Though in class debates King had once rejected Niebuhr and defended Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr’s “realistic” and “prophetic” analysis now appealed to him. Alas, King too had been naïve and sentimental about human nature. This had caused him, like Rauschenbusch, to overlook the fact that reason was “darkened by sin,” as his examination of history should have indicated. Reflecting on history, King considered the vacillations of America’s Founding Fathers—enlightened men in the Age of Reason—when it came to slavery and race on these shores. And he considered the rationalizations and histrionics of the southern proslavery apologists. “The more I observed the tragedies of history and man’s shameful inclination to choose the low road,” King said, “the more I came to see the depth and strength of sin.” And the more he realized how man’s tragic inclination to sin made him use his mind to rationalize his actions. Protestant liberals, for their part, had failed to understand that reason alone was little more than an instrument for justification—that reason devoid of “the purifying power of faith” could never free itself from “distortion and rationalization.”
King was indebted to Niebuhr for clarifying this. By making him realize that evil was “stark, grim, and colossally real,” Niebuhr had saved King from the trap of an illusory optimism about the capacity of man for good. Above all, Niebuhr helped King perceive “the glaring reality of collective evil”—the kind of group evil that caused otherwise decent men to kill, persecute, and crucify.
Too many pacifists, King decided, failed to recognize the existence of collective evil. He thought the pacifist nurtured a superficial idealism about human nature that made him unconsciously self-righteous, made him claim “to be free from the moral dilemmas that the Christian non-pacifist confronts.” Repelled by such an attitude, King refused to join any pacifist organization.
As for pacifism itself, Niebuhr’s critique left King in “a state of confusion” as to whether it could be a realistic and responsible position. Moreover, if Protestant liberalism was utterly wrong about the character of man, did this mean that neo-orthodoxy—with its echoes of fundamentalism—was utterly right? King was still grappling with such questions when he graduated from Crozer in June, 1951, with a B.A. in divinity. He finished at the top of his class, gave its valedictory address, and won a $1,300 scholarship to the graduate school of his choice. His choice was Boston University’s prestigious School of Theology, where he planned to pursue a Ph.D. in systematic theology and work under Dr. Edgar Sheffield Brightman, an eminent scholar in the philosophy of personalism whose texts King had read since Morehouse days.
The elder King approved of his son’s plans. He’d toiled long and hard to earn his own degrees, and he appreciated M. L.’s scholarly achievements. As in other summers, King returned to Atlanta and assumed his duties at Ebenezer, where he was now an associate pastor. At such times, Daddy “took a vacation” and let his son do much of the preaching. Young King saw something of “the Atlanta girl” Daddy wanted him to marry, heard more of his father’s plans for him at Ebenezer. In the fall, he loaded his possessions into a new green Chevrolet—a graduation present from his Daddy—and set out for Boston. He drove through Washington, D.C., at a time when McCarthyism was gripping the capital and fears of Communist conspiracies were sweeping the land. On the racial front, the United States Supreme Court had ordered the law schools of the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma to admit Negroes. And the NAACP Legal Defense Fund had elected to attack segregation in all public schools as unconstitutional. Out in Illinois, a Negro couple had moved into all-white Cicero, a Chicago suburb, only to be driven out by a nigger-yelling mob.
IN HIS FIRST SEMESTER AT BOSTON UNIVERSITY, King took Dr. Brightman’s course in the philosophy of religion and under his tutelage began a study of Hegel, tackling the monumental Phenomenology of Mind. A gentle, white-haired fellow who peered out through small, round-rimmed glasses, Brightman thought King a “uniformly courteous young theologian” and an A student. On his part, King idolized Brightman, whose erudition was awe-inspiring. Alas, though, Brightman was extremely ill. In fact, he was dying. He managed to finish the term, but it was a terrible struggle for him. When he could no longer leave his home in Newton, King and other graduate students went there to see him, and he gave them all he could. He died during King’s second year, and the young scholar would get tears in his eyes when he spoke of this man who had given him “so much” and helped to shape his character.
King’s new adviser was forty-seven-year-old L. Harold DeWolf, a Brightman protégé who hailed originally from Nebraska. He had pastored there for a time and then come east to attend Boston University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1935 and joined the faculty of systematic theology. A distinguished scholar in his own right, meticulous, learned, and exacting, DeWolf took King’s measure and liked what he saw. “He was very self-contained and resourceful,” DeWolf remembered, and always well prepared for their conferences, coming in with a list of questions and his own proposed answers. DeWolf noticed “a gentle kind of humor” in King and observed that he was “universally liked” among his classmates.
Under DeWolf’s guidance, King plunged into the most rigorous and stimulating curriculum in his academic career. He took seminars in personalism and systematic theology, in the religious teachings of the New Testament, in the history of ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy, in Christian ethics and the psychology of religion. Writing at a feverish pace, he turned out technical compositions on “A View of the Cross Possessing Biblical and Spiritual Justification,” on “The Christian Pertinence of Eschatological Hope,” on “A Comparison of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Christology with that of Albrecht Ritschl,” and on “The Place of Reason and Experience in Finding God.” At the same time, he explored the lofty heights of comparative religions, perusing texts on Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Confucianism, Shintoism, and Mohammedanism, and noting their mutal concern with the eternal conflict between good and evil. In traditional Judaism and Christianity, of course, the struggle was between God and Satan; in Zoroastrianism, between the God of light and the God of darkness; in Hinduism, between illusion and reality.
In his course on the psychology of religion, King encountered the theories of Sigmund Freud and John B. Watson. At first he scorned them both, rejecting psychology for the same reason that he spurned Communism and modern humanism: psychology, too, left out the spiritual and the divine in man. But on reflection he admitted that psychology offered useful insights into the dangers of repression, escapism, and irrational fear. Psychoanalysis, he decided, could help people understand the causes of their failures and fears, though the only cure for fear itself was “positive religious faith.” He also conceded that behaviorists like Watson made him aware of environmental influences on the growth of personality. In fact, in an “Autobiography of Religious Development,” prepared for a course in the religious development of personality, King applied Watsonian theory to his own life: he traced the influences of his childhood world on his anticapitalist sentiments, social and racial concerns, and deep religious faith. He said nothing, however, about his two suicide attempts. He simply stated that he had grown up in a family of loving relationships and that ever since childhood, even during periods of skepticism, “religion has been real to me and closely linked to life. In fact the two cannot be separated; religion for me is life.”
In search of the meaning of life, King drove across the Charles River to take additional philosophy courses at Harvard, where he read existentialists like Jaspers, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre, and discussed their “perception of the anxiety and conflict produced in man’s personal and social life by the perilous and ambiguous structure of existence.” In and out of class, he could impress audiences with his encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy, theology, and history and his remarkable ability to quote a host of thinkers to illustrate his points.
In the meantime he tried desperately to bring order to his vast accumulation of knowledg
e, to provide coherent answers to questions that still perplexed him—questions about Niebuhr, pacifism, and the nature of God and man. In his spare time, he turned back to Hegel, reviewing the Phenomenology of Mind and poring over The Philosophy of History and The Philosophy of Right. He pondered Hegel’s contention that “world historical individuals” served as agents for “the will of the world spirit.” Endowed with superior vision, such figures sensed the spirit and truth of the age—the Zeitgeist—and made it their own aim and destiny. “World-historical men—the Heroes of an epoch—must therefore be recognized as its clearsighted ones,” Hegel asserted: “their deeds, their words are the best of the time.” While King had reservations (Hegel’s “absolute idealism” seemed to King “rationally unsound” because it “tended to swallow up the many in the one”), he admired “world-historical men” himself—from Plato and Aristotle to Lincoln and Gandhi—and incorporated the notion of the Zeitgeist into his understanding of history.
On other points, Hegel proved a revelation for him. For one thing, Hegel’s analysis of the dialectical process showed King that growth came through pain and struggle, and persuaded him anew that the course of world history moved toward universal justice. For another thing, Hegel convinced King that the higher level of truth was found in a synthesis that reconciled an assertible proposition (the thesis) with another and seemingly contradictory proposition (the antithesis). Hegel’s “truth as a whole” thus freed King from an either-or choice in his social and theological concerns and furnished him “a philosophical method of rational coherence.” This meant forging “a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony.” In economics, for instance, King observed that neither capitalism nor Communism possessed the full truth. “Historically capitalism had failed to see the truth in collective enterprise and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise. Nineteenth-century capitalism failed to see that life is social and Marxism failed and still fails to see that life is individual and personal.” The kingdom of God, King concluded, was a synthesis that reconciled these two truths.
Eventually, Hegel helped King out of his dilemma over pacifism and neo-orthodoxy. But this came after he had been exposed to the pacifist teachings of Dean Walter Muelder and Professor Allan Knight Chalmers of the Boston University School of Theology. Their passion for social justice came not from a false idealism but from an abiding faith in man’s ability to adapt and reform himself when he became “a co-worker with God.” Thanks to their influence and that of other advocates of nonviolence at Boston University, King realized that Niebuhr had overemphasized man’s corruption. “He was so involved in diagnosing man’s sickness of sin that he overlooked the cure of grace,” King wrote. If Protestant liberals were too optimistic about human nature, Niebuhr and the neo-orthodoxists were too pessimistic. Their revolt against liberalism had carried them too far the other way, so that they lapsed into a mood of antirationalism and semifundamentalism, which exaggerated the utter hopelessness of the world and man’s incapacity to change it or himself. King deemed this “inadequate both for the church and personal life.”
As with capitalism and Communism, King decided that the full truth about man was not found in either theological interpretation. The true explanation was a Hegelian synthesis of both: that man was capable of both good and evil, with an eternal civil war between the two raging within him. The nonviolent reformer, King believed, must appeal to the good in man, by asking man to open himself to the possibility God had given him for brotherhood.
As for Niebuhr’s critique of pacifism, King saw that it tended to equate pacifism with complete nonresistance to evil, which naïvely trusted in the power of love. Reviewing his books on Gandhi, particularly Richard Gregg’s The Power of Nonviolence, King now judged Niebuhr’s position “a serious distortion.” True pacifism, Gandhi had taught, was not “nonresistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil.” Had Gandhi not confronted evil with as much force, vigor, and strength as the violent resister? True pacifism was not some unrealistic submission to evil; it was, King noted, “a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be a recipient of violence than an inflictor of it.” By appealing to the good in the oppressor, loving resistance (agape resistance) could bring about a transformation in the human heart and take man a long step closer toward the universal justice Hegel anticipated.
By 1953, King’s analysis had led him to reject war, any kind of war. Since both the Soviet Union and the United States now possessed the atomic bomb, King sided with all those who condemned war as obsolete. In a day of potential atomic annihilation, war could no longer serve even as “a negative good” to arrest the spread of an evil force. No, “wisdom born of experience” dictated that man must now find an alternative to war—and that of course was love and nonviolence. In today’s perilous world, King believed, we must love our enemies—or else.
In his graduate work, meanwhile, King was writing technical compositions on the radical idealism of George Berkeley, the ethical relativism of Charles Renouvier, and the personalism of Borden P. Bowne and Brightman himself. Under DeWolf’s patient supervision, King sought to reconcile the conflict between relativism and idealism that bitterly divided the thinkers he studied. He was satisfied that he found such a synthesis in his examination of the philosophy of personalism, which held that a personal God operated in and on every human life and that the clue to “the meaning of ultimate reality” was thus found in personality. This “personal idealism,” King said. became “my basic philosophical position. Personalism’s insistence that only personality—finite and infinite—is ultimately real, strengthened me in two convictions: it gave me metaphysical and philosophical grounding for the idea of a personal God, and it gave me a metaphysical basis for [my belief] in the dignity and worth of all human personality.”
As a student of personalism, King was certain that man could cast out evil from the world—by confronting his own sinfulness and opening himself to the Father’s incandescent love and good will. Thus he not only rejected Niebuhr’s argument that evil could never be eliminated; he also disagreed with Rauschenbusch that evil was social rather than personal. Evil was essentially personal, but it could be conquered—and social salvation attained—through “man’s willing acceptance of God’s mighty gift.” Hence all men were “potential sons of God.”
By now, things were falling together for him. From divergent intellectual currents, he had fashioned the rudiments of a coherent “synthesis” theology and a positive social philosophy, one predicated on nonviolence and an awareness of the complexity of human existence. He hadn’t all the answers, by any means. He realized how much more he had to learn. But how he enjoyed intellectual inquiry. He would love to do this for the rest of his life, to become a scholar of personalism, the Social Gospel, and Hegelian idealism, inspiring young people as his own mentors had inspired him. Yes, that would be a splendid and meaningful way to serve God and humanity.
EVER SOLEMN AND SERIOUS IN HIS STUDIES, King was loquacious and debonair in his social life. “I’m an ambivert,” he claimed, a cross between an extrovert and an introvert. He liked to quote what a French philosopher once said: “No man is strong unless he bears within his character antitheses strongly marked.” Jesus too had recognized the need for blending opposites when he commanded men to be both tough-minded and tender-hearted. And if King was tough-minded as an intellectual, he was tender-hearted as always when it came to romances. “Apparently you are still meeting these girls who are onetime wreckers,” a friend wrote. “Watch the Doctor don’t let one catch you with your shoes off.” Another associate marveled at his “gallivanting around Boston, the most eligible bachelor in town.” But he cautioned King: “Remember, M. L., ‘we are expecting great things from you.’ The only element to restrain our expectations from bearing fruit will be M. L. himself.”
King’s best friend in Boston was a fellow Morehouse man named Philip Lenud, who was a Ph.D. candidate at Tufts University and
whose father was also a Baptist minister. Lenud could perform the impressive feat of jumping in the air and clicking his heels together. He and King ate at the Western Lunch Box, which served down-home food, and frequented hot night spots like the Totem Pole, which rocked with brassy jazz.
Because they found one another congenial, King and Lenud moved in together, renting a four-room apartment in a largely Negro neighborhood. Lenud cooked most of the meals, and King washed the dishes. After setting up house, the two bachelors organized a Philosophy Club that met on weekends “to solve the problems of the world.” A dozen or so black students—male and female—would gather in the living room to drink coffee, chat, and critique a paper someone would present. Sometimes professors from area colleges would give talks; DeWolf himself spoke on “the meaning of the kingdom and how it will come.”
Still, King was bored with bachelor life. If the right woman came along, he might like to settle down. One day he was having lunch with a married friend named Mary Powell. “Mary,” he said, “I am about to get cynical. I have met quite a few girls here, but none that I am particularly fond of. Do you know any nice, attractive young ladies?”
She knew two and named one King had already met. “Who is the other one?” King asked.
“Coretta Scott,” Mary said. “She is really a nice girl—pretty and intelligent.” Mary paused. “But I don’t think Coretta is really right for you. She doesn’t attend church very often.”
King was not bothered about that: he didn’t want to date anyone too set in her religious beliefs. He persuaded Mary to give him Coretta’s telephone number and to put in a good word for him.
He phoned her on a cold February evening in 1952. “This is M. L. King, Jr,.” he announced. There was an embarrassing silence on the other end. “A mutual friend of ours told me about you and gave me your telephone number,” King went on. “She said some very wonderful things about you and I’d like very much to meet you and talk to you.”
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