Every great religion has explained itself in the form of a history and
a cosmogony. It has been felt necessary to say _Why_ and _To
what end_. Every religion has had necessarily to adopt the physical
conceptions and usually also to assume many of the moral and social
values current at the time of its foundation. It could not transcend
the philosophical phrases and attitudes that seemed then to supply the
natural frame for a faith, nor draw upon anything beyond the store of
scientific knowledge of its time. In these conditions lurked the seeds
of an ultimate decay and supersession of every religion.
But as the idea of continual change going farther and farther from
existing realities and never returning to them is a new one, each fresh
development of religion in the world so far has been proclaimed in
perfect good faith as the culminating and final truth. The suggestion
of the possibility of further restatement is an unsettling suggestion;
it seems to undermine conviction and it breaks the ranks of the
believers because there are enormous variations in the capacities of
men to recognise the same spirit under a changing shape. While some
intelligences can recognise the same God under a variety of names and
symbols without any severe strain, others cannot even detect the most
contrasted Gods one from the other, provided they wear the same mask
and title. It appears a perfectly natural and reasonable thing to many
minds to restate religion in terms of biological and psychological
necessity, while to others any variation in the phrasing of the faith
seems to be nothing less than atheistical misrepresentations of the
most damnable kind. For them God, a God still anthropomorphic enough
to have a will and purpose, to display preferences and reciprocate
emotions, to be indeed a person, must be retained until the end of
time. For others, God can be thought of as a Great First Cause, as
impersonal and inhuman as atomic structure.
It is because of the historical and philosophical commitments they
have undertaken, and because of concessions made to common human
weaknesses in regard to such once apparently minor but now vital moral
issues as property, mental activity and public veracity--rather than
of any inadequacy in their adaptation to psychological needs--that
the present discredit of recognised religions has come about. They no
longer seem even roughly truthful upon issues of fact, and they give
no imperatives over large fields of conduct in which perplexity is
prevalent. People will say: “I could be perfectly happy leading the
life of a Catholic devotee if only I could believe.” But most of the
framework of religious explanation upon which that life is sustained is
too old-fashioned and too irrelevant to admit of that thoroughness of
belief which is necessary for the devotion of intelligent people.
Great ingenuity has been shown by modern writers and thinkers in
the adaptation of venerated religious expressions to new ideas.
_Peccavi._ The word “God” is in most minds so associated with
the concept of religion that it is abandoned only with the greatest
reluctance. The word remains though the idea is continually attenuated.
He is pushed farther and farther from actuality and His definition
becomes increasingly a bundle of negations, until at last, in His
rôle of The Absolute, He becomes an entirely negative expression.
While we can speak of good, say some, we can speak of God. God is the
possibility of goodness, the good side of things. If phrases in which
the name of God is used are to be abandoned, they argue, religion will
be left speechless before many occasions.
Certainly there is something beyond the individual that is and the
world that is; on that we have already insisted as a characteristic
of all religions; that persuasion is the essence of faith and the
key to courage. But whether that is to be considered, even after the
most strenuous exercises in personification, as a greater person or
a comprehensive person is another matter. Personality is the last
vestige of anthropomorphism. The modern urge to a precise veracity is
against such concessions to traditional expression. On the other hand
there is in many fine religious minds a desire amounting almost to a
necessity for an object of devotion so individualised as to be capable
at least of a receptive consciousness even if no definite response
is conceded. One type of mind can accept a reality in itself which
another must project and dramatise before it can comprehend it and
react to it. The human soul is an intricate thing which will not endure
elucidation when that passes beyond a certain degree of harshness and
roughness. The human spirit has learnt love, devotion, obedience and
humility in relation to other personalities, and with difficulty it
takes the final step to a transcendent subordination, from which the
last shred of personality has been stripped. In matters not immediately
material, language has to work by metaphors, and though every metaphor
carries its own peculiar risks of confusion we cannot do without them.
Great intellectual tolerance is necessary, therefore--a cultivated
disposition to translate and retranslate from one metaphysical or
emotional idiom to another--if there is not to be a deplorable wastage
of moral force in our world.
Three profound differences between the mental dispositions of the
present time and those of preceding ages have to be realised if current
developments of the religious impulse are to be seen in their correct
relationship to the religious life of the past. There has been a great
advance in the analysis of psychic processes and the courage with
which men have probed into the origins of human thought and feeling.
Following upon the biological advances that have made us recognise fish
and amphibian in the bodily structure of man, have come these parallel
developments in which we see elemental fear and lust and self-love
moulded, modified and exalted, under the stress of social progress,
into intricate human motives. Our conception of sin and our treatment
of sin have been profoundly modified by this analysis. Our former sins
are seen as ignorances, inadequacies and bad habits, and the moral
conflict is robbed of three-fourths of its ego-centred melodramatic
quality. We are no longer moved to be less wicked; we are moved to
organise our conditioned reflexes and lead a life less fragmentary and
silly.
Secondly, the conception of individuality has been influenced and
relaxed by biological thought, so that we do not think so readily of
the individual _contra mundum_ as our fathers did. We begin to
realise that we are egotists by misapprehension. Nature cheats the self
to serve the purposes of the species by filling it with wants that war
against its private interests. As gut eyes are opened to these things,
we see ourselves as beings greater or less than the definitive self.
Man’s soul is no longer his own. It is, he discovers, part of a greater
being which lived before he was born and will survive him. The idea
of a survival of the definite individual with all the accidents and
idiosyncrasies of his temporal nature upon him, dissolves to nothing in
this new view of immortality.
The third of the main contrasts between modern and former thought which
have rendered the general shapes of established religion old-fashioned
and unserviceable, is a reorientation of current ideas about time.
The powerful disposition of the human mind to explain everything as
the inevitable unfolding of a past event which, so to speak, sweeps
the future helplessly before it, has been checked by a mass of subtle
criticisms. The conception of progress as a broadening and increasing
purpose, a conception which is taking hold of the human imagination
more and more firmly, turns religious life towards the future. We
think no longer of submission to the irrevocable decrees of absolute
dominion, but of participation in an adventure on behalf of a power
that gains strength and establishes itself. The history of our world,
which has been unfolded to us by science, runs counter to all the
histories on which religions have been based. There was no Creation in
the past, we begin to realise, but eternally there is creation; there
was no Fall to account for the conflict of good and evil, but a stormy
ascent. Life as we know it is a mere beginning.
It seems unavoidable that if religion is to develop unifying and
directive power in the present confusion of human affairs it must
adapt itself to this forward-looking, individuality-analysing turn
of mind; it must divest itself of its sacred histories, its gross
preoccupations, its posthumous prolongation of personal ends. The
desire for service, for subordination, for permanent effect, for an
escape from the distressful pettiness and morality of the individual
life, is the undying element in every religious system. The time has
come to strip religion right down to that, to strip it for greater
tasks than it has ever faced before. The histories and symbols that
served our fathers encumber and divide us. Sacraments and rituals
harbour disputes and waste our scanty emotions. The explanation of why
things are is an unnecessary effort in religion. The essential fact in
religion is the desire for religion and not how it came about. If you
do not want religion, no persuasions, no convictions about your place
in the universe can give it to you. The first sentence in the modern
creed must be, not “I believe” but “I give myself.”
To what? And how? To these questions we must next address ourselves.
_Chapter IV_