts and message that are amply enough displayed, but of their motives and outcomes. Surely, the history, anthropology, and psychology that drew Haydon to his biography of the gods asks this much of us. Yet to be left asking for more is as well an appreciation of what has already been given.

Howard B. Radest is adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, Beaufort. A member of the Council of Ethical Culture Leaders, he is dean emeritus of The Humanist Institute, former director of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, and former co-chair of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. His recent books include: From Clinic To Classroom, Biomedical Ethics, and Ethics and Public Health in a Time of Terrorism. He is currently working on a book about biomedical ethics and catastrophic events.