We have now
passed in review the more important of the phenomena which are regarded as fruits
of genuine religion and characteristics of men who are devout. To-day we have
to change our attitude from that of description to that of appreciation; we have
to ask whether the fruits in question can help us to judge the absolute value
of what religion adds to human life. Were I to parody Kant, I should say that
a 'Critique of pure Saintliness' must be our theme. If, in turning to this
theme, we could descend upon our subject from above like Catholic theologians,
with our fixed definitions of man and man's perfection and our positive dogmas
about God, we should have an easy time of it. Man's perfection would be the fulfillment
of his end; and his end would be union with his Maker. That union could be pursued
by him along three paths, active, purgative, and contemplative, respectively;
and progress along either path would be a simple matter to measure by the application
of a limited number of theological and moral conceptions and definitions. The
absolute significance and value of any bit of religious experience we might hear
of would thus be given almost mathematically into our hands.
If convenience
were everything, we ought now to grieve at finding ourselves cut off from so admirably
convenient a method as this. But we did cut ourselves off from it deliberately
in those remarks which you remember we made, in our first lecture, about the empirical
method; and it must be confessed that after that act of renunciation we can never
hope for clean-cut and scholastic results. We cannot divide man sharply into an
animal and a rational part. We cannot distinguish natural from supernatural effects;
nor among the latter know which are favors of God, and which are counterfeit operations
of the demon. We have merely to collect things together without any special a
priori theological system, and out of an aggregate of piecemeal judgments as to
the value of this and that experience- judgments in which our general philosophic
prejudices, our instincts, and our common sense are our only guides- decide that
on the whole one type of religion is approved by its fruits, and another type
condemned. 'On the whole,'- I fear we shall never escape complicity with that
qualification, so dear to your practical man, so repugnant to your systematizer!
I also fear that as I make this frank confession, I may seem to some of you
to throw our compass overboard, and to adopt caprice as our pilot. Skepticism
or wayward choice, you may think, can be the only results of such a formless method
as I have taken up. A few remarks in deprecation of such an opinion, and in farther
explanation of the empiricist principles which I profess, may therefore appear
at this point to be in place.
Abstractly, it would seem
illogical to try to measure the worth of a religion's fruits in merely human terms
of value. How can you measure their worth without considering whether the God
really exists who is supposed to inspire them? If he really exists, then all the
conduct instituted by men to meet his wants must necessarily be a reasonable fruit
of his religion,- it would be unreasonable only in case he did not exist. If,
for instance, you were to condemn a religion of human or animal sacrifices by
virtue of your subjective sentiments, and if all the while a deity were really
there demanding such sacrifices, you would be making a theoretical mistake by
tacitly assuming that the deity must be non-existent; you would be setting up
a theology of your own as much as if you were a scholastic philosopher.
To
this extent, to the extent of disbelieving peremptorily in certain types of deity,
I frankly confess that we must be theologians. If disbeliefs can be said to constitute
a theology, then the prejudices, instincts, and common sense which I chose as
our guides make theological partisans of us whenever they make certain beliefs
abhorrent.
But such common-sense prejudices and instincts
are themselves the fruit of an empirical evolution. Nothing is more striking than
the secular alteration that goes on in the moral and religious tone of men, as
their insight into nature and their social arrangements progressively develop.
After an interval of a few generations the mental climate proves unfavorable to
notions of the deity which at an earlier date were perfectly satisfactory: the
older gods have fallen below the common secular level, and can no longer be believed
in. To-day a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would
be too sanguinary to be taken seriously. Even if powerful historical credentials
were put forward in his favor, we would not look at them. Once, on the contrary,
his cruel appetites were of themselves credentials. They positively recommended
him to men's imaginations in ages when such coarse signs of power were respected
and no others could be understood. Such deities then were worshiped because such
fruits were relished.
Doubtless historic accidents always played some later
part, but the original factor in fixing the figure of the gods must always have
been psychological. The deity to whom the prophets, seers, and devotees who founded
the particular cult bore witness was worth something to them personally. They
could use him. He guided their imagination, warranted their hopes, and controlled
their will,- or else they required him as a safeguard against the demon and a
curber of other people's crimes. In any case, they chose him for the value of
the fruits he seemed to them to yield. So soon as the fruits began to seem quite
worthless; so soon as they conflicted with indispensable human ideals, or thwarted
too extensively other values; so soon as they appeared childish, contemptible,
or immoral when reflected on, the deity grew discredited, and was erelong neglected
and forgotten. It was in this way that the Greek and Roman gods ceased to be believed
in by educated pagans; it is thus that we ourselves judge of the Hindu, Buddhist,
and Mohammedan theologies; Protestants have so dealt with the Catholic notions
of deity, and liberal Protestants with older Protestant notions; it is thus that
Chinamen judge of us, and that all of us now living will be judged by our descendants.
When we cease to admire or approve what the definition of a deity implies, we
end by deeming that deity incredible.
Few historic changes are more curious
than these mutations of theological opinion. The monarchical type of sovereignty
was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our own forefathers that
a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their deity seems positively to have been
required by their imagination. They called the cruelty 'retributive justice,'
and a God without it would certainly have struck them as not 'sovereign' enough.
But to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary
dealing-out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan
Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a 'delightful
conviction,' as of a doctrine 'exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,' appears
to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean. Not only the
cruelty, but the paltriness of character of the gods believed in by earlier centuries
also strikes later centuries with surprise. We shall see examples of it from the
annals of Catholic saintship which make us rub our Protestant eyes. Ritual worship
in general appears to the modern transcendentalist, as well as to the ultra-puritanic
type of mind, as if addressed to a deity of an almost absurdly childish character,
taking delight in toy-shop furniture, tapers and tinsel, costume and mumbling
and mummery, and finding his 'glory' incomprehensibly enhanced thereby;- just
as on the other hand the formless spaciousness of pantheism appears quite empty
to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt theism of evangelical sects seems intolerably
bald and chalky and bleak. Luther, says Emerson, would have would have cut off
his right hand rather than nail his theses to the door at Wittenberg, if he had
supposed that they were destined to lead to the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism.
So far, then, although we are compelled, whatever may be
our pretensions to empiricism, to employ some sort of a standard of theological
probability of our own whenever we assume to estimate the fruits of other men's
religion, yet this very standard has been begotten out of the drift of common
life. It is the voice of human experience within us, judging and condemning all
gods that stand athwart the pathway along which it feels itself to be advancing.
Experience, if we take it in the largest sense, is thus the parent of those disbeliefs
which, it was charged, were inconsistent with the experiential method. The inconsistency,
you see, is immaterial, and the charge may be neglected.
If we pass from disbeliefs
to positive beliefs, it seems to me that there is not even a formal inconsistency
to be laid against our method. The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can
use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves
and on one another. What I then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness
by common sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious
life commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity. If it commends itself,
then any theological beliefs that may inspire it, in so far forth will stand accredited.
If not, then they will be discredited, and all without reference to anything but
human working principles. It is but the elimination of the humanly unfit, and
the survival of the humanly fittest, applied to religious beliefs; and if we look
at history candidly and without prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has
ever in the long run established or proved itself in any other way. Religions
have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they
found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths
came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.
The needs were always many, and the tests were never sharp. So the reproach
of vagueness and subjectivity and 'on the whole'-ness, which can with perfect
legitimacy be addressed to the empirical method as we are forced to use it, is
after all a reproach to which the entire life of man in dealing with these matters
is obnoxious. No religion has ever yet owed its prevalence to 'apodictic certainty.'
In a later lecture I will ask whether objective certainty can ever be added by
theological reasoning to a religion that already empirically prevails.
One
word, also, about the reproach that in following this sort of an empirical
method we are handing ourselves over to systematic skepticism.
Since it is
impossible to deny secular alterations in our sentiments and needs, it would be
absurd to affirm that one's own age of the world can be beyond correction by the
next age. Skepticism cannot, therefore, be ruled out by any set of thinkers as
a possibility against which their conclusions are secure; and no empiricist ought
to claim exemption from this universal liability. But to admit one's liability
to correction is one thing, and to embark upon a sea of wanton doubt is another.
Of willfully playing into the hands of skepticism we cannot be accused. He who
acknowledges the imperfectness of his instrument, and makes allowance for it in
discussing his observations, is in a much better position for gaining truth than
if he claimed his instrument to be infallible. Or is dogmatic or scholastic theology
less doubted in point of fact for claiming, as it does, to be in point of right
undoubtable? And if not, what command over truth would this kind of theology really
lose if, instead of absolute certainty, she only claimed reasonable probability
for her conclusions? If we claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much
as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their
grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious
of our liability to err.
Nevertheless, dogmatism will doubtless continue to
condemn us for this confession. The mere outward form of inalterable certainty
is so precious to some minds that to renounce it explicitly is for them out of
the question. They will claim it even where the facts most patently pronounce
its folly. But the safe thing is surely to recognize that all the insights of
creatures of a day like ourselves must be provisional. The wisest of critics is
an altering being, subject to the better insight of the morrow, and right at any
moment, only 'up to date' and 'on the whole.' When larger ranges of truth open,
it is surely best to be able to open ourselves to their reception, unfettered
by our previous pretensions. "Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive."
The fact of diverse judgments about religious phenomena is therefore entirely
unescapable, whatever may be one's own desire to attain the irreversible. But
apart from that fact, a more fundamental question awaits us, the question whether
men's opinions ought to be expected to be absolutely uniform in this field. Ought
all men to have the same religion? Ought they to approve the same fruits and follow
the same leadings? Are they so like in their inner needs that, for hard and soft,
for proud and humble, for strenuous and lazy, for healthy-minded and despairing,
exactly the same religious incentives are required? Or are different functions
in the organism of humanity allotted to different types of man, so that some may
really be the better for a religion of consolation and reassurance, whilst others
are better for one of terror and reproof? It might conceivably be so; and we shall,
I think, more and more suspect it to be so as we go on. And if it be so, how can
any possible judge or critic help being biased in favor of the religion by which
his own needs are best met? He aspires to impartiality; but he is too close to
the struggle not to be to some degree a participant, and he is sure to approve
most warmly those fruits of piety in others which taste most good and prove most
nourishing to him.
I am well aware of how anarchic much of what I say may
sound. Expressing myself thus abstractly and briefly, I may seem to despair of
the very notion of truth. But I beseech you to reserve your judgment until we
see it applied to the details which lie before us. I do indeed disbelieve that
we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible
and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions
deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual
instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to
lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly. That we can gain more
and more of it by moving always in the right direction, I believe as much as any
one, and I hope to bring you all to my way of thinking before the termination
of these lectures. Till then, do not, I pray you, harden your minds irrevocably
against the empiricism which I profess.
I will waste no more words, then,
in abstract justification of my method, but seek immediately to use it upon the
facts.
In critically judging of the value of religious phenomena,
it is very important to insist on the distinction between religion as an individual
personal function, and religion as an institutional, corporate, or tribal product.
I drew this distinction, you may remember, in my second lecture. The word 'religion,'
as ordinarily used, is equivocal. A survey of history shows us that, as a rule,
religious geniuses attract disciples, and produce groups of sympathizers. When
these groups get strong enough to 'organize' themselves, they become ecclesiastical
institutions with corporate ambitions of their own. The Spirit of politics and
the lust of dogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate the originally
innocent thing; so that when we hear the word 'religion' nowadays, we think inevitably
of some 'church' or other; and to some persons the word 'church' suggests so much
hypocrisy and tyranny and meanness and tenacity of superstition that in a wholesale
undiscerning way they glory in saying that they are 'down' on religion altogether.
Even we who belong to churches do not exempt other churches than our own from
the general condemnation.
But in this course of lectures
ecclesiastical institutions hardly concern us at all. The religious experience
which we are studying is that which lives itself out within the private breast.
First-hand individual experience of this kind has always appeared as a heretical
sort of innovation to those who witnessed its birth. Naked comes it into the world
and lonely; and it has always, for a time at least, driven him who had it into
the wilderness, often into the literal wilderness out of doors, where the Buddha,
Jesus, Mohammed, St. Francis, George Fox, and so many others had to go. George
Fox expresses well this isolation; and I can do no better at this point than read
to you a page from his Journal, referring to the period of his youth when religion
began to ferment within him seriously.
"I fasted much," Fox says, "walked
abroad in solitary places many days, and often took my Bible, and sat in hollow
trees and lonesome places until night came on; and frequently in the night walked
mournfully about by myself; for I was a man of sorrows in the time of the first
workings of the Lord in me.
"During all this time I was never joined in profession
of religion with any, but gave up myself to the Lord, having forsaken all evil
company, taking leave of father and mother, and all other relations, and traveled
up and down as a stranger on the earth, which way the Lord inclined my heart;
taking a chamber to myself in the town where I came, and tarrying sometimes more,
sometimes less in a place: for I durst not stay long in a place, being afraid
both of professor and profane, lest, being a tender young man, I should be hurt
by conversing much with either. For which reason I kept much as a stranger, seeking
heavenly wisdom and getting knowledge from the Lord; and was brought off from
outward things, to rely on the Lord alone. As I had forsaken the priests, so I
left the separate preachers also, and those called the most experienced people;
for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. And
when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone so that I had nothing outwardly
to help me, nor could tell what to do; then, oh then, I heard a voice which said,
'There is one, even Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy condition.' When I heard
it, my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord let me see why there was none upon
the earth that could speak to my condition. I had not fellowship with any people,
priests, nor professors, nor any sort of separated people. I was afraid of all
carnal talk and talkers, for I could see nothing but corruptions. When I was in
the deep, under all shut up, I could not believe that I should ever overcome;
my troubles, my sorrows, and my temptations were so great that I often thought
I should have despaired, I was so tempted. But when Christ opened to me how he
was tempted by the same devil, and had overcome him, and had brushed his head;
and that through him and his power, life, grace, and spirit, I should overcome
also, I had confidence in him. If I had had a king's diet, palace, and attendance,
all would have been as nothing; for nothing gave me comfort but the Lord by his
power. I saw professors, priests, and people were whole and at ease in that condition
which was my misery, and they loved that which I would have been rid of. But the
Lord did stay my desires upon himself, and my care was cast upon him alone." *
* GEORGE FOX: Journal, Philadelphia, 1800, pp. 59-61, abridged.
A
genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy
to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine
prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled
heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution,
it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its
day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand
exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of
whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch
ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop
all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply
of inspiration. Unless, indeed, by adopting new movements of the spirit it can
make capital out of them and use them for its selfish corporate designs! Of protective
action of this politic sort, promptly or tardily decided on, the dealings of the
Roman ecclesiasticism with many individual saints and prophets yield examples
enough for our instruction.
The plain fact is that men's minds are built,
as has been often said, in water-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion,
they yet have many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements
and associations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged to religion's
account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper,
but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion.
And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked
intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying
down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoretic system. The ecclesiastical
spirit in general is the sum of these two spirits of dominion; and I beseech you
never to confound the phenomena of mere tribal or corporate psychology which it
presents with those manifestations of the purely interior life which are the exclusive
object of our study. The baiting of Jews, the hunting of Albigenses and Waldenses,
the stoning of Quakers and ducking of Methodists, the murdering of Mormons and
the massacring of Armenians, express much rather that aboriginal human neophobia,
that pugnacity of which we all share the vestiges, and that unborn hatred of the
alien and of eccentric and non-conforming men as aliens, than they express the
positive piety of the various perpetrators. Piety is the mask, the inner force
is tribal instinct. You believe as little as I do, in spite of the Christian unction
with which the German emperor addressed his troops upon their way to China, that
the conduct which he suggested, and in which other Christian armies went beyond
them, had anything whatever to do with the interior religious life of those concerned
in the performance.
Well, no more for past atrocities than for this atrocity
should we make piety responsible. At most we may blame piety for not availing
to check our natural passions, and sometimes for supplying them with hypocritical
pretexts. But hypocrisy also imposes obligations, and with the pretext usually
couples some restriction; and when the passion gust is over, the piety may bring
a reaction of repentance which the irreligious natural man would not have shown.
For many of the historic aberrations which have been laid to her charge, religion
as such, then, is not to blame. Yet of the charge that over-zealousness or fanaticism
is one of her liabilities we cannot wholly acquit her, so I will next make a remark
upon that point. But I will preface it by a preliminary remark which connects
itself with much that follows.
Our survey of the phenomena
of saintliness has unquestionably produced in your minds an impression of extravagance.
Is it necessary, some of you have asked, as one example after another came before
us, to be quite so fantastically good as that? We who have no vocation for the
extremer ranges of sanctity will surely be let off at the last day if our humility,
asceticism, and devoutness prove of a less convulsive sort. This practically amounts
to saying that much that it is legitimate to admire in this field need nevertheless
not be imitated, and that religious phenomena, like all other human phenomena,
are subject to the law of the golden mean. Political reformers accomplish their
successive tasks in the history of nations by being blind for the time to other
causes. Great schools of art work out the effects which it is their mission to
reveal, at the cost of a one-sidedness for which other schools must make amends.
We accept a John Howard, a Mazzini, a Botticelli, a Michael Angelo, with a kind
of indulgence. We are glad they existed to show us that way, but we are glad there
are also other ways of seeing and taking life. So of many of the saints whom we
have looked at. We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme,
but we shrink from advising others to follow the example. The conduct we blame
ourselves for not following lies nearer to the middle line of human effort. It
is less dependent on particular beliefs and doctrines. It is such as wears well
in different ages, such as under different skies all judges are able to commend.
The fruits of religion, in other words, are, like all human products, liable
to corruption by excess. Common sense must judge them. It need not blame the votary;
but it may be able to praise him only conditionally, as one who acts faithfully
according to his lights. He shows us heroism in one way, but the unconditionally
good way is that for which no indulgence need be asked.
We find that error
by excess is exemplified by every saintly virtue. Excess, in human faculties,
means usually one-sidedness or want of balance; for it is hard to imagine an essential
faculty too strong, if only other faculties equally strong be there to cooperate
with it in action. Strong affections need a strong will; strong active powers
need a strong intellect; strong intellect needs strong sympathies, to keep life
steady. If the balance exist, no one faculty can possibly be too strong- we only
get the stronger all-round character. In the life of saints, technically so called,
the spiritual faculties are strong, but what gives the impression of extravagance
proves usually on examination to be a relative deficiency of intellect. Spiritual
excitement takes pathological forms whenever other interests are too few and the
intellect too narrow. We find this exemplified by all the saintly attributes in
turn- devout love of God, purity, charity, asceticism, all may lead astray. I
will run over these virtues in succession.
First of all
let us take Devoutness. When unbalanced, one of its vices is called Fanaticism.
Fanaticism (when not a mere expression of ecclesiastical ambition) is only loyalty
carried to a convulsive extreme. When an intensely loyal and narrow mind is once
grasped by the feeling that a certain superhuman person is worthy of its exclusive
devotion, one of the first things that happens is that it idealizes the devotion
itself. To adequately realize the merits of the idol gets to be considered the
one great merit of the worshiper; and the sacrifices and servilities by which
savage tribesmen have from time immemorial exhibited their faithfulness to chieftains
are now outbid in favor of the deity. Vocabularies are exhausted and languages
altered in the attempt to praise him enough; death is looked on as gain if it
attract his grateful notice; and the personal attitude of being his devotee becomes
what one might almost call a new and exalted kind of professional specialty within
the tribe. * The legends that gather round the lives of holy persons are fruits
of this impulse to celebrate and glorify, The Buddha *(2) and Mohammed *(3) and
their companions and many Christian saints are incrusted with a heavy jewelry
of anecdotes which are meant to be honorific, but are simply abgeschmackt and
silly, and form a touching expression of man's misguided propensity to praise.
-
* Christian saints have had their specialties of devotion, Saint Francis
to Christ's wounds; Saint Anthony of Padua to Christ's childhood; Saint Bernard
to his humanity; Saint Teresa to Saint Joseph, etc. The Shi-ite Mohammedans venerate
Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law, instead of Abu-bekr, his brother-in-law. Vambery
describes a dervish whom he met in Persia, "who had solemnly vowed, thirty years
before, that he would never employ his organs of speech otherwise but in uttering,
everlastingly, the name of his favorite, Ali, Ali. He thus wished to signify to
the world that he was the most devoted partisan of that Ali who had been dead
a thousand years. In his own home, speaking with his wife, children, and friends,
no other word but 'Ali!' ever passed his lips. If he wanted food or drink or anything
else, he expressed his wants still by repeating 'Ali!' Begging or buying at the
bazaar, it was always 'Ali!' Treated ill or generously, he would still harp on
his monotonous 'Ali!' Latterly his zeal assumed such tremendous proportions that,
like a madman, he would race, the whole day, up and down the streets of the town,
throwing his stick high up into the air, and shriek out, all the while, at the
top of his voice, 'Ali!' This dervish was venerated by everybody as a saint, and
received everywhere with the greatest distinction." ARMINIUS VAMBERY, his Life
and Adventures, written by Himself, London, 1889, p. 69. On the anniversary of
the death of Hussein, Ali's son, the Shi-ite Moslems still make the air resound
with cries of his name and Ali's.
*(2) Compare H.C. WARREN: Buddhism in Translation,
Cambridge, U.S., 1898, passim.
*(3) Compare J.L. MERRICK: The Life and Religion
of Mohammed, as contained in the Sheeah traditions of the Hyat-ul-Kuloob, Boston,
1850, passim.
An immediate consequence of this condition of mind is jealousy
for the deity's honor. How can the devotee show his loyalty better than by sensitiveness
in this regard? The slightest affront or neglect must be resented, the deity's
enemies must be put to shame. In exceedingly narrow minds and active wills, such
a care may become an engrossing preoccupation; and crusades have been preached
and massacres instigated for no other reason than to remove a fancied slight upon
the God. Theologies representing the gods as mindful of their glory, and churches
with imperialistic policies, have conspired to fan this temper to a glow, so that
intolerance and persecution have come to be vices associated by some of us inseparably
with the saintly mind. They are unquestionably its besetting sins. The Saintly
temper is a moral temper, and a moral temper has often to be cruel. It is a partisan
temper, and that is cruel. Between his own and Jehovah's enemies a David knows
no difference; a Catherine of Siena, panting to stop the warfare among Christians
which was the scandal of her epoch, can think of no better method of union among
them than a crusade to massacre the Turks; Luther finds no word of protest or
regret over the atrocious tortures with which the Anabaptist leaders were put
to death; and a Cromwell praises the Lord for delivering his enemies into his
hands for 'execution.' Politics come in in all such cases; but piety finds the
partnership not quite unnatural. So, when 'freethinkers' tell us that religion
and fanaticism are twins, we cannot make an unqualified denial of the charge.
Fanaticism must then be inscribed on the wrong side of religion's account,
so long as the religious person's intellect is on the stage which the despotic
kind of God satisfies. But as soon as the God is represented as less intent on
his own honor and glory, it ceases to be a danger.
Fanaticism
is found only where the character is masterful and aggressive. In gentle characters,
where devoutness is intense and the intellect feeble, we have an imaginative absorption
in the love of God to the exclusion of all practical human interests, which, though
innocent enough, is too one-sided to be admirable. A mind too narrow has room
but for one kind of affection. When the love of God takes possession of such a
mind, it expels all human loves and human uses. There is no English name for such
a sweet excess of devotion, so I will refer to it as a theopathic condition.
The blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque may serve as an example. -
"To be loved
here upon the earth," her recent biographer exclaims: "to be loved by a noble,
elevated, distinguished being; to be loved with fidelity, with devotion,- what
enchantment! But to be loved by God! and loved by him to distraction [aime jusqu'a
la folie]!- Margaret melted away with love at the thought of such a thing. Like
Saint Philip of Neri in former times, or like Saint Francis Xavier, she said to
God: 'Hold back, O my God, these torrents which overwhelm me, or else enlarge
my capacity for their reception.'" *
* BOUGAUD: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite
Marie, Paris, 1894, p. 145.
The most signal proofs of God's love which Margaret
Mary received were her hallucinations of sight, touch, and hearing, and the most
signal in turn of these were the revelations of Christ's sacred heart, "surrounded
with rays more brilliant than the Sun, and transparent like a crystal. The wound
which he received on the cross visibly appeared upon it. There was a crown of
thorns round about this divine Heart, and a cross above it." At the same time
Christ's voice told her that, unable longer to contain the flames of his love
for mankind, he had chosen her by a miracle to spread the knowledge of them. He
thereupon took out her mortal heart, placed it inside of his own and inflamed
it, and then replaced it in her breast, adding: "Hitherto thou hast taken the
name of my slave, hereafter thou shalt be called the well-beloved disciple of
my Sacred Heart."
In a later vision the Saviour revealed to her in detail
the 'great design' which he wished to establish through her instrumentality. "I
ask of thee to bring it about that every first Friday after the week of holy Sacrament
shall be made into a special holy day for honoring my Heart by a general communion
and by services intended to make honorable amends for the indignities which it
has received. And I promise thee that my Heart will dilate to shed with abundance
the influences of its love upon all those who pay to it these honors, or who bring
it about that others do the same."
"This revelation," says Mgr. Bougaud, "is
unquestionably the most important of all the revelations which have illumined
the Church since that of the Incarnation and of the Lord's Supper.... After the
Eucharist, the supreme effort of the Sacred Heart." * Well, what were its good
fruits for Margaret Mary's life? Apparently little else but sufferings and prayers
and absences of mind and swoons and ecstasies. She became increasingly useless
about the convent, her absorption in Christ's love,- -
* BOUGAUD: Hist. de
la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, pp. 365, 241.
"which grew upon
her daily, rendering her more and more incapable of attending to external duties.
They tried her in the infirmary, but without much success, although her kindness,
zeal, and devotion were without bounds, and her charity rose to acts of such a
heroism that our readers would not bear the recital of them. They tried her in
the kitchen, but were forced to give it up as hopeless- everything dropped out
of her hands. The admirable humility with which she made amends for her clumsiness
could not prevent this from being prejudicial to the order and regularity which
must always reign in a community. They put her in the school, where the little
girls cherished her, and cut pieces out of her clothes [for relics] as if she
were already a saint, but where she was too absorbed inwardly to pay the necessary
attention. Poor dear sister, even less after her visions than before them was
she a denizen of earth, and they had to leave her in her heaven." *
* BOUGAUD:
Op. cit., p. 267.
Poor dear sister, indeed! Amiable and good, but so feeble
of intellectual outlook that it would be too much to ask of us, with our Protestant
and modern education, to feel anything but indulgent pity for the kind of saintship
which she embodies. A lower example still of theopathic saintliness is that of
Saint Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the thirteenth century, whose 'Revelations,'
a well-known mystical authority, consist mainly of proofs of Christ's partiality
for her undeserving person. Assurances of his love, intimacies and caresses and
compliments of the most absurd and puerile sort, addressed by Christ to Gertrude
as an individual, form the tissue of this paltry-minded recital. * In reading
such a narrative, we realize the gap between the thirteenth and the twentieth
century, and we feel that saintliness of character may yield almost absolutely
worthless fruits if it be associated with such inferior intellectual sympathies.
What with science, idealism, and democracy, our own imagination has grown to need
a God of an entirely different temperament from that Being interested exclusively
in dealing out personal favors, with whom our ancestors were so contented. Smitten
as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything
but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential
element of largeness; and even the best professional sainthood of former centuries,
pent in as it is to such a conception, seems to us curiously shallow and unedifying.
* Examples: "Suffering from a headache, she sought, for the glory of God,
to relieve herself by holding certain odoriferous substances in her mouth, when
the Lord appeared to her to lean over towards her lovingly, and to find comfort
Himself in these odors. After having gently breathed them in, He arose, and said
with a gratified air to the Saints, as if contented with what He had done: 'See
the new present which my betrothed has given Me!'
"One day, at chapel, she
heard supernaturally sung the words, 'Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus.' The Son of God
leaning towards her like a sweet lover, and giving to her soul the softest kiss,
said to her at the second Sanctus: 'In this Sanctus addressed to my person, receive
with this kiss all the sanctity of my divinity and of my humanity, and let it
be to thee a sufficient preparation for approaching the communion table.' And
the next following Sunday, while she was thanking God for this favor, behold the
Son of God, more beauteous than thousands of angels, takes her in His arms as
if He were proud of her, and presents her to God the Father, in that perfection
of sanctity with which He had dowered her. And the Father took such delight in
this soul thus presented by His only Son, that, as if unable longer to restrain
Himself, He gave her, and the Holy Ghost gave her also, the Sanctity attributed
to each by His own Sanctus- and thus she remained endowed with the plenary fullness
of the blessing of Sanctity, bestowed on her by Omnipotence, by Wisdom, and by
Love." Revelations de Sainte Gertrude, Paris, 1898, i. 44, 186.
Take Saint
Teresa, for example, one of the ablest women, in many respects, of whose life
we have the record. She had a powerful intellect of the practical order. She wrote
admirable descriptive psychology, possessed a will equal to any emergency, great
talent for politics and business, a buoyant disposition, and a first-rate literary
style. She was tenaciously aspiring, and put her whole life at the service of
her religious ideals. Yet so paltry were these, according to our present way of
thinking, that (although I know that others have been moved differently) I confess
that my only feeling in reading her has been pity that so much vitality of soul
should have found such poor employment.
In spite of the sufferings which she
endured, there is a curious flavor of superficiality about her genius. A Birmingham
anthropologist, Dr. Jordan, has divided the human race into two types, whom he
calls 'shrews' and 'non-shrews' respectively. * The shrew-type is defined as possessing
an 'active unimpassioned temperament.' In other words, shrews are the 'motors,'
rather than the 'sensories,' *(2) and their expressions are as a rule more energetic
than the feelings which appear to prompt them. Saint Teresa, paradoxical as such
a judgment may sound, was a typical shrew, in this sense of the term. The bustle
of her style, as well as of her life, proves it. Not only must she receive unheard-of
personal favors and spiritual graces from her Saviour, but she must immediately
write about them and exploiter them professionally, and use her expertness to
give instruction to those less privileged. Her voluble egotism; her sense, not
of radical bad being, as the really contrite have it, but of her 'faults' and
'imperfections' in the plural; her stereo-typed humility and return upon herself,
as covered with 'confusion' at each new manifestation of God's singular partiality
for a person so unworthy, are typical of shrewdom: a paramountly feeling nature
would be objectively lost in gratitude, and silent. She had some public instincts,
it is true; she hated the Lutherans, and longed for the church's triumph over
them; but in the main her idea of religion seems to have been that of an endless
amatory flirtation- if one may say so without irreverence-between the devotee
and the deity; and apart from helping younger nuns to go in this direction by
the inspiration of her example and instruction, there is absolutely no human use
in her, or sign of any general human interest. Yet the spirit of her age, far
from rebuking her, exalted her as superhuman.
* FURNEAUX JORDAN: Character
in Birth and Parentage, first edition. Later editions change the nomenclature.
*(2) As to this distinction, see the admirably practical account in J.M. BALDWIN'S
little book, The Story of the Mind, 1898. -
We have to pass a similar judgment
on the whole notion of saintship based on merits. Any God who, on the one hand,
can care to keep a pedantically minute account of individual shortcomings, and
on the other can feel such partialities, and load particular creatures with such
insipid marks of favor, is too small-minded a God for our credence. When Luther,
in his immense manly way, swept off by a stroke of his hand the very notion of
a debit and credit account kept with individuals by the Almighty, he stretched
the soul's imagination and saved theology from puerility.
So much for mere
devotion, divorced from the intellectual conceptions which might guide it towards
bearing useful human fruit.
The next saintly virtue in which
we find excess is Purity. In theopathic characters, like those whom we have just
considered, the love of God must not be mixed with any other love. Father and
mother, sisters, brothers, and friends are felt as interfering distractions; for
sensitiveness and narrowness, when they occur together, as they often do, require
above all things a simplified world to dwell in. Variety and confusion are too
much for their powers of comfortable adaptation. But whereas your aggressive pietist
reaches his unity objectively, by forcibly stamping disorder and divergence out,
your retiring pietist reaches his subjectively, leaving disorder in the world
at large, but making a smaller world in which he dwells himself and from which
he eliminates it altogether. Thus, alongside of the church militant with its prisons,
dragonnades, and inquisition methods, we have the church fugient, as one might
call it, with its hermitages, monasteries, and sectarian organizations, both churches
pursuing the same object- to unify the life, * and simplify the spectacle presented
to the soul. A mind extremely sensitive to inner discords will drop one external
relation after another, as interfering with the absorption of consciousness in
spiritual things. Amusements must go first, then conventional 'society,' then
business, then family duties, until at last seclusion, with a subdivision of the
day into hours for stated religious acts, is the only thing that can be borne.
The lives of saints are a history of successive renunciations of complication,
one form of contact with the outer life being dropped after another, to save the
purity of inner tone. *(2) "Is it not better," a young sister asks her Superior,
"that I should not speak at all during the hour of recreation, so as not to run
the risk, by speaking, of falling into some sin of which I might not be conscious?"
*(3) If the life remains a social one at all, those who take part in it must follow
one identical rule. Embosomed in this monotony, the zealot for purity feels clean
and free once more. The minuteness of uniformity maintained in certain sectarian
communities, whether monastic or not, is something almost inconceivable to a man
of the world. Costume, phraseology, hours, and habits are absolutely stereotyped,
and there is no doubt that some persons are so made as to find in this stability
an incomparable kind of mental rest.
* On this subject I refer to the work
of M. MURISIER (Les Maladies du Sentiment Religieux, Paris, 1901), who makes inner
unification the mainspring of the whole religious life. But all strongly ideal
interests, religious or irreligious, unify the mind and tend to subordinate everything
to themselves. One would infer from M. Murisier's pages that this formal condition
was peculiarly characteristic of religion, and that one might in comparison almost
neglect material content, in studying the latter. I trust that the present work
will convince the reader that religion has plenty of material content which is
characteristic, and which is more important by far than any general psychological
form. In spite of this criticism, I find M. Murisier's book highly instructive.
*(2) Example: "At the first beginning of the Servitor's [Suso's] interior
life, after he had purified his soul properly by confession, he marked out for
himself, in thought, three circles, within which he shut himself up, as in a spiritual
intrenchment. The first circle was his cell, his chapel, and the choir. When he
was within this circle, he seemed to himself in complete security. The second
circle was the whole monastery as far as the outer gate. The third and outermost
circle was the gate itself, and here it was necessary for him to stand well upon
his guard. When he went outside these circles, it seemed to him that he was in
the plight of some wild animal which is outside its hole, and surrounded by the
hunt, and therefore in need of all its cunning and watchfulness." The Life of
the Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself, translated by KNOX, London, 1865, p. 168.
*(3) Vie des premieres Religieuses Dominicaines de la Congregation de St Dominique,
a Nancy; Nancy, 1896, p. 129. -
We have no time to multiply examples, so I
will let the case of Saint Louis of Gonzaga serve as a type of excess in purification.
I think you will agree that this youth carried the elimination of the external
and discordant to a point which we cannot unreservedly admire. At the age of ten,
his biographer says:- -
"The inspiration came to him to consecrate to the
Mother of God his own virginity- that being to her the most agreeable of possible
presents. Without delay, then, and with all the fervor there was in him, joyous
of heart, and burning with love, he made his vow of perpetual chastity. Mary accepted
the offering of his innocent heart, and obtained for him from God, as a recompense,
the extraordinary grace of never feeling during his entire life the slightest
touch of temptation against the virtue of purity. This was an altogether exceptional
favor, rarely accorded even to Saints themselves, and all the more marvelous in
that Louis dwelt always in courts and among great folks, where danger and opportunity
are so unusually frequent. It is true that Louis from his earliest childhood had
shown a natural repugnance for whatever might be impure or unvirginal, and even
for relations of any sort whatever between persons of opposite sex. But this made
it all the more surprising that he should, especially since this vow, feel it
necessary to have recourse to such a number of expedients for protecting against
even the shadow of danger the virginity which he had thus consecrated. One might
suppose that if any one could have contented himself with the ordinary precautions,
prescribed for all Christians, it would assuredly have been he. But no! In the
use of preservatives and means of defense, in flight from the most insignificant
occasions, from every possibility of peril, just as in the mortification of his
flesh, he went farther than the majority of saints. He, who by an extraordinary
protection of God's grace was never tempted, measured all his steps as if he were
threatened on every side by particular dangers. Thence forward he never raised
his eyes, either when walking in the streets, or when in society. Not only did
he avoid all business with females even more scrupulously than before, but he
renounced all conversation and every kind of social recreation with them, although
his father tried to make him take part; and he commenced only too early to deliver
his innocent body to austerities of every kind." *
* MESCHLER'S Life of Saint
Louis of Gonzaga, French translation by LEBREQUIER, 1891, p. 40.
At the age
of twelve, we read of this young man that "if by chance his mother sent one of
her maids of honor to him with a message, he never allowed her to come in, but
listened to her through the barely opened door, and dismissed her immediately.
He did not like to be alone with his own mother, whether at table or in conversation;
and when the rest of the company withdrew, he sought also a pretext for retiring....
Several great ladies, relatives of his, he avoided learning to know even by sight;
and he made a sort of treaty with his father, engaging promptly and readily to
accede to all his wishes, if he might only be excused from all visits to ladies."
(Ibid., p. 71.)
When he was seventeen years old Louis joined the Jesuit order,
* against his father's passionate entreaties, for he was heir of a princely house;
and when a year later the father died, he took the loss as a 'particular attention'
to himself on God's part, and wrote letters of stilted good advice, as from a
spiritual superior, to his grieving mother. He soon became so good a monk that
if any one asked him the number of his brothers and sisters, he had to reflect
and count them over before replying. A Father asked him one day if he were never
troubled by the thought of his family, to which, "I never think of them except
when praying for them," was his only answer. Never was he seen to hold in his
hand a flower or anything perfumed, that he might take pleasure in it. On the
contrary, in the hospital, he used to seek for whatever was most disgusting, and
eagerly snatch the bandages of ulcers, etc., from the hands of his companions.
He avoided worldly talk, and immediately tried to turn every conversation on to
pious subjects, or else he remained silent. He systematically refused to notice
his surroundings. Being ordered one day to bring a book from the rector's seat
in the refectory, he had to ask where the rector sat, for in the three months
he had eaten bread there, so carefully did he guard his eyes that he had not noticed
the place. One day, during recess, having looked by chance on one of his companions,
he reproached himself as for a grave sin against modesty. He cultivated silence,
as preserving from sins of the tongue; and his greatest penance was the limit
which his superiors set to his bodily penances. He sought after false accusations
and unjust reprimands as opportunities of humility; and such was his obedience
that, when a room-mate, having no more paper, asked him for a sheet, he did not
feel free to give it to him without first obtaining the permission of the superior,
who, as such, stood in the place of God, and transmitted his orders.
* In
his boyish note-book he praises the monastic life for its freedom from sin, and
for the imperishable treasures, which it enables us to store up, "of merit in
God's eyes which makes of Him our debtor for all Eternity." Loc. cit., p. 62.
I can find no other sorts of fruit than these of Louis's saintship. He died
in 1591, in his twenty-ninth year, and is known in the Church as the patron of
all young people. On his festival, the altar in the chapel devoted to him in a
certain church in Rome "is embosomed in flowers, arranged with exquisite taste;
and a pile of letters may be seen at its foot, written to the Saint by young men
and women, and directed to 'Paradiso.' They are supposed to be burnt unread except
by San Luigi, who must find singular petitions in these pretty little missives,
tied up now with a green ribbon, expressive of hope, now with a red one, emblematic
of love," etc. *
* Mademoiselle Mori, a novel quoted in HARE'S Walks in Rome,
1900, i. 55.
I cannot resist the temptation to quote from Starbuck's book,
p. 388, another case of purification by elimination. It runs as follows:
"The
signs of abnormality which sanctified persons show are of frequent occurrence.
They get out of tune with other people; often they will have nothing to do with
churches, which they regard as worldly; they become hypercritical towards others;
they grow careless of their social, political, and financial obligations. As an
instance of this type may be mentioned a woman of sixty-eight of whom the writer
made a special study. She had been a member of one of the most active and progressive
churches in a busy part of a large city. Her pastor described her as having reached
the censorious stage. She had grown more and more out of sympathy with the church;
her connection with it finally consisted simply in attendance at prayer-meeting,
at which her only message was that of reproof and condemnation of the others for
living on a low plane. At last she withdrew from fellowship with any church. The
writer found her living alone in a little room on the top story of a cheap boarding-house,
quite out of touch with all human relations, but apparently happy in the enjoyment
of her own spiritual blessings. Her time was occupied in writing booklets on sanctification-
page after page of dreamy rhapsody. She proved to be one of a small group of persons
who claim that entire salvation involves three steps instead of two; not only
must there be conversion and sanctification, but a third, which they call 'crucifixion'
or 'perfect redemption,' and which seems to bear the same relation to sanctification
that this bears to conversion. She related how the Spirit had said to her, 'Stop
going to church. Stop going to holiness meetings. Go to your own room and I will
teach you.' She professes to care nothing for colleges, or preachers, or churches,
but only cares to listen to what God says to her. Her description of her experience
seemed entirely consistent; she is happy and contented, and her life is entirely
satisfactory to herself. While listening to her own story, one was tempted to
forget that it was from the life of a person who could not live by it in conjunction
with her fellows."
Our final judgment of the worth of such a life as this
will depend largely on our conception of God, and of the sort of conduct he is
best pleased with in his creatures. The Catholicism of the sixteenth century paid
little heed to social righteousness; and to leave the world to the devil whilst
saving one's own soul was then accounted no discreditable scheme. To-day, rightly
or wrongly, helpfulness in general human affairs is, in consequence of one of
those secular mutations in moral sentiment of which I spoke, deemed an essential
element of worth in character; and to be of some public or private use is also
reckoned as a species of divine service. Other early Jesuits, especially the missionaries
among them, the Xaviers, Brebeufs, Jogues, were objective minds, and fought in
their way for the world's welfare; so their lives to-day inspire us. But when
the intellect, as in this Louis, is originally no larger than a pin's head, and
cherishes ideas of God of corresponding smallness, the result, notwithstanding
the heroism put forth, is on the whole repulsive. Purity, we see in the object-lesson,
is not the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many
a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted.
Proceeding
onwards in our search of religious extravagance, we next come upon excesses
of Tenderness and Charity. Here saintliness has to face the charge of preserving
the unfit, and breeding parasites and beggars. 'Resist not evil,' 'Love your enemies,'
these are saintly maxims of which men of this world find it hard to speak without
impatience. Are the men of this world right, or are the saints in possession of
the deeper range of truth?
No simple answer is possible. Here, if anywhere,
one feels the complexity of the moral life, and the mysteriousness of the way
in which facts and ideals are interwoven.
Perfect conduct is a relation between
three terms: the actor, the objects for which he acts, and the recipients of the
action. In order that conduct should be abstractly perfect, all three terms, intention,
execution, and reception, should be suited to one another. The best intention
will fail if it either work by false means or address itself to the wrong recipient.
Thus no critic or estimator of the value of conduct can confine himself to the
actor's animus alone, apart from the other elements of the performance. As there
is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable
arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are
folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors. The saint
may simply give the universe into the hands of the enemy by his trustfulness.
He may by non-resistance cut off his own survival.
Herbert Spencer
tells us that the perfect man's conduct will appear perfect only when the
environment is perfect: to no inferior environment is it suitably adapted. We
may paraphrase this by cordially admitting that saintly conduct would be the most
perfect conduct conceivable in an environment where all were saints already; but
by adding that in an environment where few are saints, and many the exact reverse
of saints, it must be ill adapted. We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical
common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually
is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have
been, manifested in excess. The powers of darkness have systematically taken advantage
of them. The whole modern scientific organization of charity is a consequence
of the failure of simply giving alms. The whole history of constitutional government
is a commentary on the excellence of resisting evil, and when one cheek is smitten,
of smiting back and not turning the other cheek also.
You will agree to this
in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoy,
you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up
thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.
And yet you are sure, as
I am sure, that were the world confined to these hard-headed, hard-hearted, and
hard-fisted methods exclusively, were there no one prompt to help a brother first,
and find out afterwards whether he were worthy; no one willing to drown his private
wrongs in pity for the wronger's person; no one ready to be duped many a time
rather than live always on suspicion; no one glad to treat individuals passionately
and impulsively rather than by general rules of prudence; the world would be an
infinitely worse place than it is now to live in. The tender grace, not of a day
that is dead, but of a day yet to be born somehow, with the golden rule grown
natural, would be cut out from the perspective of our imaginations.
The
saints, existing in this way, may, with their extravagances of human tenderness,
be prophetic. Nay, innumerable times they have proved themselves prophetic. Treating
those whom they met, in spite of the past, in spite of all appearances, as worthy,
they have stimulated them to be worthy, miraculously transformed them by their
radiant example and by the challenge of their expectation.
From this point
of view we may admit the human charity which we find in all saints, and the great
excess of it which we find in some saints, to be a genuinely creative social force,
tending to make real a degree of virtue which it alone is ready to assume as possible.
The saints are authors, auctores, increasers, of goodness. The potentialities
of development in human souls are unfathomable. So many who seemed irretrievably
hardened have in point of fact been softened, converted, regenerated, in ways
that amazed the subjects even more than they surprised the spectators, that we
never can be sure in advance of any man that his salvation by the way of love
is hopeless. We have no right to speak of human crocodiles and boa-constrictors
as of fixedly incurable beings. We know not the complexities of personality, the
smouldering emotional fires, the other facets of the character-polyhedron, the
resources of the subliminal region. St. Paul long ago made our ancestors familiar
with the idea that every soul is virtually sacred. Since Christ died for us all
without exception, St. Paul said, we must despair of no one. This belief in the
essential sacredness of every one expresses itself to-day in all sorts of humane
customs and reformatory institutions, and in a growing aversion to the death penalty
and to brutality in punishment. The saints, with their extravagance of human tenderness,
are the great torch-bearers of this belief, the tip of the wedge, the clearers
of the darkness. Like the single drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flung
far ahead of the advancing edge of a wave-crest or of a flood, they show the way
and are forerunners. The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the
midst of the world's affairs to be preposterous. Yet they are impregnators of
the world, vivifiers and animaters of potentialities of goodness which but for
them would lie forever dormant. It is not possible to be quite as mean as we naturally
are, when they have passed before us. One fire kindles another; and without that
over-trust in human worth which they show, the rest of us would lie in spiritual
stagnancy.
Momentarily considered, then, the saint may waste his tenderness
and be the dupe and victim of his charitable fever, but the general function of
his charity in social evolution is vital and essential. If things are ever to
move upward, some one must be ready to take the first step, and assume the risk
of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the
saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.
When they do succeed, they are far more powerfully successful than force or worldly
prudence. Force destroys enemies; and the best that can be said of prudence is
that it keeps what we already have in safety. But non-resistance, when successful,
turns enemies into friends; and charity regenerates its objects. These saintly
methods are, as I said, creative energies; and genuine saints find in the elevated
excitement with which their faith endows them an authority and impressiveness
which makes them irresistible in situations where men of shallower nature cannot
get on at all without the use of worldly prudence. This practical proof that worldly
wisdom may be safely transcended is the saint's magic gift to mankind. * Not only
does his vision of a better world console us for the generally prevailing prose
and barrenness; but even when on the whole we have to confess him ill adapted,
he makes some converts, and the environment gets better for his ministry. He is
an effective ferment of goodness, a slow transmuter of the earthly into a more
heavenly order.
In this respect the Utopian dreams of social justice in which
many contemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in spite of their impracticability
and non-adaptation to present environmental conditions, analogous to the saint's
belief in an existent kingdom of heaven. They help to break the edge of the general
reign of hardness, and are slow leavens of a better order.
* The best missionary
lives abound in the victorious combination of non-resistance with personal authority.
John G. Paton, for example, in the New Hebrides, among brutish Melanesian cannibals,
preserves a charmed life by dint of it. When it comes to the point, no one ever
dares actually to strike him. Native converts, inspired by him, showed analogous
virtue. "One of our chiefs, full of the Christ-kindled desire to seek and to save,
sent a message to an inland chief, that he and four attendants would come on Sabbath
and tell them the gospel of Jehovah God. The reply came back sternly forbidding
their visit, and threatening with death any Christian that approached their village.
Our chief sent in response a loving message, telling them that Jehovah had taught
the Christians to return good for evil, and that they would come unarmed to tell
them the story of how the Son of God came into the world and died in order to
bless and save his enemies. The heathen chief sent back a stern and prompt reply
once more: 'If you come, you will be killed.' On Sabbath morn the Christian chief
and his four companions were met outside the village by the heathen chief, who
implored and threatened them once more. But the former said:
"'We come to you
without weapons of war! We come only to tell you about Jesus. We believe that
He will protect us to-day.'
"As they pressed steadily forward towards the
village, spears began to be thrown at them. Some they evaded, being all except
one dexterous warriors; and others they literally received with their bare hands,
and turned them aside in an incredible manner. The heathen, apparently thunderstruck
at these men thus approaching them without weapons of war, and not even flinging
back their own spears which they had caught, after having thrown what the old
chief called 'a shower of spears,' desisted from mere surprise. Our Christian
chief called out, as he and his companions drew up in the midst of them on the
village public ground:
"'Jehovah thus protects us. He has given us all your
spears! Once we would have thrown them back at you and killed you. But now we
come, not to fight but to tell you about Jesus. He has changed our dark hearts.
He asks you now to lay down all these your other weapons of war, and to hear what
we can tell you about the love of God, our great Father, the only living God.'
"The heathen were perfectly overawed. They manifestly looked on these Christians
as protected by some Invisible One. They listened for the first time to the story
of the Gospel and of the Cross. We lived to see that chief and all his tribe sitting
in the school of Christ. And there is perhaps not an island in these southern
seas, amongst all those won for Christ, where similar acts of heroism on the part
of converts cannot be recited." JOHN G. PATON, Missionary to the New Hebrides,
An Autobiography, second part, London, 1890, p. 243.
The next
topic in order is Asceticism, which I fancy you are all ready to consider
without argument a virtue liable to extravagance and excess. The optimism and
refinement of the modern imagination has, as I have already said elsewhere, changed
the attitude of the church towards corporeal mortification, and a Suso or a Saint
Peter of Alcantara * appear to us to-day rather in the light of tragic mountebanks
than of sane men inspiring us with respect. If the inner dispositions are right,
we ask, what need of all this torment, this violation of the outer nature? It
keeps the outer nature too important. Any one who is genuinely emancipated from
the flesh will look on pleasures and pains, abundance and privation, as alike
irrelevant and indifferent. He can engage in actions and experience enjoyments
without fear of corruption or enslavement. As the Bhagavad-Gita says, only those
need renounce worldly actions who are still inwardly attached thereto. If one
be really unattached to the fruits of action, one may mix in the world with equanimity.
I quoted in a former lecture Saint Augustine's antinomian saying: If you only
love God enough, you may safely follow all your inclinations. "He needs no devotional
practices," is one of Ramakrishna's maxims, "whose heart is moved to tears at
the mere mention of the name of Hari." *(2) And the Buddha, in pointing out what
he called 'the middle way' to his disciples, told them to abstain from both extremes,
excessive mortification being as unreal and unworthy as mere desire and pleasure.
The only perfect life, he said, is that of inner wisdom, which makes one thing
as indifferent to us as another, and thus leads to rest, to peace, and to Nirvana.
*(3)
* Saint Peter, Saint Teresa tells us in her autobiography (French translation,
p. 333), "had passed forty years without ever sleeping more than an hour and a
half a day. Of all his mortifications, this was the one that had cost him the
most. To compass it, he kept always on his knees or on his feet. The little sleep
he allowed nature to take was snatched in a sitting posture, his head leaning
against a piece of wood fixed in the wall. Even had he wished to lie down, it
would have been impossible, because his cell was only four feet and a half long.
In the course of all these years he never raised his hood, no matter what the
ardor of the sun or the rain's strength. He never put on a shoe. He wore a garment
of coarse sackcloth, with nothing else upon his skin. This garment was as scant
as possible, and over it a little cloak of the same stuff. When the cold was great
he took off the cloak and opened for a while the door and little window of his
cell. Then he closed them and resumed the mantle,- his way, as he told us, of
warming himself, and making his body feel a better temperature. It was a frequent
thing with him to eat once only in three days; and when I expressed my surprise,
he said that it was very easy if one once had acquired the habit. One of his companions
has assured me that he has gone sometimes eight days without food.... His poverty
was extreme; and his mortification, even in his youth, was such that he told me
he had passed three years in a house of his order without knowing any of the monks
otherwise than by the sound of their voice, for he never raised his eyes, and
only found his way about by following the others. He showed this same modesty
on public highways. He spent many years without ever laying eyes upon a woman;
but he confessed to me that at the age he had reached it was indifferent to him
whether he laid eyes on them or not. He was very old when I first came to know
him, and his body so attenuated that it seemed formed of nothing so much as of
so many roots of trees. With all this sanctity he was very affable. He never spoke
unless he was questioned, but his intellectual right-mindedness and grace gave
to all his words an irresistible charm."
*(2) F. MAX MULLER: Ramakrishna,
his Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 180.
*(3) OLDENBERG: Buddha; translated by
W. HOEY, London, 1882, p. 127
We find accordingly that as ascetic saints have
grown older, and directors of conscience more experienced, they usually have shown
a tendency to lay less stress on special bodily mortifications. Catholic teachers
have always professed the rule that, since health is needed for efficiency in
God's service, health must not be sacrificed to mortification. The general optimism
and healthy-mindedness of liberal Protestant circles to-day makes mortification
for mortification's sake repugnant to us. We can no longer sympathize with cruel
deities, and the notion that God can take delight in the spectacle of sufferings
self-inflicted in his honor is abhorrent. In consequence of all these motives
you probably are disposed, unless some special utility can be shown in some individual's
discipline, to treat the general tendency to asceticism as pathological.
Yet
I believe that a more careful consideration of the whole matter, distinguishing
between the general good intention of asceticism and the uselessness of some of
the particular acts of which it may be guilty, ought to rehabilitate it in our
esteem. For in its spiritual meaning asceticism stands for nothing less than for
the essence of the twice-born philosophy. It symbolizes, lamely enough no doubt,
but sincerely, the belief that there is an element of real wrongness in this world,
which is neither to be ignored nor evaded, but which must be squarely met and
overcome by an appeal to the soul's heroic resources, and neutralized and cleansed
away by suffering. As against this view, the ultra-optimistic form of the once-born
philosophy thinks we may treat evil by the method of ignoring. Let a man who,
by fortunate health and circumstances, escapes the suffering of any great amount
of evil in his own person, also close his eyes to it as it exists in the wider
universe outside his private experience, and he will be quit of it altogether,
and can sail through life happily on a healthy-minded basis. But we saw in our
lectures on melancholy how precarious this attempt necessarily is. Moreover it
is but for the individual; and leaves the evil outside of him, unredeemed and
unprovided for in his philosophy.
No such attempt can be a general solution
of the problem; and to minds of sombre tinge, who naturally feel life as a tragic
mystery, such optimism is a shallow dodge or mean evasion. It accepts, in lieu
of a real deliverance, what is a lucky personal accident merely, a cranny to escape
by. It leaves the general world unhelped and still in the clutch of Satan. The
real deliverance, the twice-born folk insist, must be of universal application.
Pain and wrong and death must be fairly met and overcome in higher excitement,
or else their sting remains essentially unbroken. If one has ever taken the fact
of the prevalence of tragic death in this world's history fairly into his mind,-
freezing, drowning, entombment alive, wild beasts, worse men, and hideous diseases,-
he can with difficulty, it seems to me, continue his own career of worldly prosperity
without suspecting that he may all the while not be really inside the game, that
he may lack the great initiation.
Well, this is exactly what asceticism thinks;
and it voluntarily takes the initiation. Life is neither farce nor genteel comedy,
it says, but something we must sit at in mourning garments, hoping its bitter
taste will purge us of our folly. The wild and the heroic are indeed such rooted
parts of it that healthy-mindedness pure and simple, with its sentimental optimism,
can hardly be regarded by any thinking man as a serious solution. Phrases of neatness,
cosiness, and comfort can never be an answer to the sphinx's riddle.
In these
remarks I am leaning only upon mankind's common instinct for reality, which in
point of fact has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.
In heroism, we feel, life's supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who
has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter
what a man's frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still
more if be suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates
him forever. Inferior to ourselves in this or that way, if yet we cling to life,
and he is able 'to fling it away like a flower' as caring nothing for it, we account
him in the deepest way our born superior. Each of us in his own person feels that
a high-hearted indifference to life would expiate all his shortcomings.
The
metaphysical mystery, thus recognized by common sense, that he who feeds on death
that feeds on men possesses life supereminently and excellently, and meets best
the secret demands of the universe, is the truth of which asceticism has been
the faithful champion. The folly of the cross, so inexplicable by the intellect,
has yet its indestructible vital meaning.
Representatively, then, and symbolically,
and apart from the vagaries into which the unenlightened intellect of former times
may have let it wander, asceticism must, I believe, be acknowledged to go with
the profounder way of handling the gift of existence. Naturalistic optimism is
mere syllabub and flattery and sponge-cake in comparison. The practical course
of action for us, as religious men, would therefore, it seems to me, not be simply
to turn our backs upon the ascetic impulse, as most of us to-day turn them, but
rather to discover some outlet for it of which the fruits in the way of privation
and hardship might be objectively useful. The older monastic asceticism occupied
itself with pathetic futilities, or terminated in the mere egotism of the individual,
increasing his own perfection. * But is it not possible for us to discard most
of these older forms of mortification, and yet find saner channels for the heroism
which inspired them?
* "The vanities of all others may die out, but the vanity
of a saint as regards his sainthood is hard indeed to wear away." Ramakrishna,
his Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 172.
Does not, for example, the worship of
material luxury and wealth, which constitutes so large a portion of the 'spirit'
of our age, make somewhat for effeminacy and unmanliness? Is not the exclusively
sympathetic and facetious way in which most children are brought up today so different
from the education of a hundred years ago, especially in evangelical circles-
in danger, in spite of its many advantages, of developing a certain trashiness
of fibre? Are there not hereabouts some points of application for a renovated
and revised ascetic discipline?
Many of you would recognize
such dangers, but would point to athletics, militarism, and individual and national
enterprise and adventure as the remedies. These contemporary ideals are quite
as remarkable for the energy with which they make for heroic standards of life,
as contemporary religion is remarkable for the way in which it neglects them.
* War and adventure assuredly keep all who engage in them from treating themselves
too tenderly. They demand such incredible efforts, depth beyond depth of exertion,
both in degree and in duration, that the whole scale of motivation alters. Discomfort
and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and cold, squalor and filth, cease to have
any deterrent operation whatever. Death turns into a commonplace matter, and its
usual power to check our action vanishes. With the annulling of these customary
inhibitions, ranges of new energy are set free, and life seems cast upon a higher
plane of power.
* "When a church has to be run by oysters, ice-cream, and
fun," I read in an American religious paper, "you may be sure that it is running
away from Christ." Such, if one may judge by appearances, is the present plight
of many of our churches. -
The beauty of war in this respect is that it is
so congruous with ordinary human nature. Ancestral evolution has made us all potential
warriors; so the most insignificant individual, when thrown into an army in the
field, is weaned from whatever excess of tenderness towards his precious person
he may bring with him, and may easily develop into a monster of insensibility.
But when we compare the military type of self-severity with that of the ascetic
saint, we find a world-wide difference in all their spiritual concomitants.
"'Live and let live,'" writes a clear-headed Austrian officer, "is no device for
an army. Contempt for one's own comrades, for the troops of the enemy, and, above
all, fierce contempt for one's own person, are what war demands of every one.
Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than
to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness. If the soldier is
to be good for anything as a soldier, he must be exactly the opposite of a reasoning
and thinking man. The measure of goodness in him is his possible use in war. War,
and even peace, require of the soldier absolutely peculiar standards of morality.
The recruit brings with him common moral notions, of which he must seek immediately
to get rid. For him victory, success, must be everything. The most barbaric tendencies
in men come to life again in war, and for war's uses they are incommensurably
good." *
* C.V.B.K.: Friedens- und Kriegs-moral der Heere. Quoted by HAMON:
Psychologie du Militaire professional, 1895, p. xli. -
These words are of
course literally true. The immediate aim of the soldier's life is, as Moltke said,
destruction, and nothing but destruction; and whatever constructions wars result
in are remote and non-military. Consequently the soldier cannot train himself
to be too feelingless to all those usual sympathies and respects, whether for
persons or for things, that make for conservation. Yet the fact remains that war
is a school of strenuous life and heroism; and, being in the line of aboriginal
instinct, is the only school that as yet is universally available. But when we
gravely ask ourselves whether this wholesale organization of irrationality and
crime be our only bulwark against effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought,
and think more kindly of ascetic religion. One hears of the mechanical equivalent
of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent
of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and
yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself
to be incompatible. I have often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship,
in spite of the pedantry which infested it, there might be something like that
moral equivalent of war which we are seeking. May not voluntarily accepted poverty
be 'the strenuous life,' without the need of crushing weaker peoples?
Poverty
indeed is the strenuous life,- without brass bands or uniforms or hysteric popular
applause or lies or circumlocutions; and when one sees the way in which wealth-getting
enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation, one wonders
whether a revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may
not be 'the transformation of military courage,' and the spiritual reform which
our time stands most in need of.
Among us English-speaking peoples especially
do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally
afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify
and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with
the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have
lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could
have meant; the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier
indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have,
the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly,- the more athletic
trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes
are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship;
when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought
of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time
for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.
It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to
ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth
does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain
wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators
of corruption. There are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man
must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman.
Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if
we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear
to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes
of promotion vanish; our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet,
while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example
would help to set free our generation. The cause would need its funds, but we
its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with
our poverty.
I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is
certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst
moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
I have now said all that
I can usefully say about the several fruits of religion as they are manifested
in saintly lives, so I will make a brief review and pass to my more general conclusions.
Our question, you will remember, is as to whether religion
stands approved by its fruits, as these are exhibited in the saintly type of character.
Single attributes of saintliness may, it is true, be temperamental endowments,
found in non-religious individuals. But the whole group of them forms a combination
which, as such, is religious, for it seems to flow from the sense of the divine
as from its psychological centre. Whoever possesses strongly this sense comes
naturally to think that the smallest details of this world derive infinite significance
from their relation to an unseen divine order. The thought of this order yields
him a superior denomination of happiness, and a steadfastness of soul with which
no other can compare. In social relations his serviceability is exemplary; he
abounds in impulses to help. His help is inward as well as outward, for his sympathy
reaches souls as well as bodies, and kindles unsuspected faculties therein. Instead
of placing happiness where common men place it, in comfort, he places it in a
higher kind of inner excitement, which converts discomforts into sources of cheer
and annuls unhappiness. So he turns his back upon no duty, however thankless;
and when we are in need of assistance, we can count upon the saint lending his
hand with more certainty than we can count upon any other person. Finally, his
humble-mindedness and his ascetic tendencies save him from the petty personal
pretensions which so obstruct our ordinary social intercourse, and his purity
gives us in him a clean man for a companion. Felicity, purity, charity, patience,
self-severity,- these are splendid excellencies, and the saint of all men shows
them in the completest possible measure.
But, as we saw, all these things
together do not make saints infallible. When their intellectual outlook is narrow,
they fall into all sorts of holy excesses, fanaticism or theopathic absorption,
self-torment, prudery, scrupulosity, gullibility, and morbid inability to meet
the world. By the very intensity of his fidelity to the paltry ideals with which
an inferior intellect may inspire him, a saint can be even more objectionable
and damnable than a superficial carnal man would be in the same situation. We
must judge him not sentimentally only, and not in isolation, but using our own
intellectual standards, placing him in his environment, and estimating his total
function.
Now in the matter of intellectual standards, we must bear in mind
that it is unfair, where we find narrowness of mind, always to impute it as a
vice to the individual, for in religious and theological matters he probably absorbs
his narrowness from his generation. Moreover, we must not confound the essentials
of saintliness, which are those general passions of which I have spoken, with
its accidents, which are the special determinations of these passions at any historical
moment. In these determinations the saints will usually be loyal to the temporary
idols of their tribe. Taking refuge in monasteries was as much an idol of the
tribe in the middle ages, as bearing a hand in the world's work is to-day. Saint
Francis or Saint Bernard, were they living to-day, would undoubtedly be leading
consecrated lives of some sort, but quite as undoubtedly they would not lead them
in retirement. Our animosity to special historic, manifestations must not lead
us to give away the saintly impulses in their essential nature to the tender mercies
of inimical critics.
The most inimical critic of the saintly impulses whom
I know is Nietzsche. He contrasts them with the worldly passions as we find these
embodied in the predaceous military character, altogether to the advantage of
the latter. Your born saint, it must be confessed, has something about him which
often makes the gorge of a carnal man rise, so it will be worth while to consider
the contrast in question more fully.
Dislike of the saintly
nature seems to be a negative result of the biologically useful instinct of welcoming
leadership, and glorifying the chief of the tribe. The chief is the potential,
if not the actual tyrant, the masterful, overpowering man of prey. We confess
our inferiority and grovel before him. We quail under his glance, and are at the
same time proud of owning so dangerous a lord. Such instinctive and submissive
hero-worship must have been indispensable in primeval tribal life. In the endless
wars of those times, leaders were absolutely needed for the tribe's survival.
If there were any tribes who owned no leaders, they can have left no issue to
narrate their doom. The leaders always had good consciences, for conscience in
them coalesced with Will, and those who looked on their face were as much smitten
with wonder at their freedom from inner restraint as with awe at the energy of
their outward performances.
Compared with these beaked and taloned graspers
of the world, saints are herbivorous animals, tame and harmless barn-yard poultry.
There are saints whose beard you may, if you ever care to, pull with impunity.
Such a man excites no thrills of wonder veiled in terror; his conscience is full
of scruples and returns; he stuns us neither by his inward freedom nor his outward
power; and unless he found within us an altogether different faculty of admiration
to appeal to, we should pass him by with contempt.
In point of fact, he does
appeal to a different faculty. Reenacted in human nature is the fable of the wind,
the sun, and the traveler. The sexes embody the discrepancy. The woman loves the
man the more admiringly the stormier he shows himself, and the world deifies its
rulers the more for being willful and unaccountable. But the woman in turn subjugates
the man by the mystery of gentleness in beauty, and the saint has always charmed
the world by something similar. Mankind is susceptible and suggestible in opposite
directions, and the rivalry of influences is unsleeping. The saintly and the worldly
ideal pursue their feud in literature as much as in real life.
For Nietzsche
the saint represents little but sneakingness and slavishness. He is the sophisticated
invalid, the degenerate par excellence, the man of insufficient vitality. His
prevalence would put the human type in danger.
"The sick are the greatest
danger for the well. The weaker, not the stronger, are the strong's undoing. It
is not fear of our fellow-man, which we should wish to see diminished; for fear
rouses those who are strong to become terrible in turn themselves, and preserves
the hard-earned and successful type of humanity. What is to be dreaded by us more
than any other doom is not fear, but rather the great disgust, not fear, but rather
the great pity- disgust and pity for our human fellows.... The morbid are our
greatest peril- not the 'bad' men, not the predatory beings. Those born wrong,
the miscarried, the broken- they it is, the weakest, who are undermining the vitality
of the race, poisoning our trust in life, and putting humanity in question. Every
look of them is a sigh,- 'Would I were something other! I am sick and tired of
what I am.' In this swamp-soil of self-contempt, every poisonous weed flourishes,
and all so small, so secret, so dishonest, and so sweetly rotten. Here swarm the
worms of sensitiveness and resentment; here the air smells odious with secrecy,
with what is not to be acknowledged; here is woven endlessly the net of the meanest
of conspiracies, the conspiracy of those who suffer against those who succeed
and are victorious; here the very aspect of the victorious is hated- as if health,
success, strength, pride, and the sense of power were in themselves things vicious,
for which one ought eventually to make bitter expiation. Oh, how these people
would themselves like to inflict the expiation, how they thirst to be the hangmen!
And all the while their duplicity never confesses their hatred to be hatred."
*
* Zur Genealogie der Moral, Dritte Abhandlung, SS 14. I have abridged, and
in one place transposed, a sentence.
Poor Nietzsche's antipathy is itself
sickly enough, but we all know what he means, and he expresses well the clash
between the two ideals. The carnivorous-minded 'strong man,' the adult male and
cannibal, can see nothing but mouldiness and morbidness in the saint's gentleness
and self-severity, and regards him with pure loathing. The whole feud revolves
essentially upon two pivots: Shall the seen world or the unseen world be our chief
sphere of adaptation? and must our means of adaptation in this seen world be aggressiveness
or non-resistance?
The debate is serious. In some sense and to some degree
both worlds must be acknowledged and taken account of; and in the seen world both
aggressiveness and non-resistance are needful. It is a question of emphasis, of
more or less. Is the saint's type or the strong-man's type the more ideal?
It has often been supposed, and even now, I think, it is supposed
by most persons, that there can be one intrinsically ideal type of human character.
A certain kind of man, it is imagined, must be the best man absolutely and apart
from the utility of his function, apart from economical considerations. The saint's
type, and the knight's or gentleman's type, have always been rival claimants of
this absolute ideality; and in the ideal of military religious orders both types
were in a manner blended. According to the empirical philosophy, however, all
ideals are matters of relation. It would be absurd, for example, to ask for a
definition of 'the ideal horse,' so long as dragging drays and running races,
bearing children, and jogging about with tradesmen's packages all remain as indispensable
differentiations of equine function. You may take what you call a general all-round
animal as a compromise, but he will be inferior to any horse of a more specialized
type, in some one particular direction. We must not forget this now when, in discussing
saintliness, we ask if it be an ideal type of manhood. We must test it by its
economical relations.
I think that the method which Mr. Spencer uses in his
Data of Ethics will help to fix our opinion. Ideality in conduct is altogether
a matter of adaptation. A society where all were invariably aggressive would destroy
itself by inner friction, and in a society where some are aggressive, others must
be non-resistant, if there is to be any kind of order. This is the present constitution
of society, and to the mixture we owe many of our blessings. But the aggressive
members of society are always tending to become bullies, robbers, and swindlers;
and no one believes that such a state of things as we now live in is the millennium.
It is meanwhile quite possible to conceive an imaginary society in which there
should be no aggressiveness, but only sympathy and fairness,- any small community
of true friends now realizes such a society. Abstractly considered, such a society
on a large scale would be the millennium, for every good thing might be realized
there with no expense of friction. To such a millennial society the saint would
be entirely adapted. His peaceful modes of appeal would be efficacious over his
companions, and there would be no one extant to take advantage of his non-resistance.
The saint is therefore abstractly a higher type of man than the 'strong man,'
because he is adapted to the highest society conceivable, whether that society
ever be concretely possible or not. The strong man would immediately tend by his
presence to make that society deteriorate. It would become inferior in everything
save in a certain kind of bellicose excitement, dear to men as they now are.
But if we turn from the abstract question to the actual situation,
we find that the individual saint may be well or ill adapted, according to particular
circumstances. There is, in short, no absoluteness in the excellence of sainthood.
It must be confessed that as far as this world goes, any one who makes an out-and-out
saint of himself does so at his peril. If he is not a large enough man, he may
appear more insignificant and contemptible, for all his saintship, than if he
had remained a worldling. * Accordingly religion has seldom been so radically
taken in our Western world that the devotee could not mix it with some worldly
temper. It has always found good men who could follow most of its impulses, but
who stopped short when it came to non-resistance. Christ himself was fierce upon
occasion. Cromwells, Stonewall Jacksons, Gordons, show that Christians can be
strong men also.
* We all know daft saints, and they inspire a queer kind
of aversion. But in comparing saints with strong men we must choose individuals
on the same intellectual level. The under-witted strong man, homologous in his
sphere with the under-witted saint, is the bully of the slums, the hooligan or
rowdy. Surely on this level also the saint preserves a certain superiority.
How is success to be absolutely measured when there are so many environments and
so many ways of looking at the adaptation? It cannot be measured absolutely; the
verdict will vary according to the point of view adopted. From the biological
point of view Saint Paul was a failure, because he was beheaded. Yet he was magnificently
adapted to the larger environment of history; and so far as any saint's example
is a leaven of righteousness in the world, and draws it in the direction of more
prevalent habits of saintliness, he is a success, no matter what his immediate
bad fortune may be. The greatest saints, the spiritual heroes whom every one acknowledges,
the Francises, Bernards, Luthers, Loyolas, Wesleys, Channings, Moodys, Gratrys,
the Phillips Brookses, the Agnes Joneses, Margaret Hallahans, and Dora Pattisons,
are successes from the outset. They show themselves, and there is no question;
every one perceives their strength and stature. Their sense of mystery in things,
their passion, their goodness, irradiate about them and enlarge their outlines
while they soften them. They are like pictures with an atmosphere and background;
and, placed alongside of them, the strong men of this world and no other seem
as dry as sticks, as hard and crude as blocks of stone or brickbats.
In
a general way, then, and 'on the whole,' our abandonment of theological criteria,
and our testing of religion by practical common sense and the empirical method,
leave it in possession of its towering place in history. Economically, the saintly
group of qualities is indispensable to the world's welfare. The great saints are
immediate successes; the smaller ones are at least heralds and harbingers, and
they may be leavens also, of a better mundane order. Let us be saints, then, if
we can, whether or not we succeed visibly and temporally. But in our Father's
house are many mansions, and each of us must discover for himself the kind of
religion and the amount of saintship which best comports with what he believes
to be his powers and feels to be his truest mission and vocation. There are no
successes to be guaranteed and no set orders to be given to individuals, so long
as we follow the methods of empirical philosophy.
This is my conclusion so
far. I know that on some of your minds it leaves a feeling of wonder that such
a method should have been applied to such a subject, and this in spite of all
those remarks about empiricism which I made at the beginning of Lecture XIII.
How, you say, can religion, which believes in two worlds and an invisible order,
be estimated by the adaptation of its fruits to this world's order alone? It is
its truth, not its utility, you insist, upon which our verdict ought to depend.
If religion is true, its fruits are good fruits, even though in this world they
should prove uniformly ill adapted and full of naught but pathos. It goes back,
then, after all, to the question of the truth of theology. The plot inevitably
thickens upon us; we cannot escape theoretical considerations. I propose, then,
that to some degree we face the responsibility. Religious persons have often,
though not uniformly, professed to see truth in a special manner. That manner
is known as mysticism. I will consequently now proceed to treat at some length
of mystical phenomena, and after that, though more briefly, I will consider religious
philosophy.