The Varieties of Religious Experience - Lecture 2: Circumscription of the Topic
Lecture II
CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC
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 oversimplification 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 to religion. If we should inquire for the essence of
"government," for example, one man might tell us it was authority,
another submission, an other police, another an army, another an
assembly, an other 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?[9]
[9] 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 he no one specific and
essential kind of religious object, and no one specific and essential
kind of religious act.
The field of religion being as wide as this, it is manifestly
impossible that I should pretend to cover it. My lectures must be
limited to a fraction of the subject. And, although it would indeed be
foolish to set up an abstract definition of religion's essence, and
then proceed to defend that definition against all comers, yet this
need not prevent me from taking my own narrow view of what religion
shall consist in FOR THE PURPOSE OF THESE LECTURES, or, out of the many
meanings of the word, from choosing the one meaning in which I wish to
interest you particularly, and proclaiming arbitrarily that when I say
"religion" I mean THAT. This, in fact, is what I must do, and I will
now preliminarily seek to mark out the field I choose.
One way to mark it out easily is to say what aspects of the subject we
leave out. At the outset we are struck by one great partition which
divides the religious field. On the one side of it lies institutional,
on the other personal religion. As M. P. Sabatier says, one branch of
religion keeps the divinity, another keeps man most in view. Worship
and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity,
theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the
essentials of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit
our view to it, we should have to define religion as an external art,
the art of winning the favor of the gods. In the more personal branch
of religion it is on the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself
which form the center of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his
helplessness, his incompleteness. And although the favor of the God,
as forfeited or gained, is still an essential feature of the story, and
theology plays a vital part therein, yet the acts to which this sort of
religion prompts are personal not ritual acts, the individual transacts
the business by himself alone, and the ecclesiastical organization,
with its priests and sacraments and other go-betweens, sinks to an
altogether secondary place. The relation goes direct from heart to
heart, from soul to soul, between man and his maker.
Now in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch
entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to
consider as little as possible the systematic theology and the ideas
about the gods themselves, and to confine myself as far as I can to
personal religion pure and simple. To some of you personal religion,
thus nakedly considered, will no doubt seem too incomplete a thing to
wear the general name. "It is a part of religion," you will say, "but
only its unorganized rudiment; if we are to name it by itself, we had
better call it man's conscience or morality than his religion. The
name 'religion' should be reserved for the fully organized system of
feeling, thought, and institution, for the Church, in short, of which
this personal religion, so called, is but a fractional element."
But if you say this, it will only show the more plainly how much the
question of definition tends to become a dispute about names.
Rather than prolong such a dispute, I am willing to accept almost any
name for the personal religion of which I propose to treat. Call it
conscience or morality, if you yourselves prefer, and not
religion--under either name it will be equally worthy of our study. As
for myself, I think it will prove to contain some elements which
morality pure and simple does not contain, and these elements I shall
soon seek to point out; so I will myself continue to apply the word
"religion" to it; and in the last lecture of all, I will bring in the
theologies and the ecclesiasticisms, and say something of its relation
to them.
In one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more
fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches, when
once established, live at second-hand upon tradition; but the FOUNDERS
of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct
personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders,
the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian
sects have been in this case;--so personal religion should still seem
the primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it
incomplete.
There are, it is true, other things in religion chronologically more
primordial than personal devoutness in the moral sense. Fetishism and
magic seem to have preceded inward piety historically--at least our
records of inward piety do not reach back so far. And if fetishism and
magic be regarded as stages of religion, one may say that personal
religion in the inward sense and the genuinely spiritual
ecclesiasticisms which it founds are phenomena of secondary or even
tertiary order. But, quite apart from the fact that many
anthropologists--for instance, Jevons and Frazer --expressly oppose
"religion" and "magic" to each other, it is certain that the whole
system of thought which leads to magic, fetishism, and the lower
superstitions may just as well be called primitive science as called
primitive religion. The question thus becomes a verbal one again; and
our knowledge of all these early stages of thought and feeling is in
any case so conjectural and imperfect that farther discussion would not
be worth while.
Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall
mean for us THE FEELINGS, ACTS, AND EXPERIENCES OF INDIVIDUAL MEN IN
THEIR SOLITUDE, SO FAR AS THEY APPREHEND THEMSELVES TO STAND IN
RELATION TO WHATEVER THEY MAY CONSIDER THE DIVINE. Since the relation
may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of
religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies,
and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. In these
lectures, however, as I have already said, the immediate personal
experiences will amply fill our time, and we shall hardly consider
theology or ecclesiasticism at all.
We escape much controversial matter by this arbitrary definition of our
field. But, still, a chance of controversy comes up over the word
"divine," if we take the definition in too narrow a sense. There are
systems of thought which the world usually calls religious, and yet
which do not positively assume a God. Buddhism is in this case.
Popularly, of course, the Buddha himself stands in place of a God; but
in strictness the Buddhistic system is atheistic. Modern
transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let
God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a
superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially
spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the
transcendentalist cult. In that address to the graduating class at
Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank
expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the
scandal of the performance.
"These laws," said the speaker, "execute themselves. They are out of
time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance: Thus, in the soul
of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire.
He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed
is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity thereby
puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God;
the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God, do enter
into that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives
himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. Character is
always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will
speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie--for example,
the taint of vanity, any attempt to make a good impression, a favorable
appearance--will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth,
and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the
grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear your witness.
For all things proceed out of the same spirit, which is differently
named love, justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as
the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it
washes. In so far as he roves from these ends, a man bereaves himself
of power, of auxiliaries. His being shrinks . .. he becomes less and
less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death. The
perception of this law awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call
the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness.
Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air.
It is the embalmer of the world.
It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the
stars is it. It is the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable.
When he says 'I ought'; when love warns him; when he chooses, warned
from on high, the good and great deed; then, deep melodies wander
through his soul from supreme wisdom. Then he can worship, and be
enlarged by his worship; for he can never go behind this sentiment.
All the expressions of this sentiment are sacred and permanent in
proportion to their purity. [They] affect us more than all other
compositions. The sentences of the olden time, which ejaculate this
piety, are still fresh and fragrant. And the unique impression of
Jesus upon mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into
the history of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this
infusion."[10]
[10] Miscellanies, 1868, p. 120 (abridged).
Such is the Emersonian religion. The universe has a divine soul of
order, which soul is moral, being also the soul within the soul of man.
But whether this soul of the universe be a mere quality like the eye's
brilliancy or the skin's softness, or whether it be a self-conscious
life like the eye's seeing or the skin's feeling, is a decision that
never unmistakably appears in Emerson's pages. It quivers on the
boundary of these things, sometimes leaning one way sometimes the
other, to suit the literary rather than the philosophic need. Whatever
it is, though, it is active. As much as if it were a God, we can trust
it to protect all ideal interests and keep the world's balance
straight. The sentences in which Emerson, to the very end, gave
utterance to this faith are as fine as anything in literature: "If you
love and serve men, you cannot by any hiding or stratagem escape the
remuneration. Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when
disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam.
All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain
set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forevermore the
ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must
range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil."[11]
[11] Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1868, p. 186.
Now it would be too absurd to say that the inner experiences that
underlie such expressions of faith as this and impel the writer to
their utterance are quite unworthy to be called religious experiences.
The sort of appeal that Emersonian optimism, on the one hand, and
Buddhistic pessimism, on the other, make to the individual and the son
of response which he makes to them in his life are in fact
indistinguishable from, and in many respects identical with, the best
Christian appeal and response. We must therefore, from the
experiential point of view, call these godless or quasi-godless creeds
"religions"; and accordingly when in our definition of religion we
speak of the individual's relation to "what he considers the divine,"
we must interpret the term "divine" very broadly, as denoting any
object that is god- LIKE, whether it be a concrete deity or not. But
the term "godlike," if thus treated as a floating general quality,
becomes exceedingly vague, for many gods have flourished in religious
history, and their attributes have been discrepant enough. What then
is that essentially godlike quality--be it embodied in a concrete deity
or not--our relation to which determines our character as religious
men? It will repay us to seek some answer to this question before we
proceed farther.
For one thing, gods are conceived to be first things in the way of
being and power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there is no
escape. What relates to them is the first and last word in the way of
truth. Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true
might at this rate be treated as godlike, and a man's religion might
thus be identified with his attitude, whatever it might be, toward what
he felt to be the primal truth.
Such a definition as this would in a way be defensible. Religion,
whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life, so why not say
that any total reaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions are
different from casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from
usual or professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the
foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the
whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien,
terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree everyone
possesses. This sense of the world's presence, appealing as it does to
our peculiar individual temperament, makes us either strenuous or
careless, devout or blasphemous, gloomy or exultant, about life at
large; and our reaction, involuntary and inarticulate and often half
unconscious as it is, is the completest of all our answers to the
question, "What is the character of this universe in which we dwell?"
It expresses our individual sense of it in the most definite way. Why
then not call these reactions our religion, no matter what specific
character they may have? Non-religious as some of these reactions may
be, in one sense of the word "religious," they yet belong to THE
GENERAL SPHERE OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE, and so should generically be
classed as religious reactions. "He believes in No-God, and he
worships him," said a colleague of mine of a student who was
manifesting a fine atheistic ardor; and the more fervent opponents of
Christian doctrine have often enough shown a temper which,
psychologically considered, is indistinguishable from religious zeal.
But so very broad a use of the word "religion" would be inconvenient,
however defensible it might remain on logical grounds. There are
trifling, sneering attitudes even toward the whole of life; and in some
men these attitudes are final and systematic. It would strain the
ordinary use of language too much to call such attitudes religious,
even though, from the point of view of an unbiased critical philosophy,
they might conceivably be perfectly reasonable ways of looking upon
life. Voltaire, for example, writes thus to a friend, at the age of
seventy-three: "As for myself," he says, "weak as I am, I carry on the
war to the last moment, I get a hundred pike-thrusts, I return two
hundred, and I laugh. I see near my door Geneva on fire with quarrels
over nothing, and I laugh again; and, thank God, I can look upon the
world as a farce even when it becomes as tragic as it sometimes does.
All comes out even at the end of the day, and all comes out still more
even when all the days are over."
Much as we may admire such a robust old gamecock spirit in a
valetudinarian, to call it a religious spirit would be odd. Yet it is
for the moment Voltaire's reaction on the whole of life. Je me'n fiche
is the vulgar French equivalent for our English ejaculation "Who
cares?" And the happy term je me'n fichisme recently has been
invented to designate the systematic determination not to take anything
in {37} life too solemnly. "All is vanity" is the relieving word in
all difficult crises for this mode of thought, which that exquisite
literary genius Renan took pleasure, in his later days of sweet decay,
in putting into coquettishly sacrilegious forms which remain to us as
excellent expressions of the "all is vanity" state of mind. Take the
following passage, for example--we must hold to duty, even against the
evidence, Renan says--but he then goes on:--
"There are many chances that the world may be nothing but a fairy
pantomime of which no God has care. We must therefore arrange
ourselves so that on neither hypothesis we shall be completely wrong.
We must listen to the superior voices, but in such a way that if the
second hypothesis were true we should not have been too completely
duped. If in effect the world be not a serious thing, it is the
dogmatic people who will be the shallow ones, and the worldly minded
whom the theologians now call frivolous will be those who are really
wise.
"In utrumque paratus, then. Be ready for anything--that perhaps is
wisdom. Give ourselves up, according to the hour, to confidence, to
skepticism, to optimism, to irony and we may be sure that at certain
moments at least we shall be with the truth.... Good-humor is a
philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her
no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always
talk of philosophy with a smile. We owe it to the Eternal to be
virtuous but we have the right to add to this tribute our irony as a
sort of personal reprisal. In this way we return to the right quarter
jest for jest; we play the trick that has been played on us. Saint
Augustine's phrase: Lord, if we 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."[12]
[12] Feuilles detachees, pp. 394-398 (abridged).
Surely all the usual associations of the word "religion" would have to
be stripped away if such a systematic parti pris of irony were also to
be denoted by the name. For common men "religion," whatever more
special meanings it may have, signifies always a SERIOUS state of mind.
If any one phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase would
be, "All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may
suggest." If it can stop anything, religion as commonly apprehended
can stop just such chaffing talk as Renan's. It favors gravity, not
pertness; it says "hush" to all vain chatter and smart wit.
But if hostile to light irony, religion is equally hostile to heavy
grumbling and complaint. The world appears tragic enough in some
religions, but the tragedy is realized as purging, and a way of
deliverance is held to exist. We shall see enough of the religious
melancholy in a future lecture; but melancholy, according to our
ordinary use of language, forfeits all title to be called religious
when, in Marcus Aurelius's racy words, the sufferer simply lies kicking
and screaming after the fashion of a sacrificed pig. The mood of a
Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche--and in a less degree one may sometimes say
the same of our own sad Carlyle--though often an ennobling sadness, is
almost as often only peevishness running away with the bit between its
teeth. The sallies of the two German authors remind one, half the
time, of the sick shriekings of two dying rats. They lack the
purgatorial note which religious sadness gives forth.
There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude
which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker;
if sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being SOLEMN
experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. So I
propose--arbitrarily again, if you please--to narrow our definition
once more by saying that the word "divine," as employed therein, shall
mean for us not merely the primal and enveloping and real, for that
meaning if taken without restriction might prove too broad. The divine
shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels
impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor
a jest.
But solemnity, and gravity, and all such emotional attributes, admit of
various shades; and, do what we will with our defining, the truth must
at last be confronted that we are dealing with a field of experience
where there is not a single conception that can be sharply drawn. The
pretension, under such conditions, to be rigorously "scientific" or
"exact" in our terms would only stamp us as lacking in understanding of
our task. Things are more or less divine, states of mind are more or
less religious, reactions are more or less total, but the boundaries
are always misty, and it is everywhere a question of amount and degree.
Nevertheless, at their extreme of development, there can never be any
question as to what experiences are religious. The divinity of the
object and the solemnity of the reaction are too well marked for doubt.
Hesitation as to whether a state of mind is "religious," or
"irreligious," or "moral," or "philosophical," is only likely to arise
when the state of mind is weakly characterized, but in that case it
will be hardly worthy of our study at all. With states that can only
by courtesy be called religious we need have nothing to do, our only
profitable business being with what nobody can possibly feel tempted to
call anything else. I said in my former lecture that we learn most
about a thing when we view it under a microscope, as it were, or in its
most exaggerated form. This is as true of religious phenomena as of
any other kind of fact. The only cases likely to be profitable enough
to repay our attention will therefore be cases where the religious
spirit is unmistakable and extreme. Its fainter manifestations we may
tranquilly pass by. Here, for example, is the total reaction upon life
of Frederick Locker Lampson, whose autobiography, entitled
"Confidences," proves him to have been a most amiable man.
"I am so far resigned to my lot that I feel small pain at the thought
of having to part from what has been called the pleasant habit of
existence, the sweet fable of life. I would not care to live my wasted
life over again, and so to prolong my span. Strange to say, I have but
little wish to be younger. I submit with a chill at my heart. I
humbly submit because it is the Divine Will, and my appointed destiny.
I dread the increase of infirmities that will make me a burden to those
around me, those dear to me. No! let me slip away as quietly and
comfortably as I can. Let the end come, if peace come with it.
"I do not know that there is a great deal to be said for this world, or
our sojourn here upon it; but it has pleased God so to place us, and it
must please me also. I ask you, what is human life? Is not it a
maimed happiness--care and weariness, weariness and care, with the
baseless expectation, the strange cozenage of a brighter to-morrow? At
best it is but a froward child, that must be played with and humored,
to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over."[13]
[13] Op. cit., pp. 314, 313.
This is a complex, a tender, a submissive, and a graceful state of
mind. For myself, I should have no objection to calling it on the
whole a religious state of mind, although I dare say that to many of
you it may seem too listless and half-hearted to merit so good a name.
But what matters it in the end whether we call such a state of mind
religious or not? It is too insignificant for our instruction in any
case; and its very possessor wrote it down in terms which he would not
have used unless he had been thinking of more energetically religious
moods in others, with which he found himself unable to compete. It is
with these more energetic states that our sole business lies, and we
can perfectly well afford to let the minor notes and the uncertain
border go. It was the extremer cases that I had in mind a little while
ago when I said that personal religion, even without theology or
ritual, would prove to embody some elements that morality pure and
simple does not contain. You may remember that I promised shortly to
point out what those elements were. In a general way I can now say
what I had in mind.
"I accept the universe" is reported to have been a favorite utterance
of our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some
one repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is
said to have been: "Gad! she'd better!" At bottom the whole concern
of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of
the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily
and altogether? Shall our protests against certain things in it be
radical and unforgiving, or shall we think that, even with evil, there
are ways of living that must lead to good? If we accept the whole,
shall we do so as if stunned into submission--as Carlyle would have
us--"Gad! we'd better!"--or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent?
Morality pure and simple accepts the law of the whole which it finds
reigning, so far as to acknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with
the heaviest and coldest heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke.
But for religion, in its strong and fully developed manifestations, the
service of the highest never is felt as a yoke. Dull submission is
left far behind, and a mood of welcome, which may fill any place on the
scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken
its place.
It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether
one accept the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation
to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
The difference is as great as that between passivity and activity, as
that between the defensive and the aggressive mood. Gradual as are the
steps by which an individual may grow from one state into the other,
many as are the intermediate stages which different individuals
represent, yet when you place the typical extremes beside each other
for comparison, you feel that two discontinuous psychological universes
confront you, and that in passing from one to the other a "critical
point" has been overcome.
If we compare stoic with Christian ejaculations we see much more than a
difference of doctrine; rather is it a difference of emotional mood
that parts them. When Marcus Aurelius reflects on the eternal reason
that has ordered things, there is a frosty chill about his words which
you rarely find in a Jewish, and never in a Christian piece of
religious writing. The universe is "accepted" by all these writers;
but how devoid of passion or exultation the spirit of the Roman Emperor
is! Compare his fine sentence: "If gods care not for me or my
children, here is a reason for it," with Job's cry: "Though he slay
me, yet will I trust in him!" and you immediately see the difference I
mean. The anima mundi, to whose disposal of his own personal destiny
the Stoic consents, is there to be respected and submitted to, but the
Christian God is there to be loved; and the difference of emotional
atmosphere is like that between an arctic climate and the tropics,
though the outcome in the way of accepting actual conditions
uncomplainingly may seem in abstract terms to be much the same.
"It is a man's duty," says Marcus Aurelius, "to comfort himself and
wait for the natural dissolution, and not to be vexed, but to find
refreshment solely in these thoughts--first that nothing will happen to
me which is not conformable to the nature of the universe; and secondly
that I need do nothing contrary to the God and deity within me; for
there is no man who can compel me to transgress. He is an abscess on
the universe who withdraws and separates himself from the reason of our
common nature, through being displeased with the things which happen.
For the same nature produces these, and has produced thee too. And so
accept everything which happens, even if it seem disagreeable, because
it leads to this, the health of the universe and to the prosperity and
felicity of Zeus. For he would not have brought on any man what he has
brought if it were not useful for the whole. The integrity of the
whole is mutilated if thou cuttest off anything. And thou dost cut
off, as far as it is in thy power, when thou art dissatisfied, and in a
manner triest to put anything out of the way."[14]
[14] Book V., ch. ix. (abridged).
Compare now this mood with that of the old Christian author of the
Theologia Germanica:--
"Where men are enlightened with the true light, they renounce all
desire and choice, and commit and commend themselves and all things to
the eternal Goodness, so that every enlightened man could say: 'I
would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.'
Such men are in a state of freedom, because they have lost the fear of
pain or hell, and the hope of reward or heaven, and are living in pure
submission to the eternal Goodness, in the perfect freedom of fervent
love. When a man truly perceiveth and considereth himself, who and
what he is, and findeth himself utterly vile and wicked and unworthy,
he falleth into such a deep abasement that it seemeth to him reasonable
that all creatures in heaven and earth should rise up against him. And
therefore he will not and dare not desire any consolation and release;
but he is willing to be unconsoled and unreleased; and he doth not
grieve over his sufferings, for they are right in his eyes, and he hath
nothing to say against them. This is what is meant by true repentance
for sin; and he who in this present time entereth into this hell, none
may console him. Now God hath not forsaken a man in this hell, but He
is laying his hand upon him, that the man may not desire nor regard
anything but the eternal Good only. And then, when the man neither
careth for nor desireth anything but the eternal Good alone, and
seeketh not himself nor his own things, but the honour of God only, he
is made a partaker of all manner of joy, bliss, peace, rest, and
consolation, and so the man is henceforth in the kingdom of heaven.
This hell and this heaven are two good safe ways for a man, and happy
is he who truly findeth them."[15]
[15] Chaps. x., xi. (abridged): Winkworth's translation.
How much more active and positive the impulse of the Christian writer
to accept his place in the universe is! Marcus Aurelius agrees TO the
scheme--the German theologian agrees WITH it. He literally ABOUNDS in
agreement, he runs out to embrace the divine decrees.
Occasionally, it is true, the stoic rises to something like a Christian
warmth of sentiment, as in the often quoted passage of Marcus
Aurelius:--
"Everything harmonizes with me which is harmonious to thee, O Universe.
Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which is in due time for
thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring, O Nature:
from thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things
return. The poet says, Dear City of Cecrops; and wilt thou not say,
Dear City of Zeus?"[16]
[16] Book IV., 523
But compare even as devout a passage as this with a genuine Christian
outpouring, and it seems a little cold. Turn, for instance, to the
Imitation of Christ:--
"Lord, thou knowest what is best; let this or that be according as thou
wilt. Give what thou wilt, so much as thou wilt, when thou wilt. Do
with me as thou knowest best, and as shall be most to thine honour.
Place me where thou wilt, and freely work thy will with me in all
things.... When could it be evil when thou wert near? I had rather be
poor for thy sake than rich without thee. I choose rather to be a
pilgrim upon the earth with thee, than without thee to possess heaven.
Where thou art, there is heaven; and where thou art not, behold there
death and hell."[17]
[17] Benham's translation: Book III., chaps. xv., lix. Compare Mary
Moody Emerson: "Let me be a blot on this fair world, the obscurest the
loneliest sufferer, with one proviso--that I know it is His agency. I
will love Him though He shed frost and darkness on every way of mine."
R. W. Emerson: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 188.
It is a good rule in physiology, when we are studying the meaning of an
organ, to ask after its most peculiar and characteristic sort of
performance, and to seek its office in that one of its functions which
no other organ can possibly exert. Surely the same maxim holds good in
our present quest. The essence of religious experiences, the thing by
which we finally must judge them, must be that element or quality in
them which we can meet nowhere else. And such a quality will be of
course most prominent and easy to notice in those religious experiences
which are most one-sided, exaggerated, and intense.
Now when we compare these intenser experiences with the experiences of
tamer minds, so cool and reasonable that we are tempted to call them
philosophical rather than religious, we find a character that is
perfectly distinct. That character, it seems to me, should be regarded
as the practically important differentia of religion for our purpose;
and just what it is can easily be brought out by comparing the mind of
an abstractly conceived Christian with that of a moralist similarly
conceived.
A life is manly, stoical, moral, or philosophical, we say, in
proportion as it is less swayed by paltry personal considerations and
more by objective ends that call for energy, even though that energy
bring personal loss and pain. This is the good side of war, in so far
as it calls for "volunteers." And for morality life is a war, and the
service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls
for volunteers. Even a sick man, unable to be militant outwardly, can
carry on the moral warfare. He can willfully turn his attention away
from his own future, whether in this world or the next. He can train
himself to indifference to his present drawbacks and immerse himself in
whatever objective interests still remain accessible. He can follow
public news, and sympathize with other people's affairs. He can
cultivate cheerful manners, and be silent about his miseries. He can
contemplate whatever ideal aspects of existence his philosophy is able
to present to him, and practice whatever duties, such as patience,
resignation, trust, his ethical system requires. Such a man lives on
his loftiest, largest plane. He is a high-hearted freeman and no
pining slave. And yet he lacks something which the Christian par
excellence, the mystic and ascetic saint, for example, has in abundant
measure, and which makes of him a human being of an altogether
different denomination.
The Christian also spurns the pinched and mumping sick-room attitude,
and the lives of saints are full of a kind of callousness to diseased
conditions of body which probably no other human records show. But
whereas the merely moralistic spurning takes an effort of volition, the
Christian spurning is the result of the excitement of a higher kind of
emotion, in the presence of which no exertion of volition is required.
The moralist must hold his breath and keep his muscles tense; and so
long as this athletic attitude is possible all goes well--morality
suffices. But the athletic attitude tends ever to break down, and it
inevitably does break down even in the most stalwart when the organism
begins to decay, or when morbid fears invade the mind. To suggest
personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of
irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things.
What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel
that the spirit of the universe {47} recognizes and secures him, all
decaying and failing as he is. Well, we are all such helpless failures
in the last resort. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with
lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the robustest of us
down. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity and
provisionality of our voluntary career comes over us that all our
morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and
all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-BEING that
our lives ought to be grounded in, but, alas! are not.
And here religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her
hands. There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no
others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been
displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the
floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most
dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our
moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for
tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep
breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be
anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by
mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away.
We shall see abundant examples of this happy state of mind in later
lectures of this course. We shall see how infinitely passionate a
thing religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath,
like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness
and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or
logically deducible from anything else. This enchantment, coming as a
gift when it does come--a gift of our organism, the physiologists will
tell us, a gift of God's grace, the theologians say --is either there
or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become
possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere
word of command. Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the
Subject's range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the
outward battle is lost, and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and
vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste.
If religion is to mean anything definite for us, it seems to me that we
ought to take it as meaning this added dimension of emotion, this
enthusiastic temper of espousal, in regions where morality strictly so
called can at best but bow its head and acquiesce. It ought to mean
nothing short of this new reach of freedom for us, with the struggle
over, the keynote of the universe sounding in our ears, and everlasting
possession spread before our eyes.[18]
[18] Once more, there are plenty of men, constitutionally sombre men,
in whose religious life this rapturousness is lacking. They are
religious in the wider sense, yet in this acutest of all senses they
are not so, and it is religion in the acutest sense that I wish,
without disputing about words, to study first, so as to get at its
typical differentia.
This sort of happiness in the absolute and everlasting is what we find
nowhere but in religion. It is parted off from all mere animal
happiness, all mere enjoyment of the present, by that element of
solemnity of which I have already made so much account. Solemnity is a
hard thing to define abstractly, but certain of its marks are patent
enough. A solemn state of mind is never crude or simple--it seems to
contain a certain measure of its own opposite in solution. A solemn joy
preserves a sort of bitter in its sweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to
which we intimately consent. But there are writers who, realizing that
happiness of a supreme sort is the prerogative of religion, forget this
complication, and call all happiness, as such, religious. Mr. Havelock
Ellis, for example, identifies religion with the entire field of the
soul's liberation from oppressive moods.
"The simplest functions of physiological life," he writes may be its
ministers. Every one who is at all acquainted with the Persian mystics
knows how wine may be regarded as an instrument of religion. Indeed,
in all countries and in all ages some form of physical
enlargement--singing, dancing, drinking, sexual excitement--has been
intimately associated with worship. Even the momentary expansion of the
soul in laughter is, to however slight an extent, a religious
exercise.... Whenever an impulse from the world strikes against the
organism, and the resultant is not discomfort or pain, not even the
muscular contraction of strenuous manhood, but a joyous expansion or
aspiration of the whole soul--there is religion. It is the infinite for
which we hunger, and we ride gladly on every little wave that promises
to bear us towards it."[19]
[19] The New Spirit, p. 232.
But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form
of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness
out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are "reliefs,"
occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or
threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious
happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape.
It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice--inwardly it
knows it to be permanently overcome. If you ask HOW religion thus falls
on the thorns and faces death, and in the very act annuls annihilation,
I cannot explain the matter, for it is religion's secret, and to
understand it you must yourself have been a religious man of the
extremer type. In our future examples, even of the simplest and
healthiest-minded type of religious consciousness, we shall find this
complex sacrificial constitution, in which a higher happiness holds a
lower unhappiness in check. In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido
Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of
the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there.
The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being
there--that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it,
SO LONG AS WE KEEP OUR FOOT UPON HIS NECK. In the religious
consciousness, that is just the position in which the fiend, the
negative or tragic principle, is found; and for that very reason the
religious consciousness is so rich from the emotional point of
view.[20] We shall see how in certain men and women it takes on a
monstrously ascetic form. There are saints who have literally fed on
the negative principle, on humiliation and privation, and the thought
of suffering and death--their souls growing in happiness just in
proportion as their outward state grew more intolerable. No other
emotion than religious emotion can bring a man to this peculiar pass.
And it is for that reason that when we ask our question about the value
of religion for human life, I think we ought to look for the answer
among these violenter examples rather than among those of a more
moderate hue.
[20] I owe this allegorical illustration to my lamented colleague and
Friend, Charles Carroll Everett.
Having the phenomenon of our study in its acutest possible form to
start with, we can shade down as much as we please later. And if in
these cases, repulsive as they are to our ordinary worldly way of
judging, we find ourselves compelled to acknowledge religion's value
and treat it with respect, it will have proved in some way its value
for life at large. By subtracting and toning down extravagances we may
thereupon proceed to trace the boundaries of its legitimate sway.
To be sure, it makes our task difficult to have to deal so muck with
eccentricities and extremes. "How CAN religion on the whole be the
most important of all human functions," you may ask, "if every several
manifestation of it in turn have to be corrected and sobered down and
pruned away?"
Such a thesis seems a paradox impossible to sustain reasonably--yet I
believe that something like it will have to be our final contention.
That personal attitude which the individual finds himself impelled to
take up towards what he apprehends to be the divine--and you will
remember that this was our definition--will prove to be both a helpless
and a sacrificial attitude. That is, we shall have to confess to at
least some amount of dependence on sheer mercy, and to practice some
amount of renunciation, great or small, to save our souls alive. The
constitution of the world we live in requires it:--
"Entbehren sollst du! sollst entbehren!
Das ist der ewige Gesang
Der jedem an die Ohren klingt,
Den, unser ganzes Leben lang
Uns heiser jede Stunde singt."
For when all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent
on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort,
deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into
our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind
which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an
imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very
best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary,
surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary
givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase.
Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary;
and if it be the only agency that can accomplish this result, its vital
importance as a human faculty stands vindicated beyond dispute. It
becomes an essential organ of our life, performing a function which no
other portion of our nature can so successfully fulfill. From the
merely biological point of view, so to call it, this is a conclusion to
which, so far as I can now see, we shall inevitably be led, and led
moreover by following the purely empirical method of demonstration
which I sketched to you in the first lecture. Of the farther office of
religion as a metaphysical revelation I will say nothing now.
But to foreshadow the terminus of one's investigations is one thing,
and to arrive there safely is another. In the next lecture, abandoning
the extreme generalities which have engrossed us hitherto, I propose
that we begin our actual journey by addressing ourselves directly to
the concrete facts.
CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC
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 oversimplification 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 to religion. If we should inquire for the essence of
"government," for example, one man might tell us it was authority,
another submission, an other police, another an army, another an
assembly, an other 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?[9]
[9] 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 he no one specific and
essential kind of religious object, and no one specific and essential
kind of religious act.
The field of religion being as wide as this, it is manifestly
impossible that I should pretend to cover it. My lectures must be
limited to a fraction of the subject. And, although it would indeed be
foolish to set up an abstract definition of religion's essence, and
then proceed to defend that definition against all comers, yet this
need not prevent me from taking my own narrow view of what religion
shall consist in FOR THE PURPOSE OF THESE LECTURES, or, out of the many
meanings of the word, from choosing the one meaning in which I wish to
interest you particularly, and proclaiming arbitrarily that when I say
"religion" I mean THAT. This, in fact, is what I must do, and I will
now preliminarily seek to mark out the field I choose.
One way to mark it out easily is to say what aspects of the subject we
leave out. At the outset we are struck by one great partition which
divides the religious field. On the one side of it lies institutional,
on the other personal religion. As M. P. Sabatier says, one branch of
religion keeps the divinity, another keeps man most in view. Worship
and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity,
theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the
essentials of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit
our view to it, we should have to define religion as an external art,
the art of winning the favor of the gods. In the more personal branch
of religion it is on the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself
which form the center of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his
helplessness, his incompleteness. And although the favor of the God,
as forfeited or gained, is still an essential feature of the story, and
theology plays a vital part therein, yet the acts to which this sort of
religion prompts are personal not ritual acts, the individual transacts
the business by himself alone, and the ecclesiastical organization,
with its priests and sacraments and other go-betweens, sinks to an
altogether secondary place. The relation goes direct from heart to
heart, from soul to soul, between man and his maker.
Now in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch
entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to
consider as little as possible the systematic theology and the ideas
about the gods themselves, and to confine myself as far as I can to
personal religion pure and simple. To some of you personal religion,
thus nakedly considered, will no doubt seem too incomplete a thing to
wear the general name. "It is a part of religion," you will say, "but
only its unorganized rudiment; if we are to name it by itself, we had
better call it man's conscience or morality than his religion. The
name 'religion' should be reserved for the fully organized system of
feeling, thought, and institution, for the Church, in short, of which
this personal religion, so called, is but a fractional element."
But if you say this, it will only show the more plainly how much the
question of definition tends to become a dispute about names.
Rather than prolong such a dispute, I am willing to accept almost any
name for the personal religion of which I propose to treat. Call it
conscience or morality, if you yourselves prefer, and not
religion--under either name it will be equally worthy of our study. As
for myself, I think it will prove to contain some elements which
morality pure and simple does not contain, and these elements I shall
soon seek to point out; so I will myself continue to apply the word
"religion" to it; and in the last lecture of all, I will bring in the
theologies and the ecclesiasticisms, and say something of its relation
to them.
In one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more
fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches, when
once established, live at second-hand upon tradition; but the FOUNDERS
of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct
personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders,
the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian
sects have been in this case;--so personal religion should still seem
the primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it
incomplete.
There are, it is true, other things in religion chronologically more
primordial than personal devoutness in the moral sense. Fetishism and
magic seem to have preceded inward piety historically--at least our
records of inward piety do not reach back so far. And if fetishism and
magic be regarded as stages of religion, one may say that personal
religion in the inward sense and the genuinely spiritual
ecclesiasticisms which it founds are phenomena of secondary or even
tertiary order. But, quite apart from the fact that many
anthropologists--for instance, Jevons and Frazer --expressly oppose
"religion" and "magic" to each other, it is certain that the whole
system of thought which leads to magic, fetishism, and the lower
superstitions may just as well be called primitive science as called
primitive religion. The question thus becomes a verbal one again; and
our knowledge of all these early stages of thought and feeling is in
any case so conjectural and imperfect that farther discussion would not
be worth while.
Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall
mean for us THE FEELINGS, ACTS, AND EXPERIENCES OF INDIVIDUAL MEN IN
THEIR SOLITUDE, SO FAR AS THEY APPREHEND THEMSELVES TO STAND IN
RELATION TO WHATEVER THEY MAY CONSIDER THE DIVINE. Since the relation
may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of
religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies,
and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. In these
lectures, however, as I have already said, the immediate personal
experiences will amply fill our time, and we shall hardly consider
theology or ecclesiasticism at all.
We escape much controversial matter by this arbitrary definition of our
field. But, still, a chance of controversy comes up over the word
"divine," if we take the definition in too narrow a sense. There are
systems of thought which the world usually calls religious, and yet
which do not positively assume a God. Buddhism is in this case.
Popularly, of course, the Buddha himself stands in place of a God; but
in strictness the Buddhistic system is atheistic. Modern
transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let
God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a
superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially
spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the
transcendentalist cult. In that address to the graduating class at
Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank
expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the
scandal of the performance.
"These laws," said the speaker, "execute themselves. They are out of
time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance: Thus, in the soul
of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire.
He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed
is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity thereby
puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God;
the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God, do enter
into that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives
himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. Character is
always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will
speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie--for example,
the taint of vanity, any attempt to make a good impression, a favorable
appearance--will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth,
and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the
grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear your witness.
For all things proceed out of the same spirit, which is differently
named love, justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as
the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it
washes. In so far as he roves from these ends, a man bereaves himself
of power, of auxiliaries. His being shrinks . .. he becomes less and
less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death. The
perception of this law awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call
the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness.
Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air.
It is the embalmer of the world.
It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the
stars is it. It is the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable.
When he says 'I ought'; when love warns him; when he chooses, warned
from on high, the good and great deed; then, deep melodies wander
through his soul from supreme wisdom. Then he can worship, and be
enlarged by his worship; for he can never go behind this sentiment.
All the expressions of this sentiment are sacred and permanent in
proportion to their purity. [They] affect us more than all other
compositions. The sentences of the olden time, which ejaculate this
piety, are still fresh and fragrant. And the unique impression of
Jesus upon mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into
the history of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this
infusion."[10]
[10] Miscellanies, 1868, p. 120 (abridged).
Such is the Emersonian religion. The universe has a divine soul of
order, which soul is moral, being also the soul within the soul of man.
But whether this soul of the universe be a mere quality like the eye's
brilliancy or the skin's softness, or whether it be a self-conscious
life like the eye's seeing or the skin's feeling, is a decision that
never unmistakably appears in Emerson's pages. It quivers on the
boundary of these things, sometimes leaning one way sometimes the
other, to suit the literary rather than the philosophic need. Whatever
it is, though, it is active. As much as if it were a God, we can trust
it to protect all ideal interests and keep the world's balance
straight. The sentences in which Emerson, to the very end, gave
utterance to this faith are as fine as anything in literature: "If you
love and serve men, you cannot by any hiding or stratagem escape the
remuneration. Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when
disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam.
All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain
set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forevermore the
ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must
range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil."[11]
[11] Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1868, p. 186.
Now it would be too absurd to say that the inner experiences that
underlie such expressions of faith as this and impel the writer to
their utterance are quite unworthy to be called religious experiences.
The sort of appeal that Emersonian optimism, on the one hand, and
Buddhistic pessimism, on the other, make to the individual and the son
of response which he makes to them in his life are in fact
indistinguishable from, and in many respects identical with, the best
Christian appeal and response. We must therefore, from the
experiential point of view, call these godless or quasi-godless creeds
"religions"; and accordingly when in our definition of religion we
speak of the individual's relation to "what he considers the divine,"
we must interpret the term "divine" very broadly, as denoting any
object that is god- LIKE, whether it be a concrete deity or not. But
the term "godlike," if thus treated as a floating general quality,
becomes exceedingly vague, for many gods have flourished in religious
history, and their attributes have been discrepant enough. What then
is that essentially godlike quality--be it embodied in a concrete deity
or not--our relation to which determines our character as religious
men? It will repay us to seek some answer to this question before we
proceed farther.
For one thing, gods are conceived to be first things in the way of
being and power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there is no
escape. What relates to them is the first and last word in the way of
truth. Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true
might at this rate be treated as godlike, and a man's religion might
thus be identified with his attitude, whatever it might be, toward what
he felt to be the primal truth.
Such a definition as this would in a way be defensible. Religion,
whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life, so why not say
that any total reaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions are
different from casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from
usual or professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the
foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the
whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien,
terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree everyone
possesses. This sense of the world's presence, appealing as it does to
our peculiar individual temperament, makes us either strenuous or
careless, devout or blasphemous, gloomy or exultant, about life at
large; and our reaction, involuntary and inarticulate and often half
unconscious as it is, is the completest of all our answers to the
question, "What is the character of this universe in which we dwell?"
It expresses our individual sense of it in the most definite way. Why
then not call these reactions our religion, no matter what specific
character they may have? Non-religious as some of these reactions may
be, in one sense of the word "religious," they yet belong to THE
GENERAL SPHERE OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE, and so should generically be
classed as religious reactions. "He believes in No-God, and he
worships him," said a colleague of mine of a student who was
manifesting a fine atheistic ardor; and the more fervent opponents of
Christian doctrine have often enough shown a temper which,
psychologically considered, is indistinguishable from religious zeal.
But so very broad a use of the word "religion" would be inconvenient,
however defensible it might remain on logical grounds. There are
trifling, sneering attitudes even toward the whole of life; and in some
men these attitudes are final and systematic. It would strain the
ordinary use of language too much to call such attitudes religious,
even though, from the point of view of an unbiased critical philosophy,
they might conceivably be perfectly reasonable ways of looking upon
life. Voltaire, for example, writes thus to a friend, at the age of
seventy-three: "As for myself," he says, "weak as I am, I carry on the
war to the last moment, I get a hundred pike-thrusts, I return two
hundred, and I laugh. I see near my door Geneva on fire with quarrels
over nothing, and I laugh again; and, thank God, I can look upon the
world as a farce even when it becomes as tragic as it sometimes does.
All comes out even at the end of the day, and all comes out still more
even when all the days are over."
Much as we may admire such a robust old gamecock spirit in a
valetudinarian, to call it a religious spirit would be odd. Yet it is
for the moment Voltaire's reaction on the whole of life. Je me'n fiche
is the vulgar French equivalent for our English ejaculation "Who
cares?" And the happy term je me'n fichisme recently has been
invented to designate the systematic determination not to take anything
in {37} life too solemnly. "All is vanity" is the relieving word in
all difficult crises for this mode of thought, which that exquisite
literary genius Renan took pleasure, in his later days of sweet decay,
in putting into coquettishly sacrilegious forms which remain to us as
excellent expressions of the "all is vanity" state of mind. Take the
following passage, for example--we must hold to duty, even against the
evidence, Renan says--but he then goes on:--
"There are many chances that the world may be nothing but a fairy
pantomime of which no God has care. We must therefore arrange
ourselves so that on neither hypothesis we shall be completely wrong.
We must listen to the superior voices, but in such a way that if the
second hypothesis were true we should not have been too completely
duped. If in effect the world be not a serious thing, it is the
dogmatic people who will be the shallow ones, and the worldly minded
whom the theologians now call frivolous will be those who are really
wise.
"In utrumque paratus, then. Be ready for anything--that perhaps is
wisdom. Give ourselves up, according to the hour, to confidence, to
skepticism, to optimism, to irony and we may be sure that at certain
moments at least we shall be with the truth.... Good-humor is a
philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her
no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always
talk of philosophy with a smile. We owe it to the Eternal to be
virtuous but we have the right to add to this tribute our irony as a
sort of personal reprisal. In this way we return to the right quarter
jest for jest; we play the trick that has been played on us. Saint
Augustine's phrase: Lord, if we 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."[12]
[12] Feuilles detachees, pp. 394-398 (abridged).
Surely all the usual associations of the word "religion" would have to
be stripped away if such a systematic parti pris of irony were also to
be denoted by the name. For common men "religion," whatever more
special meanings it may have, signifies always a SERIOUS state of mind.
If any one phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase would
be, "All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may
suggest." If it can stop anything, religion as commonly apprehended
can stop just such chaffing talk as Renan's. It favors gravity, not
pertness; it says "hush" to all vain chatter and smart wit.
But if hostile to light irony, religion is equally hostile to heavy
grumbling and complaint. The world appears tragic enough in some
religions, but the tragedy is realized as purging, and a way of
deliverance is held to exist. We shall see enough of the religious
melancholy in a future lecture; but melancholy, according to our
ordinary use of language, forfeits all title to be called religious
when, in Marcus Aurelius's racy words, the sufferer simply lies kicking
and screaming after the fashion of a sacrificed pig. The mood of a
Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche--and in a less degree one may sometimes say
the same of our own sad Carlyle--though often an ennobling sadness, is
almost as often only peevishness running away with the bit between its
teeth. The sallies of the two German authors remind one, half the
time, of the sick shriekings of two dying rats. They lack the
purgatorial note which religious sadness gives forth.
There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude
which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker;
if sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being SOLEMN
experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. So I
propose--arbitrarily again, if you please--to narrow our definition
once more by saying that the word "divine," as employed therein, shall
mean for us not merely the primal and enveloping and real, for that
meaning if taken without restriction might prove too broad. The divine
shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels
impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor
a jest.
But solemnity, and gravity, and all such emotional attributes, admit of
various shades; and, do what we will with our defining, the truth must
at last be confronted that we are dealing with a field of experience
where there is not a single conception that can be sharply drawn. The
pretension, under such conditions, to be rigorously "scientific" or
"exact" in our terms would only stamp us as lacking in understanding of
our task. Things are more or less divine, states of mind are more or
less religious, reactions are more or less total, but the boundaries
are always misty, and it is everywhere a question of amount and degree.
Nevertheless, at their extreme of development, there can never be any
question as to what experiences are religious. The divinity of the
object and the solemnity of the reaction are too well marked for doubt.
Hesitation as to whether a state of mind is "religious," or
"irreligious," or "moral," or "philosophical," is only likely to arise
when the state of mind is weakly characterized, but in that case it
will be hardly worthy of our study at all. With states that can only
by courtesy be called religious we need have nothing to do, our only
profitable business being with what nobody can possibly feel tempted to
call anything else. I said in my former lecture that we learn most
about a thing when we view it under a microscope, as it were, or in its
most exaggerated form. This is as true of religious phenomena as of
any other kind of fact. The only cases likely to be profitable enough
to repay our attention will therefore be cases where the religious
spirit is unmistakable and extreme. Its fainter manifestations we may
tranquilly pass by. Here, for example, is the total reaction upon life
of Frederick Locker Lampson, whose autobiography, entitled
"Confidences," proves him to have been a most amiable man.
"I am so far resigned to my lot that I feel small pain at the thought
of having to part from what has been called the pleasant habit of
existence, the sweet fable of life. I would not care to live my wasted
life over again, and so to prolong my span. Strange to say, I have but
little wish to be younger. I submit with a chill at my heart. I
humbly submit because it is the Divine Will, and my appointed destiny.
I dread the increase of infirmities that will make me a burden to those
around me, those dear to me. No! let me slip away as quietly and
comfortably as I can. Let the end come, if peace come with it.
"I do not know that there is a great deal to be said for this world, or
our sojourn here upon it; but it has pleased God so to place us, and it
must please me also. I ask you, what is human life? Is not it a
maimed happiness--care and weariness, weariness and care, with the
baseless expectation, the strange cozenage of a brighter to-morrow? At
best it is but a froward child, that must be played with and humored,
to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over."[13]
[13] Op. cit., pp. 314, 313.
This is a complex, a tender, a submissive, and a graceful state of
mind. For myself, I should have no objection to calling it on the
whole a religious state of mind, although I dare say that to many of
you it may seem too listless and half-hearted to merit so good a name.
But what matters it in the end whether we call such a state of mind
religious or not? It is too insignificant for our instruction in any
case; and its very possessor wrote it down in terms which he would not
have used unless he had been thinking of more energetically religious
moods in others, with which he found himself unable to compete. It is
with these more energetic states that our sole business lies, and we
can perfectly well afford to let the minor notes and the uncertain
border go. It was the extremer cases that I had in mind a little while
ago when I said that personal religion, even without theology or
ritual, would prove to embody some elements that morality pure and
simple does not contain. You may remember that I promised shortly to
point out what those elements were. In a general way I can now say
what I had in mind.
"I accept the universe" is reported to have been a favorite utterance
of our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some
one repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is
said to have been: "Gad! she'd better!" At bottom the whole concern
of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of
the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily
and altogether? Shall our protests against certain things in it be
radical and unforgiving, or shall we think that, even with evil, there
are ways of living that must lead to good? If we accept the whole,
shall we do so as if stunned into submission--as Carlyle would have
us--"Gad! we'd better!"--or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent?
Morality pure and simple accepts the law of the whole which it finds
reigning, so far as to acknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with
the heaviest and coldest heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke.
But for religion, in its strong and fully developed manifestations, the
service of the highest never is felt as a yoke. Dull submission is
left far behind, and a mood of welcome, which may fill any place on the
scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken
its place.
It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether
one accept the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation
to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
The difference is as great as that between passivity and activity, as
that between the defensive and the aggressive mood. Gradual as are the
steps by which an individual may grow from one state into the other,
many as are the intermediate stages which different individuals
represent, yet when you place the typical extremes beside each other
for comparison, you feel that two discontinuous psychological universes
confront you, and that in passing from one to the other a "critical
point" has been overcome.
If we compare stoic with Christian ejaculations we see much more than a
difference of doctrine; rather is it a difference of emotional mood
that parts them. When Marcus Aurelius reflects on the eternal reason
that has ordered things, there is a frosty chill about his words which
you rarely find in a Jewish, and never in a Christian piece of
religious writing. The universe is "accepted" by all these writers;
but how devoid of passion or exultation the spirit of the Roman Emperor
is! Compare his fine sentence: "If gods care not for me or my
children, here is a reason for it," with Job's cry: "Though he slay
me, yet will I trust in him!" and you immediately see the difference I
mean. The anima mundi, to whose disposal of his own personal destiny
the Stoic consents, is there to be respected and submitted to, but the
Christian God is there to be loved; and the difference of emotional
atmosphere is like that between an arctic climate and the tropics,
though the outcome in the way of accepting actual conditions
uncomplainingly may seem in abstract terms to be much the same.
"It is a man's duty," says Marcus Aurelius, "to comfort himself and
wait for the natural dissolution, and not to be vexed, but to find
refreshment solely in these thoughts--first that nothing will happen to
me which is not conformable to the nature of the universe; and secondly
that I need do nothing contrary to the God and deity within me; for
there is no man who can compel me to transgress. He is an abscess on
the universe who withdraws and separates himself from the reason of our
common nature, through being displeased with the things which happen.
For the same nature produces these, and has produced thee too. And so
accept everything which happens, even if it seem disagreeable, because
it leads to this, the health of the universe and to the prosperity and
felicity of Zeus. For he would not have brought on any man what he has
brought if it were not useful for the whole. The integrity of the
whole is mutilated if thou cuttest off anything. And thou dost cut
off, as far as it is in thy power, when thou art dissatisfied, and in a
manner triest to put anything out of the way."[14]
[14] Book V., ch. ix. (abridged).
Compare now this mood with that of the old Christian author of the
Theologia Germanica:--
"Where men are enlightened with the true light, they renounce all
desire and choice, and commit and commend themselves and all things to
the eternal Goodness, so that every enlightened man could say: 'I
would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.'
Such men are in a state of freedom, because they have lost the fear of
pain or hell, and the hope of reward or heaven, and are living in pure
submission to the eternal Goodness, in the perfect freedom of fervent
love. When a man truly perceiveth and considereth himself, who and
what he is, and findeth himself utterly vile and wicked and unworthy,
he falleth into such a deep abasement that it seemeth to him reasonable
that all creatures in heaven and earth should rise up against him. And
therefore he will not and dare not desire any consolation and release;
but he is willing to be unconsoled and unreleased; and he doth not
grieve over his sufferings, for they are right in his eyes, and he hath
nothing to say against them. This is what is meant by true repentance
for sin; and he who in this present time entereth into this hell, none
may console him. Now God hath not forsaken a man in this hell, but He
is laying his hand upon him, that the man may not desire nor regard
anything but the eternal Good only. And then, when the man neither
careth for nor desireth anything but the eternal Good alone, and
seeketh not himself nor his own things, but the honour of God only, he
is made a partaker of all manner of joy, bliss, peace, rest, and
consolation, and so the man is henceforth in the kingdom of heaven.
This hell and this heaven are two good safe ways for a man, and happy
is he who truly findeth them."[15]
[15] Chaps. x., xi. (abridged): Winkworth's translation.
How much more active and positive the impulse of the Christian writer
to accept his place in the universe is! Marcus Aurelius agrees TO the
scheme--the German theologian agrees WITH it. He literally ABOUNDS in
agreement, he runs out to embrace the divine decrees.
Occasionally, it is true, the stoic rises to something like a Christian
warmth of sentiment, as in the often quoted passage of Marcus
Aurelius:--
"Everything harmonizes with me which is harmonious to thee, O Universe.
Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which is in due time for
thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring, O Nature:
from thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things
return. The poet says, Dear City of Cecrops; and wilt thou not say,
Dear City of Zeus?"[16]
[16] Book IV., 523
But compare even as devout a passage as this with a genuine Christian
outpouring, and it seems a little cold. Turn, for instance, to the
Imitation of Christ:--
"Lord, thou knowest what is best; let this or that be according as thou
wilt. Give what thou wilt, so much as thou wilt, when thou wilt. Do
with me as thou knowest best, and as shall be most to thine honour.
Place me where thou wilt, and freely work thy will with me in all
things.... When could it be evil when thou wert near? I had rather be
poor for thy sake than rich without thee. I choose rather to be a
pilgrim upon the earth with thee, than without thee to possess heaven.
Where thou art, there is heaven; and where thou art not, behold there
death and hell."[17]
[17] Benham's translation: Book III., chaps. xv., lix. Compare Mary
Moody Emerson: "Let me be a blot on this fair world, the obscurest the
loneliest sufferer, with one proviso--that I know it is His agency. I
will love Him though He shed frost and darkness on every way of mine."
R. W. Emerson: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 188.
It is a good rule in physiology, when we are studying the meaning of an
organ, to ask after its most peculiar and characteristic sort of
performance, and to seek its office in that one of its functions which
no other organ can possibly exert. Surely the same maxim holds good in
our present quest. The essence of religious experiences, the thing by
which we finally must judge them, must be that element or quality in
them which we can meet nowhere else. And such a quality will be of
course most prominent and easy to notice in those religious experiences
which are most one-sided, exaggerated, and intense.
Now when we compare these intenser experiences with the experiences of
tamer minds, so cool and reasonable that we are tempted to call them
philosophical rather than religious, we find a character that is
perfectly distinct. That character, it seems to me, should be regarded
as the practically important differentia of religion for our purpose;
and just what it is can easily be brought out by comparing the mind of
an abstractly conceived Christian with that of a moralist similarly
conceived.
A life is manly, stoical, moral, or philosophical, we say, in
proportion as it is less swayed by paltry personal considerations and
more by objective ends that call for energy, even though that energy
bring personal loss and pain. This is the good side of war, in so far
as it calls for "volunteers." And for morality life is a war, and the
service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls
for volunteers. Even a sick man, unable to be militant outwardly, can
carry on the moral warfare. He can willfully turn his attention away
from his own future, whether in this world or the next. He can train
himself to indifference to his present drawbacks and immerse himself in
whatever objective interests still remain accessible. He can follow
public news, and sympathize with other people's affairs. He can
cultivate cheerful manners, and be silent about his miseries. He can
contemplate whatever ideal aspects of existence his philosophy is able
to present to him, and practice whatever duties, such as patience,
resignation, trust, his ethical system requires. Such a man lives on
his loftiest, largest plane. He is a high-hearted freeman and no
pining slave. And yet he lacks something which the Christian par
excellence, the mystic and ascetic saint, for example, has in abundant
measure, and which makes of him a human being of an altogether
different denomination.
The Christian also spurns the pinched and mumping sick-room attitude,
and the lives of saints are full of a kind of callousness to diseased
conditions of body which probably no other human records show. But
whereas the merely moralistic spurning takes an effort of volition, the
Christian spurning is the result of the excitement of a higher kind of
emotion, in the presence of which no exertion of volition is required.
The moralist must hold his breath and keep his muscles tense; and so
long as this athletic attitude is possible all goes well--morality
suffices. But the athletic attitude tends ever to break down, and it
inevitably does break down even in the most stalwart when the organism
begins to decay, or when morbid fears invade the mind. To suggest
personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of
irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things.
What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel
that the spirit of the universe {47} recognizes and secures him, all
decaying and failing as he is. Well, we are all such helpless failures
in the last resort. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with
lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the robustest of us
down. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity and
provisionality of our voluntary career comes over us that all our
morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and
all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-BEING that
our lives ought to be grounded in, but, alas! are not.
And here religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her
hands. There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no
others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been
displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the
floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most
dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our
moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for
tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep
breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be
anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by
mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away.
We shall see abundant examples of this happy state of mind in later
lectures of this course. We shall see how infinitely passionate a
thing religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath,
like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness
and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or
logically deducible from anything else. This enchantment, coming as a
gift when it does come--a gift of our organism, the physiologists will
tell us, a gift of God's grace, the theologians say --is either there
or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become
possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere
word of command. Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the
Subject's range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the
outward battle is lost, and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and
vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste.
If religion is to mean anything definite for us, it seems to me that we
ought to take it as meaning this added dimension of emotion, this
enthusiastic temper of espousal, in regions where morality strictly so
called can at best but bow its head and acquiesce. It ought to mean
nothing short of this new reach of freedom for us, with the struggle
over, the keynote of the universe sounding in our ears, and everlasting
possession spread before our eyes.[18]
[18] Once more, there are plenty of men, constitutionally sombre men,
in whose religious life this rapturousness is lacking. They are
religious in the wider sense, yet in this acutest of all senses they
are not so, and it is religion in the acutest sense that I wish,
without disputing about words, to study first, so as to get at its
typical differentia.
This sort of happiness in the absolute and everlasting is what we find
nowhere but in religion. It is parted off from all mere animal
happiness, all mere enjoyment of the present, by that element of
solemnity of which I have already made so much account. Solemnity is a
hard thing to define abstractly, but certain of its marks are patent
enough. A solemn state of mind is never crude or simple--it seems to
contain a certain measure of its own opposite in solution. A solemn joy
preserves a sort of bitter in its sweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to
which we intimately consent. But there are writers who, realizing that
happiness of a supreme sort is the prerogative of religion, forget this
complication, and call all happiness, as such, religious. Mr. Havelock
Ellis, for example, identifies religion with the entire field of the
soul's liberation from oppressive moods.
"The simplest functions of physiological life," he writes may be its
ministers. Every one who is at all acquainted with the Persian mystics
knows how wine may be regarded as an instrument of religion. Indeed,
in all countries and in all ages some form of physical
enlargement--singing, dancing, drinking, sexual excitement--has been
intimately associated with worship. Even the momentary expansion of the
soul in laughter is, to however slight an extent, a religious
exercise.... Whenever an impulse from the world strikes against the
organism, and the resultant is not discomfort or pain, not even the
muscular contraction of strenuous manhood, but a joyous expansion or
aspiration of the whole soul--there is religion. It is the infinite for
which we hunger, and we ride gladly on every little wave that promises
to bear us towards it."[19]
[19] The New Spirit, p. 232.
But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form
of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness
out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are "reliefs,"
occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or
threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious
happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape.
It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice--inwardly it
knows it to be permanently overcome. If you ask HOW religion thus falls
on the thorns and faces death, and in the very act annuls annihilation,
I cannot explain the matter, for it is religion's secret, and to
understand it you must yourself have been a religious man of the
extremer type. In our future examples, even of the simplest and
healthiest-minded type of religious consciousness, we shall find this
complex sacrificial constitution, in which a higher happiness holds a
lower unhappiness in check. In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido
Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of
the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there.
The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being
there--that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it,
SO LONG AS WE KEEP OUR FOOT UPON HIS NECK. In the religious
consciousness, that is just the position in which the fiend, the
negative or tragic principle, is found; and for that very reason the
religious consciousness is so rich from the emotional point of
view.[20] We shall see how in certain men and women it takes on a
monstrously ascetic form. There are saints who have literally fed on
the negative principle, on humiliation and privation, and the thought
of suffering and death--their souls growing in happiness just in
proportion as their outward state grew more intolerable. No other
emotion than religious emotion can bring a man to this peculiar pass.
And it is for that reason that when we ask our question about the value
of religion for human life, I think we ought to look for the answer
among these violenter examples rather than among those of a more
moderate hue.
[20] I owe this allegorical illustration to my lamented colleague and
Friend, Charles Carroll Everett.
Having the phenomenon of our study in its acutest possible form to
start with, we can shade down as much as we please later. And if in
these cases, repulsive as they are to our ordinary worldly way of
judging, we find ourselves compelled to acknowledge religion's value
and treat it with respect, it will have proved in some way its value
for life at large. By subtracting and toning down extravagances we may
thereupon proceed to trace the boundaries of its legitimate sway.
To be sure, it makes our task difficult to have to deal so muck with
eccentricities and extremes. "How CAN religion on the whole be the
most important of all human functions," you may ask, "if every several
manifestation of it in turn have to be corrected and sobered down and
pruned away?"
Such a thesis seems a paradox impossible to sustain reasonably--yet I
believe that something like it will have to be our final contention.
That personal attitude which the individual finds himself impelled to
take up towards what he apprehends to be the divine--and you will
remember that this was our definition--will prove to be both a helpless
and a sacrificial attitude. That is, we shall have to confess to at
least some amount of dependence on sheer mercy, and to practice some
amount of renunciation, great or small, to save our souls alive. The
constitution of the world we live in requires it:--
"Entbehren sollst du! sollst entbehren!
Das ist der ewige Gesang
Der jedem an die Ohren klingt,
Den, unser ganzes Leben lang
Uns heiser jede Stunde singt."
For when all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent
on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort,
deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into
our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind
which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an
imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very
best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary,
surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary
givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase.
Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary;
and if it be the only agency that can accomplish this result, its vital
importance as a human faculty stands vindicated beyond dispute. It
becomes an essential organ of our life, performing a function which no
other portion of our nature can so successfully fulfill. From the
merely biological point of view, so to call it, this is a conclusion to
which, so far as I can now see, we shall inevitably be led, and led
moreover by following the purely empirical method of demonstration
which I sketched to you in the first lecture. Of the farther office of
religion as a metaphysical revelation I will say nothing now.
But to foreshadow the terminus of one's investigations is one thing,
and to arrive there safely is another. In the next lecture, abandoning
the extreme generalities which have engrossed us hitherto, I propose
that we begin our actual journey by addressing ourselves directly to
the concrete facts.