Most books on the philosophy of religion try
to begin with a precise definition of what its essence consists of. Some of these
would-be definitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this course,
and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now. Meanwhile
the very fact that they are so many and so different from one another is enough
to prove that the word 'religion' cannot stand for any single principle or essence,
but is rather a collective name. The theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification
of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism
by which both philosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall immediately
into a one-sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit freely at the outset
that we may very likely find no one essence, but many characters which may alternately
be equally important in religion. If we should inquire for the essence of 'government,'
for example, one man might tell us it was authority, another submission, another
police, another an army, another an assembly, another a system of laws; yet all
the while it would be true that no concrete government can exist without all these
things, one of which is more important at one moment and others at another. The
man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about
a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance
with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract
conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
And why may not religion be a conception equally complex? * - * I can do no
better here than refer my readers to the extended and admirable remarks on the
futility of all these definitions of religion, in an article by Professor Leuba,
published in the Monist for January, 1901, after my own text was written. -
Consider also the 'religious sentiment' which we see referred
to in so many books, as if it were a single sort of mental entity. In the
psychologies and in the philosophies of religion, we find the authors attempting
to specify just what entity it is. One man allies it to the feeling of dependence;
one makes it a derivative from fear; others connect it with the sexual life; others
still identify it with the feeling of the infinite; and so on. Such different
ways of conceiving it ought of themselves to arouse doubt as to whether it possibly
can be one specific thing; and the moment we are willing to treat the term 'religious
sentiment' as a collective name for the many sentiments which religious objects
may arouse in alternation, we see that it probably contains nothing whatever of
a psychologically specific nature. There is religious fear, religious love, religious
awe, religious joy, and so forth. But religious love is only man's natural emotion
of love directed to a religious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear
of commerce, so to speak, the common quaking of the human breast, in so far as
the notion of divine retribution may arouse it; religious awe is the same organic
thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only this
time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations; and similarly
of all the various sentiments which may be called into play in the lives of religious
persons. As concrete states of mind, made up of a feeling plus a specific sort
of object, religious emotions of course are psychic entities distinguishable from
other concrete emotions; but there is no ground for assuming a simple abstract
'religious emotion' to exist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself,
present in every religious experience without exception. As there thus seems
to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a common storehouse of emotions
upon which religious objects may draw, so there might conceivably also prove to
be no one specific and essential kind of religious object, and no one specific
and essential kind of religious act. The field of religion
being as wide as this, it is manifestly impossible that I should pretend to cover
it. My lectures must be limited to a fraction of the subject. And, although it
would indeed be foolish to set up an abstract definition of religion's essence,
and then proceed to defend that definition against all comers, yet this need not
prevent me from taking my own narrow view of what religion shall consist in for
the purpose of these lectures, or, out of the many meanings of the word, from
choosing the one meaning in which I wish to interest you particularly, and proclaiming
arbitrarily that when I say 'religion' I mean that. This, in fact, is what I must
do, and I will now preliminarily seek to mark out the field I choose. One
way to mark it out easily is to say what aspects of the subject we leave out.
At the outset we are struck by one great partition which divides the religious
field. On the one side of it lies institutional, on the other personal religion.
As M.P. Sabatier says, one branch of religion keeps the divinity, another keeps
man most in view. Worship and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions
of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials
of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it, we should
have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning the favor of the
gods. In the more personal branch of religion it is on the contrary the inner
dispositions of man himself which form the centre of interest, his conscience,
his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness. And although the favor of the
God, as forfeited or gained, is still an essential feature of the story, and theology
plays a vital part therein, yet the acts to which this sort of religion prompts
are personal not ritual acts, the individual transacts the business by himself
alone, and the ecclesiastical organization, with its priests and sacraments and
other go-betweens, sinks to an altogether secondary place. The relation goes direct
from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between man and his maker. Now
in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch entirely, to
say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to consider as little as possible
the systematic theology and the ideas about the gods themselves, and to confine
myself as far as I can to personal religion pure and simple. To some of you personal
religion, thus nakedly considered, will no doubt seem too incomplete a thing to
wear the general name. "It is a part of religion," you will say, "but only its
unorganized rudiment; if we are to name it by itself, we had better call it man's
conscience or morality than his religion. The name 'religion' should be reserved
for the fully organized system of feeling, thought, and institution, for the Church,
in short, of which this personal religion, so called, is but a fractional element."
But if you say this, it will only show the more plainly how much the question
of definition tends to become a dispute about names. Rather than prolong such
a dispute, I am willing to accept almost any name for the personal religion of
which I propose to treat. Call it conscience or morality, if you yourselves prefer,
and not religion- under either name it will be equally worthy of our study. As
for myself, I think it will prove to contain some elements which morality pure
and simple does not contain, and these elements I shall soon seek to point out;
so I will myself continue to apply the word 'religion' to it; and in the last
lecture of all, I will bring in the theologies and the ecclesiasticisms, and say
something of its relation to them. In one sense at least the personal religion
will prove itself more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches,
when once established, live at second hand upon tradition; but the founders of
every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal
communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha,
Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case;- so
personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who continue
to esteem it incomplete. There are, it is true, other things in religion chronologically
more primordial than personal devoutness in the moral sense. Fetishism and magic
seem to have preceded inward piety historically- at least our records of inward
piety do not reach back so far. And if fetishism and magic be regarded as stages
of religion, one may say that personal religion in the inward sense and the genuinely
spiritual ecclesiasticisms which it founds are phenomena of secondary or even
tertiary order. But, quite apart from the fact that many anthropologists- for
instance, Jevons and Frazer- expressly oppose 'religion' and 'magic' to each other,
it is certain that the whole system of thought which leads to magic, fetishism,
and the lower superstitions may just as well be called primitive science as called
primitive religion. The question thus becomes a verbal one again; and our knowledge
of all these early stages of thought and feeling is in any case so conjectural
and imperfect that farther discussion would not be worth while. Religion,
therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the
feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as
they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the
divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident
that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies,
and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. In these lectures, however,
as I have already said, the immediate personal experiences will amply fill our
time, and we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all. We
escape much controversial matter by this arbitrary definition of our field.
But, still, a chance of controversy comes up over the word 'divine,' if we take
it in the definition in too narrow a sense. There are systems of thought which
the world usually calls religious, and yet which do not positively assume a God.
Buddhism is in this case. Popularly, of course, the Buddha himself stands in place
of a God; but in strictness the Buddhistic system is atheistic. Modern transcendental
idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract
Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity
in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object
of the transcendentalist cult. In that address to the graduating class at Divinity
College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship
of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance. - "These
laws," said the speaker, "execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space,
and not subject to circumstance: Thus, in the soul of man there is a justice whose
retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled.
He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity
thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the
safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God, do enter into that
man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out
of acquaintance with his own being. Character is always known. Thefts never enrich;
alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture
of a lie- for example, the taint of vanity, any attempt to make a good impression,
a favorable appearance- will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth,
and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground
there do seem to stir and move to bear your witness. For all things proceed out
of the same spirit, which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in its
different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the several
shores which it washes. In so far as he roves from these ends, a man bereaves
himself of power, of auxiliaries. His being shrinks... he becomes less and less,
a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death. The perception of this
law awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and
which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command.
It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. It makes the sky and the
hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. It is the beatitude of
man. It makes him illimitable. When he says 'I ought'; when love warns him; when
he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then, deep melodies
wander through his soul from supreme wisdom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged
by his worship; for he can never go behind this sentiment. All the expressions
of this sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity. [They]
affect us more than all other compositions. The sentences of the olden time, which
ejaculate this piety, are still fresh and fragrant. And the unique impression
of Jesus upon mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the
history of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion." *
* Miscellanies, 1868, p. 120 (abridged). Such is the Emersonian religion.
The universe has a divine soul of order, which soul is moral, being also the soul
within the soul of man. But whether this soul of the universe be a mere quality
like the eye's brilliancy or the skin's softness, or whether it be a self-conscious
life like the eye's seeing or the skin's feeling, is a decision that never unmistakably
appears in Emerson's pages. It quivers on the boundary of these things, sometimes
leaning one way, sometimes the other, to suit the literary rather than the philosophic
need. Whatever it is, though, it is active. As much as if it were a God, we can
trust it to protect all ideal interests and keep the world's balance straight.
The sentences in which Emerson, to the very end, gave utterance to this faith
are as fine as anything in literature: "If you love and serve men, you cannot
by any hiding or stratagem escape the remuneration. Secret retributions are always
restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to
tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in
vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forevermore the ponderous equator
to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized
by the recoil." * * Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1868, p. 186. -
Now it would be too absurd to say that the inner experiences that underlie such
expressions of faith as this and impel the writer to their utterance are quite
unworthy to be called religious experiences. The sort of appeal that Emersonian
optimism, on the one hand, and Buddhistic pessimism, on the other, make to the
individual and the sort of response which he makes to them in his life are in
fact indistinguishable from, and in many respects identical with, the best Christian
appeal and response. We must therefore, from the experiential point of view, call
these godless or quasi-godless creeds 'religions'; and accordingly when in our
definition of religion we speak of the individual's relation to 'what he considers
the divine,' we must interpret the term 'divine' very broadly, as denoting any
object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not. But the term
'godlike,' if thus treated as a floating general quality, becomes exceedingly
vague, for many gods have flourished in religious history, and their attributes
have been discrepant enough. What then is that essentially godlike quality- be
it embodied in a concrete deity or not- our relation to which determines our character
as religious men? It will repay us to seek some answer to this question before
we proceed farther. For one thing, gods are conceived to be first things in
the way of being and power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there is
no escape. What relates to them is the first and last word in the way of truth.
Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true might at this rate
be treated as godlike, and a man's religion might thus be identified with his
attitude, whatever it might be, towards what he felt to be the primal truth.
Such a definition as this would in a way be defensible. Religion, whatever it
is, is a man's total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total reaction
upon life is a religion? Total reactions are different from casual reactions,
and total attitudes are different from usual or professional attitudes. To get
at them you must go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that
curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate
or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree every one
possesses. This sense of the world's presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar
individual temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous,
gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and inarticulate
and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all our answers to the
question, "What is the character of this universe in which we dwell?" It expresses
our individual sense of it in the most definite way. Why then not call these reactions
our religion, no matter what specific character they may have? Non-religious as
some of these reactions may be, in one sense of the word 'religious,' they yet
belong to the general sphere of the religious life, and so should generically
be classed as religious reactions. "He believes in No-God, and he worships him,"
said a colleague of mine of a student who was manifesting a fine atheistic ardor;
and the more fervent opponents of Christian doctrine have often enough shown a
temper which, psychologically considered, is indistinguishable from religious
zeal. But so very broad a use of the word 'religion' would be inconvenient,
however defensible it might remain on logical grounds. There are trifling, sneering
attitudes even towards the whole of life; and in some men these attitudes are
final and systematic. It would strain the ordinary use of language too much to
call such attitudes religious, even though, from the point of view of an unbiased
critical philosophy, they might conceivably be perfectly reasonable ways of looking
upon life. Voltaire, for example, writes thus to a friend, at the age of seventy-three:
"As for myself," he says, "weak as I am, I carry on the war to the last moment,
I get a hundred pike-thrusts, I return two hundred, and I laugh. I see near my
door Geneva on fire with quarrels over nothing, and I laugh again; and, thank
God, I can look upon the world as a farce even when it becomes as tragic as it
sometimes does. All comes out even at the end of the day, and all comes out still
more even when all the days are over." Much as we may admire such a robust
old gamecock spirit in a valetudinarian, to call it a religious spirit would be
odd. Yet it is for the moment Voltaire's reaction on the whole of life. Je m'en
fiche is the vulgar French equivalent for our English ejaculation 'Who cares?'
And the happy term je m'en fichisme recently has been invented to designate the
systematic determination not to take anything in life too solemnly. 'All is vanity'
is the relieving word in an difficult crises for this mode of thought, which that
exquisite literary genius Renan took pleasure, in his later days of sweet decay,
in putting into coquettishly sacrilegious forms which remain to us as excellent
expressions of the 'all is vanity' state of mind. Take the following passage,
for example,- we must hold to duty, even against the evidence, Renan says,- but
he then goes on:- - "There are many chances that the world may be nothing
but a fairy pantomime of which no God has care. We must therefore arrange ourselves
so that on neither hypothesis we shall be completely wrong. We must listen to
the superior voices, but in such a way that if the second hypothesis were true
we should not have been too completely duped. If in effect the world be not a
serious thing, it is the dogmatic people who will be the shallow ones, and the
worldly minded whom the theologians now call frivolous will be those who are really
wise. "In utrumque paratus, then. Be ready for anything- that perhaps is wisdom.
Give ourselves up, according to the hour, to confidence, to skepticism, to optimism,
to irony, and we may be sure that at certain moments at least we shall be with
the truth.... Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature
that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should
always talk of philosophy with a smile. We owe it to the Eternal to be virtuous;
but we have the right to add to this tribute our irony as a sort of personal reprisal.
In this way we return to the right quarter jest for jest; we play the trick that
has been played on us. Saint Augustine's phrase: Lord, if we are deceived, it
is by thee! remains a fine one, well suited to our modern feeling. Only we wish
the Eternal to know that if we accept the fraud, we accept it knowingly and willingly.
We are resigned in advance to losing the interest on our investments of virtue,
but we wish not to appear ridiculous by having counted on them too securely."
* - * Feuilles detachees, pp. 394-398 (abridged). - Surely all the usual
associations of the word 'religion' would have to be stripped away if such a systematic
parti pris of irony were also to be denoted by the name. For common men 'religion,'
whatever more special meanings it may have, signifies always a serious state of
mind. If any one phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase would
be, 'All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.'
If it can stop anything, religion as commonly apprehended can stop just such chaffing
talk as Renan's. It favors gravity, not pertness; it says 'hush' to all vain chatter
and smart wit. But if hostile to light irony, religion is equally hostile
to heavy grumbling and complaint. The world appears tragic enough in some religions,
but the tragedy is realized as purging, and a way of deliverance is held to exist.
We shall see enough of the religious melancholy in a future lecture; but melancholy,
according to our ordinary use of language, forfeits all title to be called religious
when, in Marcus Aurelius's racy words, the sufferer simply lies kicking and screaming
after the fashion of a sacrificed pig. The mood of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche,-
and in a less degree one may sometimes say the same of our own sad Carlyle,- though
often an ennobling sadness, is almost as often only peevishness running away with
the bit between its teeth. The sallies of the two German authors remind one, half
the time, of the sick shriekings of two dying rats. They lack the purgatorial
note which religious sadness gives forth. There must be something
solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious.
If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse. It
is precisely as being solemn experiences that I wish to interest you in religious
experiences. So I propose- arbitrarily again, if you please- to narrow our definition
once more by saying that the word 'divine,' as employed therein, shall mean for
us not merely the primal and enveloping and real, for that meaning if taken without
restriction might well prove too broad. The divine shall mean for us only such
a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely,
and neither by a curse nor a jest. But solemnity, and gravity,
and all such emotional attributes, admit of various shades; and, do what we will
with our defining, the truth must at last be confronted that we are dealing with
a field of experience where there is not a single conception that can be sharply
drawn. The pretension, under such conditions, to be rigorously 'scientific' or
'exact' in our terms would only stamp us as lacking in understanding of our task.
Things are more or less divine, states of mind are more or less religious, reactions
are more or less total, but the boundaries are always misty, and it is everywhere
a question of amount and degree. Nevertheless, at their extreme of development,
there can never be an question as to what experiences are religious. The divinity
of the object and the solemnity of the reaction are too well marked for doubt.
Hesitation as to whether a state of mind is 'religious,' or 'moral,' or 'philosophical,'
is only likely to arise when the state of mind is weakly characterized, but in
that case it will be hardly worthy of our study at all. With states that can only
by courtesy be called religious we need have nothing to do, our only profitable
business being with what nobody can possibly feel tempted to call anything else.
I said in my former lecture that we learn most about a thing when we view it under
a microscope, as it were, or in its most exaggerated form. This is as true of
religious phenomena as of any other kind of fact. The only cases likely to be
profitable enough to repay our attention will therefore be cases where the religious
spirit is unmistakable and extreme. Its fainter manifestations we may tranquilly
pass by. Here, for example, is the total reaction upon life of Frederick Locker
Lampson, whose autobiography, entitled 'Confidences,' proves him to have been
a most amiable man. "I am so far resigned to my lot that I feel small pain
at the thought of having to part from what has been called the pleasant habit
of existence, the sweet fable of life. I would not care to live my wasted life
over again, and so to prolong my span. Strange to say, I have but little wish
to be younger. I submit with a chill at my heart. I humbly submit because it is
the Divine Will, and my appointed destiny. I dread the increase of infirmities
that will make me a burden to those around me, those dear to me. No! let me slip
away as quietly and comfortably as I can. Let the end come, if peace come with
it. "I do not know that there is a great deal to be said for this world, or
our sojourn here upon it; but it has pleased God so to place us, and it must please
me also. I ask you, what is human life? Is not it a maimed happiness- care and
weariness, weariness and care, with the baseless expectation, the strange cozenage
of a brighter to-morrow? At best it is but a froward child, that must be played
with and humored, to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is
over." * * Op. cit., pp. 314, 313. - This is a complex, a tender, a submissive,
and a graceful state of mind. For myself, I should have no objection to calling
it on the whole a religious state of mind, although I dare say that to many of
you it may seem too listless and half-hearted to merit so good a name. But what
matters it in the end whether we call such a state of mind religious or not? It
is too insignificant for our instruction in any case; and its very possessor wrote
it down in terms which he would not have used unless he had been thinking of more
energetically religious moods in others, with which he found himself unable to
compete. It is with these more energetic states that our sole business lies, and
we can perfectly well afford to let the minor notes and the uncertain border go.
It was the extremer cases that I had in mind a little while
ago when I said that personal religion, even without theology or ritual, would
prove to embody some elements that morality pure and simple does not contain.
You may remember that I promised shortly to point out what those elements were.
In a general way I can now say what I had in mind. "I accept
the universe" is reported to have been a favorite utterance of our New England
transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one repeated this phrase to
Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: "Gad! she'd better!"
At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of
our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or
heartily and altogether? Shall our protests against certain things in it be radical
and unforgiving, or shall we think that, even with evil, there are ways of living
that must lead to good? If we accept the whole, shall we do so as if stunned into
submission,- as Carlyle would have us- "Gad! we'd better!"- or shall we do so
with enthusiastic assent? Morality pure and simple accepts the law of the whole
which it finds reigning, so far as to acknowledge and obey it, but it may obey
it with the heaviest and coldest heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke.
But for religion, in its strong and fully developed manifestations, the service
of the highest never is felt as a yoke. Dull submission is left far behind, and
a mood of welcome, which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity
and enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place. It makes a tremendous emotional
and practical difference to one whether one accept the universe in the drab discolored
way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian
saints. The difference is as great as that between passivity and activity, as
that between the defensive and the aggressive mood. Gradual as are the steps by
which an individual may from one state into the other, many as are the intermediate
stages which different individuals represent, yet when you place the typical extremes
beside each other for comparison, you feel that two discontinuous psychological
universes confront you, and that in passing from one to the other a 'critical
point' has been overcome. If we compare stoic with Christian ejaculations
we see much more than a difference of doctrine; rather is it a difference of emotional
mood that parts them. When Marcus Aurelius reflects on the eternal reason that
has ordered things, there is a frosty chill about his words which you rarely find
in a Jewish, and never in a Christian piece of religious writing. The universe
is 'accepted' by all these writers; but how devoid of passion or exultation the
spirit of the Roman Emperor is! Compare his fine sentence "If gods care not for
me or my children, here is a reason for it," with Job's cry: "Though he slay me,
yet will I trust in him!" and you immediately see the difference I mean. The anima
mundi, to whose disposal of his own personal destiny the Stoic consents, is there
to be respected and submitted to, but the Christian God is there to be loved and
the difference of emotional atmosphere is like that between an arctic climate
and the tropics, though the outcome in the way of accepting actual conditions
uncomplainingly may seem in abstract terms to be much the same. "It is a man's
duty," says Marcus Aurelius, "to comfort himself and wait for the natural dissolution,
and not to be vexed, but to find refreshment solely in these thoughts- first that
nothing will happen to me which is not conformable to the nature of the universe;
and secondly that I need do nothing contrary to the God and deity within me; for
there is no man who can compel me to transgress. * He is an abscess on the universe
who withdraws and separates himself from the reason of our common nature, through
being displeased with the things which happen. For the same nature produces these,
and has produced thee too. And so accept everything which happens, even if it
seem disagreeable, because it leads to this, the health of the universe and to
the prosperity and felicity of Zeus. For he would not have brought on any man
what he has brought, if it were not useful for the whole. The integrity of the
whole is mutilated if thou cuttest off anything. And thou dost cut off, as far
as it is in thy power, when thou art dissatisfied, and in a manner triest to put
anything out of the way." *(2) * Book V., ch. x. (abridged). *(2) Book
V., ch. ix. (abridged). Compare now this mood with that of the old Christian
author of the Theologia Germanica:- - "Where men are enlightened with the
true light, they renounce all desire and choice, and commit and commend themselves
and all things to the eternal Goodness, so that every enlightened man could say:
'I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.' Such
men are in a state of freedom, because they have lost the fear of pain or hell,
and the hope of reward or heaven, and are living in pure submission to the eternal
Goodness, in the perfect freedom of fervent love. When a man truly perceiveth
and considereth himself, who and what he is, and findeth himself utterly vile
and wicked and unworthy, he falleth into such a deep abasement that it seemeth
to him reasonable that all creatures in heaven and earth should rise up against
him. And therefore he will not and dare not desire any consolation and release;
but he is willing to be unconsoled and unreleased; and he doth not grieve over
his sufferings, for they are right in his eyes, and he hath nothing to say against
them. This is what is meant by true repentance for sin; and he who in this present
time entereth into this hell, none may console him. Now God hath not forsaken
a man in this hell, but He is laying his hand upon him, that the man may not desire
nor regard anything but the eternal Good only. And then, when the man neither
careth for nor desireth anything but the eternal Good alone, and seeketh not himself
nor his own things, but the honour of God only, he is made a partaker of all manner
of joy, bliss, peace, rest, and consolation, and so the man is henceforth in the
kingdom of heaven. This hell and this heaven are two good safe ways for a man,
and happy is he who truly findeth them." * * Chaps. x., xi. (abridged): Winkworth's
translation. - How much more active and positive the impulse of the Christian
writer to accept his place in the universe is! Marcus Aurelius agrees to the scheme-
the German theologian agrees with it. He literally abounds in agreement, he runs
out to embrace the divine decrees. Occasionally, it is true, the Stoic rises
to something like a Christian warmth of sentiment, as in the often quoted passage
of Marcus Aurelius:- "Everything harmonizes with me which is harmonious to
thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which is in due time
for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring, O Nature: from thee
are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things return. The poet says,
Dear City of Cecrops; and wilt thou not say, Dear City of Zeus?" * * Book
IV., SS 23. - But compare even as devout a passage as this with a genuine
Christian outpouring, and it seems a little cold. Turn, for instance, to the Imitation
of Christ:- "Lord, thou knowest what is best; let this or that be according
as thou wilt. Give what thou wilt, so much as thou wilt, when thou wilt. Do with
me as thou knowest best, and as shall be most to thine honour. Place me where
thou wilt, and freely work thy will with me in all things.... When could it be
evil when thou wert near? I had rather be poor for thy sake than rich without
thee. I choose rather to be a pilgrim upon the earth with thee, than without thee
to possess heaven. Where thou art, there is heaven; and where thou art not, behold
there death and hell." * - * Benham's translation: Book III., chaps. xv.,
lix. Compare Mary Moody Emerson: "Let me be a blot on this fair world, the obscurest,
the loneliest sufferer, with one proviso,- that I know it is His agency. I will
love Him though He shed frost and darkness on every way of mine." R.W. EMERSON:
Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 188. It is a good rule in physiology,
when we are studying the meaning of an organ, to ask after its most peculiar and
characteristic sort of performance, and to seek its office in that one of its
functions which no other organ can possibly exert. Surely the same maxim holds
good in our present quest. The essence of religious experiences, the thing by
which we finally must judge them, must be that element or quality in them which
we can meet nowhere else. And such a quality will be of course most prominent
and easy to notice in those religious experiences which are most one-sided, exaggerated,
and intense. Now when we compare these intenser experiences
with the experiences of tamer minds, so cool and reasonable that we are tempted
to call them philosophical rather than religious, we find a character that is
perfectly distinct. That character, it seems to me, should be regarded as the
practically important differentia of religion for our purpose; and just what it
is can easily be brought out by comparing the mind of an abstractly conceived
Christian with that of a moralist similarly conceived. A life is manly, stoical,
moral, or philosophical, we say, in proportion as it is less swayed by paltry
personal considerations and more by objective ends that call for energy, even
though that energy bring personal loss and pain. This is the good side of war,
in so far as it calls for 'volunteers.' And for morality life is a war, and the
service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.
Even a sick man, unable to be militant outwardly, can carry on the moral warfare.
He can willfully turn his attention away from his own future, whether in this
world or the next. He can train himself to indifference to his present drawbacks
and immerse himself in whatever objective interests still remain accessible. He
can follow public news, and sympathize with other people's affairs. He can cultivate
cheerful manners, and be silent about his miseries. He can contemplate whatever
ideal aspects of existence his philosophy is able to present to him, and practice
whatever duties, such as patience, resignation, trust, his ethical system requires.
Such a man lives on his loftiest, largest plane. He is a high-hearted freeman
and no pining slave. And yet he lacks something which the Christian par excellence,
the mystic and ascetic saint, for example, has in abundant measure, and which
makes of him a human being of an altogether different denomination. The Christian
also spurns the pinched and mumping sick-room attitude, and the lives of saints
are full of a kind of callousness to diseased conditions of body which probably
no other human records show. But whereas the merely moralistic spurning takes
an effort of volition, the Christian spurning is the result of the excitement
of a higher kind of emotion, in the presence of which no exertion of volition
is required. The moralist must hold his breath and keep his muscles tense; and
so long as this athletic attitude is possible all goes well- morality suffices.
But the athletic attitude tends ever to break down, and it inevitably does break
down even in the most stalwart when the organism begins to decay, or when morbid
fears invade the mind. To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied
o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible
of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel
that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing
as he is. Well, we are all such helpless failures in the last resort. The sanest
and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally
runs the robustest of us down. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the
vanity and provisionality of our voluntary career comes over us that all our morality
appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing
as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded
in, but, alas! are not. And here religion comes to our rescue and takes our
fate into her hands. There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to
no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced
by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts
of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become the habitation
of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday.
The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm
deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious
about, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it
is positively expunged and washed away. We shall see abundant examples of
this happy state of mind in later lectures of this course. We shall see how infinitely
passionate a thing religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath,
like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse,
it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible
from anything else. This enchantment, coming as a gift when it does come,- a gift
of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God's grace, the theologians
say,- is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more
become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word
of command. Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject's range
of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost,
and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which
otherwise would be an empty waste. If religion is to mean
anything definite for us, it seems to me that we ought to take it as meaning this
added dimension of emotion, this enthusiastic temper of espousal, in regions where
morality strictly so called can at best but bow its head and acquiesce. It ought
to mean nothing short of this new reach of freedom for us, with the struggle over,
the keynote of the universe sounding in our ears, and everlasting possession spread
before our eyes. * - * Once more, there are plenty of men, constitutionally
sombre men, in whose religious life this rapturousness is lacking. They are religious
in the wider sense; yet in this acutest of all senses they are not so, and it
is religion in the acutest sense that I wish, without disputing about words, to
study first, so as to get at its typical differentia. - This sort of happiness
in the absolute and everlasting is what we find nowhere but in religion. It is
parted off from all mere animal happiness, all mere enjoyment of the present,
by that element of solemnity of which I have already made so much account. Solemnity
is a hard thing to define abstractly, but certain of its marks are patent enough.
A solemn state of mind is never crude or simple- it seems to contain a certain
measure of its own opposite in solution. A solemn joy preserves a sort of bitter
in its sweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent. But there
are writers who, realizing that happiness of a supreme sort is the prerogative
of religion, forget this complication, and call all happiness, as such, religious.
Mr. Havelock Ellis, for example, identifies religion with the entire field of
the soul's liberation from oppressive moods. "The simplest functions of physiological
life," he writes, "may be its ministers. Every one who is at all acquainted with
the Persian mystics knows how wine may be regarded as an instrument of religion.
Indeed, in all countries and in all ages, some form of physical enlargement- singing,
dancing, drinking, sexual excitement- has been intimately associated with worship.
Even the momentary expansion of the soul in laughter is, to however slight an
extent, a religious exercise.... Whenever an impulse from the world strikes against
the organism, and the resultant is not discomfort or pain, not even the muscular
contraction of strenuous manhood, but a joyous expansion or aspiration of the
whole soul- there is religion. It is the infinite for which we hunger, and we
ride gladly on every little wave that promises to bear us towards it." * *
The New Spirit, p. 232. - But such a straight identification
of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity
of religious happiness out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are
'reliefs,' occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or
threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is
no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil
outwardly as a form of sacrifice- inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome.
If you ask how religion thus falls on the thorns and faces death, and in the very
act annuls annihilation, I cannot explain the matter, for it is religion's secret,
and to understand it you must yourself have been a religious man of the extremer
type. In our future examples, even of the simplest and healthiest-minded type
of religious consciousness, we shall find this complex sacrificial constitution,
in which a higher happiness holds a lower unhappiness in check. In the Louvre
there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck.
The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there.
The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there- that is,
the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot
upon his neck. In the religious consciousness, that is just the position in which
the fiend, the negative or tragic principle, is found; and for that very reason
the religious consciousness is so rich from the emotional point of view. * We
shall see how in certain men and women it takes on a monstrously ascetic form.
There are saints who have literally fed on the negative principle, on humiliation
and privation, and the thought of suffering and death,- their souls growing in
happiness just in proportion as their outward state grew more intolerable. No
other emotion than religious emotion can bring a man to this peculiar pass. And
it is for that reason that when we ask our question about the value of religion
for human life, I think we ought to look for the answer among these violenter
examples rather than among those of a more moderate hue. - * I owe this allegorical
illustration to my lamented colleague and friend, Charles Carroll Everett.
Having the phenomenon of our study in its acutest possible form to start with,
we can shade down as much as we please later. And if in these cases, repulsive
as they are to our ordinary worldly way of judging, we find ourselves compelled
to acknowledge religion's value and treat it with respect, it will have proved
in some way its value for life at large. By subtracting and toning down extravagances
we may thereupon proceed to trace the boundaries of its legitimate sway. To
be sure, it makes our task difficult to have to deal so much with eccentricities
and extremes. "How can religion on the whole be the most important of all human
functions," you may ask, "if every several manifestation of it in turn have to
be corrected and sobered down and pruned away?" Such a thesis seems a paradox
impossible to sustain reasonably,- yet I believe that something like it will have
to be our final contention. That personal attitude which the individual finds
himself impelled to take up towards what he apprehends to be the divine and you
will remember that this was our definition will prove to be both a helpless and
a sacrificial attitude. That is, we shall have to confess to at least some amount
of dependence on sheer mercy, and to practice some amount of renunciation, great
or small, to save our souls alive. The constitution of the world we live in requires
it: "Entbehren sollst du! sollst entbehren! Das ist der ewige Gesang
Der jedem an die Ohren klingt, Den, unser ganzes Leben lang Uns heiser
jede Stunde singt." For when all is said and done, we are
in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders
of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as
into our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which
fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of necessity,
and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the religious
life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary
givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. Religion thus makes
easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary; and if it be the only agency
that can accomplish this result, its vital importance as a human faculty stands
vindicated beyond dispute. It becomes an essential organ of our life, performing
a function which no other portion of our nature can so successfully fulfill. From
the merely biological point of view, so to call it, this is a conclusion to which,
so far as I can now see, we shall inevitably be led, and led moreover by following
the purely empirical method of demonstration which I sketched to you in the first
lecture. Of the farther office of religion as a metaphysical revelation I will
say nothing now. But to foreshadow the terminus of one's investigations is
one thing, and to arrive there safely is another. In the next lecture, abandoning
the extreme generalities which have engrossed us hitherto, I propose that we begin
our actual journey by addressing ourselves directly to the concrete facts.
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