[ p. 37 ]
THE psychological attack on current religious ideas, from the time of Plato until to-day. Its parallel in the Hebrew prophets. The full weight of this attack only recently made clear, since it is now not the arguments for religion that are criticized but the very mental processes upon which those arguments rest.
In this attack psychology of the classical type, as seen, e.g., in Ward, remains neutral. The real danger begins with the attempt of William James to defend religious belief upon a pragmatic basis. Behaviourism is simply the logical outcome of this position. It is defended by mere crude assertion and may fairly be met by counterassertion.
The psycho-analysts have developed the attack on more serious lines, claiming to show, in the mental process of ‘ projection,’ a natural origin for religious symbols and beliefs, and at the same time their transitory and unreal character. The case, as developed by Freud and Jung, when fully stated, proves to be itself a mythological structure since
It does no justice to the fact that the processes to which it refers, as well as the persons in whom they take place, are real.
It fails completely to recognize the significance of historical facts and the impossibility of reducing these to mental process.
It substitutes, especially in Jung’s psychology, an even more mythological system of ‘ racial ’ or ‘ absolute ’ dominants.
The attack from the side of the sociologists, e.g. Durkheim, need not be taken seriously, since its basis is to be found in the theories of the analytical psychologists.
The value of this critical attack for Christianity is in its exposure of false gods, and of inadequate grounds for belief. The essential basis of theism in our response to creative Reality remains untouched.
[ p. 38 ]
[ p. 39 ]
For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth ; as there are gods many, and lords many ; yet to us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we unto him ; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him.—i Cor. viii. 5, 6.
In the very beginning of science, the parsons, who managed things then,
Being handy with hammer and chisel, made gods in the likeness of men ;
Till commerce arose, and at length some men of exceptional power
Supplanted both demons and gods by the atoms, which last to this hour.
Yet they did not abolish the gods, but they sent them well out of the way,
With the rarest of nectar to drink, and blue fields of nothing to sway.
From nothing comes nothing, they told us naught happens by chance but by fate ;
There is nothing but atoms and void, all else is mere whims out of date !
Then why should a man curry favour with beings who cannot exist,
To compass some petty promotion in nebulous kingdoms of mist ? [1]
So begins the parody, written by a great scientist and a great Christian, of Tyndall’s famous presidential address to the British Association at Belfast in 1874, at the very crisis oi the issue between science and religion. The atom has passed through many vicissitudes since TyndalTs day, but Clerk [ p. 40 ] Maxwell’s lines remain in all other respects as terse and vivid a statement as exists of the fundamental difficulties which arise when the scientific categories of thought are made absolute.
The type of thought was not in the least new. We recall at once poor Strepsiades in Aristophanes’ Clouds, struggling to keep up to date with the latest ideas of the ‘ reflectory.’
. . . Vortex ? Of course, I’d forgotten,
There is no Zeus, and now in his place Vortex is reigning. [2]
There comes to mind, too, Lucian’s ludicrous picture of the gods in conclave upon Olympus, taking counsel as best they might in view of the stringency which had resulted from the cessation of sacrifices. [3] Cultured thought in classical times is revealed as sharply by the satirists as the real Oxford of yesterday by the shrewd pen of Mr. A. D. Godley, and cultured thought had firmly sent the gods ‘ well out of the way.’ Much of the modern psychological attack upon religion can be found foreshadowed in the later Greek writers. And for the matter of that the prophets of Israel, in their own more concrete and more passionate way, deliver exactly the same judgment upon the gods of the nations. ‘ Of their silver and their gold have they made them idols, . . . the workman made it and it is no god,’ [4] ‘ The work of men’s hands ’ [5]—that is the verdict written by man across the figure of every god that he rejects.
But to destroy the false gods is not to deny that God, the true God, exists. The best thought of Greece is at one with the prophets of Israel here. The philosopher, reaching out to the ideal world of the good and the true, finds a reality greater than that of the gods whose existence he has [ p. 41 ] challenged. Even Lucian has a serious purpose behind his exposure of credulity and hypocrisy. And the author of Psalm xix. sums up the whole vision of the prophets when he declares, in words strangely anticipating Kant, how the starry heavens without and the moral law within point alike to God.
The heavens declare the glory of God ;
And the firmament sheweth his handywork.
. . . . . .
The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul :
The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. [6]
When we turn to the present day we find that the issues are still unchanged. A speaker at the last meeting of the British Association [7] reiterated the challenge of deterministic science, repudiating, upon grounds identical in principle with those stated by Tyndall, the mediating vitalistic theories, in which so many of us have seen a real hope of a mutual understanding between science and religion. Science, to be science, must hold that ‘ naught happens by chance but by fate,’ Where then in such a universe is there room for freedom, or for God ?
Before we examine in detail the form which this ancient problem takes for us to-day, we may indicate our answer in a few words. Our defence is to admit the truth of the [ p. 42 ] claims of science, and to welcome every advance in empirical knowledge which it can give. Within, and in virtue of, its limitations, it is a method of immense fertility and usefulness of result. But we deny wholly that it gives, or can give, a full account and explanation of life. If it does not set its problems, like the traditional examination question, ‘ neglecting the weight of the elephant,’ it must set them neglecting the elephant’s individuality, [8] its absolute and intrinsic worth, and the possibility that it may act upon its own initiative. We refuse, therefore, to be bound by the restricted methods of science, holding that despite all appearances it is the world of the scientist and not that of the philosopher or the theologian that is abstract and unreal. And it is only when our more concrete world of common life, with its individual values resting upon that supreme [ p. 43 ] value which is God, is taken fully into account, that we dare trust the scientist. For indeed we have committed ourselves into his hands in these latter days, and, if the growth of science outruns that growth of goodness with which science has no concern, we cannot say to what strange chaotic horror our civilization may be hastening. There is nothing unscientific about war, and it is for the sake of values unknown to science that war must cease to be.
The fields of astronomy, geology, and biology are no longer battlegrounds of religious controversy, and though there are still those, in Tennessee and even nearer home, who rush to the defence of positions long since abandoned, time and education will gradually curb their zeal, or turn it to more useful ends. It is only in the field of psychology that there is still a living problem. For the psychologist studies not only external facts, but the very processes of the mind which perceive them and estimate their worth. And if he shows, as sometimes he claims to show, that religion is simply a natural by-product of those processes, having no validity beyond the processes themselves, then indeed man walketh in a vain shadow, and the shadow is his own.
It is not with the whole range of psychology that we are specially concerned. Such writers as Stout and Ward, maintaining what may be called the classical tradition, are in principle neutral upon the fundamental question of the validity of religion and the realities upon which it rests. In their emphasis upon the ego and its direct apprehension of values as true psychological data they may, indeed, be called in evidence by the apologist for religion, since it is exactly here that they challenge the presuppositions upon which the destructive theories of the psycho-analysts and their allies rest. A few sentences from Ward will suffice to make the point clear :
Personality and values, as we have seen, are mutually implicated. The only psychological standard for assigning gradations [ p. 44 ] of rank to values and motives we found to be the thinking and willing self. … In appraising the world the individual at the same time ranks himself : find the microcosm and you find the man. [9]
And again :
It detracts in no wise from this living by faith we must emphatically maintain that its so-called God-consciousness may be epistemologically unverifiable. We are for the present concerned exclusively with the psychological facts and these seem to be beyond question. . . . There are no more important psychological facts especially when character is in question than the ideals or values that determine conduct. [10]
And Ward closes his study of man with an expression of faith which carries us far on our way :
Upon one point only is it needful to insist all such topics must be regarded in the light of the one organic whole on which their meaning and their value depend, viz. the creative synthesis which reveals and must perfect personality. [11]
It is not surprising, then, that in the first volume of his Philosophical Theology, a volume to which he has given the significant title of The Soul and its Faculties, Tennant has found it possible to take Ward’s psychology as a firm basis for theological reconstruction. We may safely leave this aspect of the subject in his hands.
The transition to the theories of those psychologists who have found it part of their programme to abolish God, even though in some cases they endeavour to conserve religious values, is to be found- in the destructive pragmatism of William James. Unquestionably James writes as an apologist for religion. His Will to Believe is far more bracing than a multitude of devotional treatises. f I wish to make you feel,’ he says, ‘ that we have a right to believe [ p. 45 ] the physical order to be only a partial order ; that we have a right to supplement it by an unseen spiritual order which we assume on trust, if only thereby life may seem to us better worth living again.’ [12] But what, for James, is this right to believe ? It is an option, [13] a freedom to believe what we will, subject only to the empirical testing that life provides. The fundamental affirmation of religion, ‘ that the best things are the more eternal things,’ is ‘ an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all,’ And so we are left with a second-best. ‘ The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true,’ [14] James declares passionately enough his right to this option, this overbelief, [15] but in the end there can be no doubt that he has delivered faith into the hands of the critic, and his successors have set themselves to show that these values can readily be explained as resting upon nothing more than compensatory fantasies, accommodating the stress and strain of living to biological necessity and social interadjustment.
Before leaving James we must observe that a more positive principle does after all emerge. The options are not all upon the common footing which a sound pragmatism would demand. We cannot apply the freedom of belief to ‘ some patent superstition,’ It ‘ can only cover living options which the intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve ; and living options never seem absurdities to him who has them to consider.’ [16] We must choose among the gods. ‘ To-day a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to be taken seriously.’ [17] ‘ To this extent, to the extent of disbelieving peremptorily in certain types of deity, I frankly confess that [ p. 46 ] we must be theologians. If disbeliefs can be said to constitute a theology, then the prejudices, instincts, and commonsense which I chose as our guides make theological partisans of us whenever they make certain beliefs abhorrent.’ [18] That James goes on to point out the empirical evolution of these tests whereby man unmakes his gods does not alter the fundamental implications of his admissions. In the end the living options are not options at all, for they reduce to one, and one that we must take or leave by a choice which we know in the end to be not merely intellectual or empirical.
We needs must love the highest when we see it, [19]
and to love the highest is to make an affirmation of the most definite kind about the nature of the Universe. We have no right and no need to ask that all shall understand the theistic arguments, or be able to discuss the metaphysical problems of the nature of Ultimate Being. But love of the highest is open to all, and is the way that leads directly through Christ to God. Of that we must speak again when we come to deal with faith.
It would be impossible within the limits of this lecture to trace out in historical order the development of the psychological attack. Much of it, especially on the sociological side, is far earlier than James, and his pragmatism merely lent force to a movement already well established. We can only attempt to deal with one or two main arguments which have had a considerable vogue in recent years.
Behaviourism may be dismissed in a very few sentences. The almost prophetic aptness of Clerk Maxwell’s lines attracts our attention at once.
Till commerce arose, and at length some men of exceptional power
Supplanted both demons and gods by the atoms.
[ p. 47 ]
Behaviourism has in fact not only a strikingly commercial outlook but even a directly commercial purpose. It is an application of the pragmatic conception of truth which would have staggered William James. It deals entirely in observable facts and in results. Its methods of propaganda are precisely the methods of commercial advertisement, since its exponents proceed entirely by positive assertion and never attempt to deal with the issues raised by their critics. [20] When Watson is asked what he means by experience or consciousness he simply says that he does not care. Behaviour is all that matters. ‘ Tell me,’ he says in effect, ‘ what you want, whether it is to sell a soap or to fill a church, and I will give you the necessary advice, based upon observation and experiment,’ And his ally Dr. E. B. Holt, one of the extremer American Neo-Realists, has successfully gone back to Tyndall, or to Aristophanes, and explains that all man’s consciousness, volition, desire, and the rest ‘ are really movements of particles or of currents of energy in the world about him.’ [21]
What then has Watson to say of religion ? Simply, and in so many words, that upon the advent of Behaviourism it is ’ being replaced among the educated by experimental ethics,’ [22] That there is some truth in this, especially in a country which has the divorce records of America and in which companionate marriages can be seriously advocated, [23] [ p. 48 ] there is no need to deny. Nor, as every parish priest knows, are we free here in England from the slackening of moral fibre which results when the very existence of moral sanctions is called in question. But this disastrous state of affairs is no commendation of a psychology which claims, rightly or wrongly, to be responsible for it, and if Watson means us to infer that he regards experimental ethics as an improvement upon religion his remark is nothing less than an impertinence.
Yet we may well ask ourselves why we feel the impertinence so keenly. The answer is simply that we know that love, love of man and love of God through man, is not an experimental principle but absolute. By it all experiments must be tested, and not by results. And that this primary ruling of religion is not out of keeping with a sound psychology the whole doctrine of the sentiments bears witness.
We pass on, then, to the main psychological attack. This takes many forms, but the principles upon which it rests are few and can be simply stated. They emerge most clearly in the writings of the psycho-analysts, into whose theories the view of religion as a purely cultural or sociological phenomenon can readily be fitted. Their central feature is the mental mechanism known as projection, the name being that given by Jung [24] to one of the processes [ p. 49 ] which had been found by Freud to play a very large part in dream structure. It is a process independent of the aware and rational consciousness, and it may be said at the outset that there is quite general agreement among psychologists as to its importance. Its interpretation is another matter. Dr. Tansley’s account of it may be taken as typical :
In projection, as in repression, the mind refuses to acknowledge part of its own contents, but instead of refusing attention to the existence of the content in question, it recognises the existence while denying the ownership. The ownership of the content in question is too painful, or too sublime, to be compassed within the limits of its weakness, and an external substitute is sought, whether as scapegoat or as support. [25]
The process is familiar emough and may be illustrated any day by the spectacle of two controversialists each accusing the other of losing his temper, of the child scolding its doll to restore self-esteem after its own scolding, of the layman leaving the business of Christian living to some parson whom he profoundly respects but does not dream of imitating. Many a man is only too glad to entrust his ideals to the keeping of a church in order that he may proceed about his business unencumbered. He will, of course, have little to do with the said church in outward practice, and yet his real identification with it is shown by the violence with which he will defend it when it is attacked, even though the proposal be no more than to change the colour of the bags in which the offertory is collected.
Freud applies this principle to the explanation of religion when he speaks of the relation between the ego and the egoideal in the individual. [26] The ideal ego is formed through the pressure of the family-environment, developing into that [ p. 50 ] of society, and since it must always serve the ends of the family or of society, it must conflict in greater or less degree with the actual ego, which has its own individual impulses and needs. It is out of this clash of impulses and ideals, we are told, that the gods are born.
For Freud the basis of religion is this universal situation in which man’s needs demand a solution, which if denied on earth, as it always is—for here to the end we fight a losing battle with weariness, failure, and death—must create its ideal satisfaction, establishing it in ‘ blue fields of nothing ’ and so securing its reality against all criticism. And he sees in the appearance of the gods simply the restoration of the infantile situation, living on in the unconscious, and distorted, and so again secured from criticism, into forms suited for adult use. In his Totem and Tabu he has worked this out as an expression of the old ‘ son-father relationship ; God is the exalted father and the longing for the father is the root of the need for religion.’ [27] We need not linger over the unpleasant and unessential sexual turn which is given to this theory. After all, no Christian can ever be afraid or ashamed to follow out the implications of the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer. We have the highest authority of all for seeing the God of our worship in terms of Fatherhood. For Freud the blending of fear and mystery and love, and the dimly understood fascination of creative energy, are simply the reappearance in adult life of the emotions of early childhood. And we note that these are the very characteristics which Otto has singled out as peculiar to the religious experience. [28] The analogy is exact.
In his more recent essay, The Future of an Illusion, Freud has stressed especially the development of the task of culture, the reaction of man’s helplessness against the forces with [ p. 51 ] which ‘ nature rises up against us, sublime, pitiless, inexorable.’ [29] The first step, he tells us, is the humanization of nature. Instead of impersonal and eternally remote forces and fates man sees in the elements passions such as rage in his own soul, and he uses against ‘ these violent supermen of the beyond ’ just such methods as ‘ we make use of in our own community ; we can try to exorcise them, to appease them, to bribe them, and so rob them of part of their power,’ Thus there is not only immediate relief, but a hope of further mastery of the situation. And by linking this process up with its infantile prototype, the child’s relationship to its parents, the figure of God comes full into view. He is simply the father, at once an object of fear and the strong protector. He is eternal, and knows no weakness. How should a child understand the frailty of this gigantic, strong being who has always been the centre and the security of the home ? Perchance this father-god may avail even against death itself.
But science destroys the human traits in nature, and nevertheless man retains his helplessness, his father-longing, and the gods. Inevitably then the gods are withdrawn into the background. ‘ Without doubt the gods are the lords of nature : they have arranged it thus and now they can leave it to itself,’ Occasionally they may intervene in miracle, but in the main destiny prevails. Indeed the suspicion persists that destiny stands above even the gods themselves. The father after all dies in the end. Nature appears increasingly autonomous. God is seen as Himself the first subject of the Eternal Law. And thus the function of the gods comes to be found more and more in the field not of destiny but of morality. They secure not life but goodness. They are both the guardians of that social structure by which man has sought to ward off the vicissitudes of fate, [ p. 52 ] and the guardians of the individual against the evils and restrictions of that structure itself. They become fused into the figure of Providence, at once benevolent and just, which secures, in another life (itself a projection-fantasy) if not in this, that moral perfection and its correlative happiness which we fail so dismally to attain. And so Freud says, and he is speaking specifically of Christianity, the last advance of religious development reveals once more ‘ the father nucleus which had always lain hidden behind every divine figure ; fundamentally it was a return to the historical beginnings of the idea of God.’ And therewith, ‘ now that God was a single person, man’s relations to him could recover the intimacy and intensity of the child’s relation to the father.’
For Freud, with his mechanistic hypothesis, all this is illusion, and the future which he foresees for religion is that man should be set free from this fantasy-structure, which is only the product of his weakness and fears. He sees the one hope for mankind in a courageous facing of facts as they are, a morality which stands in its own right, based upon a scientific understanding of the truth of life. ‘ Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.’ [30] Man, putting away childish things, will grow to his full stature, which is at least that of a man, if it may not be that of a god. And when Freud sees his purpose as at one with that of religion in ‘ the brotherhood of man and the reduction of suffering ’ [31] we may wonder how, upon a mechanistic hypothesis, he should give value to such ideals, but we cannot refuse him the hand of fellowship.
Obviously the case is formidable, the more formidable for a certain rugged moral grandeur :
Why should a man curry favour with beings who cannot exist, To compass some petty promotion in nebulous kingdoms of mist ?
[ p. 53 ]
But before making our reply we must note how Freud’s attack has been supplemented by other recent psychological writers, and most notably by Jung.
Jung [32] starts from the suggestion, made independently by Nietzsche and by Freud, that myths are simply the traces in man of an infantile mode of thought. They are for the race what the dream is to the individual [33] and they have the same striking unity of type. The history of religion is simply the history of mythology, in which the longings of mankind find in fantasy a fulfilment which reality denies. The power of religion is the power of this primitive, infantile, prelogical type of thinking, which lingers on in the unconscious, dominating our lives to an extent which, for the first time, analysis has revealed. In times of weariness, or stress, or necessity, when the conscious, rational approach to the world fails us, as it must fail us all in the face of the great destroying forces of nature, or in periods of social disintegration, these mythological structures take life. By the principle of projection they are seen as realities. [34] The gods become living and personal, and by their protection secure for the individual peace and morality. For the power of the fantasy to influence the mind through suggestion is entirely real.
The great world-religions have for Jung no historical basis. Christ and Mithra are one, figures of the divine hero, [ p. 54 ] who is nothing more than the father-god rejuvenated. All alike are sun-gods, and Jung points, effectively enough, to the many traces of sun-worship in Christianity. [35] Of the historical Jesus, he declares, we know nothing. [36] Christianity arose, with its splendid moral idealism, simply because the libido, uncontrolled in a world where philosophy was undermining belief in the gods, was resulting not only in degeneracy but in destructive chaos. Civilized man of to-day no longer needs the Christ, by whose aid he stood firm amid ‘ the whirlwinds of the unchained libido which roared through the ancient Rome of the Caesars,’ Instead, says Jung, cynically enough, ‘ he has become merely neurotic.’ [37]
But Jung goes further back than Freud in seeking the origin of these divine figures. He traces them back not to the infantile situation in the family, but what he calls the ‘ historical collective psyche ’ or the racial unconscious. His account of this most difficult conception must be given in his own words :
The collective unconscious is the sediment of all the experience of the universe of all time, and is also an image of the universe that has been in process of formation for untold ages. In the course of time certain features have become prominent in this image, the so-called dominants. These dominants are the ruling powers, the gods ; that is, the representations resulting from dominating laws and principles, from average regularities in the issue of the images that the brain has received as a consequence of secular processes. [38]
Here we have a theory of a racially-acquired and inherited mode of response to the world of experience. It is neither thought nor feeling in the developed sense, but a pre-logical [ p. 55 ] condition of mentality, an unconscious and basic imagery, which can only take form when it is transferred by projection to suitable physical or personal experiences. Thus these dominants take shape as gods or demons, powers protective or destroying. But their compulsive power, which is for Jung the basis of all religious sanctions, is from within and not from without. It is none other than the life-impulse of the libido, now viewed not as sexual but as something more primitive and vital still, striving creatively, as it has ever striven throughout the history of the race, to make itself a place and a security of achievement in a transient and a hostile world.
This appearance in history of this religious fantasy is, so Jung declares, inevitable. We may quote a famous passage :
Every man has eyes and all his senses to perceive that the world is dead, cold, and unending, and he has never yet seen a God, nor brought to light the existence of such from empirical necessity. On the contrary, there was need of a phantastic, indestructible optimism, and one far removed from all sense of reality, in order, for example, to discover in the shameful death of Christ really the highest salvation and the redemption of the world. Thus one can indeed withhold from a child the substance of earlier myths but not take from him the need for mythology. One can say, that should it happen that all traditions in the world were cut off with a single blow, then with the succeeding generation, the whole mythology and history of religion would start over again. Only a few individuals succeed in throwing off mythology in a time of a certain intellectual supremacy—the mass never frees itself. Explanations are of no avail ; they merely destroy a transitory form of manifestation, but not the creating impulse. [39]
As to the future which lies before religion, and the goal towards which mankind should strive Jung is in agreement with Freud. The unconscious resolution of the conflict [ p. 56 ] into religious exercises ’ is not the only possible way. Our positive creeds only serve to keep us infantile and therefore ethically inferior. ‘ Although of the greatest significance from the cultural point of view, and of imperishable beauty from the aesthetic standpoint, this delusion can no longer ethically suffice humanity striving after moral autonomy,’ Religion, with its symbolism, is perhaps the greatest of all human achievements. It has no actual truth, but psychologically it is the basis of all that man has accomplished. And, psychologically, man must go further still.
It is thinkable that instead of doing good to our fellow-men for ‘ the love of Christ,’ we do it from the knowledge that humanity, even as ourselves, could not exist, if among the herd, the one could not sacrifice himself for the other. This would be the course of moral autonomy, of perfect freedom, when man could without compulsion wish that which he must do, and this from knowledge, without delusion through belief in religious symbols. [40]
And so religion is to end in an ethic, an ethic forced upon man by necessity and not by love. Jung’s theory provides a broader basis than that of Freud in his conceptions of the creative energy of the libido and of the racial character of the unconscious. But the end is the same. The impetus of man’s life has its inevitable limit. The structures which it erects may secure it a place in time, but have no foothold in eternity. The analogy with the vital impulse of Bergson’s philosophy is obvious enough, [41] but there is no trace here of Bergson’s strange, almost prophetic, vision of death itself going down before the onward sweep of human life. [42] As for Huxley so for Freud and Jung man stands, courageous [ p. 57 ] enough at his best, but a pathetically futile figure when all is said. ‘ From nothing comes nothing, they told us ’—unde haec nihili in nihila tarn portentosa transnihilatio ? [43]
Another form of the psychological attack is to be found in the rather numerous body of writers who, from various points of view, regard religion as purely a social phenomenon. Fortunately Professor Webb [44] has made it unnecessary for us to deal in detail with the theories of Durkheim and Lvy Bruhl, and we may content ourselves with pointing out that their argument, so far as it is not merely destructive, but claims to explain the genesis of religious belief and practice, demands as its basis the psychological mechanisms described by Freud and Jung. In answering the one theory we shall in effect answer the other. And with these writers we may class those who identify religion with morality, finding the key to this identification in the social consciousness. Ames, [45] for example, defines religion as ‘ the consciousness of the highest social values ’ and declares that we must dispense with the ‘ rigid distinction between the natural and the supernatural, between the human and the divine.’ Apart from such dualism ‘ the line between morality and religion becomes obscure and tends to vanish completely.’ Similarly Patten “ identifies religion, not with morality, but with the social reaction against degeneration and vice.” [46] Surely this is distinction without difference, and in any case these writers fail to explain the process by which the figure of the deity is separated from the society for which he becomes significant. They bring us to the point from which, as we saw, Jung starts his analysis, and no further.
Durkheim makes the transition boldly enough. ‘ The [ p. 58 ] reality which religious thought expresses is society.’ [47] ‘ It is unquestionable that a society has all that is necessary to arouse the sensation of the divine in minds, merely by the power it has over them ; for to its members it is what a god is to his worshippers,’ [48] And again, rather more tentatively : ‘ at bottom the concept of totality, that of society and that of divinity, are very probably only different aspects of the same notion.’ [49]
This is, of course, the direct corollary of Durkheim 's well-known definition of religion as consisting in ‘ obligatory beliefs connected with definite practices relating to objects given in these beliefs,’ [50] As he identifies all obligation with social obligation there is nothing more to be said, except to refuse the definition. And history provides an admirable precedent for our refusal. The attempt to erect an Imperial cultus of ‘ Roma et Augustus ’ was the greatest experiment on these lines that has ever been tried. And a whole world of loyal Roman citizens, pagan and Christian alike, rejected it with a decision which should have been final. Whether it were Christ or Mithras, men demanded a god who could be worshipped, and not the empty and unreal personification of a system. Apart from some such theory as that of Freud we cannot make the transition from society even to a god who merely confirms the social sanctions. And when the principle of projection is brought into play at once we reach the figure of a god who is more than society, even as the individual is more than the group of which he forms a part and within which his ideals are shaped. Here Freud carries us further in the direction of Christian theism than these barren sociological speculations. His god, if he were real, would at least be personal.
[ p. 59 ]
We may notice in passing a close parallel between one aspect of this sociological theory and Jung’s psychology. Lévy Bruhl [51] has developed a theory that the genesis of religion took place in a phase of human development which preceded logical and scientific thinking, and other writers of this school [52] have maintained the same view. He speaks of the group as compelling its members to believe and act in certain ways, which had no rational basis but were simply the tribal reactions to what Cornford has called nature and destiny. [53] Custom was powerful long before it could possibly be understood, and thus arose what Lvy Bruhl terms ‘collective representations,’ [54] It was in this phase of thought that the figures of gods, demons, and the like took shape, and therefore, these writers conclude, religion in all its forms is a sheer anachronism. The conclusion is illogical enough, but we should not on that account refuse to recognize the large element of truth in theories of this kind. It is probable that the facts to which Jung points in his evidence for a racial unconsciousness find their explanation in the processes which Lévy Bruhl has described. We may question whether they can possibly be regarded as inherited modes of symbolic thinking. It is more probable that they are developed anew in the life of each child as it takes its place in the family and then in society, each of them at once the product of Jung’s ‘ absolute dominants ’ and their cause. And it is obviously true enough that many of the concepts even of Christianity are of social origin, and that Christianity, with all the higher religions, has rested again and again [ p. 60 ] upon social sanctions. In fact the very existence of the Church, and the acceptance of its necessary function in maintaining and developing the religious life of its members, is a witness to the fundamental truth of Durkheim’s position up to a point. After all society is real, and the fellowship of mankind may not be ignored in any right religious development. But the writers of this school fail utterly to do justice to the significance of the individual and therewith of his relationship to a God who can and does respond in a directness of intimacy which is the supreme goal of Christian worship. And this is a value which may not be surrendered. [55]
We may now attempt the task of seeing what parts of this attack are really relevant to Christianity, and at the outset we must guard against the mistake, made so often by enthusiastic but short-sighted apologists, of rejecting new knowledge because its advocates have arrived at wrong conclusions in matters outside their proper sphere. Our full answer will emerge in later lectures, as we develop certain suggestions, drawn from psychology, in the direction of a constructive approach to Christian theism. At this point a few comments must suffice.
(i) Christianity holds no brief whatever for false gods. The modern vague idea, which has even infected a good deal of our missionary work, that there is much truth in all religions and that our task is to bring out and strengthen this indigenous approach to God rather than to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is no part of the authentic Christian tradition. ‘ For all the gods of the peoples are idols : but the Lord made the heavens.’ [56] ‘ Though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth ; as there are gods many and lords many ; yet to us there is one God, the Father of whom are all things, and we unto him ; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him.’ [57] There can be no doubt whatever that [ p. 61 ] Freud and Jung are perfectly right in principle, if not always in detail, when they show how pantheons have arisen to give expression and satisfaction to man’s emotions, needs, and desires. Nothing can save the gods of Olympus, with all their beauty, from the charge that they are mere projections, having no more reality than the primitive and universal human emotions from which they sprang. But no Christian wishes to save the gods of Olympus, or any of the gods of the nations. ‘ There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions.’ [58] At the very outset of his faith the Christian disclaims a god who is in any sense a reflection of himself, fashioned in the image of man. Herein is the essential truth of the doctrine of the Divine impassibility.
Further, we are ready and very willing to recognize that Christians have from time to time held the most varied conceptions of the God whom they worship, and that these conceptions are fully open to psychological criticism. We have no more desire to defend paganism within than to make terms with paganism without. Here too we accept gladly all the help that psychology can give in showing how we have confused the truth of God by making Him the bearer of our emotions and by clothing Him with our passions.
(2) There is danger for Christianity in all definitions of religion which lay specific emphasis upon man’s sense of need. This approach to the subject has had considerable popularity, largely through the influence of Ritschl, who saw in religion the solution of the conflict in which man finds himself involved as a member both of the realm of nature and of the realm of grace. The plea for religion that it is ‘ a very present help in time of trouble ’ is constantly put forward, but it is a dangerous plea indeed in face of the power of the human mind to fashion and to believe in the reality of its own compensatory fantasies. As we have seen, [ p. 62 ] this is actually the basis of Freud’s whole theory, and we go far to rob that theory of its power when we point out that Christianity, whatever may be true of other religions, did not take its rise in the discovery of a Saviour, but in the discovery of a Friend. [59] The psychological theory of the sentiments which teaches that man’s personality is shaped into a unity through personal relationships is the essential teaching of Christianity too, though Christianity goes further and sees in a special historical manifestation of friendship a revelation of the central mystery of the Universe, the truth that God is Love. But the sentiments rest not upon fantasy but upon fact. The whole theory breaks down unless their object is real. And, as we have pointed out before, Freud himself can be called in evidence for the reality and the cardinal importance of the ‘ love-life.’
(3) The same criticism applies to any attempt to reduce Christianity to a system of ethical teaching. This has been characteristic of a certain type of liberal Protestantism, and religious thought is now, rightly, in strong reaction against it. It has been found impossible to isolate any part of the ethical teaching of Jesus which accounts for His hold over His disciples and over the world. [60] ‘Much of it can be illustrated from contemporary Judaism, and it is only in the light of His Person that it takes a new significance. An [ p. 63 ] ethical teaching by itself merely invites the test of an empirical trial. And Christianity is no system of Pragmatism or Behaviourism. Even Jung can advocate an ethic of self-sacrifice, but he can give no reason for it save that any other ethic might be self-destructive, and that is a matter of opinion. But to pass directly from an ethical teaching to belief in God is impossible except by the philosophical route of the ontological assumption, or by the psychological route of projection and fantasy. The one method assumes faith to be already there. The other makes its object a mere shadow cast upon a cloud.
(4) It is perhaps worth while to point out the danger of finding a special sphere for the Divine activity in the subconscious levels of the mind. This idea is mainly due to William James, with his account of conversion as due to repressed conflict, breaking out in sudden solution. [61] The subconscious has become a sort of psychological dust-bin, a tempting repository for problems which resist analysis on more obvious lines. Even Dr. Sanday was drawn into a tentative acceptance of this apparently attractive theory, [62] trying to reach by its aid a solution of some of the difficult problems of Christology. The step is, however, a fatal one. The unconscious mind is beyond question the sphere of the mechanisms described by Freud and Jung. It is tenanted by the gods and demons of fantasy, and it has a curious, quasi-religious, authority derived simply from the ego itself. But this is not the ego of full and free personal relationships, of love that is aware of itself as love. It is at our highest, [ p. 64 ] most self-conscious, and most self-controlled, that our lives come most fully within the power of God, that
Our wills are ours, to make them thine. [63]
(5) The main weakness of the psychological account of religion lies in its failure to take account of reality. Jung completely ignores the fact that the Jesus of Christianity is a figure of history, and that fantasy certainly did not create the Gospel-narratives. Freud, it is true, speaks of a reality-principle, whereby life is forced to make terms with circumstance. But he does not carry this conception far enough. This mechanism of projection of which he speaks is no fantasy, but a perfectly real process within the reality of the ego itself. And if it is able to create fantasies which have the appearance of otherness, of external self-existence, it is only because the other and the self-existent is already there. It is essential to the whole theory of projection that the transferred and dissociated affects are attached to some perfectly real object, which is significant for the ego in some way. We do not cast our shadow-gods out upon a void. The ego never creates entities. There is always an objective basis upon which the fantasy rests. And the very material of the fantasy is drawn from real experience. Our dream figures, however super-imposed and distorted, are always built up out of memory-traces, and these traces, whatever precisely they may be, always depend upon real events in our life-history. So too the symbolic structures of mythology are linked both with the real history and with the real psychological needs of some tribe, nation, or cult. Thus the popular idea that the gods are reduced to nothingness by this theory of projection is a sheer misunderstanding, and one of which no sensible psychologist would be guilty. For Freud and Jung the gods have all the reality and significance of the ego itself, or of the social group.
[ p. 65 ]
But what if we can say one thing more ? What if these projections, these fantasies, which for our peace we cast upon the outer world and worship there, find in that reality upon which they are cast a fulfilment greater than our dreaming, greater than all the collective dreaming of the social group, which is more than any individual dream ? What if the God of our worship bestows upon us not peace, not the solution of our conflict, but growth and a warfare ever-renewed in our growing ? The stream may not rise above its source, and upon the theories of Freud and even of Jung the slow but real progress of human ideals is a thing hard to explain. Here is no merely mechanical process. May it not be that the explanation is love ? Is there any way in which we can make sense of psychological mechanisms and of historical facts together, unless that Reality, that Other, towards which our lives are turned, is not only greater than our fantasies, but more real, more personal, than the ego from which those fantasies are cast forth, unless, in a word, there is a God ?
By J. Clerk Maxwell. Published in Blackwood’s Magazine, under the title “British Association, 1874. Notes of the President’s Address.” ↩︎
Clouds, 11. 381 f. ↩︎
Ζεύς τραγωδός. The seriousness as well as the satire of Lucian’s dialogues is brilliantly brought out by Froude in his Short Studies. ↩︎
Hos. viii. 4-6. Cf. the tremendous satire in Is. xliv. and Ps. cxv. ↩︎
Ps. cxv. 4 j cxxxv. 15. ↩︎
Ps. xix. i, 7. ↩︎
Prof. L. T. Hogben, in the course of the debate upon ‘ The Nature of Life,’ argued against theories of ‘ Holism ’ and vitalism on the ground that they could not submit experimental evidence capable of establishing results which would enable the scientist to make predictions with the certainty possible upon mechanical principles. He urged that the work of Loeb and Pavlov on conditioned reflexes had broken down the distinction between voluntary and reflex activity, and that even conscious behaviour could be subjected to physico-chemical interpretation. At the same meeting Prof, G. Barger, while maintaining an agnostic attitude as to the ultimate nature of life, declared that it is ‘ treachery to science ’ to resort to any other hypothesis than the mechanistic. For a full criticism of the theories of tropisms and conditioned reflexes see McDougall, An Outline of Psychology, pp. 21-71. ↩︎
This remark is open at first sight to the obvious criticism that modern science, and modern psychology in particular, are at the moment paying great attention to the individual. In the British Association debate to which reference has been made above Dr. J. S. Haldane and Prof. Wildon Carr both laid great stress upon this point. But in each case the point of the argument was that in recognizing individuality biological science differs radically from the mechanistic sciences, and that its world must be differently interpreted. Dr. Haldane referred to the modern physical investigations which seem to reveal something very like an individual life even in the atom and molecule, as showing that no meaning can be attached to the idea that life has arisen by mechanical processes. And Prof. Wildon Carr argued that the essential substance of the world is activity, ‘ and activity distinguished from mechanical movement by its individuality,’ ‘ Activity is essentially individual and purposive, and in its higher form personal.’ (I quote, in this and the preceding note, from the Times report—all that is available at the time of writing.) This position is quite distinct from the strict scientific study of the individual which simply seeks to find in him a special case of the working of general rules. True science abhors, an exception just as much as nature abhors a vacuum, and for the same ultimate reason. In the special field of psychology we have at least two considerable attempts to deal with the individual. Adler’s ‘ Individual Psychology ’ depends upon the principle that each individual has his own special ‘ guiding principle ’ (see p. 26 above). And Dr. C. Burt and others have made a special study of the individual differences of normal adult minds, fully summarized in Burt’s presidential address to the British Association, Psychology Section, in 1923. But even here we have not the study of individuality as such, but only the attempt to study the laws and meaning of variation. ↩︎
Ward, Psychological Principles, p. 467. ↩︎
Op. cit. p. 469. ↩︎
Op. cit. p. 470. ↩︎
The Will to Believe, p. 52. ↩︎
Op. cit. pp. 3 ff. ↩︎
Op. cit. pp. 25 . ↩︎
Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 513-515. ↩︎
The Will to Believe, p. 29. ↩︎
Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 328. ↩︎
Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 328. ↩︎
Tennyson, Idylls of the King : Guinevere. ↩︎
See especially The Battle of Behaviorism, by Watson and McDougall. The ‘ postscript ’ by the latter seems to me to be entirely justified. ↩︎
Quoted from McDougall’s Outline of Psychology, p. 27. Holt’s The Concept of Consciousness may be said, perhaps more accurately, to revive the theory of ‘ diminutive vibratiuncles ’ expounded by David Hartley in 1747, in An Enquiry into the Origin of the Human Appetites and Affections. But for Hartley the ideas, being vibrations, are real enough. For Holt they have no reality save as vibrations or movements of particles. The change of emphasis makes a whole world of difference between the two positions. ↩︎
Behaviorism, p. 18. ↩︎
For details Lindsey’s Companionate Marriage and Calverton’s The Bankruptcy of Marriage may be consulted. But it is difficult to believe that accurate statistics are available. Some estimate of the gravity of the problem is possible in the light of the following estimates, made by specialists. Max Hirsch (Fruchabtreibung und Prdventivverkehr, 1914) states that according to an estimate of the New York Medical Record 800,000 (a misprint for 80,000) abortions are procured annually in New York alone. This state Of affairs is, however, now general. Bertillon estimates that 50,000 abortions are procured every year in Paris, and Julius Wolf puts the annual number for the whole of Germany at 600,000. I owe these references to the Dean of St. Paul’s. ↩︎
Jung, Analytical Psychology, pp. 426 ff. ; cf. p. 409. The classical account of Freud’s theory is to be found in his Traumdeutung. A full summary is given by E. Jones, Papers on Psycho-analysts, pp. 187 ff. Freud usually terms this process ‘ displacement,’ a term which is far less confusing than that used by Jung, since it suggests the reality of the object to which the affect or interest is displaced. ↩︎
The New Psychology and Its Relation to Life (1920 edn.), p. 133. ↩︎
So especially in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, pp. 60 ff., and The Ego and the Id, pp. 34 ff. ↩︎
Freud’s own summary of the theory in The Future of an Illusion, P- 39 ↩︎
The Idea of the Holy, pp. 12-41. ↩︎
The Future of an Illusion, p. 27. The next two paragraphs are roughly abridged from Freud’s argument on pp. 27-34 of this essay. ↩︎
The Future of an Illusion, p. 92. ↩︎
Ibid. p. 93. ↩︎
Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 15. ↩︎
The myth is a fragment of the infantile soul-life of the people and ‘ Thus the myth is a sustained, still remaining fragment from th infantile soul-life of the people, and the dream is the myth of the individual ’ (quoted by Jung, loc. cit., from Abraham, Dreams and Myths). The subject has been especially studied by O. Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, and Riklin, Wish Fulfilment and Symbolism in Fairy Tales. ↩︎
The well-attested accounts of ‘ the angels of Mons ’ are an admirable example of this process from the war-records of 1914. An exact parallel is to be found in the classical legends of the Great Twin Brethren, which undoubtedly reflect real experiences. Cf. Macaulay’s Battle of the Lake Regillus, stanzas 32 ff ., an excellent piece of psychology. ↩︎
Psychology of the Unconscious, pp. 61 f. ↩︎
Op. cit. p. 142 : ‘ . . . the historical and philosophical weakness of the Christian dogmatism and the religious emptiness of an historical Jesus, of whose person we know nothing, and whose religious value is partly Talmudic, partly Hellenic wisdom.’ ↩︎
Op. cit. pp. 42 f. ↩︎
Analytical Psychology, pp. 431 f. ↩︎
Psychology of the Unconscious, pp. 15 f. Cf. Tanslev. The New Psychology, p. 139. ↩︎
This quotation and those in the preceding paragraph are from Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 144. ↩︎
So Jung himself, Analytical Psychology, p. 231 and passim. See also Dr. B. M. Hinkle in her Introduction to Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious, pp. xvii ff. ↩︎
Bergson, Creative Evolution , p. 286. ↩︎
I owe to Archbishop Temple (The Nature of Personality) this reference to Coleridge’s comment upon Schelling’s Absolute. ↩︎
Group Theories of Religion and the Individual. ↩︎
The Psychology of Religious Experience, pp. vii, 168 f. ↩︎
From the opening sentence of The Social Basis of Religion. ↩︎
Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p. 431. ↩︎
Op. cit. p. 206. ↩︎
Op. cit. p. 442 note. ↩︎
Quoted and fully criticized in relation to other definitions given by Durkheim in Webb’s Group Theories, pp. 46 ff. See especially the note on p. 60. ↩︎
Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieures. ↩︎
Hubert and Mauss, Esquisse d’un Théorie Générale de la Magie (UAnn&e Sociologique, vol. vii.). Cf. the rather similar position taken up by Miss Jane Harrison in the Introduction to Themis. I owe the reference to Prof. Webb. ↩︎
Cornford’s From Religion to Philosophy takes these two conceptions as the basic principle of Greek religion, and traces its development on lines very like those expounded by Lévy Bruhl. ↩︎
For a criticism of this view cf. McDougall, The Group Mind, pp. 74 ff. ↩︎
So Webb, op. cit. pp. 171-173. ↩︎
Ps. xcvi. 5. ↩︎
I Cor. viii. 5, 6. ↩︎
XXXIX Articles, Art. I. ↩︎
Incidentally this is also the answer to those who have sought to derive all that is essential in Christianity from Greek conceptions of a ‘ saviour-god.’ ↩︎
The one feature in His teaching which cannot easily be paralleled is His insistence upon forgiveness, as has been pointed out by Reitzenstein (e.g. Poimandres, p. 180, and Rawlinson’s comments, New Testament Doctrine of the Christ, pp. 152 if.). But this is not, strictly speaking, a matter of ethics at all, although ethical considerations enter in. Forgiveness, as Jesus taught and practised it, is in the higher sphere of personal relationships, and has in fact created problems for ethics which remain unsolved to the present day. The distinction becomes clear when it is realized that no law of forgiveness can be stated which does not result in immediate contradiction. The position taken up by R. C. Moberly (Atonement and Personality, chap, iii.) may be unsatisfactory, but he at least makes this essential antinomy abundantly clear. ↩︎
Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 189 ff. ↩︎
Christologies Ancient and Modern, pp. 155 ff. ‘ The deposits left by vital experience do not lie together passively side by side, like so many dead bales of cotton or wool, but there is a constant play as it were of electricity passing and repassing between them. In this way are formed all the deeper and more permanent constituents of character and motive. And it is in these same subterranean regions, and by the same vitally reciprocating action, that whatever there is of the divine in the soul of man passes into the roots of his being ’ (p. 157). ↩︎
Tennyson, In Memoriam, init. ↩︎