[ p. 1 ]
THE older Theology was accustomed to approach the doctrine of God without reference to the religious conceptions of those races which had not the benefit of the Christian revelation or the dimmer illumination of the Hebrew dispensation. If the beliefs and practices of the heathen were dwelt upon at all, they were mentioned as examples of the fallibility of human conjectures upon divine things apart from the assistance of the inspired teaching of the Gospel and as a means of emphasizing the darkness of the religious world outside the radius of the Christian light. This method of classifying religions into the two categories of true and false has, it must be confessed, the weight of authority on its side. Though the Apostles seem to recognize a natural impulse in man to seek after God and indeed declare that the Divine is not without its witness even in the minds of the pagans, it would be difficult to find in their writings any admission that the creeds and rites of the Gentiles have any seeds of truth or virtue in them, or are anything else than the products of the perverted imagination of unregenerate [ p. 2 ] humanity. There have been students of the New Testament who have thought that St. Paul was deeply influenced by the mystery cults of the Hellenistie civilization and that his doctrine of the Eucharist, if not the Eucharist itself, should be traced to this source ; but these theories have to meet as the principal objection the fact that St. Paul never betrays even a sympathetic understanding of religion outside the pale of Judaism and Christianity and that his mind is plainly still imbued with the contempt of the Hebrew prophets for the “idols of the heathen”. There is little need to labour the point that the attitude of the early Fathers of the Church was not different. Though in general they did not venture to deny all reality to the objects of pagan worship, they considered them to be evil spirits and the worship in their temples part of the mystery of iniquity by which men were led more deeply into condemnation. Even those Fathers who held o liberal attitude towards the writings of the Philosophers and were prepared to accept Plato as an ally of the Gospel, had little that is good to say of the Greek religion.
This posture of antagonism and this emphatic assertion of the antithesis between the Christian faith in God and all others had no doubt an historical justification. It was a salutary and necessary state of mind for those who were called upon to present a higher conception of God and a purer standard of conduct, and not only so but to resist in themselves the tendencies which would have drawn them back into the modes of religious thought and feeling from which, at their conversion, they had emerged. Nor can we question that a permanent truth is contained in the intransigeance of the primitive Church. Though we may prefer to regard the Christian idea of God as the culmination of all the conceptions which men’s minds [ p. 3 ] have entertained and see in all religion the preparatio evangelica which earlier generations found only in the Hebrew, we cannot let go the ancient claim that the Christian God is the only true God, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ the only true object of worship, and that every declension from this thought of the Divine Being is to be resisted and condemned as a falling back into superstition and error.
Modern thought, as we have already hinted, would encourage a different point of view from that which the Church has on the whole adopted. It would seek to place the Christian experience of God and the Christian ideas of God in the context of the general history of religion. Ono important school of modern Protestant theologians would demur and, though for somewhat different reasons, agree with the exclusiyeness of the early Church. The Ritschlians would treat the universal history of religion as strictly irrelevant for Christian theology, and would hold that only in the words and work of the historical Jesus do we find material for a Christian doctrine of God. With the reservation which has been already made, I propose, however, to consider Christianity in relation to the whole development of the religious consciousness. Two reasons seem decisive in favour of this course. First, we are led to adopt this method by a survey of the phenomena themselves. Religion, in spite of its wide diversity of forms, possesses a recognizable character throughout. It appears to constitute one movement of the human spirit, and though it has proved difficult to define, it is not hard to recognize. Indeed, the student of comparative religions is often startled by resemblances between its highest and its lowest forms. Perhaps this self-identity of the religious consciousness all through its history is often obscured because the attention is [ p. 4 ] concentrated chiefly upon the ideas of divinity, upon mythologies and theologies which are multifarious in their diversity, rather than upon the mental attitude of the worshipper. There is an identity in the experience though an unlimited diversity in the concepts and images of religion. One of the chief merits of Professor Heiler’s book on Prayer[1] is that he has brought out by means of very numerous examples of the prayer life of the most diverse individuals and races the inherent unity of the religious consciousness.
The second reason for the adoption of the method of placing the Christian consciousness of God within the larger frame of religious history as a whole is concerned with the interests of Christian thought and apologetics. Only so can we hope to arrive at an effective defence of the Christian faith for the modern world. That world is dominated by the notions of evolution and continuity. It is perhaps a defect that the ideas of a sharp break and a fundamental antithesis are not easy for it to apply ; but we must go with the modern mind so far as we may, even though at the end we may discover that there is an element in the Christian view of the world and God which will not fit into a merely evolutionary scheme. It will, at any rate, be well for us to dwell first of all on the common elements and universal motives which run through all réligion. If wé are persuaded that the religious experience of mankind is not wholly illusion but can be taken as in some sort an experience of reality, and if further we can see reason to believe that it is a progressive experience of Reality, or rather that an upward development can be discerned in it, it may be possible to trace that line of development and to show that it issues in the Christian experience of God and the Christian conception of God. [ p. 5 ]
This chapter and the two following may suggest a train of thought leading to that conclusion.
The problem of the “ definition ” of religion has been a favourite topic of philosophers, and their labours have at least been fruitful in a large crop of formulas, if not perhaps in great illumination. It would be easy to draw up a list of a hundred definitions all different from one another. A review of these essays, which range from the cynical dictum of Salomon Reinach that “religion is a sum of scruples which impede the free use of our faculties” to the evasive phrase of Matthew Arnold about “morality touched with emotion ”, discloses that most of them have some purpose in view which is not that of philosophy. They are contrived from the standpoint of psychology or anthropology or “ sociology ” and for that reason are one-sided and abstract. They do not answer the question which we really have in mind. We wish to know what Aristotle would have called the τέλος or φύσις of religion. We are concerned to know what drives man forward in hig quest for God,—or what allures him,—what religion in its essential nature is; and this inquiry is suggested to us apart from any view which we may have about the truth of any particular religion. Even though with Mr. Bertrand Russell we may be convinced that religion is based upon illusion, yet that illusion is so persistent, so much a permanent characteristic of human culture in all its phases, that we cannot attribute if to the surface of the psyche or to fortuitous circumstances, but must seck for its root in the nature of the human mind itself. Contemporary events reinforce and illustrate this contention. Bolshevik Russia has presented us with an example, the first in history, of a large social group explicitly founded on an anti-religious basis ; not only, however, has that society been unable to [ p. 6 ] eradicate the older religion, but, as Mr. Keynes and other observers have pointed out, it has itself become the organ of a new religion whose bible is das Kapital and deity Lenin.
It is generally recognized that one of the most important contributions to the solution of our problem of the nature of the religious consciousness was made by Schleiermacher, who was among the first to concentrate attention on religious experience and to make it the foundation of theology. We will set out from his description of religion in the hope that reflection upon it will lead us deeper into the reality which we have to explore. In his first work, the Addresses to the Cultured Despisers of Religion, Schleiermacher defended the view that religion consisted in, or was coicerned with, a mental activity more “ primordial” than conscious knowing or conscious willing. Religion, he declared, was a kind of “feeling”. At this period of his development he amplified his thesis by saying that it was a “ focling for the infinite ”. His later reflection led him to modify this formula and to move away from its implication of Pantheism. In his epoch-making work on the Christian Faith[2] he propounded the thesis that of absolute dependence”. His full view of religion is not, however, contained in this famous phrase. He added to it some ideas which profoundly modify his theory. He attempts to show that all self-consciousness is accompanied by God-consciousness and that there is no mind possessed of awareness of itself which does not also possess, in however dim a form, an awareness of God. There are no true atheists. He argues further that the progressive evolution of the Godconsciousness is intimately connected with the individual’s consciousness of his place both in the order of nature and [ p. 7 ] in the human race. And finally he holds that the specifically Christian consciousness of God is mediated through the Redeemer and the Church.
This is not the occasion for a detailed exposition or criticism of Schleiermacher’s theology. Its chief value, from our point of view, is that it attempts to treat the religious impulse as an inherent and necessary quality of human consciousness which normally develops along with the mind itself, and we may state at once that any view of religion which will do justice to the facts must be in general agreement with him in this matter. There are, however, defects in his conception of religion, three of which are of importance for our present purpose. First, his reaction against the presentation of religion as merely morality or merely dogma led him to lay an exclusive emphasis upon “feeling”. The meaning of this term, however, is ambiguous, and he does not appear to have definitely distinguished between “fooling.” in the sense of pleasure and pain, in the sense of emotion, and in the senso of perception. In fact, though Schleiermacher discarded the term “intuition” which he had at first used, his theory is really only intelligible if we take “feeling ” to include some kind of perception or awareness. In any case, however, we cannot absolve him altogether from the charge of neglecting the part of reason and conscience in religious development. Closely connected with this defect is the second—that he conceives the religious life too much as passive. The fecling of absolute dependence, taken by itself, seems to rule out the sense of co-operation with God which has been an element in some at least of the most highly evolved religious experience. By passing over this aspect of religion Schleiermacher has unduly simplified the problem and has kept in the background a [ p. 8 ] paradoxical character of religion which we must not allow to escape our notice. In religious experience as a wholo we find a combination of attitudes of mind which, at least on a superficial view, are contradictory—the attitude of dependence on the Divine as the source of all power and good, and the attitude which may almost be described as “ protectiveness ”, in which the Divine is thought of as needing and demanding our help. Dependence is balanced by co-operation.
Professor Rudolph Otto may help us to observe the third defect in Schleiermacher’s conception of religion, for his well-known book, The Idea of the Holy, starts from a point of view which is admittedly akin to that of the great “romantic ” theologian. He contends that the root of the religious consciousness is to be found in the feeling of the “numinous ”, a quite distinctive emotion which appears in its most rudimentary form as a shuddering sense of the uncanny and becomes at the higher points of religious experience the apprehension of the transcendently “ Other ” and mysterious, separated by a gulf which no reason can bridge from all that is “ creaturely”. Though the details of Otto’s theory are open to question and we may entertain doubts even about the real existence of this special and distinctive “ numinous feeling”, there is an obvious truth in his position. The expression “feeling of dependence” does not meet the need of an adequate definition, for there are feelings of dependence which have no religious tone. There is something in the religious feeling of dependence which distinguishes it from all other kinds, and that clement, in the more developed religions, is awe and reverence for That on which we depend.
The foundation of the theories of Schleiermacher and Otto appears to be sound. We are concerned with an [ p. 9 ] experience which begins with the most primitive state of consciousness and does not have to wait for the development of full moral personality and self-conscious reasoning. The first spring of religion is some immediate intuition or “feeling” which lies below our ordinary conscious mental processes. But I would suggest that both these authors have been too cager to delimit religion as a specifie form of experience, and have distinguished it too sharply from other activities of spirit. It is significant that neither of them gives us a wholly satisfactory account of how moral values and intellectual judgments come to be so closely associated with a form of the spirit with which, on their hypothesis, they have no necessary connexion.
In truth the “feeling ” or intuition which lies at the root of religion is not ultimately different from that which lies at the root of all the higher functions of mind. It is an intuition or perception of continuity, which may become a feeling of dependence. The self realizes itself as being continuous with a reality which is, at the same time, “other” than itself. This apprehension of continuity — and “ otherness,” of course, takes different forms in the more highly developed mind than those which it has in the dim twilight of the beginning of self-consciousness ; but it is present throughout the whole range of mental life as known to us. But there is much more in this than the oft-repeated truth that the “ subject-object relation ” is fundamental. In the foundation intuition we know something about the “other”. The mind in contact with a merely “other” would be helpless and sterile, for it would never be able to issue from its isolated selfhood. This reality then with which we are continuous must be affirmed, and is recognized in the primordial intuition, as being not a mere not-self, but in some sense [ p. 10 ] akin. If ve are in search of a compendious phrase to denote this “feeling” or intuition we shall scarcely improve upon one which we owe to the late Professor Boutroux, “the Beyond which is within”; or perhaps, if we wish to avoid some possible implications of the phrase, we might retain our former word and speak of “the Beyond which is akin”.
That this sense of continuity with a Beyond which is not completely “other” than the human spirit is a permanent. characteristic of religion might be shown by illustrations from all stages of religious evolution. To elaborate this at any length would be wearisome. Let us, then, take religion at its most childlike expression and at its most mature, and see if in both we shall be able to hear the same undertone. The animist and polytheist assuredly find their divinities outside themselves, the spirits or gods are objects of which practical account has to be taken; but nevertheless it is an essential part of this primitive creed, or rather of the mental attitude which underlies it, that the divine beings are in some way akin to the worshippers, with comprehensible motives and “all too human” passions. At the other end of the scale stands, perhaps we may allow, the mystical theist, a Plotinus or an Augustine. What is his consuming ambition? To rise, in an experience which transcends discursive thought, to a Being who is indeed far other than himself, and yet a Being in whom he knows that he will find his completion and his home.
But this sense of continuity is not by itself sufficient to differentiate religion from the other aspects of man’s spiritual life. On the contrary, it is common to them all and is in fact the germinal situation from which all intellectual, esthetic and moral activity springs. Throughout the whole of our life as spirit we are confronted with [ p. 11 ] an “other” which responds, or is believed to respond, to our efforts to come to terms with it in various ways. Religion is one of the ways in which we seek to come to terms with that other ; and in “ coming to terms” we include “interpret”. Religion might be defined as one of the ways of “coming to terms” with the Other by means of a special mode of interpretation.
The truth of the unity of the life of the spirit, of its underlying identity in its various forms, is of the highest moment. It is a truth upon which we wish to insist, for it will affect profoundly our conception of religion, of the nature of its development and of its relation with other “forms” of the spirit which may at times appear to be its rivals. At the outset of our inquiry we would protest against any view of religious experience which would deny its intimate connexion with thought and conduct or which, in the endeavour to safeguard its specific nature and its independence, would cut it off from the general life of the mind. But here a particular consequence of the principles which we have been enunciating may be mentioned. It is often said that religion is essentially an “ anthropomorphic ” way of interpreting reality, and the statement is undoubtedly true ; but this is not a peculiarity of religion, for anthropomorphism is a characteristic which it shares with every other “ form” of the spirit.
The possibility of any knowledge of “nature”, of any stience, depends upon the assumption that the “ other ” responds to, is really interpretable by, the categories of our thought. It rests, in other words, upon the conviction that the “ beyond ”’ is in some way akin. There is no way of proving that this conviction is true. In its origin it is plainly not a “ working hypothesis,” and it seems most reasonable to hold that this ineradicable [ p. 12 ] conviction is the expression of a fundamental intuition. It needs no argument at the present time to show that the scientific interpretation of reality is thoroughly anthropomorphie in the sense that it makes use of human modes of experionce and thought.[3] The great authority of Professor Whitehead might be cited in support of this thesis[4]; but it needs no authority, for it is sufficiently evident that he who seeks to employ categories or ideas which are not human must first cease to be a man; and in fact every concept of science derives from an experience and is an abstraction or generalization from experience. This is true of “cause”, “substance ”, even of “relation ”.
An interesting illustration of the fundamentally “anthropic ” character of scientific notions is furnished by the latest development of physics. The category of “ thing ” or “ substance ” seems to be vanishing from the stage on which for long it has played the central réle and its place is being taken by more dynamic conceptions, among which that of “event” is specially important. The attempt is being made to envisage the natural order not as a collection of “ things ” but as an inter-related system or series of “events”. An event, however, is just as much an “ anthropic ” idea as that of “cause” or “thing”. It arises from the fact that human attention is not absolutely continuous, but proceeds, as it were, in spasms, that it has a “time span” which forms a “specious now”. By “event” we mean, in the last_resort, an experience which for some consciousness, possibly an ideal one, would constitute a [ p. 13 ] “specious now”. The object of these remarks is not in the Teast to depreciate the value of scientific knowledge ; on the contrary, the tendencies on the part of some authorities on the new physics to philosophical scepticism seems to the present writer deplorable. The advance of scientific knowledge is indeed an advance in our knowledge of the real world, and no one who reflects upon the fact that science enables us in many cases to predict events can doubt that it is, in a true sense, knowledge ; but this genuine acquaintance with and mastery over “nature” is built upon one assumption, that we are continuous with an “other” which is not merely other, not simply alien, but responsive.
Science is one mode of interpretation of the object, and we may state briefly its salient characteristics in order that we may compare them with those of other modes of interpretation. The scientific mode is essentially analytical and proceeds by way of simplification and abstraction. Its ideal is to reduce all its subject-matter to the calculable: and, since only genuine units can be counted, to see the world as a system of measurable relations between countable x’s.
The point which I have perhaps been unduly labouring is illustrated, however, equally by the most elementary form of knowledge—that perception from which all science begins. In perception we meet with the same basic condition of experience. We perceive the room in which we are: it is an “other”, an object; if it were not an other there would be no knowledge of it, for there would be nothing to know; but equally in the act of perception it has ceased to be wholly other and has come within our consciousness—“ a beyond which is within”.
But elementary perception and the intellectual construction which grows out of it—natural science—are [ p. 14 ] not the sole forms of the spirit, and we must now try to indicate how those other “forms” exemplify the principle which we are setting forth as the basis of the whole life of mind in general. Every form of the spirit is, regarded from one point of view, an interpretation of the “other” in terms of the person or of some element within the experience of persons; from another point of view it is an essay towards eliciting a response from the “beyond the self”. AEsthetic experience is an aspect of spiritual life no less fundamental than that of perception and science, We may ask what conditions make esthetic experience possible. We shall be justified in rejecting at once the paradoxical view of Croce that art comes before nature and that we find beauty in nature because we have first found it in art.[5] If that were true, it would be difficult to understand how art could ever begin. The precise opposite is the truth; we find beauty in art because we have first found it in nature, and the effort of the artist is to perpetuate a momentary revelation. This experience of natural beauty is surely best described as that of a suddenly disclosed kinship with ourselves. We feel that we, at that instant, have understood that “other”; but it is an understanding of the emotions and, as such, can never be expressed in concepts, it is a felt fellowship rather than a rationalized relation. But “nature ” in that experience is not melted into mere “subjectivity”: it does not become simply a part of us. The consoling rapture of the zsthetie experience would lose most of its power if we became convinced that it had no objective source but was illusion or dream. Why is that ? Because in that case it would have lost its character of a revelation of real kinship. [ p. 15 ] Nature in the highest and most ecstatic experience of beauty or sublimity remains a “ beyond ”, an “ other ” than ourselves, yet it is now felt as in some way continuous with and akin to ourselyes— “a beyond that is within ”.
The world is, however, for us not merely a series of percepts or an object of wsthetic enjoyment but also a “realm of ends”, a sphere in which purposes are to be fulfilled and ideals or “ values” realized. The practical life is also a “form ” of the spirit. It is possible to regard this aspect of the activity of mind as the most fundamental of all, and Kant to some extent and Fichte with much greater thoroughness have taken this view. The “ objective” world, according to the latter philosopher, exists as the condition of moral effort, being posited by the Ego as requisite for the development of ethical will.
We must confess that the moral consciousness appears, at first sight, to be peculiarly difficult to fit into our general scheme, since it has a characteristic note which is not obviously equivalent to continuity, indeed is almost the opposite. For in the experience of moral endeavour we seem to postulate of the “ beyond ” that it is not akin or congruous with the self. The moral life has meaning precisely because the objective world, the “given”, does not conform to our ideals. Morality lives in the contrast between “ideal” and “actual”, and if this vanishes it vanishes too, This undeniable fact has been taken by F. H. Bradley and many other thinkers as an indication that a merely ethical interpretation of reality is not finally true, that the moral consciousness belongs to the realm of “ appearance”. We need not commit ourselves to the contrast between “appearance” and “reality ” in the sense of the absolute idealists, but we must agree that the moral interpretation of the world is not the complete truth. It demands a supplement, or [ p. 16 ] rather a crown, and that is to be found in religion. Morality is a form of the spirit with a distinctive nature of its own; it is not, as such, a kind of esthetic feeling, nor is it religion, though it has affinities with both. It is not the whole life of the spirit.
Yet we need not abandon the formula which we have suggested as the general outline of the life of spirit. Though morality depends upon contrast, it does not depend on that alone. The ethical consciousness cannot regard the not-self as merely alien, simply impervious to ethical ends. The primary aspect of the not-self in ethical experience is that of opposition ; but this aspect is itself, in some sense, a response to the moral self, since it is precisely that opposition which the moral will needs in order to be moral will. But further, in spite of Kant, the moral consciousness could not subsist in the face of a “nature” which was so “step-motherly ” as to refuse all response to its ideals. If it could be shown that the “ other ” were essentially and as such the merely opposite, the totally recalcitrant to ideal aims, moral effort would cease. “Who can dwell with everlasting burnings ?” Still further, the moral consciousness seems to convey another implication, or rather perhaps there is an affirmation which the ethically developed person is impelled to make, namely, that its ideals and judgments of value are more than subjective, of greater validity than personal or racial preferences, that, on the contrary, they are founded in reality as a whole and “stand fast like the strong mountains”. At this point many moral philosophers would part company with us, and we will agree that when we make this claim for moral values we have already passed beyond the borders of the ethical consciousness into the sphere of religion. As we have already contended, it is not easy to separate these two forms of [ p. 17 ] the spirit from one another ; here more plainly than elsewhere religion completes the dialectic of the spirit.
It is time to attempt the delineation of the religious consciousness in its determinate nature. As we have seen, it issues, like all other forms of the spiritual life, from a primal intuition of the continuity of the self with an “ other ” which is more than a mere opposite, an other which responds. It comes into being in an interpretation of that “other”, and here again it does not differ in principle from the remaining forms of the life of spirit. It differs from them, however, in this respect, that in religion the affirmation of continuity and the intuition that there is response in the Object to the needs of the self are_much more thoroughgoing; and hence the religious interpretation of the world is essentially different from the interpretations which are natural to the scientific, the esthetic and the moral consciousness. We owe to Dr. Tennant a convenient distinction between “anthropie ” and “ anthropomorphic ”, the former being used. to denote an interpretation which is based upon some aspect or element of human personality and its experience, the latter denoting an interpretation which is made in terms of human personality as a whole.[6] If we adopt this distinction, we may describe science, ethics and xsthetic experience as being “ anthropic ” interpretations affirming, or if we please, “ projecting ”, one side of the whole self-consciousness, perception, emotion, will, while religion is in its inmost nature anthropomorphie, projecting or affirming the whole personality and interpreting the “other” in terms of the most concrete experience, that of the self before it has been dissected by analysis.
A great deal of discussion has been devoted to the question of the particular needs which impel human beings [ p. 18 ] to elaborate religious interpretations of the world. A popular suggestion, which is favoured by Mr. Bertrand Russell,[7] is that religion arises because men seek comfort in a world which, dispassionately considered, is a terrifying wilderness. It seems remarkable, if this is the sufficient explanation, that man has invented such a formidable array of deities, many of whom, one would think, can scarcely have afforded comfort to any human being. If the race has been secking reassurance from its religion it has been singularly unfortunate in some of its imaginative flights. Such generalizations are worthless, because they select a superficial and partial character of some religion and attempt to stretch it into a universal cause. We must look for some deep and permanent needs of the human spirit if we would explain man’s religiousness from the most degraded to the highest peak which it has touched.
Two salient and ineradicable needs of the spirit seek satisfaction through religion ; the need for unity and the need for the substantiation of value. Let us first briefly consider the need for unity. We may admit that there is an element of truth in the view of the nature of religion which we may call “ intellectualist”. According to this, religion is a crude and childlike speculation, of which the motive is curiosity and the purpose explanation. This opinion has been defended by Tylor, Sir James Frazer, and other anthropologists, and a similar theory is held by Croce, who regards religion as essentially mythology. We must, however, look deeper than conscious intellectual curiosity. The motive force of religion is not a need simply to seek out the causes of things nor are its first beliefs a clever hypothesis. It springs indeed from an impulse which is within the intellect, but one which is [ p. 19 ] also within the life of will, emotion, and imagination— the impulse to unify, to bring into coherence inner and outer experience.
It may seem a strange paradox to describe the thirst for unity as a fundamental spring of religious experience. The impression made upon our minds by such forms of religion as animism, polytheism, and polydemonism is one of incoherence and diversity; when we contemplate them we are confronted with a world falling apart. But this impression arises from the fact that we view the religion of uncivilized man from our own standpoint. Doubtless for us a return to polytheism would be a regression towards chaos. But if we try to place ourselves at the standpoint of the primitive believer, we can see that for him his belief in spirits or demons is a relative unification. The world as interpreted by polytheism is a more coherent thing than the world not interpreted at all. There is truth in the saying of Professor Hocking, “All polytheism is imperfect monotheism”. To dwell upon this aspect of the relig consciousness in its higher development is needless, for there it is generally admitted. Baron von Higel in his Mystical Element of Religion has abundantly illustrated the desire of the mystic and of all religion, in so far as it is genuine and first-hand, to rise “ away from multiplicity to unity”, from incoherence to coherence. It is true that there have been expressions of this desire which have been one-sided and imperfect, which have implied a mere flight from the world to a One who is beyond all multiplicity. “ Otherworldliness ” in the bad sense has been a pathological state of religion. But that has not been the road taken by the complete and fully developed religious consciousness. In that more excellent way to know God is not to negate the world and its multiplicity [ p. 20 ] but to affirm it in its true being as an element within the unity; and if Augustine can say, “ Deum et animam scire cupio. Nihilne plus? Nihil omnino”,[8] it is because, like Malebranche, he “ sees all things in God ”.
The second need which is met in the religious experience is that for the substantiation of values. The human mind seeks for an objective basis for its judgments of good and right; it has a need to be assured that they are not mere passing preferences but grounded in reality. Here again what is in fact a truism is apt to appear to be a paradox. We are often invited to observe that religion and ethics have no necessary connexion and indeed that very much of religion is opposed to any decent standard of conduct. The contention is true in the sense that our moral consciousness would condemn a great deal of religion ; but the question is not whether religion always substantiates our values but whether it substantiates any values, and here there can be little doubt. Notoriously the divine beings of uncivilized mankind are the guardians of tribal custom and later of the accepted law, guardians also of the social structure in which these customs and laws are expressed. The monotheistic faiths have held that God is the substance of values, Himself the supreme Value. It makes no difference to our argument here that the values themselves have changed and that the content of the God-idea has correspondingly varied. That is precisely what we should expect if our conception of the nature of spiritual life is correct. The mind begins with an intuition of its continuity with an “ other” which is not merely other, with a “ beyond ” which is akin, which is also responsive to it. It follows, therefore, that man knows God in proportion as he knows himself: but the converse is also true, since man is not anything at all apart [ p. 21 ] from the “ other ” with which ho is in rapport; he knows himself in proportion as he knows God.
The religious attitude of mind has a peculiarity which is not easy to define but which has been indicated by most writers upon the religions consciousness in language coloured by their own particular theories. Schleiermacher touches upon it in his “ feeling of absolute dependence ”, Otto in his “ sense of the numinous ”, and Professor J. B. Pratt when he designates God as “ the determiner of destiny ”. Religious states of mind contrast with those which aro scientific or simply practical or moral in this respect, that whereas the scientific and moral are attempts at mastery over the not-self, to bring the objective material within the categories of the understanding or to bend it to the urpose of the will, in religion the self seeks r rather to be 1 mastered, to bend itself to that “ other ” with which itis continuous. This is because, for religion, the “other” is the realization of its values. In this respect the religious attitude is more closely akin to that of zsthetic enjoyment, which wishes not to alter the object but to remain in its presence. There is, however, an important difference from the esthetic attitude. The religious attitude, though sclf-abnegating, is not passive, for it includes the possibility of co-operation. This difference, on which we must carefully insist, is connected. with a difference in the interpretation of the object. For the religious state of mind the object is not passive but active, not dead but alive.
Closely connected with this aspect of religion is the redemptive element which is present in every kind of religious life and system. No doubt the idea of salvation is more oxplicit in some religions than others, and the conceptions of what man is redeemed from and what redeemed to vary enormously even in the highest [ p. 22 ] examples of spiritual consciousness. There is, for example, a profound and significant difference between the salvation of the Buddhist and the Christian. The former seeks release from suffering, the latter from sin. But the thought of redemption is present in some form throughout the whole range of religion and springs from its essential nature. In so far as he is religious man feels himself to be, in the end, impotent and miserable so long as he remains in his isolated selfhood. Within him there dwells no power to achiove by himself the good, whatever that may be, which will satisfy him. Only if he can find some living power in the “other” which will unite itself with him, becoming indeed the Beyond which is within, can he emerge from the state of unsatisfactoriness and worthlessness. “In thé conception of the redeeming God the intuition of the responsiveness of the “ other ” reaches its most complete expression.
We are not here directly concerned with the defence of the validity of religious experience ; but it is relevant to remark upon a very common objection against every kind of religious interpretation of existence. We are told that every conception of God, and every so-called experience of God, is a case of “ projection”; man, it is said, projects his desires, ideals, hopes—himself, upon the outer world, or upon the unknowable, or upon “ something I know not what ” (the designations of the “ other” conceived as merely blank or merely opposite are confusing, since the conception itself is contradictory). We may reply summarily in a two-fold manner. First, we must refuse to accept the abstract and arbitrary idea of the self which this view implies. We do not admit the assumption that the self “has” anything simply in its own right and as a merely private creation, and therefore that it can project its independent imaginings. The self [ p. 23 ] never is thus isolated. It has being and it develops only through its relation with that “other” with which it is continuous. If it has ideas or desires or hopes or is a self, it has and is these things only through its constant dynamic relation with the beyond-self. All psychological “ explanations ” of religion which propose to be also exposures of its illusory character aro due to this fallacy, which arises from the legitimate procedure of the science of psychology, which, like all sciences, isolates its subject-matter. Psychology, no less than any other science, when it pronounces finally on philosophical problems becomes ridiculous. Secondly, we must insist that, if this utterly untenable and viciously abstract conception of the self be maintained, the full sceptical consequences shall be drawn. They are alarming. There is nothing whatever which will not then be a “mere projection ”, no concepts of science, no idea of the no judgment of value which has not a psychical origin, and, if to be a projection is to be condemned, we must resign ourselves to the conclusion that no mental or spiritual activity of ours has any objective validity.
The view of the general character of man’s experience of God which has been presented in this chapter has a consequence which we cannot pass over in silence. If we have rightly described it, religion cannot be regarded as a specialized activity. It is certainly a distinct form of the spiritual life and is not to be resolved into morality or art or philosophy ; but it is not the product of a separate faculty in the individual nor is it the peculiar prerogative of a special type of human being. It is native to the developed human consciousness. The recent. interest in the lives and writings of “ mystics” and the cult of the “religious genius” have been wholly beneficial in that they have drawn attention to a type of human [ p. 24 ] faculty which had been misunderstood and have emphasized the power of the religious motive in minds of exceptional character; but there is a danger lest this type of religious thought should tend to suggest that religion itself depends upon the possession of a rare combination of qualities. It may be, too, that to judge religion by its specialists is likely to give us a distorted conception of its nature. Religion, in our view, is the completion of the other forms of the life of the spirit, the climax towards which they tend, so that each of them, when intense and full, passes over into religion. Hegel’s phrase “Das denken ist auch Gottesdienst ” was not a poor excuse for not going to church, for the most severe and faithful thought, not only thought about so-called “sacred ” subjects, is religious. The aesthetic experience again cannot be divorced from that of religion, as indeed we might learn from the poetry of Wordsworth and from the sayings of Schleiermacher that music is most akin to religion and of Mr. Aldous Huxley that for many modern minds it is an almost adequate substitute. The moral consciousness, as we have seen, trembles always on the brink of religion and finds its support in an affirmation about: the objective reality of its judgments of value and its fulfilment in an experience which goes beyond the merely moral situation. In religion the life of the spirit of man reaches unity, dnd the richest religious life has not left the other activities of spirit behind but has taken them up into itself. The Reality which it seeks and thinks that it has known is One in which the thirsts of the soul for goodness, beauty, and truth are not annulled but satisfied.
Das Gebet, by P. Heiler. ↩︎
Der christliche Glaube, Eng. trans. The Christian Faith. ↩︎
The word “ anthropic ” has been eoined by Dr. Tennant to denoto the dependence of science on the human point of view while indicating a difference from the kind of “humanism” which is characteristic of religion. Philosophical Theology, Vol. I, p. 175. ↩︎
Specially his little book Symbolism. ↩︎
“As regards natural beauty man is like Narcissus at the fountain.” Croco, AEsthetic, E:T, p. 162. ↩︎
See note, p. 12, above. ↩︎
Why I am not a Christian. ↩︎
Solilog., 1. 7. ↩︎