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As
there thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a
common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, so
there might conceivably also prove to he no one specific and essential kind
of religious object, and no one specific and essential kind of religious
act.
The
field of religion being as wide as this, it is manifestly impossible that I
should pretend to cover it. My
lectures must be limited to a fraction of the subject.
And, although it would indeed be foolish to set up an abstract
definition of religion's essence, and then proceed to defend that definition
against all comers, yet this need not prevent me from taking my own narrow
view of what religion shall consist in FOR THE PURPOSE OF THESE LECTURES,
or, out of the many meanings of the word, from choosing the one meaning in
which I wish to interest you particularly, and proclaiming arbitrarily that
when I say "religion" I mean THAT.
This, in fact, is what I must do, and I will now preliminarily seek
to mark out the field I choose.
One
way to mark it out easily is to say what aspects of the subject we leave
out. At the outset we are
struck by one great partition which divides the religious field.
On the one side of it lies institutional, on the other personal
religion. As M. P. Sabatier says, one branch of religion keeps the divinity,
another keeps man most in view. Worship
and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity,
theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials of
religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it, we
should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning the
favor of the gods. In the more
personal branch of religion it is on the contrary the inner dispositions of
man himself which form the center of interest, his conscience, his deserts,
his helplessness, his incompleteness. And
although the favor of the God, as forfeited or gained, is still an essential
feature of the story, and theology plays a vital part therein, yet the acts
to which this sort of religion prompts are personal not ritual acts, the
individual transacts the business by himself alone, and the ecclesiastical
organization, with its priests and sacraments and other go-betweens, sinks
to an altogether secondary place. The
relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between man and
his maker.
Now
in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch entirely, to
say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to consider as little as
possible the systematic theology and the ideas about the gods themselves,
and to confine myself as far as I can to personal religion pure and simple.
To some of you personal religion, thus nakedly considered, will no
doubt seem too incomplete a thing to wear the general name.
"It is a part of religion," you will say, "but only
its unorganized rudiment; if we are to name it by itself, we had better call
it man's conscience or morality than his religion.
The name 'religion' should be reserved for the fully organized system
of feeling, thought, and institution, for the Church, in short, of which
this personal religion, so called, is but a fractional element."
But
if you say this, it will only show the more plainly how much the question of
definition tends to become a dispute about names.
Rather
than prolong such a dispute, I am willing to accept almost any name for the
personal religion of which I propose to treat.
Call it conscience or morality, if you yourselves prefer, and not
religion--under either name it will be equally worthy of our study.
As for myself, I think it will prove to contain some elements which
morality pure and simple does not contain, and these elements I shall soon
seek to point out; so I will myself continue to apply the word
"religion" to it; and in the last lecture of all, I will bring in
the theologies and the ecclesiasticisms, and say something of its relation
to them.
In
one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more fundamental
than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches, when once established,
live at second-hand upon tradition; but the FOUNDERS of every church owed
their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with
the divine. Not only the
superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the
originators of Christian sects have been in this case;--so personal religion
should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem
it incomplete.
There
are, it is true, other things in religion chronologically more primordial
than personal devoutness in the moral sense.
Fetishism and magic seem to have preceded inward piety
historically--at least our records of inward piety do not reach back so far.
And if fetishism and magic be regarded as stages of religion, one may
say that personal religion in the inward sense and the genuinely spiritual
ecclesiasticisms which it founds are phenomena of secondary or even tertiary
order. But, quite apart from
the fact that many anthropologists--for instance, Jevons and Frazer
--expressly oppose "religion" and "magic" to each other,
it is certain that the whole system of thought which leads to magic,
fetishism, and the lower superstitions may just as well be called primitive
science as called primitive religion. The question thus becomes a verbal one
again; and our knowledge of all these early stages of thought and feeling is
in any case so conjectural and imperfect that farther discussion would not
be worth while.
Religion,
therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us THE
FEELINGS, ACTS, AND EXPERIENCES OF INDIVIDUAL MEN IN THEIR SOLITUDE, SO FAR
AS THEY APPREHEND THEMSELVES TO STAND IN RELATION TO WHATEVER THEY MAY
CONSIDER THE DIVINE. Since the
relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of
religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and
ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.
In these lectures, however, as I have already said, the immediate
personal experiences will amply fill our time, and we shall hardly consider
theology or ecclesiasticism at all.
We
escape much controversial matter by this arbitrary definition of our field.
But, still, a chance of controversy comes up over the word
"divine," if we take the definition in too narrow a sense.
There are systems of thought which the world usually calls religious,
and yet which do not positively assume a God.
Buddhism is in this case. Popularly,
of course, the Buddha himself stands in place of a God; but in strictness
the Buddhistic system is atheistic. Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance,
also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the
immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the
universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult.
In that address to the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838
which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere
abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.
"These
laws," said the speaker, "execute themselves.
They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance:
Thus, in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are
instant and entire. He who does
a good deed is instantly ennobled. He
who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted.
He who puts off impurity thereby puts on purity.
If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of
God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with
justice. If a man dissemble,
deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own
being. Character is always
known. Thefts never enrich;
alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.
The least admixture of a lie--for example, the taint of vanity, any
attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance--will instantly
vitiate the effect. But speak
the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of
the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear your witness.
For all things proceed out of the same spirit, which is differently
named love, justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as the
ocean receives different names on the several shores which it washes.
In so far as he roves from these ends, a man bereaves himself of
power, of auxiliaries. His
being shrinks . . . he becomes
less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death. The perception of this law awakens in the mind a sentiment
which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest
happiness. Wonderful is its
power to charm and to command. It
is a mountain air. It is the
embalmer of the world.
It
makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it.
It is the beatitude of man. It
makes him illimitable. When he
says 'I ought'; when love warns him; when he chooses, warned from on high,
the good and great deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from
supreme wisdom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for he
can never go behind this sentiment. All
the expressions of this sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to
their purity. [They] affect us
more than all other compositions. The sentences of the olden time, which
ejaculate this piety, are still fresh and fragrant.
And the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind, whose name is not so
much written as ploughed into the history of this world, is proof of the
subtle virtue of this infusion."[10]
[10]
Miscellanies, 1868, p. 120 (abridged).
Such
is the Emersonian religion. The
universe has a divine soul of order, which soul is moral, being also the
soul within the soul of man. But
whether this soul of the universe be a mere quality like the eye's
brilliancy or the skin's softness, or whether it be a self-conscious life
like the eye's seeing or the skin's feeling, is a decision that never
unmistakably appears in Emerson's pages.
It quivers on the boundary of these things, sometimes leaning one way
sometimes the other, to suit the literary rather than the philosophic need.
Whatever it is, though, it is active.
As much as if it were a God, we can trust it to protect all ideal
interests and keep the world's balance straight. The sentences in which Emerson, to the very end, gave
utterance to this faith are as fine as anything in literature: "If you love and serve men, you cannot by any hiding or
stratagem escape the remuneration. Secret
retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine
justice. It is impossible to
tilt the beam. All the tyrants
and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to
heave the bar. Settles
forevermore the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star
and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil."[11]
[11]
Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1868, p. 186.
Now
it would be too absurd to say that the inner experiences that underlie such
expressions of faith as this and impel the writer to their utterance are
quite unworthy to be called religious experiences.
The sort of appeal that Emersonian optimism, on the one hand, and
Buddhistic pessimism, on the other, make to the individual and the son of
response which he makes to them in his life are in fact indistinguishable
from, and in many respects identical with, the best Christian appeal and
response. We must therefore,
from the experiential point of view, call these godless or quasi-godless
creeds "religions"; and accordingly when in our definition of
religion we speak of the individual's relation to "what he considers
the divine," we must interpret the term "divine" very
broadly, as denoting any object that is god- LIKE, whether it be a concrete
deity or not. But the term
"godlike," if thus treated as a floating general quality, becomes
exceedingly vague, for many gods have flourished in religious history, and
their attributes have been discrepant enough.
What then is that essentially godlike quality--be it embodied in a
concrete deity or not--our relation to which determines our character as
religious men? It will repay us to seek some answer to this question before
we proceed farther.
For
one thing, gods are conceived to be first things in the way of being and
power. They overarch and
envelop, and from them there is no escape.
What relates to them is the first and last word in the way of truth.
Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true might
at this rate be treated as godlike, and a man's religion might thus be
identified with his attitude, whatever it might be, toward what he felt to
be the primal truth.
Such
a definition as this would in a way be defensible. Religion, whatever it is,
is a man's total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total reaction
upon life is a religion? Total reactions are different from casual
reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or professional
attitudes. To get at them you
must go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that curious
sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or
alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree everyone
possesses. This sense of the
world's presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual
temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous,
gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and
inarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all
our answers to the question, "What is the character of this universe in
which we dwell?" It
expresses our individual sense of it in the most definite way.
Why then not call these reactions our religion, no matter what
specific character they may have? Non-religious
as some of these reactions may be, in one sense of the word
"religious," they yet belong to THE GENERAL SPHERE OF THE
RELIGIOUS LIFE, and so should generically be classed as religious reactions.
"He believes in No-God, and he worships him," said a
colleague of mine of a student who was manifesting a fine atheistic ardor;
and the more fervent opponents of Christian doctrine have often enough shown
a temper which, psychologically considered, is indistinguishable from
religious zeal.
But
so very broad a use of the word "religion" would be inconvenient,
however defensible it might remain on logical grounds.
There are trifling, sneering attitudes even toward the whole of life;
and in some men these attitudes are final and systematic.
It would strain the ordinary use of language too much to call such
attitudes religious, even though, from the point of view of an unbiased
critical philosophy, they might conceivably be perfectly reasonable ways of
looking upon life. Voltaire,
for example, writes thus to a friend, at the age of seventy-three:
"As for myself," he says, "weak as I am, I carry on
the war to the last moment, I get a hundred pike-thrusts, I return two
hundred, and I laugh. I see
near my door Geneva on fire with quarrels over nothing, and I laugh again;
and, thank God, I can look upon the world as a farce even when it becomes as
tragic as it sometimes does. All comes out even at the end of the day, and
all comes out still more even when all the days are over."
Much
as we may admire such a robust old gamecock spirit in a valetudinarian, to
call it a religious spirit would be odd.
Yet it is for the moment Voltaire's reaction on the whole of life.
Je me'n fiche is the vulgar French equivalent for our English
ejaculation "Who cares?"
And the happy term je me'n fichisme recently has been invented to
designate the systematic determination not to take anything in <37>
life too solemnly. "All is
vanity" is the relieving word in all difficult crises for this mode of
thought, which that exquisite literary genius Renan took pleasure, in his
later days of sweet decay, in putting into coquettishly sacrilegious forms
which remain to us as excellent expressions of the "all is vanity"
state of mind. Take the
following passage, for example--we must hold to duty, even against the
evidence, Renan says--but he then goes on:--
"There
are many chances that the world may be nothing but a fairy pantomime of
which no God has care. We must
therefore arrange ourselves so that on neither hypothesis we shall be
completely wrong. We must
listen to the superior voices, but in such a way that if the second
hypothesis were true we should not have been too completely duped.
If in effect the world be not a serious thing, it is the dogmatic
people who will be the shallow ones, and the worldly minded whom the
theologians now call frivolous will be those who are really wise.
"In
utrumque paratus, then. Be
ready for anything--that perhaps is wisdom.
Give ourselves up, according to the hour, to confidence, to
skepticism, to optimism, to irony and we may be sure that at certain moments
at least we shall be with the truth. . . .
Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature
that we take her no more seriously than she takes us.
I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.
We owe it to the Eternal to be virtuous but we have the right to add
to this tribute our irony as a sort of personal reprisal.
In this way we return to the right quarter jest for jest; we play the
trick that has been played on us. Saint Augustine's phrase:
Lord, if we arc deceived, it is by thee! remains a fine one, well
suited to our modern feeling. Only
we wish the Eternal to know that if we accept the fraud, we accept it
knowingly and willingly. We are
resigned in advance to losing the interest on our investments of virtue, but
we wish not to appear ridiculous by having counted on them too
securely."[12] [12]
Feuilles detachees, pp. 394-398 (abridged).
Surely
all the usual associations of the word "religion" would have to be
stripped away if such a systematic parti pris of irony were also to be
denoted by the name. For common
men "religion," whatever more special meanings it may have,
signifies always a SERIOUS state of mind.
If any one phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase
would be, "All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances
may suggest." If it can
stop anything, religion as commonly apprehended can stop just such chaffing
talk as Renan's. It favors
gravity, not pertness; it says "hush" to all vain chatter and
smart wit.
But
if hostile to light irony, religion is equally hostile to heavy grumbling
and complaint. The world
appears tragic enough in some religions, but the tragedy is realized as
purging, and a way of deliverance is held to exist. We shall see enough of
the religious melancholy in a future lecture; but melancholy, according to
our ordinary use of language, forfeits all title to be called religious
when, in Marcus Aurelius's racy words, the sufferer simply lies kicking and
screaming after the fashion of a sacrificed pig.
The mood of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche--and in a less degree one
may sometimes say the same of our own sad Carlyle--though often an ennobling
sadness, is almost as often only peevishness running away with the bit
between its teeth. The sallies
of the two German authors remind one, half the time, of the sick shriekings
of two dying rats. They lack
the purgatorial note which religious sadness gives forth.
There
must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we
denominate religious. If glad,
it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.
It is precisely as being SOLEMN experiences that I wish to interest
you in religious experiences. So I propose--arbitrarily again, if you please--to narrow our
definition once more by saying that the word "divine," as employed
therein, shall mean for us not merely the primal and enveloping and real,
for that meaning if taken without restriction might prove too broad.
The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the
individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by
a curse nor a jest.
But
solemnity, and gravity, and all such emotional attributes, admit of various
shades; and, do what we will with our defining, the truth must at last be
confronted that we are dealing with a field of experience where there is not
a single conception that can be sharply drawn.
The pretension, under such conditions, to be rigorously
"scientific" or "exact" in our terms would only stamp us
as lacking in understanding of our task.
Things are more or less divine, states of mind are more or less
religious, reactions are more or less total, but the boundaries are always
misty, and it is everywhere a question of amount and degree.
Nevertheless, at their extreme of development, there can never be any
question as to what experiences are religious.
The divinity of the object and the solemnity of the reaction are too
well marked for doubt. Hesitation
as to whether a state of mind is "religious," or
"irreligious," or "moral," or "philosophical,"
is only likely to arise when the state of mind is weakly characterized, but
in that case it will be hardly worthy of our study at all.
With states that can only by courtesy be called religious we need
have nothing to do, our only profitable business being with what nobody can
possibly feel tempted to call anything else.
I said in my former lecture that we learn most about a thing when we
view it under a microscope, as it were, or in its most exaggerated form.
This is as true of religious phenomena as of any other kind of fact.
The only cases likely to be profitable enough to repay our attention
will therefore be cases where the religious spirit is unmistakable and
extreme. Its fainter
manifestations we may tranquilly pass by.
Here, for example, is the total reaction upon life of Frederick
Locker Lampson, whose autobiography, entitled
"Confidences," proves him to have been a most amiable man.
"I
am so far resigned to my lot that I feel small pain at the thought of having
to part from what has been called the pleasant habit of existence, the sweet
fable of life. I would not care
to live my wasted life over again, and so to prolong my span. Strange to say, I have but little wish to be younger.
I submit with a chill at my heart.
I humbly submit because it is the Divine Will, and my appointed
destiny. I dread the increase
of infirmities that will make me a burden to those around me, those dear to
me. No! let me slip away as
quietly and comfortably as I can. Let
the end come, if peace come with it.
"I
do not know that there is a great deal to be said for this world, or our
sojourn here upon it; but it has pleased God so to place us, and it must
please me also. I ask you, what
is human life? Is not it a
maimed happiness--care and weariness, weariness and care, with the baseless
expectation, the strange cozenage of a brighter to-morrow?
At best it is but a froward child, that must be played with and
humored, to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is
over."[13]
[13]
Op. cit., pp. 314, 313.
This
is a complex, a tender, a submissive, and a graceful state of mind.
For myself, I should have no objection to calling it on the whole a
religious state of mind, although I dare say that to many of you it may seem
too listless and half-hearted to merit so good a name.
But what matters it in the end whether we call such a state of mind
religious or not? It is too
insignificant for our instruction in any case; and its very possessor wrote
it down in terms which he would not have used unless he had been thinking of
more energetically religious moods in others, with which he found himself
unable to compete. It is with
these more energetic states that our sole business lies, and we can
perfectly well afford to let the minor notes and the uncertain border go.
It was the extremer cases that I had in mind a little while ago when
I said that personal religion, even without theology or ritual, would prove
to embody some elements that morality pure and simple does not contain. You may remember that I promised shortly to point out what
those elements were. In a
general way I can now say what I had in mind.
"I
accept the universe" is reported to have been a favorite utterance of
our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one
repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have
been: "Gad! she'd
better!" At bottom the
whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our
acceptance of the universe. Do
we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether?
Shall our protests against certain things in it be radical and
unforgiving, or shall we think that, even with evil, there are ways of
living that must lead to good? If
we accept the whole, shall we do so as if stunned into submission--as
Carlyle would have us--"Gad! we'd better!"--or shall we do so with
enthusiastic assent? Morality
pure and simple accepts the law of the whole which it finds reigning, so far
as to acknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with the heaviest and
coldest heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke.
But for religion, in its strong and fully developed manifestations,
the service of the highest never is felt as a yoke.
Dull submission is left far behind, and a mood of welcome, which may
fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic
gladness, has taken its place.
It
makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one
accept the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to
necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints. The difference is as great as that between passivity and
activity, as that between the defensive and the aggressive mood.
Gradual as are the steps by which an individual may grow from one
state into the other, many as are the intermediate stages which different
individuals represent, yet when you place the typical extremes beside each
other for comparison, you feel that two discontinuous psychological
universes confront you, and that in passing from one to the other a
"critical point" has been overcome.
If
we compare stoic with Christian ejaculations we see much more than a
difference of doctrine; rather is it a difference of emotional mood that
parts them. When Marcus
Aurelius reflects on the eternal reason that has ordered things, there is a
frosty chill about his words which you rarely find in a Jewish, and never in
a Christian piece of religious writing.
The universe is "accepted" by all these writers; but how
devoid of passion or exultation the spirit of the Roman Emperor is!
Compare his fine sentence: "If
gods care not for me or my children, here is a reason for it," with
Job's cry: "Though he slay
me, yet will I trust in him!" and you immediately see the difference I
mean. The anima mundi, to whose
disposal of his own personal destiny the Stoic consents, is there to be
respected and submitted to, but the Christian God is there to be loved; and
the difference of emotional atmosphere is like that between an arctic
climate and the tropics, though the outcome in the way of accepting actual
conditions uncomplainingly may seem in abstract terms to be much the same.
"It
is a man's duty," says Marcus Aurelius, "to comfort himself and
wait for the natural dissolution, and not to be vexed, but to find
refreshment solely in these thoughts--first that nothing will happen to me
which is not conformable to the nature of the universe; and secondly that I
need do nothing contrary to the God and deity within me; for there is no man
who can compel me to transgress. He
is an abscess on the universe who withdraws and separates himself from the
reason of our common nature, through being displeased with the things which
happen. For the same nature
produces these, and has produced thee too.
And so accept everything which happens, even if it seem disagreeable,
because it leads to this, the health of the universe and to the prosperity
and felicity of Zeus. For he
would not have brought on any man what he has brought if it were not useful
for the whole. The integrity of
the whole is mutilated if thou cuttest off anything.
And thou dost cut off, as far as it is in thy power, when thou art
dissatisfied, and in a manner triest to put anything out of the
way."[14]
[14]
Book V., ch. ix. (abridged).
Compare
now this mood with that of the old Christian author of the Theologia
Germanica:--
"Where
men are enlightened with the true light, they renounce all desire and
choice, and commit and commend themselves and all things to the eternal
Goodness, so that every enlightened man could say:
'I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a
man.' Such men are in a state
of freedom, because they have lost the fear of pain or hell, and the hope of
reward or heaven, and are living in pure submission to the eternal Goodness,
in the perfect freedom of fervent love.
When a man truly perceiveth and considereth himself, who and what he
is, and findeth himself utterly vile and wicked and unworthy, he falleth
into such a deep abasement that it seemeth to him reasonable that all
creatures in heaven and earth should rise up against him.
And therefore he will not and dare not desire any consolation and
release; but he is willing to be unconsoled and unreleased; and he doth not
grieve over his sufferings, for they are right in his eyes, and he hath
nothing to say against them. This
is what is meant by true repentance for sin; and he who in this present time
entereth into this hell, none may console him.
Now God hath not forsaken a man in this hell, but He is laying his
hand upon him, that the man may not desire nor regard anything but the
eternal Good only. And then,
when the man neither careth for nor desireth anything but the eternal Good
alone, and seeketh not himself nor his own things, but the honour of God
only, he is made a partaker of all manner of joy, bliss, peace, rest, and
consolation, and so the man is henceforth in the kingdom of heaven.
This hell and this heaven are two good safe ways for a man, and happy
is he who truly findeth them."[15]
[15]
Chaps. x., xi. (abridged):
Winkworth's translation.
How
much more active and positive the impulse of the Christian writer to accept
his place in the universe is! Marcus Aurelius agrees TO the scheme--the
German theologian agrees WITH it. He
literally ABOUNDS in agreement, he runs out to embrace the divine decrees.
Occasionally,
it is true, the stoic rises to something like a Christian warmth of
sentiment, as in the often quoted passage of Marcus Aurelius:--
"Everything
harmonizes with me which is harmonious to thee, O Universe.
Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which is in due time for
thee. Everything is fruit to me
which thy seasons bring, O Nature: from
thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things return.
The poet says, Dear City of Cecrops; and wilt thou not say, Dear City
of Zeus?"[16]
[16]
Book IV., 523
But
compare even as devout a passage as this with a genuine Christian
outpouring, and it seems a little cold. Turn, for instance, to the Imitation
of Christ:--
"Lord,
thou knowest what is best; let this or that be according as thou wilt.
Give what thou wilt, so much as thou wilt, when thou wilt.
Do with me as thou knowest best, and as shall be most to thine honour.
Place me where thou wilt, and freely work thy will with me in all
things. . . . When could it be
evil when thou wert near? I had
rather be poor for thy sake than rich without thee.
I choose rather to be a pilgrim upon the earth with thee, than
without thee to possess heaven. Where
thou art, there is heaven; and where thou art not, behold there death and
hell."[17]
[17]
Benham's translation: Book
III., chaps. xv., lix.
Compare Mary Moody Emerson: "Let
me be a blot on this fair world, the obscurest the loneliest sufferer, with
one proviso--that I know it is His agency.
I will love Him though He shed frost and darkness on every way of
mine." R. W. Emerson:
Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 188.
It
is a good rule in physiology, when we are studying the meaning of an organ,
to ask after its most peculiar and characteristic sort of performance, and
to seek its office in that one of its functions which no other organ can
possibly exert. Surely the same
maxim holds good in our present quest.
The essence of religious experiences, the thing by which we finally
must judge them, must be that element or quality in them which we can meet
nowhere else. And such a
quality will be of course most prominent and easy to notice in those
religious experiences which are most one-sided, exaggerated, and intense.
Now
when we compare these intenser experiences with the experiences of tamer
minds, so cool and reasonable that we are tempted to call them philosophical
rather than religious, we find a character that is perfectly distinct.
That character, it seems to me, should be regarded as the practically
important differentia of religion for our purpose; and just what it is can
easily be brought out by comparing the mind of an abstractly conceived
Christian with that of a moralist similarly conceived.
A
life is manly, stoical, moral, or philosophical, we say, in proportion as it
is less swayed by paltry personal considerations and more by objective ends
that call for energy, even though that energy bring personal loss and pain.
This is the good side of war, in so far as it calls for
"volunteers." And for
morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic
patriotism which also calls for volunteers. Even a sick man, unable to be militant outwardly, can carry
on the moral warfare. He can
willfully turn his attention away from his own future, whether in this world
or the next. He can train
himself to indifference to his present drawbacks and immerse himself in
whatever objective interests still remain accessible.
He can follow public news, and sympathize with other people's
affairs. He can cultivate
cheerful manners, and be silent about his miseries. He can contemplate
whatever ideal aspects of existence his philosophy is able to present to
him, and practice whatever duties, such as patience, resignation, trust, his
ethical system requires. Such a
man lives on his loftiest, largest plane.
He is a high-hearted freeman and no pining slave.
And yet he lacks something which the Christian par excellence, the
mystic and ascetic saint, for example, has in abundant measure, and which
makes of him a human being of an altogether different denomination.
The
Christian also spurns the pinched and mumping sick-room attitude, and the
lives of saints are full of a kind of callousness to diseased conditions of
body which probably no other human records show.
But whereas the merely moralistic spurning takes an effort of
volition, the Christian spurning is the result of the excitement of a higher
kind of emotion, in the presence of which no exertion of volition is
required. The moralist must
hold his breath and keep his muscles tense; and so long as this athletic
attitude is possible all goes well--morality suffices.
But the athletic attitude tends ever to break down, and it inevitably
does break down even in the most stalwart when the organism begins to decay,
or when morbid fears invade the mind. To
suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of
irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things.
What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel
that the spirit of the universe <47> recognizes and secures him, all
decaying and failing as he is. Well, we are all such helpless failures in the last resort.
The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison
inmates, and death finally runs the robustest of us down.
And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity and
provisionality of our voluntary career comes over us that all our morality
appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our
well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-BEING that our lives
ought to be grounded in, but, alas! are not.
And
here religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her hands.
There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others,
in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by
a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and
waterspouts of God. In this
state of mind, what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety,
and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday.
The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy
relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no
discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived.
Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is
positively expunged and washed away.
We
shall see abundant examples of this happy state of mind in later lectures of
this course. We shall see how
infinitely passionate a thing religion at its highest flights can be.
Like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every
other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment
which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else.
This enchantment, coming as a gift when it does come--a gift of our
organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God's grace, the
theologians say --is either there or not there for us, and there are persons
who can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a
given woman by mere word of command. Religious
feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject's range of life.
It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost,
and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world
which otherwise would be an empty waste.
If
religion is to mean anything definite for us, it seems to me that we ought
to take it as meaning this added dimension of emotion, this enthusiastic
temper of espousal, in regions where morality strictly so called can at best
but bow its head and acquiesce. It
ought to mean nothing short of this new reach of freedom for us, with the
struggle over, the keynote of the universe sounding in our ears, and
everlasting possession spread before our eyes.[18]
[18]
Once more, there are plenty of men, constitutionally sombre men, in whose
religious life this rapturousness is lacking.
They are religious in the wider sense, yet in this acutest of all
senses they are not so, and it is religion in the acutest sense that I wish,
without disputing about words, to study first, so as to get at its typical
differentia.
This
sort of happiness in the absolute and everlasting is what we find nowhere
but in religion. It is parted
off from all mere animal happiness, all mere enjoyment of the present, by
that element of solemnity of which I have already made so much account.
Solemnity is a hard thing to define abstractly, but certain of its
marks are patent enough. A solemn state of mind is never crude or simple--it
seems to contain a certain measure of its own opposite in solution. A solemn
joy preserves a sort of bitter in its sweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to
which we intimately consent. But
there are writers who, realizing that happiness of a supreme sort is the
prerogative of religion, forget this complication, and call all happiness,
as such, religious. Mr.
Havelock Ellis, for example, identifies religion with the entire field of
the soul's liberation from oppressive moods.
"The
simplest functions of physiological life," he writes may be its
ministers. Every one who is at
all acquainted with the Persian mystics knows how wine may be regarded as an
instrument of religion. Indeed,
in all countries and in all ages some form of physical enlargement--singing,
dancing, drinking, sexual excitement--has been intimately associated with
worship. Even the momentary expansion of the soul in laughter is, to however
slight an extent, a religious exercise. . . . Whenever an impulse from the
world strikes against the organism, and the resultant is not discomfort or
pain, not even the muscular contraction of strenuous manhood, but a joyous
expansion or aspiration of the whole soul--there is religion. It is the
infinite for which we hunger, and we ride gladly on every little wave that
promises to bear us towards it."[19]
[19]
The New Spirit, p. 232.
But
such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of
happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out.
The more commonplace happinesses which we get are "reliefs,"
occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or
threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness
is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape.
It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice--inwardly it
knows it to be permanently overcome. If you ask HOW religion thus falls on
the thorns and faces death, and in the very act annuls annihilation, I
cannot explain the matter, for it is religion's secret, and to understand it
you must yourself have been a religious man of the extremer type.
In our future examples, even of the simplest and healthiest-minded
type of religious consciousness, we shall find this complex sacrificial
constitution, in which a higher happiness holds a lower unhappiness in
check. In the Louvre there is a
picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck.
The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's
figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his
being there--that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it,
SO LONG AS WE KEEP OUR FOOT UPON HIS NECK.
In the religious consciousness, that is just the position in which
the fiend, the negative or tragic principle, is found; and for that very
reason the religious consciousness is so rich from the emotional point of
view.[20] We shall see how in
certain men and women it takes on a monstrously ascetic form.
There are saints who have literally fed on the negative principle, on
humiliation and privation, and the thought of suffering and death--their
souls growing in happiness just in proportion as their outward state grew
more intolerable. No other
emotion than religious emotion can bring a man to this peculiar pass.
And it is for that reason that when we ask our question about the
value of religion for human life, I think we ought to look for the answer
among these violenter examples rather than among those of a more moderate
hue.
[20]
I owe this allegorical illustration to my lamented colleague and Friend,
Charles Carroll Everett.
Having
the phenomenon of our study in its acutest possible form to start with, we
can shade down as much as we please later.
And if in these cases, repulsive as they are to our ordinary worldly
way of judging, we find ourselves compelled to acknowledge religion's value
and treat it with respect, it will have proved in some way its value for
life at large. By subtracting
and toning down extravagances we may thereupon proceed to trace the
boundaries of its legitimate sway.
To
be sure, it makes our task difficult to have to deal so muck with
eccentricities and extremes. "How
CAN religion on the whole be the most important of all human
functions," you may ask, "if every several manifestation of it in
turn have to be corrected and sobered down and pruned away?"
Such
a thesis seems a paradox impossible to sustain reasonably--yet I believe
that something like it will have to be our final contention.
That personal attitude which the individual finds himself impelled to
take up towards what he apprehends to be the divine--and you will remember
that this was our definition--will prove to be both a helpless and a
sacrificial attitude. That is,
we shall have to confess to at least some amount of dependence on sheer
mercy, and to practice some amount of renunciation, great or small, to save
our souls alive. The
constitution of the world we live in requires it:--
"Entbehren sollst du! sollst entbehren!
Das ist der ewige Gesang
Der jedem an die Ohren klingt,
Den, unser ganzes Leben lang
Uns heiser jede Stunde singt."
For
when all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the
universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately
looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent
positions of repose. Now in
those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is
submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone
at the very best without complaint. In
the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively
espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the
happiness may increase. Religion
thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary; and if it be
the only agency that can accomplish this result, its vital importance as a
human faculty stands vindicated beyond dispute.
It becomes an essential organ of our life, performing a function
which no other portion of our nature can so successfully fulfill.
From the merely biological point of view, so to call it, this is a
conclusion to which, so far as I can now see, we shall inevitably be led,
and led moreover by following the purely empirical method of demonstration
which I sketched to you in the first lecture.
Of the farther office of religion as a metaphysical revelation I will
say nothing now.
But
to foreshadow the terminus of one's investigations is one thing, and to
arrive there safely is another. In
the next lecture, abandoning the extreme generalities which have engrossed
us hitherto, I propose that we begin our actual journey by addressing
ourselves directly to the concrete facts.
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