(1935). Just as an "impartial science" could not fully justify the "right to believe" in justice or in the possibility that justice would prevail in the political order, so it could not justify a belief in the goodness of God's wicked world. Hope—"the nerve of moral action"—had to be asserted in the face of evidence that could easily justify the conclusion that the world is "meaningless." Hope was the product of emotion, not intelligence. It sprang from "gratitude and contrition"—"gratitude for Creation and contrition before Judgment; or, in other words, confidence that life is good in spite of its evil and that it is evil in spite of its good." Hope had to be distinguished, therefore, from optimism or "sentimentality," which closed their eyes to the dark side of things and attributed evil merely to ignorance or "cultural lag"—the failure of a science of morals and society to keep pace with the scientific understanding of nature. Without hope, the world was seen "either as being meaningless or as revealing unqualifiedly good and simple meanings." Yet hope exceeded strictly reasonable and realistic expectations. For this reason, Christian orthodoxy had always equated hope with a state of grace, which could not be achieved simply by the exertion of will or intelligence.

In his Interpretation of Christian Ethics, more fully and explicitly than in his other works, Niebuhr treated Christianity—more specifically, the prophetic tradition in Judaism and Christianity—as a life-giving mythology, in very much the same sense that Sorel spoke of the myth of the general strike. As we have seen, Sorel's use of this concept puzzled his critics, who insisted that workers would never rally to a purely imaginary promise of liberation. Niebuhr's argument invited the same misunderstanding. It is important to emphasize, therefore, that he did not mean to say that Christianity was an illusion, however sustaining in its psychological effects. Mythology, as he understood it, offered a coherent account of human history, in the form of narratives that embodied ethical insight and emotional truth in symbolic form; but the truth of this account, because it rested on intuition and emotion (in the Christian case, on the emotions of trust, loyalty, gratitude, and contrition), could not be established simply by argumentation. Niebuhr did not recommend the prophetic myth—the narrative of creation, the fall, God's judgment and redemption of history—as an object of aesthetic appreciation, a set of agreeable fictions. He maintained that it gave a true account of the human condition, superior to other accounts. Judeo-Christian prophecy, like any other myth, was prescientific, but it was also "supra-scientific." Myths

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