PART I. ANALYSIS
CHAPTER TWO. The Birth of Religion in the Individual
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Birth is not the beginning of life. It is simply the occasion when we come forth into the light of day. Similarly, by the birth of religion in the individual mind we do not mean the beginning of the religious life, but simply the occasion of its coming forth into the full light of consciousness. The absolute beginnings of religion are too obscure to be described and too early to be remembered. Their nature can only be guessed at from what we know of religion when it begins to assume definite shape and consciously to affect the course of thought and motivation. But this coming of religion into full consciousness is an event sufficiently definite, in the mental life of great numbers of people, to permit of fairly clear characterization, and it usually occurs late enough in the life of the young person to be fairly well remembered. It is therefore a phase of religion, and of the mental life generally, clearly open to scientific study both by external observation of others and by reflective analysis of one’s own immediate experience and memory.
Its importance for our study is not that religion is any stronger or better in its beginnings than in its mature development. It even has the disadvantage of emphasizing tendencies to certain weaknesses and confusions due to lack of maturity. But it is usually a fairly vivid stage of religious development; and it has the great advantage, for us, of standing in close contemporary contrast with the antecedent stage when religious factors were little evident and little influential.
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Here, therefore, we should be able to see what is essential to the nature of the religious life, its true meaning as distinguished from the life in which religion is undeveloped. From these essentials we can go on to follow its growth and achieve an understanding of its fuller possibilities.
The metaphor of “birth,” however, contains certain dangers of misinterpretation. Physical birth is a comparatively sudden and complete change of status. The psychological birth of religion is, normally, not sudden. In his physical birth the individual is passive. In his religious “new birth” he is active; he is “born again” by his own labors. This labor may involve some travail of soul, or it may not. The metaphor is picturesque and suggestive but, like most metaphors, apt to be misleading if pressed too far. The one excuse for it is the fact that the religious life does and, if it is to develop normally, must, come forth into clear and definite consciousness. The individual actively undergoes certain inner mental adjustments. There is a change and enrichment of his system of values. Life acquires fuller meaning. All these influences affect, more or less completely, his system of beliefs and his habits of action.
The fact that this change may take place suddenly, and may be accompanied by abnormal psychological phenomena such as spiritual anguish and ecstasy and even by visions and voices and strange physical impulsions, has been given a great deal too much attention. This mistake has been committed both by religious people who are concerned with the practical religious results and accompanying beliefs, and by students concerned with the interpretation of religious phenomena. On the other hand, the fact that many people grow to spiritual maturity without passing through any marked period of storm and stress, responding very easily and naturally to appropriate new spiritual stimuli from the environment, has led some religious educators to believe that under proper processes of [ p. 37 ] “conditioning” moral and religious development may take place without effort from within, being purely a matter of passive responses to stimuli from without. A fair consideration of the whole range of evidence, however, strongly suggests that both extreme views are wrong. Spiritual anguish and ecstasy are abnormal and unnecessary. They are either pathological or due to the stress of unusual moral trials. Yet full religious and moral development is a prize that can no more be won without effort, struggle and occasional failure than can excellence in any other form of human achievement.
The literature of this subject is very full and has been so frequently reviewed, with the same general conclusions, that we need not do more than briefly recount some typical examples and some statements of those who have made a special study of it. The cases of conversion accompanied by exceptional psychological experiences, whether gradual or sudden, do not usually belong to the earliest phases of religious development. There are several minor Protestant sects and religious movements that make a special cult of the “second blessing,” obtained by prolonged prayer and other forms of religious activity. Similar to these are cases where the most significant feature is a new doctrinal conviction or religious insight. The apostle Paul had been for a number of years a zealous Pharisee, and because of his religious zeal was persecuting the new sect of Christians, when his remarkable conversion occurred.[1] Al-Ghazali, the great Moslem theologian who revivified Islam in the eleventh century, was a theological professor at the height of his career when he entered upon his years of spiritual crisis. Oppressed by philosophic doubts he suffered a breakdown of health and resigned his position. [ p. 38 ] Later he was brought back to faith in Allah and his Prophet by mystical experiences which, he says, were beyond description, but which were obtained through exercises involving the mastering of desire, the combating of passion, the purifying of the soul and the perfecting of the character.[2] Ramakrishna, one of the most important Indian religious leaders of the nineteenth century, was twenty years of age when, a very proud Brahmin but with a deep religious interest, he began his worship at a shrine of Kali founded by a Sudra (low caste) woman. After three years of storm and stress and unsatisfied longing for the divine, mingled with occasional visions, and after much earnest thought and genuine moral self-culture, this led him to a triumph over human pride and worldliness and lust. The love of what he called “the little self” was overcome, and he came to a realization “that God is walking in every human form and manifesting Himself alike through the saint and the sinner, the virtuous and the vicious.” [3]
These cases parallel, in their general outlines, those of St. Augustine, Tolstoi, Bunyan, Gautama Buddha and others of lesser fame, but equal intrinsic interest attaches to such experiences as William James has recorded in Varieties of Religious Experience or such as are found in books like Harold Begbie’s Twice-Born Men. In order to have one example before us in a little more detail we may take the personal account of his conversion given by the Hindu Christian, the Sadhu Sundar Singh:
When I was out in any town I got people to throw stones at Christian preachers. I would tear up the Bible and other Christian books and put kerosene oil on them and burn them. I thought this was a false religion and tried all I could to destroy it. [ p. 39 ] I was faithful to my own religion, but I could not get any satisfaction or peace, though I performed all the ceremonies and rites of that religion. So I thought of leaving it all and committing suicide. Three days after I had burnt the Bible, I woke up about three o’clock in the morning, had my usual bath, and prayed, “O God, if there is a God, wilt thou show me the right way or I will kill myself.” My intention was that, if I got no satisfaction, I would place my head upon the railway line when the five o’clock train passed by and kill myself. If I got no satisfaction in this life I thought I would get it in the next. I was praying and praying, but got no answer; and I prayed for half an hour longer hoping to get peace. At 4:30 a.m. I saw something of which I had no idea at all previously. In the room where I was praying I saw a great light. I thought the place was on fire. I looked round, but could find nothing. Then the thought came to me, “Jesus Christ is not dead but living and it must be He Himself.” So I fell at His feet and got this wonderful Peace which I could not get anywhere else. This is the joy I was wishing to get. This was Heaven itself. When I got up the vision had all disappeared; but although the vision disappeared the Peace and Joy have remained with me ever since. I went off and told my father that I had become a Christian.[4]
Modern abnormal psychology enables us to understand these extraordinary experiences. In every case there is mental conflict: and mental conflict, when prolonged and severe, generates repressions. Mental conflict is conflict of interests; and in the cases that lead to conversion there is always involved some conflict with moral interests. Saul of Tarsus, for example, had been fighting a growing conviction that the Christians were right. His persecution of them had been a case of persisting in a painful duty and nursing a bitterness that were contrary to the strong human elements of his nature. [ p. 40 ] This is expressed by the voice in the scene on the Damascus road; “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” He had heard the preaching of the martyr Stephen and had held the coats of those who stoned him, without himself participating in the deed — a picture of hesitation. As a Jew of Tarsus he was probably a member of the synagogue of Cilicia with which Stephen had held discussions. He had rejected the doctrine of the Christians because he saw that it meant the end of Jewish exclusiveness and of the high hopes of Jewish messianism, as well as for its intrinsic improbability. It was because he saw, perhaps more clearly than most of the Christians, that it meant the end of Judaism, the equality of the Gentiles before the one true God, that he felt so strongly that the sect must be crushed. And probably, as C. G. Jung suggests,[5] it was because he felt himself half convinced by the testimony of the Christians and strongly attracted by the Christian ideal that he was so zealous in their suppression. There was a conflict in his soul between the pride of the Hebrew in being the chosen people of God and the Christian ideal that opened the love and forgiveness of God equally to all. He hated the growing Christianity in his own mind, and he fought it by fighting the Christians. But on the Damascus road he had several days of enforced inactivity in which to think, and when he came in sight of the walls of Damascus, where the hateful business of persecution was to begin again, a revulsion of feeling set in. The repressed Christian ideal of a universal religion that made all men alike before God took possession of his mind, and with it came a conviction of the truth of the martyr’s witness to the doctrine of the risen Christ. There flashed upon his mind a vision of the heavenly triumph of the teacher whose followers he was persecuting, and there rang in his ears a call to become an apostle of the new truth to the [ p. 41 ] Gentiles whom he had been seeking to shut out of the Kingdom of God.
A very similar conflict, resulting in a similar stage of bitterness toward the new religion and a similar symbolic seeing of the light in the vision, is to be observed in the case of the sadhu. Each of the other cases reveals its owh distinctive kind of conflict. With al-Ghazali it was between doubts that the scientific and philosophic reason had raised and a faith that rested on a moral foundation; and the conflict was not solved until reason found a new foundation in a new sort of experience that led to convictions in harmony with those that the moral life seemed to him to require. With Ramakrishna it was chiefly the pride of the Brahmin as opposed to a generous recognition of the spiritual equality of others, suggested by the fact that a Sudra, and a woman, had erected the shrine at which he was worshiping. St. Augustine’s conflict was chiefly with sensuality, a difficulty that remained after intellectual doubts had been satisfactorily resolved. In the case of Tolstoi the trouble was that he had lost all religious belief and given himself over to enjoy the superficial and artificial life of the idle aristocracy. But these things after a time failed to satisfy. His deeper moral nature demanded that life should have a meaning, and his thought and mode of life had made it meaningless. He tells, in My Confession, how the problem was solved with a growth of insight into the values of simple things and of the life of common helpfulness toward one’s fellow men. And with this insight there came back to him the belief in God and immortality. Bunyan was afflicted by a sense of sin which was typically psychopathic — vague, generalized and acute. Of the inner conflict and dissatisfaction that underlay the religious experience of Gautama we know little save that it was sufficient to move him to renounce his position as a petty rajah and take up the life of an ascetic in search of peace of soul.
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This examination of cases of conversion and exceptional religious experience, among persons of importance in history and literature, leads thus to the same conclusions as Professor Starbuck arrived at from his study of numerous cases, chiefly in American evangelical circles, by the method of the questionnaire.[^xxxx] The more pronounced types of religious experience arise out of conflict; they are preceded by a period of “storm and stress and the conflict is essentially a moral one. Conversion, Starbuck found, is principally a phenomenon of adolescence. Its periods of greatest frequency coincide with the three periods ’’ within adolescence when the most serious problems of personal adjustment arise, though adolescence as a whole is a period of rapid adjustment and thus always more or less of conflict. It is the time of the awakening of the sexual life. But, much more important, it is the period of the chief development of the moral understanding, requiring constant adjustment to new moral insights and the constant solution of new moral problems. In his examination of the motives for what his subjects called their “conversion,” Starbuck found considerable percentages attributed to fear of hell, social pressure and other nonmoral motives, due to the type of evangelism prevailing in America in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when his subjects had the experiences they recorded for him. But even so, in the majority of the cases the principal motive was moral, and the moral motive tended to acquire greater predominance as the age of conversion advanced. In their comments on their experience it is the moral motive and the moral conflict that his correspondents stressed. Starbuck sums up the importance of conduct as an organizing center for religious belief in the following statement:
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The ethical instinct, the effort to do right, is far the most constant and persistent of all the forces that are active in the child life. In adolescence, when the new life bursts forth, its most important content was ethical. During storm and stress and doubt that which remained firmest when life was least organised was this same instinct. And now we find, in describing their fundamental attitudes toward life, that the respondents already in the late teens and twenties mention conduct almost as frequently as at any later time in life.[6]
But over against these more striking cases and the emphasis on conflict arising from them, there must be placed a great multitude of cases of religious development apparently devoid of crisis. William James, with his usual felicity of phrase, termed these the “healthy-minded” type to distinguish them from the " sick souls” and the “twice-born.” In these cases the close interrelation of the religious and the moral development is the fact of major importance, though there are some cases where there is nothing that the subject will recognize as religious at all. Where there is a religious consciousness, it is the smoothness of its relation to the moral consciousness that seems to explain the absence of the experience of conflict. As an outstanding example of this type James (and many others after him) quotes the reply of Dr. E. E. Hale, an eminent Unitarian minister, to one of Starbuck’s circulars:
I observe, with profound regret, the religious struggles which come into many biographies, as if almost essential to the formation of the hero. I ought to speak of these, to say that any man has an advantage, not to be estimated, who is born, as I was, into a family where the religion is simple and rational; who is trained in the theory of such a religion, so that he never knows, for an hour, what these religious or irreligious struggles are. I always knew that God loved me, and I was always grateful to him for [ p. 44 ] the world he placed me in. I always liked to tell him so, and was always glad to receive his suggestions to me. … To live with all my might seemed to me easy; to learn where there was so much to learn seemed pleasant and almost of course; to lend a hand, if one had a chance, natural; and if one did this, why, he enjoyed life because he could not help it. … A child who is early taught that he is God’s child, that he may live and move and have his being in God, and that he has, therefore, infinite strength at hand for the conquering of any difficulty, will take life more easily, and probably will make more of it, than one who is told that he is born the child of wrath and wholly incapable of good.[7]
This statement, however, must be taken as asserting a relative absence of conflict compared to the experiences common in the conversion crises of the time. No person could achieve moral perfection without experiencing even a single temptation, and it must not be supposed that the Rev. Dr. Hale was making any such claim. Furthermore, it is obviously the statement of a person for whom the path of life had been set in pleasant places. It would not be so easy to be “always grateful” to God for the world he has placed one in if one had to endure economic want, pain, disease, loss of loved ones and frustrated ambitions; and to “lend a hand” would not always seem so “natural” if one could do it only at the cost of bitter personal sacrifice. Nevertheless, Dr. Hale’s experience is much nearer to that of the average religious person than is a Bunyan’s or a Tolstoi’s.
Starbuck’s investigations alone are sufficient to show that in normal circumstances, among young people who are not subjected to theological teaching seeking to provoke a crisis, the religious awakening is gradual. It is connected with the progressive development of moral ideals and the practical adjustment of conduct to the expanding moral vision. From 273 personal accounts of their religious development by people [ p. 45 ] who had no “conversion crisis,” he gathered the following general conclusions:
(a) That before the age of ten or eleven “religion is distinctively external . . . rather than something which possesses inner significance.” [8] This means that religion consists in beliefs accepted on authority, and in the performance of rites without an inner sense of their significance and value. God is an external being who, like Santa Claus, brings good gifts and watches to see whether we are good, and to whom petitions may be sent up a chimney called “prayer.” Much of what is thus called religion has, for the child, no basis in the spontaneity of his own moral interests. The genuine religious awakening has not yet taken place. Morality itself is largely a matter of conformity to rules under social pressure. It lacks insight into values and responsive appreciation of them. But belief in supernatural beings like Santa Claus, fairies, miracle-working saints and creator-gods does not constitute religion. It is on a level with belief in the virtues of a horseshoe or a rabbit’s foot, or in the universal beneficence of Dr. Quack’s Cure-all and the rigid laws of political economy. Beliefs, whether in the supernatural or in natural elements, and the practices that go with them, become religious only by virtue of their connection with a deeper and more inward experience. Children under ten are not always devoid of this experience, though in most of them it is not sufficiently clear and vigorous to make vital connection with religious belief and practice. Where this connection is not made (either because of intellectual objections to the beliefs or because of continued indecisiveness of the inner experience) , the beliefs tend to fade in adult life, and the practices tend to be dropped as meaningless. It is important, therefore, to grasp the nature of the kind of experience that makes religion real and vital. This usually comes into prominence between [ p. 46 ] the ages of ten and twenty-five, though it may manifest itself earlier or be delayed until later.
(b) A second conclusion drawn by Starbuck points to the nature of this inner experience, which usually manifests itself first during adolescence. He calls it a “spontaneous awakening” whereby the ideas of God, duty and religious observance, which have hitherto been external, take root in the inner life and assume a vital significance. In so far as the subjects were able to point to any special incidents in this connection they tend to emphasize one or more of three elements: fresh intellectual insight, first-hand perception of right and wrong, and emotional responses. But it is the moral development that is central. Starbuck sums up his study. of these phenomena by saying:“. . back of the whole adoles cent development, and central in it, is the birth of a new and larger spiritual consciousness.” [9] “It is “the birth of a larger self.” And the birth is an active process, usually difficult at some points, though not necessarily critical. In some individuals, such as Dr. Hale, the advance of the moral consciousness and the growth of habits are so skillfully directed and so little strained by adverse circumstances that there are no marked stages, no obvious patches of light and shade. But always there are some “difficulties” of a moral nature and a need “to live with all one’s might,” even though, as in the doctor’s case, a confidence in the availability of infinite resources of divine strength to overcome them may make the task seem always “easy.”
One feature of the conversion process as described by Starbuck and James seems to have received a false emphasis by these writers, due to the fact that their materials were so largely drawn from people influenced by the Protestant evangelical tradition. This is the interpretation of the element of “selfsurrender” in the final stage of conversion, and the description [ p. 47 ] of the whole process as one of “struggling away from sin rather than of striving toward righteousness.”[10] Professor Pratt [11] has done good service in pointing out that this is true of only a limited number of cases, and is due to theological emphasis on the necessity of “conviction of sin” in order to the attainment of salvation. He rightly points out that in those remarkable cases of conversion by the Salvation Army in London which are reported by Harold Begbie,[12] though the subjects were shockingly bad sinners, they were not so much oppressed by a sense of sin as animated by a positive moral ideal. They were seeking righteousness and its fruits rather than a divine remission of the sins of the past. The “surrender” they made was not, as Puritan theology used to teach, a cessation of all effort in a complete reliance on the saving grace of God, but a surrender of the old passions and desires to the new moral aspirations, a surrender of the lower self to the higher. This sort of positive effort and moral idealism is the sine qua non of all religious development.
From all this evidence one fact stands out clearly — that the roots of religion are in the moral life. If man had no moral consciousness he might have superstitions and he might even have science and a philosophy, but he would have no religion. Yet morality and religion are not just the same thing. Religious activity manifests a persistent tendency to a speculative reaching out of thought to solve the mystery of life. It tends to postulate the existence of intangible personal agencies beyond the realm of natural human beings. It issues in efforts to achieve harmony with a power outside the self, on which the self feels itself in some way to depend. It emotionalizes [ p. 48 ] and emphasizes the moral life. It finds something in its experience that arouses awe and reverence. It attributes to what it recognizes as the moral law the authority of a superhuman will. These tendencies are not typically a part of the moral consciousness, as they are of the religious. Many people live good moral lives without any special experiences, activities or beliefs of this sort, and say they have no religion. If we assert, as we must, that religion is rooted in morality, we are yet forced to admit that not all moral experience is religious in quality or tends to involve or depend upon religious beliefs. Is there then something added to the experience of the moral consciousness that transforms mere morality, or morality simpliciter, into religion? Or is there some special phase of the moral experience that contains elements which tend to lead to the development of the distinctively religious features, making religion something more than morality, something arising out of it though not essential to it?
It has been usual to adopt the former of these alternatives. The traditional religions have taught that this additional element is belief in the supernatural, founded either on reason or on revelation, or on both. Sometimes they have added that religious experience depends also on a special divine activity in the human soul. Philosophers, psychologists and anthropologists have, for the most part, agreed that some kind of belief in higher powers is necessary to religion. Most have regarded these beliefs as derived, more or less reasonably, from reflection on problems external to religious experience itself; others have thought that they arise from reflection on a distinctive (but nonmoral) element in experience, which is thus the peculiar root of religion. [13] The humanists, on the other hand, have insisted that belief in superhuman powers is quite [ p. 49 ] unnecessary to religion, that moral experience alone is enough. Their difficulty, however, has been to defend themselves against the charge of obliterating the distinction between morality and religion, for it scarcely seems sufficient to regard religion, as did Matthew Arnold, as “morality touched by emotion.”
Humanism, with its insistence that moral experience (of our relation to our fellows and of the social values involved in that relationship) is sufficient basis for the religious life, might find an answer to its problem in the second alternative view. But this second view does not necessarily lead to humanism. It asserts (a) that religious belief, feeling and activity arise in response to certain distinctive phases or features of moral experience; (b) that these beliefs, feelings and activities then tend to develop their own distinctive life in relation to other features of experience, and in such a way that there is often considerable independence and lack of correlation between morality and religion; but © that these intellectual, aesthetic and practical phases of religion, when strongly developed, tend to gather the whole of the moral life into their embrace.
If this interpretation of the roots of religious belief is correct the question still remains which, if any, of those beliefs are correct. It may still be the case that humanism is right in its rejection of all belief in anything higher than man. Or it may be that the moral argument for the existence of God achieves a new cogency from the recognition that moral experience is the actual as well as a logical basis for religious faith.[14]
The questions mainly at issue between the humanists and the theists will not concern us until we reach chapters 8 to 10 of this book. The problem with which we shall be chiefly occupied until then is the question. What is the actual basis [ p. 50 ] of the distinctively religious activities and beliefs? Is it reason, or revelation, or a feeling of dependence? Is it an experience of the numinous, or a religious a priori, or some phase of our moral experience? We shall devote little space to a dialectical discussion of the alternatives, but shall try to find the answer by continuing our analysis of the various individual and historical phases of the development of religion, and by applying the thesis to which our analysis directs us in the interpretation of those developments. That thesis is a form of the second of those referred to; i.e., that religion arises from certain distinctive features of our moral experience. It affirms that religion is rooted in the experience of moral conflict.
Now in cases where the birth of the religious consciousness is delayed until later adolescence and adult life, and in cases of later religious crisis, such as those of St. Paul and of the " second blessing” cultivated by the Holiness movement, the moral issue most prominent in consciousness may concern specific sins or ideals, or it may rest on a vague state of moral dissatisfaction without any definite content. But in the normal, youthful development of religion the moral issues involved tend to be the general, and yet quite definite, problems of human relationships. The first moral problems of which we ,are aware are not those of sex or doubt or pride, but those of justice and kindness. The moral ideals that first inspire us are not those of chastity or humility but those of service to the common good. The moral heroes of youth are those who show courage, resource, energy and self-sacrifice in loyal support of the common cause or devotion to some ideal of altruistic service. Where such ideals, rather than repentance and submission, are exalted in connection with religious belief, there is a natural and ready response on the part of young people at an early age, and religion develops naturally — not without effort, but happily and without undue distress. It is [ p. 51 ] marked by emotional peaks of social and missionary enthusiasm rather than by valleys of despair.
Because of this essentially social nature of our early and fundamental morality (and of the healthy-minded type of religion that arises from it) , and because of the predominantly social nature of primitive religion, Professor E. S. Ames goes so far as to say, not merely that “the origin of religion … is to be sought in the origin of the social consciousness,” but also that “the religious consciousness is identified with the consciousness of the greatest values of life” and that religion may be viewed as “participation in the ideal values of the social consciousness.”[15] But if this is an adequate account of the matter, then the tendency of religious thought and activity to reach beyond humanity to find the divine must be due to extraneous influences and cannot be regarded as an essential feature of religion; and if that is the case then its persistence in the history of religion calls for much explanation. When people find that their gods are false they usually do not give up all gods; they reshape their conceptions of them or search for new ones. The persistence of the god idea, through all its changes in history, indicates that there is something in human experience that seems very strongly (even if wrongly) to demand it. So if the origin of religion is in the social consciousness, the consciousness of the greatest values of life, or, as I would prefer to put it, in our consciousness of our moral relationship to our fellow men, then there must be something in that consciousness that strongly suggests a relationship of man to the suprahuman.
This brings us to the main thesis of this book; that man’s consciousness of God rests upon the element of conflict that exists within the moral life, a conflict that is first felt as between [ p. 52 ] the egoistic and the altruistic tendencies of our nature.
In the past those writers, such as James and Starbuck, who have drawn attention to the element of mental conflict in the birth of the religious consciousness, have been too much influenced by those features of the conflict in the majority of the cases studied which were due to the special influence of evangelical theology and to patholdgical repressions. These suggested that the struggle was afway from sin rather than toward righteousness, and that it, ,nded in surrender rather than in victory. In wholesome- reaction against this placing of the highest value on features of the conflict which manifest themselves only when its nature is warped by mental disorder or harsh theology, those writers who have treated the religious awakening as essentially a moral phenomenon have pointed to the religion of the healthy-minded as indicating that conflict is unnecessary. But this too is an exaggeration. Conflict is undesirable, but it is necessary, for the simple reason that there are opposing psychological factors that have to be overcome if there is to be any growth of the moral personality. If we could grow into full perfection of character without effort on our own part we would be either automatons or divinities. And in neither case would we be likely to discover that there is anything in the universe higher than ourselves. But it is because we recognize ourselves as imperfect and strive to do and be something better that the conviction tends to grow that something higher than ourselves there really must be. To discover how this comes about and why it takes the form it does, we must examine the conflict more closely.
Now it is important to recognize that ethical principles cannot be stated simply as an issue between altruism and egoism. There are altruistic actions that are wrong and egoistic actions that are right. Nevertheless, it is this issue that constitutes the moral conflict as it first emerges in the consciousness of the [ p. 53 ] individual; and it remains the fundamental moral problem throughout life. By an altruistic action I mean one aiming at an objective result selected because seen chiefly as a goodfor-some-other-person, while an egoistic action is one where the objective is selected because seen chiefly as good-for-me. Personal satisfaction, of course, will be found in successfully attaining both results; but in the former case one has the satisfaction because one sees (or believes) that a good has been obtained by some other person; in the latter case one has satisfaction in achieving what seems to be a good for oneself. In brief, the altruistic motive rejoices in seeing others prosper, the egoistic in attaining one’s own prosperity. The fact that there is rejoicing in the attaining of both goals does not alter the nature of the distinction. Altruistic and egoistic motives are not always in conflict; and egoistic motives are not always regarded as wrong, even where there is conflict. It is where one’s own good is sought at the cost of a definitely greater good of others that the moral conscience begins to condemn; and it is where the individual pursues the greater good of others at the cost of his own tliat the moral conscience begins to commend.
Thus the altruistic will commends itself to the moral consciousness, upon mature reflection, when it takes the form of a disinterested will to the good, a will that is no respecter of persons but seeks equally the good of all. But this balance and universalism of the moral consciousness is achieved only after much reflection. It is also a matter of moral judgment rather than religious experience. What gives its religious character to moral experience is simply the striking contrast and conflict between the will to seek one’s own good and the will to the good of others. As matter of fact, the will to the good of others rarely has the strength to create a conflict except where the good of others concerned is much the greater. Thus, in practice, the conflict between altruism and egoism, as [ p. 54 ] it emerges within the consciousness of youth, is a conflict between the will to seek one’s own good and the will to seek the greater good of others.
This conflict presents itself as between a lower self and a higher, between an old self and a new. This phraseology is more than mere metaphor, for though, in a strict sense, each individual is only one self, one personality, yet the self or personality is not a simple, indivisible, substantial soul. It is a composite psychological structure, having its unity in its habits and capacity for attention and in the systematic interrelation of its purposive life. It is a composite form of will that grows and changes, and the various elements in its structure are never in perfect harmony. When conflicts of will occur within it they destroy the unity and order of its functioning. They tear it apart and may even create that peculiar phenomenon known as an alternating personality. The completely integrated self is an ideal. The “divided self” is a matter of degree, the pathological condition that goes by that name being simply an exaggeration of a common defect that has reached a point of breakdown in some respects.
The conflict between egoism and altruism is always with us, but it needs must pass through a more or less acute stage, beginning usually in later childhood. The earliest formed self is a system of tendencies to respond to physiological drives and immediate experiences of pleasure and pain, satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The idea of the self grows slowly, and only pari passu with it grows the idea of other selves. The child’s own satisfactions and dissatisfactions are prominent in his consciousness, and (in so far as he distinguishes self and notself) he responds to them as his own. He thus forms a strong body of purely egoistic habits, a tightly knit egoistic self, before he develops sufficient imagination to think of the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of other people and look at matters from their point of view. This natural, childish system of [ p. 55 ] egoistic habits, which I shall call the original ego, is the “old Adam” that the altruistic desires have to contend with when they arise. It is well fixed and does not readily give way. Generous impulses arise spontaneously when the young person thinks of the needs of others; and gradually a system of habits, both of thinking of the good of others and of responding to the thought, develops.
This new system of purposive tendencies is a new part of the self; and in so far as it is not integrated with the original ego it is apt to come into conflict with it. There are conflict of will, emotional conflict, and a vaguely felt need of integration, creating inner dissatisfaction. Somehow the newer elements of the self, the altruistic, are felt as higher, as having a certain authority above that of the other desires, as pointing to obligations.[16] But these altruistic or social interests, when followed out, bring their own rewards. There is joy and satisfaction in them. Even when they have called for sacrifice and there has been hesitation, even when it has required a fight to overcome the original ego, it is usually felt as worth while, in later reflection, to have been true to the higher self. Gradually new ideals of unselfish devotion to causes of social value thus take firm hold. These broader ideals may at last become the dominant element in the personality and the original ego may sink into a place of proper subordination. But even then the higher self retains its power only by eternal vigilance.
Now all our studies of the birth of religion in the individual show that it tends to occur during this period of the awakening moral life, when the conflict between the altruistic will and the original ego is at its height. Our study of the special religious experiences in adult life of outstanding personalities [ p. 56 ] in history and literature, also showed that the new religious convictions that they obtained were wrought within them through a period of deep moral conflict — and almost all morality is ultimately concerned with the welfare of our fellow men. Thus those beliefs and activities wherein religion tends to transcend morality always seem to rise in the experience of moral conflict, a conflict which is originally and ultimately between the will to the good of the private self and the will to the greater good of others. It means that man, in this moral conflict, tends to feel that the will to the good of others, when it conflicts with the original ego, is not his own. He identifies himself with the original ego. The will to the greater good of others, usually relatively weak in itself, appears as something he should be able easily to subordinate. But it will not be subordinated. It asserts its authority. It hangs over him as an obligation. If he rejects it, it accuses him. If his ego at last surrenders to it, if he makes it his own and follows it out, it fills him with an unexpected joy, a deep sense of satisfaction and a rare feeling of power.
Is it any wonder that when earnest and thoughtful minds have reflected on this experience they have concluded that the agency which makes these demands upon the ego is more than human, that it is indeed some higher power that constrains us to devote ourselves to the common good? And when, in deeper reflection, the moral demand has been seen to be no respecter of persons, and it has been felt that obedience to it is in itself a great good, that higher power has been defined as one that seeks in and through each of us the good of all. It is this interpretation of religious experience, worked out by the religious geniuses of the race, that has, with relatively unimportant variations and exceptions, become the common Christian tradition. And it is fairly closely paralleled by all the great ethical religions. When it is taught to children, and when in the unfolding of their moral experience they find [ p. 57 ] its suggestions very fully realized, then the childish beliefs merely externally held attain new meaning and acquire internal conviction. Only if elements that ring false to their experience have been incorporated into the traditional beliefs taught to them, or if there is a clash between the religious interpretation and beliefs that seem to be based on a scientific foundation, or if their moral experience for some reason does not conform to the normal pattern, do doubts tend to arise. But even those doubts may often be set aside if the later development of their moral experience reawakens the appeal of the ideal, or if in some other way the upward moral striving is renewed.
If this analysis is sound then the immediate datum of religious experience, whence the belief in a superhuman moral agency arises, is the altruistic will itself, with its claim to present an obligation and its power to suffuse life with new interest and deeper satisfaction. This means that what men immediately feel as the divine agency, as God within them, is this element of their own personality, the altruistic will. To this extent at least God is real and personal. He is that within us which goes beyond the seeking of our own good to seek the good of others. The divine is immanent within us. The question whether it is also transcendent can be answered only after a much wider study of its operation and of the world within which we find it.
If we ask whence comes this element in themselves which men have distinguished as divine, one answer is that it may be a natural product of a continuous course of evolution, entirely reducible to laws operative at the lower levels. Another answer is that it may be an emergent property of life, new to the world in man, but something more than a continued operation of the forces that produced his animal nature and intelligence. Or it may be that it belongs to the eternal structure of the universe, and is the creative power that has [ p. 58 ] made man what he is and works still within him to make him something better. Or it may be that some more traditional type of theism holds the truth; for this interpretation of religious experience is not necessarily inconsistent with a religion which teaches that “it is God that worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure,” and that “in him was life and the life was the light of men . . . which lighteth every man coming into the world.”[17]
Few theists will object to the view that the moral will in man is God within us; but many are likely to object that the altruistic will is not always moral, i.e., not always right. Its intentions are good, but it may sometimes lead us to undue sacrifice of ourselves, sometimes to a falsity to higher values or to socially important principles in order to please some narrow or unworthy group or individual, sometimes to mistakes as to what is the true good of those whose good we seek.
But this objection misses the point. If this altruistic element of our personality which we have called divine is, indeed, the immanence of a transcendent deity within us, then it only means, so far, that he is immanent as will. It remains another question whether he is also immanent as knowledge. The theist usually recognizes that there are features of human will that have developed independently of, and even contrary to, the will of God. The view here presented would mean, for theism, that that element of human will which seeks the good of other personalities than our own is not one of these independent developments, but is derived unchanged from the creative source. But the fact that it makes mistakes and, while always pursuing good, sometimes destroys a greater good, would simply indicate that in this derivation it did not bring with it a divine omniscience. In that case it must be understood to pursue the greatest good of all as seen from the fallible human viewpoint and so, sometimes, to make mistakes [ p. 59 ] in that pursuit. The fact that the altruistic will cannot be identified with the moral will is therefore no objection, even from the theistic standpoint, to its being viewed as the divine element in human personality and the primary and immediate datum whence we attain to a knowledge of God.
But it must be emphasized that our analysis thus far has found no arguments to advance in favor of a belief in the divine transcendence, and has not sought to find them. We have been concerned to discover the distinctive element in religious experience, the actual empirical datum, that gives rise to this belief. From our analysis of the genesis of the belief in the individual we have been led to conclude that that datum is the altruistic will. This conclusion would also imply that it is this will that, in the course of the moral conflict due to it, transforms the external (nonmoral and really nonreligious) beliefs of childhood into the internal and genuinely religious and moral faith of youth; and, further, that it is this same type of experience that results in those restorations of faith, convictions of new religious truth, recoveries of reality in the religious life, and deepenings of religious experience that mark the religious crises of adult life. It explains why the sick soul has a more vivid and convincing religious experience than other people, and how a full religious development is yet possible without such crises. In general it fits the facts of the birth and growth of religion in the individual so far as we have yet studied them.
Our next task is to test this theory of the roots of religion by seeing how it fits a wider range of religious experience. We must inquire how it can account for the earliest forms of religious belief known to man, and how far it can illuminate the typical beliefs and problems disclosed in the history of religion.
Acts 9:i~2x; 22:1-22; cf. also 6:9-15; 7:55-8; 4. ↩︎
G. F. Moore: History of Religions (2 vols.; New York; Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915-19) , II, 456-66. ↩︎
J. B. Pratt: The Religious Consciousness (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1920) , pp. 129 ff. ↩︎
B. H. Streeter and A. J. Appasamy: The Sadhu (London: The Macmillan Co., 1921) , pp. 5-7. ↩︎
“The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, May 1920. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 321. ↩︎
William James: Varieties of Religious Experience, dd. 82-83. ↩︎
op. cit., p. 194. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 25s. ↩︎
Starbuck, ibid., p. 64; James, op. cit., p. 209. ↩︎
Pratt: The Religious Conscionsness, chap, 8. ↩︎
In Twice-Born Men (New York Fleming H. Revell Co., 1909) . ↩︎
In this category come Schleierraacher, with his emphasis on the sense of dependence Rudolph Otto, with the theory of the “numinous and Ernst Troeltsch, with the doctrine of “the religious a priori”. ↩︎
This position is ably defended by John Baillie: The Interpretation of Religion. ↩︎
Ames: The Psychology of Religions Experience, pp. 168, 356. ↩︎
The reasons for this, and its significance, are discussed in chap. 8. ↩︎
Phil. 2:13; John 1:4, 9. ↩︎