INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
So far, in considering what psychology had to tell us about the
conditions in which our spiritual life can develop, and the mental
machinery it can use, we have been, deliberately, looking at men one by
one. We have left on one side all those questions which relate to the
corporate aspect of the spiritual life, and its expression in religious
institutions; that is to say, in churches and cults. We have looked upon
it as a personal growth and response; a personal reception of, and
self-orientation to, Reality. But we cannot get away from the fact that
this regenerate life does most frequently appear in history associated
with, or creating for itself, a special kind of institution. Although it
is impossible to look upon it as the appearance of a favourable
variation within the species, it is also just as possible to look upon
it as the formation of a new herd or tribe. Where the variation appears,
and in its sense of newness, youth and vigour breaks away from the
institution within which it has arisen, it generally becomes the nucleus
about which a new group is formed. So that individualism and
gregariousness are both represented in the full life of the Spirit; and
however personal its achievement may seem to us, it has also a
definitely corporate and institutional aspect.
I now propose to take up this side of the subject, and try to suggest
one or two lines of thought which may help us to discover the meaning
and worth of such societies and institutions. For after all, some
explanation is needed of these often strange symbolic systems, and often
rigid mechanizations, imposed on the free responses to Eternal Reality
which we found to constitute the essence of religious experience. Any
one who has known even such direct communion with the Spirit as is
possible to normal human nature must, if he thinks out the implications
of his own experience, feel it to be inconsistent that this most
universal of all acts should be associated by men with the most
exclusive of all types of institution. It is only because we are so
accustomed to this--taking churches for granted, even when we reject
them--that we do not see how odd they really are: how curious it is that
men do not set up exclusive and mutually hostile clubs full of rules and
regulations to enjoy the light of the sun in particular times and
fashions, but do persistently set up such exclusives clubs full of rules
and regulations, so to enjoy the free Spirit of God.
When we look into history we see the life of the Spirit, even from its
crudest beginnings, closely associated with two movements. First with
the tendency to organize it in communities or churches, living under
special sanctions and rules. Next, with the tendency of its greatest,
most arresting personalities either to revolt from these organisms or to
reform, rekindle them from within. So that the institutional life of
religion persists through or in spite of its own constant tendency to
stiffen and lose fervour, and the secessions, protests, or renewals
which are occasioned by its greatest sons. Thus our Lord protested
against Jewish formalism; many Catholic mystics, and afterwards the best
of the Protestant reformers, against Roman formalism; George Fox against
one type of Protestant formalism; the Oxford movement against another.
This constant antagonism of church and prophet, of institutional
authority and individual vision, is not only true of Christianity but of
all great historical faiths. In the middle ages Kabir and Nanak, and in
our own times the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, break away from and
denounce ceremonial Hinduism: again and again the great Sufis have led
reforms within Islam. That which we are now concerned to discover is the
necessity underlying this conflict: the extent in which the institution
on one hand serves the spiritual life, and on the other cramps or
opposes its free development. It is a truism that all such institutions
tend to degenerate, to become mechanical, and to tyrannize. Are they
then, in spite of these adverse characters, to be looked on as
essential, inevitable, or merely desirable expressions of the spiritual
life in man; or can this spiritual life flourish in pure freedom?
This question, often put in the crucial form, "Did Jesus Christ intend
to form a Church?" is well worth asking. Indeed, it is of great pressing
importance to those who now have the spiritual reconstruction of society
at heart. It means, in practice: can men best be saved, regenerated, one
by one, by their direct responses to the action of the Spirit; or, is
the life of the Spirit best found and actualized through submission to
tradition and contacts with other men--that is, in a group or church?
And if in a group or church, what should the character of this society
be? But we shall make no real movement towards solving this problem,
unless we abandon both the standpoint of authority, and that of naïve
religious individualism; and consent to look at it as a part of the
general problem of human society, in the light of history, of
psychology, and of ethics.
I think we may say without exaggeration that the general modern
judgment--not, of course, the clerical or orthodox judgment--is adverse
to institutionalism; at least as it now exists. In spite of the enormous
improvement which would certainly be visible, were we to compare the
average ecclesiastical attitude and average Church service in this
country with those of a hundred years ago, the sense that religion
involves submission to the rules and discipline of a closed
society--that definite spiritual gains are attached to spiritual
incorporation--that church-going, formal and corporate worship, is a
normal and necessary part of the routine of a good life: all this has
certainly ceased to be general amongst us. If we include the whole
population, and not the pious fraction in our view, this is true both of
so-called Catholic and so-called Protestant countries. Professor Pratt
has lately described 80 per cent. of the population of the United States
as being "unchurched"; and all who worked among our soldiers at the
front were struck by the paradox of the immense amount of natural
religion existing among them, combined with almost total alienation from
religious institutions. Those, too, who study and care for the spiritual
life seem most often to conceive it in the terms of William James's
well-known definition of religion as "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."[119]
Such a life of the Spirit--and the majority of educated men would
probably accept this description of it--seems little if at all
conditioned by Church membership. It speaks in secret to its Father in
secret; and private devotion and self-discipline seem to be all it
needs. Yet looking at history, we see that this conception, this
completeness of emphasis on first-hand solitary seeking, this one-by-one
achievement of Eternity, has not in fact proved truly fruitful in the
past. Where it seems so to be fruitful, the solitude is illusory. Each
great regenerator and revealer of Reality, each God-intoxicated soul
achieving transcendence, owes something to its predecessors and
contemporaries.[120] All great spiritual achievement, like all great
artistic achievement, however spontaneous it may seem to be, however
much the fruit of a personal love and vision, is firmly rooted in the
racial past. If fulfills rather than destroys; and unless its free
movement towards novelty, fresh levels of pure experience, be thus
balanced by the stability which is given us by our hoarded traditions
and formed habits, it will degenerate into eccentricity and fail of its
full effect. Although nothing but first-hand discovery of and response
to spiritual values is in the end of any use to us, that discovery and
that response are never quite such a single-handed affair as we like to
suppose. Memory and environment, natural and cultural, play their part.
And the next most natural and fruitful movement after such a personal
discovery of abiding Reality, such a transfiguration of life, is always
back towards our fellow-men; to learn more from them, to unite with
them, to help them,--anyhow to reaffirm our solidarity with them. The
great men and women of the Spirit, then, either use their new power and
joy to restore existing institutions to fuller vitality, as did the
successive regenerators of the monastic life, such as St. Bernard and
St. Teresa and many Sufi saints; or they form new groups, new organisms
which they can animate, as did St. Paul, St. Francis, Kabir, Fox,
Wesley, Booth. One and all, they feel that the full robust life of the
Spirit demands some incarnation, some place in history and social
outlet, and also some fixed discipline and tradition.
In fact, not only the history of the soul, but that of all full human
achievement, as studied in great creative personalities, shows us that
such achievement has always two sides. (1) There is the solitary vision
or revelation, and personal work in accordance with that vision. The
religious man's direct experience of God and his effort to correspond
with it; the artist's lonely and intense apprehension of beauty, and
hard translation of it; the poet's dream and its difficult expression in
speech; the philosopher's intuition of reality, hammered into thought.
These are personal immediate experiences, and no human soul will reach
its full stature unless it can have the measure of freedom and
withdrawal which they demand. But (2) there are the social and
historical contacts which are made by all these creative types with the
past and with the present; all the big rich thick stream of human
history and effort, giving them, however little they may recognize it,
the very initial concepts with which they go to their special contact
with reality, and which colour it; supporting them and demanding from
them again their contribution to the racial treasury, and to the
present too. Thus the artist, as, well as his solitary hours of
contemplation and effort, ought to have his times alike of humble study
of the past and of intercourse with other living artists; and great and
enduring art forms more often arise within a school, than in complete
independence of tradition. It seems, then, that the advocates of
corporate and personal religion are both, in a measure, right: and that
once again a middle path, avoiding both extremes of simplification,
keeps nearest to the facts of life. We have no reason for supposing that
these principles, which history shows us, have ceased to be operative:
or that we can secure the best kind of spiritual progress for the race
by breaking with the past and the institutions in which it is conserved.
Institutions are in some sort needful if life's balance between
stability and novelty, and our links with history and our fellow-men,
are to be preserved; and if we are to achieve such a fullness both of
individual and of corporate life on highest levels as history and
psychology recommend to us.
The question of this institutional side of religion and what we should
demand from it falls into two parts, which will best be treated
separately. First, that which concerns the character and usefulness of
the group-organization or society: the Church. Secondly, that which
relates to its peculiar practices: the Cult. We must enquire under each
head what are their necessary characters, their essential gifts to the
soul, and what their dangers and limitations.
First, then, the Church. What does a Church really do for the
God-desiring individual; the soul that wants to live a full, complete
and real life, which has "felt in its solitude" the presence and
compulsion of Eternal Reality under one or other of the forms of
religious experience?
I think we can say that the Church or institution gives to its loyal
members:--
(1) Group-consciousness.
(2) Religious union, not only with its contemporaries
but with the race, that is with
history. This we may regard as an extension
into the past--and so an enrichment--of
that group-consciousness.
(3) Discipline; and with discipline a sort of
spiritual grit, which carries our fluctuating
souls past and over the inevitably recurring
periods of slackness, and corrects subjectivism.
(4) It gives Culture, handing on the discoveries
of the saints.
In so far as the free-lance gets any of these four things, he gets them
ultimately, though indirectly, from some institutional source.
On the other hand the institution, since it represents the element of
stability in life, does not give, and must not be expected to give,
direct spiritual experience; or any onward push towards novelty,
freshness of discovery and interpretation in the spiritual sphere. Its
dangers and limitations will abide in a certain dislike of such
freshness of discovery; the tendency to exalt the corporate and stable
and discount the mobile and individual. Its natural instinct will be for
exclusivism, the club-idea, conservatism and cosiness; it will, if left
to itself, revel in the middle-aged atmosphere and exhibit the
middle-aged point of view.
We can now consider these points in greater detail: and first that of
the religious group-consciousness which a church should give its
members. This is of a special kind. It is axiomatic that
group-organization of some sort is a necessity of human life. History
showed us the tendency of all spiritual movements to embody themselves,
if not in churches at least in some group-form; the paradox of each
successive revolt from a narrow or decadent institutionalism forming a
group in its turn, or perishing when its first fervour died. But this
social impulse, these spontaneous group-formations of master and
disciples, valuable though they may be, do not fully exhibit all that is
meant or done by a church. True, the Church is or should be at each
moment of its career such a living spiritual society or household of
faith. It is, essentially, a community of persons, who have or should
have a common sentiment--belief in, and reverence for, their God--and a
common defined aim, the furtherance of the spiritual life under the
special religious sanctions which they accept. But every sect, every
religious order or guild, every class-meeting, might claim this much;
yet none of these can claim to be a church.
A church is far more than this. In so far as it is truly alive, it is a
real organism, as distinguished from a crowd or collection of persons
with a common purpose. It exhibits on the religious plane the ruling
characters of such organized life: that is to say, the development of
tradition and complex habits, the differentiation of function, the
docility to leadership, the conservation of values, or carrying forward
of the past into the present. It is, like the State, embodied history;
and as such lives with its own life, a life transcending and embracing
that of the individual souls of which it is built. And here, in its
combined social and historic character, lie the sources alike of its
enormous importance for human life and of its inevitable defects.
Professor McDougall, in his discussion of national groups,[121] has laid
down the conditions which are necessary to the development of such a
true organic group life as is seen in a living church. These are: first,
continuity of existence, involving the development of a body of
traditions, customs and practices--that is, for religion, a Cultus.
Next, an authoritative organization through which custom and belief can
be transmitted--that is, a Hierarchy, order of ministers, or its
equivalent. Third, a conscious common interest, belief, or idea--Creed.
Last, the existence of antagonistic groups or conditions, developing
loyalty or keenness. These characters--continuity, authority, common
belief and loyalty--which are shown, as he says, in their completeness
in a patriot army, are I think no less marked features of a living
spiritual society. Plain examples are the primitive Christian
communities, the great religious orders in their flourishing time, the
Society of Friends. They are on the whole more fully evident in the
Catholic than in the Protestant type of church. But I think that we may
look upon them, in some form or another, as essential to any
institutional framework which shall really help the spiritual life in
man.
We find ourselves, then, committed to the picture of a church or
spiritual institution which is in essence Liturgic, Ecclesiastical,
Dogmatic, and Militant, as best fulfilling the requirements of group
psychology. Four decidedly indigestible morsels for the modern mind.
Yet, group-feeling demands common expression if it is to be lifted from
notion to fact. Discipline requires some authority, and some devotion to
it. Culture involves a tradition handed on. And these, we said, were the
chief gifts which the institution had to give to its members. We may
therefore keep them in mind, as representing actual values, and warning
us that neither history nor psychology encourages the belief that an
amiable fluidity serves the highest purposes of life. Some common
practice and custom, keeping the individual in line with the main
tendencies of the group, providing rails on which the instinctive life
can run and machinery by which fruitful suggestions can be spread. Some
real discipline and humbling submission to rule. Some traditional and
theological standard. Some missionary effort and enthusiasm. For these
four things we must find place in any incorporation of the spiritual
life which is to have its full effect upon the souls of men. And as a
matter of fact, the periodical revolts against churches and
ecclesiasticism, are never against societies in which all these
characteristics are still alive; but against those which retain and
exaggerate formal tradition and authority, whilst they have lost zest
and identity of aim.
A real Church has therefore something to give to, and something to
demand from each of its members, and there is a genuine loss for man in
being unchurched. Because it endures through a perpetual process of
discarding and renewal, those members will share the richness and
experience of a spiritual life far exceeding their own time-span; a
truth which is enshrined in the beautiful conception of the Communion of
Saints. They enter a group consciousness which reinforces their own in
the extent to which they surrender to it; which surrounds them with
favourable suggestions and gives the precision of habit to their
instinct for Eternity. The special atmosphere, the hoarded beauty, the
evocative yet often archaic symbolism, of a Gothic Cathedral, with its
constant reminiscences of past civilizations and old levels of culture,
its broken fragments and abandoned altars, its conservation of eternal
truths--the intimate union in it of the sublime and homely, the
successive and abiding aspects of reality--make it the most fitting of
all images of the Church, regarded as the spiritual institution of
humanity. And the perhaps undue conservatism commonly associated with
Cathedral circles represents too the chief reproach which can be brought
against churches--their tendency to preserve stability at the expense of
novelty, to crystallize, to cling to habits and customs which no longer
serve a useful end. In this a church is like a home; where old bits of
furniture have a way of hanging on, and old habits, sometimes absurd,
endure. Yet both the home and the church can give something which is
nowhere else obtainable by us, and represent values which it is perilous
to ignore. When once the historical character of reality is fully
grasped by us, we see that some such organization through which achieved
values are conserved and carried forward, useful habits are learned and
practised, the direct intuitions of genius, the prophet's revelation of
reality are interpreted and handed on, is essential to the spiritual
continuity of the race; and that definite churchmanship of some sort, or
its equivalent, must be a factor in the spiritual reconstruction of
society. As, other things being equal, a baby benefits enormously by
being born within the social framework rather than in the illusory
freedom of "pure" nature; so the growth of the soul is, or should be,
helped and not hindered by the nurture it receives from the religious
society in which it is born. Only indeed by attachment, open or virtual,
through life or through literature, to some such group can the new soul
link itself with history, and so participate in the hoarded spiritual
values of humanity. Thus even a general survey of life inclines us at
least to some appreciation of the principle laid down by Baron von Hügel
in "Eternal Life"--namely, that "souls who live an heroic spiritual life
_within_ great religious traditions and institutions, attain to a rare
volume and vividness of religious insight, conviction and
reality"[122]--seldom within reach of the contemplative, however ardent,
who walks by himself.
History has given one reason for this; psychology gives another. These
souls, living it is true with intensity their own life towards God,
share and are bathed in the group consciousness of their church; as
members of a family, distinct in temperament, share and are modified by
the group consciousness of the home. The mental process of the
individual is profoundly affected when he thus thinks and acts as a
member of a group. Suggestibility is then enormously increased; and we
know how much suggestion means to us. Moreover, suggestions emanating
from the group always take priority of those of the outside world: for
man is a gregarious animal, intensely sensitive to the mentality of the
herd.[123] The Mind of the Church is therefore a real thing. The
individual easily takes colour from it and the tradition it embodies,
tends to imitate his fellow-members: and each such deed and thought is a
step taken in the formation of habit, and leaves him other than he was
before.
To say this is not to discredit church-membership as placing us at the
mercy of emotional suggestion, reducing spontaneity to custom, and
lessening the energy and responsibility of the individual soul towards
God. On the contrary, right group suggestion reinforces, stimulates,
does not stultify such individual action. If the prayerful attitude of
my fellow worshippers helps me to pray better, surely it is a very mean
kind of conceit on my part which would prompt me to despise their help,
and refuse to acknowledge Creative Spirit acting on me through other
men? It is one of the most beautiful features of a real and living
corporate religion, that within it ordinary people at all levels help
each other to be a little more supernatural than would have been alone.
I do not now speak of individuals possessing special zeal and special
aptitude; though, as the lives of the Saints assure us, even the best of
these fluctuate, and need social support at times. Anyhow such persons
of special spiritual aptitude, as life is now, are as rare as persons of
special aptitude in other walks of life. But that which we seek for the
life of to-day and of the future, is such a planning of it as shall give
all men their spiritual chance. And it is abundantly clear upon all
levels of life, that men are chiefly formed and changed by the power of
suggestion, sympathy and imitation; and only reach full development when
assembled in groups, giving full opportunity for the benevolent action
of these forces. So too in the life of the Spirit, incorporation plays a
part which nothing can replace. Goodness and devotion are more easily
caught than taught; by association in groups, holy and strong
souls--both living and dead--make their full gift to society, weak,
undeveloped, and arrogant souls receive that of which they are in need.
On this point we may agree with a great ecclesiastical scholar of our
own day that "the more the educated and intellectual partake with
sympathy of heart in the ordinary devotions and pious practices of the
poor, the higher will they rise in the religion of the Spirit."[124]
Yet this family life of the ideal religious institution, with its
reasonable and bracing discipline, its gift of shelter, its care for
tradition, its habit-formation and group consciousness--all this is
given, as we may as well acknowledge, at the price which is exacted by
all family life; namely, mutual accommodation and sacrifice, place made
for the childish, the dull, the slow, and the aged, a toning-down of the
somewhat imperious demands of the entirely efficient and clear-minded, a
tolerance of imperfection. Thus for these efficient and clear-minded
members there is always, in the church as in the family, a perpetual
opportunity of humility, self-effacement, gentle acceptance; of exerting
that love which must be joined to power and a sound mind if the full
life of the Spirit is to be lived. In the realm of the supernatural this
is a solid gain; though not a gain which we are very quick to appreciate
in our vigorous youth. Did we look upon the religious institution not as
an end in itself, but simply as fulfilling the function of a
home--giving shelter and nurture, opportunity of loyalty and mutual
service on one hand, conserving stability and good custom on the
other--then, we should better appreciate its gifts to us, and be more
merciful to its necessary defects. We should be tolerant to its
inevitable conservatism, its tendency to encourage dependence and
obedience to distrust individual initiative. We should no longer expect
it to provide or specially to approve novelty and freedom, to be in the
van of life's forward thrust. For this we must go not to the
institution, which is the vehicle of history; but to the adventurous,
forward moving soul, which is the vehicle of progress--to the prophet,
not to the priest. These two great figures, the Keeper and the Revealer,
which are prominent in every historical religion, represent the two
halves of the fully-lived spiritual life. The progress of man depends
both on conserving and on exploring: and any full incorporation of that
life which will serve man's spiritual interests now, must find place for
both.
Such an application of the institutional idea to present needs is
required, in fact, to fulfil at least four primary conditions:--
(1) It must give a social life that shall develop group consciousness in
respect of our eternal interests and responsibilities: using for this
real discipline, and the influences of liturgy and creed.
(2) Yet it must not so standardize and socialize this life as to leave
no room for personal freedom in the realm of Spirit: for those
"experiences of men in their solitude" which form the very heart of
religion.
(3) It must not be so ring-fenced, so exclusive, so wholly conditioned
by the past, that the voice of the future, that is of the prophet giving
fresh expression to eternal truths, cannot clearly be heard in it; not
only from within its own borders but also from outside. But
(4) On the other hand, it must not be so contemptuous of the past and
its priceless symbols that it breaks with tradition, and so loses that
very element of stability which it is its special province to preserve.
I go on now to the second aspect of institutional religion: Cultus.
We at once make the transition from Church to Cultus, when we ask
ourselves: how does, how can, the Church as an organized and enduring
society do its special work of creating an atmosphere and imparting a
secret? How is the traditional deposit of spiritual experience handed
on, the individual drawn into the stream of spiritual history and held
there? Remember, the Church exists to foster and hand on, not merely the
moral life, the life of this-world perfection; but the spiritual life in
all its mystery and splendour--the life of more than this-world
perfection, the poetry of goodness, the life that aims at God. And this,
not only in elect souls, which might conceivably make and keep direct
contacts without her help, but in greater or less degree in the mass of
men, who _do_ need help. How is this done? The answer can only be, that
it is mostly done through symbolic acts, and by means of suggestion and
imitation.
All organized churches find themselves committed sooner or later to an
organized cultus. It may be rudimentary. It may reach a high pitch of
æsthetic and symbolic perfection. But even the successive rebels against
dead ceremony are found as a rule to invent some ceremony in their turn.
They learn by experience the truth that men most easily form religious
habits and tend, to have religious experiences when they are assembled
in groups, and caused to perform the same acts. This is so because as we
have already seen, the human psyche is plastic to the suggestions made
to it; and this suggestibility is greatly increased when it is living a
gregarious life as a member of a united congregation or flock, and is
engaged in performing corporate acts. The soldiers' drill is essential
to the solidarity of the army, and the religious service in some form
is--apart from all other considerations--essential to the solidarity of
the Church.
We need not be afraid to acknowledge that from the point of view of the
psychologist one prime reason of the value and need of religious
ceremonies abides in this corporate suggestibility of man: or that one
of their chief works is the production in him of mobility of the
threshold, and hence of spiritual awareness of a generalized kind. As
the modern mother whispers beneficent suggestions into the ear of her
sleeping child[125] so the Church takes her children at their moment of
least resistance, and suggests to them all that she desires them to be.
It is interesting to note how perfectly adapted the rituals of historic
Christianity are to this end, of provoking the emergence of the
intuitive mind and securing a state of maximum suggestibility. The more
complex and solemn the ritual, the more archaic and universal the
symbols it employs, so much the more powerful--for those natures able to
yield to it--the suggestion becomes. Music, rhythmic chanting, symbolic
gesture, the solemn periods of recited prayer, are all contributory to
this, effect In churches of the Catholic type every object that meets
the eye, every scent, every attitude that we are encouraged to assume,
gives us a push in the same direction if we let it do its rightful work.
For other temperaments the collective, deliberate, and really ceremonial
silence of the Quakers--the hush of the waiting mind, the unforced
attitude of expectation, the abstraction from visual image--works to the
same end. In either case, the aim is the production of a special
group-consciousness; the reinforcing of languid or undeveloped
individual feeling and aptitude by the suggestion of the crowd. This,
and its result, is seen of course in its crudest form in revivalism: and
on higher levels, in such elaborate dramatic ceremonies as those which
are a feature of the Catholic celebrations of Holy Week. But the nice
warm devotional feeling with which what is called a good congregation
finishes the singing of a favourite hymn belongs to the same order of
phenomena. The rhythmic phrases--not as a rule very full of meaning or
intellectual appeal--exercise a slightly hypnotic effect on the
analyzing surface-mind; and induce a condition of suggestibility open to
all the influences of the place and of our fellow worshippers. The
authorized translation of Ephesians v. 19: "_speaking to yourselves_ in
psalms and hymns and spiritual songs," whatever we may think of its
accuracy does as it stands describe one of the chief functions of
religious services of the "hearty congregational" sort. We do speak to
ourselves--our deeper, and more plastic selves--in our psalms and hymns;
so too in the common recitation, especially the chanting, of a creed. We
administer through these rhythmic affirmations, so long as we sing them
with intention, a powerful suggestion to ourselves and every one else
within reach. We gather up in them--or should do--the whole tendency of
our worship and aspiration, and in the very form in which it can most
easily sink in. This lays a considerable responsibility on those who
choose psalms and hymns for congregational singing; for these can as
easily be the instruments of fanatical melancholy and devitalizing, as
of charitable life-giving and constructive ideas.
In saying all this I do not seek to discredit religious ceremony; either
of the naïve or of the sophisticated type. On the contrary, I think that
in effecting this change in our mental tone and colour, in prompting
this emergence of a mood which, in the mass of men, is commonly
suppressed, these ceremonies do their true work. They should stimulate
and give social expression to that mood of adoration which is the very
heart of religion; helping those who cannot be devotional alone to
participate in the common devotional feeling. If, then, we desire to
receive the gifts which corporate worship can most certainly make to us,
we ought to yield ourselves without resistance or criticism to its
influence; as we yield ourselves to the influence of a great work of
art. That influence is able to tune us up, at least to a fleeting
awareness of spiritual reality; and each such emergence of
transcendental feeling is to the good. It is true that the objects which
immediately evoke this feeling will only be symbolic; but after all, our
very best conceptions of God are bound to be that. We do not, or should
not, demand scientific truth of them. Their business is rather to give
us poetry, a concrete artistic intuition of reality, and to place us in
the mood of poetry. The great thing is, that by these corporate liturgic
practices and surrenders, we can prevent that terrible freezing up of
the deep wells of our being which so easily comes to those who must lead
an exacting material or intellectual life. We keep ourselves supple; the
spiritual faculties are within reach, and susceptible to education.
Organized ceremonial religion insists upon it, that at least for a
certain time each day or week we shall attend to the things of the
Spirit. It offers us its suggestions, and shuts off as well as it can
conflicting suggestions: though, human as we are, the mere appearance of
our neighbours is often enough to bring these in. Nothing is more
certain than this: first that we shall never know the spiritual world
unless we give ourselves the chance of attending to it, clear a space
for it in our busy lives; and next, that it will not produce its real
effect in us, unless it penetrates below the conscious surface into the
deeps of the instinctive mind, and moulds this in accordance with the
regnant idea. If we are to receive the gifts of the cultus, we on our
part must bring to it at the very least what we bring to all great works
of art that speak to us: that is to say, attention, surrender,
sympathetic emotion. Otherwise, like all other works of art, it will
remain external to us. Much of the perfectly sincere denunciation and
dislike of religious ceremony which now finds frequent utterance comes
from those who have failed thus to do their share. They are like the
hasty critics who dismiss some great work of art because it is not
representative, or historically accurate; and so entirely miss the
æsthetic values which it was created to impart.
Consider a picture of the Madonna. Minds at different levels may find in
this pure representation, Bible history, theology, æsthetic
satisfaction, spiritual truth. The peasant may see in it the portrait of
the Mother of God, the critic a phase in artistic evolution; whilst the
mystic may pass through it to new contacts with the Spirit of life. We
shall receive according to the measure of what we bring. Now consider
the parallel case of some great dramatic liturgy, rich with the meanings
which history has poured into it. Take, as an example which every one
can examine for themselves, the Roman Mass. Different levels of mind
will find here magic, theology, deep mystery, the commemoration under
archaic symbols of an event. But above and beyond all these, they can
find the solemn incorporated emotion, of the Christian Church, and a
liturgic recapitulation of the movement of the human soul towards
fullness of life: through confession and reconciliation to adoration and
intercession--that is, to charity--and thence to direct communion with
and feeding on the Divine World.
To the mind which refuses to yield to it, to move with its movement, but
remains in critical isolation, the Mass like all other ceremonies will
seem external, dead, unreal; lacking in religious content. But if we do
give ourselves completely and unselfconsciously to the movement of such
a ceremony, at the end of it we may not have learnt anything, but we
have lived something. And when we remember that no experience of our
devotional life is lost, surely we may regard it as worth while to
submit ourselves to an experience by which, if only for a few minutes,
we are thus lifted to richer levels of life and brought into touch with
higher values? We have indeed only to observe the enrichment of life so
often produced in those who thus dwell meekly and without inner conflict
in the symbolic world of ceremonial religion, and accept its discipline
and its gifts, to be led at least to a humble suspension of judgment as
to its value. A whole world of spiritual experience separates the humble
little church mouse rising at six every morning to attend a service
which she believes to be pleasing to a personal God, from the
philosopher who meditates on the Absolute in a comfortable armchair;
and no one will feel much doubt as to which side the advantage lies.
Here we approach the next point. The cultus, with its liturgy and its
discipline, exists for and promotes the repetition of acts which are
primarily the expression of man's instinct for God; and by these--or any
other repeated acts--our ductile instinctive life is given a definite
trend. We know from Semon's researches[126] that the performance of any
given act by a living creature influences all future performances of
similar acts. That is to say, memory combines with each fresh stimulus
to control our reaction to it. "In the case of living organisms," says
Bertrand Russell, "practically everything that is distinctive both of
their physical and mental behaviour is bound up with this persistent
influence of the past": and most actions and responses "can only be
brought under causal laws by including past occurrences in the history
of the organism as part of the causes of the present response."[127] The
phenomena of apperception, in fact, form only one aspect of a general
law. As that which we have perceived conditions what we can now
perceive, so that which we have done conditions what we shall do. It
therefore appears that in spite of angry youthful revolts or mature
sophistications, early religious training, and especially repeated
religious _acts_, are likely to influence the whole of our future
lives. Though all they meant to us seems dead or unreal, they have
retreated to the dark background of consciousness and there live on. The
tendency which they have given persists; we never get away from them. A
church may often seem to lose her children, as human parents do; but in
spite of themselves they retain her invisible seal, and are her children
still. In nearly all conversions in middle life, or dramatic returns
from scepticism to traditional belief, a large, part is undoubtedly
played by forgotten childish memories and early religious discipline,
surging up and contributing their part to the self's new apprehensions
of Reality.
If, then, the cultus did nothing else, it would do these two highly
important things. It would influence our whole present attitude by its
suggestions, and our whole future attitude through unconscious memory of
the acts which it demands. But it does more than this. It has as perhaps
its greatest function the providing of a concrete artistic expression
for our spiritual perceptions, adorations and desires. It links the
visible with the invisible, by translating transcendent fact into
symbolic and even sensuous terms. And for this reason men, having bodies
no less surely than spirits, can never afford wholly to dispense with
it. Hasty transcendentalists often forget this; and set us spiritual
standards to which the race, so long as it is anchored to this planet
and to the physical order, cannot conform.
A convert from agnosticism with whom I was acquainted, was once
receiving religious instruction from a devout and simple-minded nun.
They were discussing the story of the Annunciation, which presented some
difficulties to her. At last she said to the nun, "Well, anyhow, I
suppose that one is not obliged to believe that the Blessed Virgin was
visited by a solid angel, dressed in a white robe?" To this the nun
replied doubtfully, "No, dear, perhaps not. But still, you know, he
would have to wear _something_."
Now here, as it seems to me, we have a great theological truth in a few
words. The elusive contacts and subtle realities of the world of spirit
have got to wear something, if we are to grasp them at all. Moreover, if
the mass of men are to grasp them ever so little, they must wear
something which is easily recognized by the human eye and human heart;
more, by the primitive, half-conscious folk-soul existing in each one of
us, stirring in the depths and reaching out in its own way towards God.
It is a delicate matter to discuss religious symbols. They are like our
intimate friends: though at the bottom of our hearts we may know that
they are only human, we hate other people to tell us so. And, even as
the love of human beings in its most perfect state passes beyond its
immediate object, is transfigured, and merged in the nature of all
love; so too, the devotion which a purely symbolic figure calls forth
from the ardently religious nature--whether this figure be the divine
Krishna of Hinduism, the Buddhist's Mother of Mercy, the S[=u]fi's
Beloved, or those objects of traditional Christian piety which are
familiar to all of us--this devotion too passes beyond its immediate
goal and the relative truth there embodied, and is eternalized. It is
characteristic of the primitive mind that it finds a difficulty about
universals, and is most at home with particulars. The success of
Christianity as a world-religion largely abides in the way in which it
meets this need. It is notorious that the person of Jesus, rather than
the Absolute God, is the object of average Protestant devotion. So too
the Catholic peasant may find it easier to approach God through and in
his special saint, or even a special local form of the Madonna. This is
the inevitable corollary of the psychic level at which he lives; and to
speak contemptuously of his "superstition" is wholly beside the point.
Other great faiths have been compelled by experience to meet need of a
particular object on which the primitive religious consciousness can
fasten itself: conspicuous examples being the development within
Buddhism of the cult of the Great Mother, and within pore Brahminism of
Krishna worship. Wherever it may be destined to end, here it is that the
life of the Spirit begins; emerging very gently from our simplest human
impulses and needs. Yet, since the Universal, the Idea, is manifested in
each such particular, we need not refuse to allow that the mass of men
do thus enjoy--in a way that their psychic level makes natural to
them--their own measure of communion with the Creative Spirit of God;
and already live according to their measure a spiritual life.
These objects of religious cultus, then, and the whole symbolic
faith-world which is built up of them, with its angels and demons, its
sharply defined heaven and hell, the Divine personifications which
embody certain attributes of God for us, the purity and gentleness of
the Mother, the simplicity and infinite possibility of the Child, the
divine self-giving of the Cross;--more, the Lamb, the Blood and the Fire
of the revivalists, the oil and water, bread and wine, of a finished
Sacramentalism--all these may be regarded as the vestures placed by man,
at one stage or another of his progress, on the freely-given but
ineffable spiritual fact. Like other clothes, they have now become
closely identified with that which wears them. And we strip them off at
our own peril: for this proceeding, grateful as it may be to our
intellects, may leave us face to face with a mystery which we dare not
look at, and cannot grasp.
So, cultus has done a mighty thing for humanity, in evolving and
conserving the system of symbols through which the Infinite and Eternal
can be in some measure expressed. The history of these symbols goes
back, as we now know, to the infancy of the race, and forward to the
last productions of the religious imagination; all of which bear the
image of our past They are like coins, varying in beauty, and often of
slight intrinsic value; but of enormous importance for our spiritual
currency, because accepted as the representatives of a real wealth. In
its symbols, the cultus preserves all the past levels of religious
response achieved by the race; weaving them into the fabric of religion,
and carrying them forward into the present. All the instinctive
movements of the primitive mind; its fear of the invisible, its
self-subjection, its trust in ritual acts, amulets, spells, sacrifices,
its tendency to localize Deity in certain places or shrines, to buy off
the unknown, to set up magicians and mediators, are represented in it.
Its function is racial more than individual. It is the art-work of the
folk-soul in the religious sphere. Here man's inveterate creative
faculty seizes on the raw material given him by religious-intuition, and
constructs from it significant shapes. We misunderstand, then, the whole
character of religious symbolism if we either demand rationality from
it, or try to adapt its imagery to the lucid and probably mistaken
conclusions of the sophisticated, modern mind.
We are learning to recognize these primitive and racial elements in
popular religion, and to endure their presence with tolerance; because
they are necessary, and match a level of mental life which is still
active in the race. This more primitive life emerges to dominate all
crowds--where the collective mental level is inevitably lower than that
of the best individuals immersed in it--and still conditions many of our
beliefs and deeds. There is the propitiatory attitude to unseen Divine
powers; which the primitive mind, in defiance of theology, insists on
regarding as somehow hostile to us and wanting to be bought off. There
is the whole idea and apparatus of sacrifice; even though no more than
the big apples and vegetable marrows of the harvest festival be involved
in it. There is the continued belief in a Deity who can and should be
persuaded to change the weather, or who punishes those who offend Him by
famine, earthquake and pestilence. Vestigial relics of all these phases
can still be discovered in the Book of Common Prayer. There is further
the undying vogue of the religious amulet. There is the purely magical
efficacy which some churches attribute to their sacraments, rites,
shrines, liturgic formulæ and religious objects; others, to the texts of
their scriptures.[128] These things, and others like them, are not only
significant survivals from the past. They also represent the religious
side of something that continues active in us at present. Since, then,
it should clearly be the object of all spiritual endeavor to win the
whole man and not only his reason for God, speaking to his instincts in
language that they understand, we should not too hurriedly despise or
denounce these things. Far better that our primitive emotions, with
their vast store of potential energy, should be won for spiritual
interests on the only terms which they can grasp, than that they should
be left to spend themselves on lower objects.
If therefore the spiritual or the regenerate life is not likely to
prosper without some incorporation in institutions, some definite link
with the past, it seems also likely to need for its full working-out and
propaganda the symbols and liturgy of a cultus. Here again, the right
path will be that of fulfilment, not of destruction; a deeper
investigation of the full meaning of cultus, the values it conserves and
the needs it must meet, a clearer and humbler understanding of our human
limitations. We must also clearly realize as makers of the future, that
as the Church has its special dangers of conservatism, cosiness,
intolerance, a checking of initiative, the domestic tendency to enclose
itself and shirk reality; so the cultus has also its special dangers, of
which the chief are perhaps formalism, magic, and spiritual sloth.
Receiving and conserving as it does all the successive deposits of
racial experience, it is the very home of magic: of the archaic tendency
to attribute words and deeds, special power to a priestly caste, and to
make of itself the essential mediator between Creative Spirit and the
soul. Further, using perpetually as it does and must symbols of the most
archaic sort, directly appealing to the latent primitive in each of us,
it offers us a perpetual temptation to fall back into something below
our best possible. The impulsive mind is inevitably conservative; always
at the mercy of memorized images. Hence its delighted self-yielding to
traditional symbols, its uncritical emotionalism, its easy slip-back
into traditional and even archaic and self-contradictory beliefs: the
way in which it pops out and enjoys itself at a service of the hearty
congregational sort, or may even lead its unresisting owner to the
revivalists' penitent-bench.
But on the other hand, Creative Spirit is not merely conservative. The
Lord and Giver of Life presses forward, and perpetually brings novelty
to birth; and in so far as we are dedicated to Him, we must not make an
unconditional surrender to psychic indolence, or to the pull-back of the
religious past. We may not, as Christians, accept easy emotions in the
place of heroic and difficult actualizations: make external religion an
excuse for dodging reality, immerse ourselves in an exquisite dream, or
tolerate any real conflict between old cultus and actual living faith. A
most delicate discrimination is therefore demanded from us; the striking
of a balance between the rightful conservatism of the cultus and the
rightful independence of the soul. Yet, this is not to justify even in
the most advanced a wholesale iconoclasm. Time after time, experience
has proved that the attempt to approach God "without means," though it
may seem to describe the rare and sacred moments of the personal life of
the Spirit, is beyond the power of the mass of men; and even those who
do achieve it are, as it were, most often supported from behind by
religious history and the religious culture of their day. I do not think
it can be doubted that the right use of cultus does-increase religious
sensitiveness. Therefore here the difficult task of the future must be
to preserve and carry forward its essential elements, all the symbolic
significance, all the incorporated emotion, which make it one of man's
greatest works of art; whilst eliminating those features which are, in
the bad sense, conventional and no longer answer to experience or
communicate life.
Were we truly reasonable human beings, we should perhaps provide openly
and as a matter of course within the Christian frame widely different
types of ceremonial religion, suited to different levels of mind and
different developments of the religious consciousness. To some extent
this is already done: traditionalism and liberalism, sacramentalism,
revivalism, quietism, have each their existing cults. But these varying
types of church now appear as competitors, too often hostile; not as the
complementary and graded expressions of one life, each having truth in
the relative though none in the absolute sense. Did we more openly
acknowledge the character of that life, the historic Churches would no
longer invite the sophisticated to play down to their own primitive
fantasies; to sing meaningless hymns and recite vindictive psalms, or
lull themselves by the recitation of litany or rosary which, admirable
as the instruments of suggestion, are inadequate expressions of the
awakened spiritual life. On the one hand, they would not require the
simple to express their corporate religious feeling in Elizabethan
English or Patristic Latin; on the other, expect the educated to accept
at face-value symbols of which the unreal character is patent to them.
Nor would they represent these activities as possessing absolute value
in themselves.
To join in simplicity and without criticism in the common worship,
humbly receiving its good influences, is one thing. This is like the
drill of the loyal soldier; welding him to his neighbours, giving him
the corporate spirit and forming in him the habits he needs. But to stop
short at that drill, and tell the individual that drill is the essence
of his life and all his duty, is another thing altogether. It confuses
means and end; destroys the balance between liberty and law. If the
religious institution is to do its real work in furthering the life of
the Spirit, it must introduce a more rich variety into its methods; and
thus educate souls of every type not only to be members of the group but
also to grow up to the full richness of the personal life. It must
offer them--as indeed Catholicism does to some extent already--both easy
emotion and difficult mystery; both dramatic ceremony and ceremonial
silence. It must also give to them all its hoarded knowledge of the
inner life of prayer and contemplation, of the remaking of the moral
nature on supernatural levels: all the gold that there is in the deposit
of faith. And it must not be afraid to impart that knowledge in modern
terms which all can understand. All this it can and will do if its
members sufficiently desire it: which means, if those who care intensely
for the life of the Spirit accept their corporate responsibilities. In
the last resort, criticism of the Church, of Christian institutionalism,
is really criticism of ourselves. Were we more spiritually alive, our
spiritual homes would be the real nesting places of new life. That which
the Church is to us is the result of all that we bring to, and ask from,
history: the impact of our present and its past.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 119: William James: "The Varieties of Religious Experience,"
p. 31.]
[Footnote 120: On this point compare Von Hügel: "Essays and Addresses on
the Philosophy of Religion," pp. 230 et seq.]
[Footnote 121: W. McDougall: "The Group Mind," Cap. 3.]
[Footnote 122: Von Hügel "Eternal Life," p. 377.]
[Footnote 123: Cf. Trotter: "Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War."]
[Footnote 124: Dom Cuthbert Butler in the "Hibbert Journal," 1906, p.
502.]
[Footnote 125: Baudouin: "Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion," Cap. VII.]
[Footnote 126: Cf. R. Semon: "Die Mneme."]
[Footnote 127: Bertrand Russell: "The Analysis of Mind," p. 78.]
[Footnote 128: A quaint example of this occurred in a recent revival,
where the exclamation "We believe in the Word of God from cover to
cover, Alleluia!" received the fervent reply, "And the covers too!"]