authors attempting to specify just what entity it is. One man allies it to
the feeling of dependence; one makes it a derivative from fear; others
connect it with the sexual life; others still identify it with the feeling
of the infinite; and so on. Such different ways of conceiving it ought of
themselves to arouse doubt as to whether it possibly can be one specific
thing; and the moment we are willing to treat the term “religious
sentiment” as a collective name for the many sentiments which religious
objects may arouse in alternation, we see that it probably contains
nothing whatever of a psychologically specific nature. There is religious
fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But
religious love is only man’s natural emotion of love directed to a
religious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so
to speak, the common quaking of the human breast, in so far as the notion
of divine retribution may arouse it; religious awe is the same organic
thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only
this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations;
and similarly of all the various sentiments which may be called into play
in the lives of religious persons. As concrete states of mind, made up of
a feeling _plus_ a specific sort of object, religious emotions of course
are psychic entities distinguishable from other concrete emotions; but
there is no ground for assuming a simple abstract “religious emotion” to
exist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself, present in
every religious experience without exception.
As there thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a
common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, so
there might conceivably also prove to be no one specific and essential
kind of religious object, and no one specific and essential kind of
religious act.
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The field of religion being as wide as this, it is manifestly impossible
that I should pretend to cover it. My lectures must be limited to a
fraction of the subject. And, although it would indeed be foolish to set
up an abstract definition of religion’s essence, and then proceed to
defend that definition against all comers, yet this need not prevent me
from taking my own narrow view of what religion shall consist in _for the
purpose of these lectures_, or, out of the many meanings of the word, from
choosing the one meaning in which I wish to interest you particularly, and
proclaiming arbitrarily that when I say “religion” I mean _that_. This, in
fact, is what I must do, and I will now preliminarily seek to mark out the
field I choose.
One way to mark it out easily is to say what aspects of the subject we
leave out. At the outset we are struck by one great partition which
divides the religious field. On the one side of it lies institutional, on
the other personal religion. As M. P. Sabatier says, one branch of
religion keeps the divinity, another keeps man most in view. Worship and
sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity,
theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials
of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it,
we should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning
the favor of the gods. In the more personal branch of religion it is on
the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the centre
of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his
incompleteness. And although the favor of the God, as forfeited or gained,
is still an essential feature of the story, and theology plays a vital
part therein, yet the acts to which this sort of religion prompts are
personal not ritual acts, the individual transacts the business by himself
alone, and the ecclesiastical organization, with its priests and
sacraments and other go‐betweens, sinks to an altogether secondary place.
The relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between
man and his maker.
Now in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch
entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to consider
as little as possible the systematic theology and the ideas about the gods
themselves, and to confine myself as far as I can to personal religion
pure and simple. To some of you personal religion, thus nakedly
considered, will no doubt seem too incomplete a thing to wear the general
name. “It is a part of religion,” you will say, “but only its unorganized
rudiment; if we are to name it by itself, we had better call it man’s
conscience or morality than his religion. The name ‘religion’ should be
reserved for the fully organized system of feeling, thought, and
institution, for the Church, in short, of which this personal religion, so
called, is but a fractional element.”
But if you say this, it will only show the more plainly how much the
question of definition tends to become a dispute about names. Rather than
prolong such a dispute, I am willing to accept almost any name for the
personal religion of which I propose to treat. Call it conscience or
morality, if you yourselves prefer, and not religion—under either name it
will be equally worthy of our study. As for myself, I think it will prove
to contain some elements which morality pure and simple does not contain,
and these elements I shall soon seek to point out; so I will myself
continue to apply the word “religion” to it; and in the last lecture of
all, I will bring in the theologies and the ecclesiasticisms, and say
something of its relation to them.
In one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more
fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches, when once
established, live at second‐hand upon tradition; but the _founders_ of
every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct
personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the
Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects
have been in this case;—so personal religion should still seem the
primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete.
There are, it is true, other things in religion chronologically more
primordial than personal devoutness in the moral sense. Fetishism and
magic seem to have preceded inward piety historically—at least our records
of inward piety do not reach back so far. And if fetishism and magic be
regarded as stages of religion, one may say that personal religion in the
inward sense and the genuinely spiritual ecclesiasticisms which it founds
are phenomena of secondary or even tertiary order. But, quite apart from
the fact that many anthropologists—for instance, Jevons and
Frazer—expressly oppose “religion” and “magic” to each other, it is
certain that the whole system of thought which leads to magic, fetishism,
and the lower superstitions may just as well be called primitive science
as called primitive religion. The question thus becomes a verbal one
again; and our knowledge of all these early stages of thought and feeling
is in any case so conjectural and imperfect that farther discussion would
not be worth while.
Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean
for us _the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their
solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to
whatever they may consider the divine_. Since the relation may be either
moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the
sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical
organizations may secondarily grow. In these lectures, however, as I have
already said, the immediate personal experiences will amply fill our time,
and we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all.
We escape much controversial matter by this arbitrary definition of our
field. But, still, a chance of controversy comes up over the word “divine”
if we take it in the definition in too narrow a sense. There are systems
of thought which the world usually calls religious, and yet which do not
positively assume a God. Buddhism is in this case. Popularly, of course,
the Buddha himself stands in place of a God; but in strictness the
Buddhistic system is atheistic. Modern transcendental idealism,
Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract
Ideality. Not a deity _in concreto_, not a superhuman person, but the
immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the
universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address to
the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson
famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was
what made the scandal of the performance.
“These laws,” said the speaker, “execute themselves. They are out
of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance: Thus, in
the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant
and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who
does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts
off impurity thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just,
then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of
God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with justice. If a
man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of
acquaintance with his own being. Character is always known. Thefts
never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of
stone walls. The least admixture of a lie—for example, the taint
of vanity, any attempt to make a good impression, a favorable
appearance—will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth,
and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of
the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear your
witness. For all things proceed out of the same spirit, which is
differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different
applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the
several shores which it washes. In so far as he roves from these
ends, a man bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries. His being
shrinks ... he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until
absolute badness is absolute death. The perception of this law
awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious
sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its
power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the
embalmer of the world. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and
the silent song of the stars is it. It is the beatitude of man. It
makes him illimitable. When he says ‘I ought’; when love warns
him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great
deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from supreme
wisdom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for
he can never go behind this sentiment. All the expressions of this
sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity.
[They] affect us more than all other compositions. The sentences
of the olden time, which ejaculate this piety, are still fresh and
fragrant. And the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind, whose
name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of this
world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion.”(10)
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)
Now it would be too absurd to say that the inner experiences that underlie
such expressions of faith as this and impel the writer to their utterance
are quite unworthy to be called religious experiences. The sort of appeal
that Emersonian optimism, on the one hand, and Buddhistic pessimism, on
the other, make to the individual and the sort of response which he makes
to them in his life are in fact indistinguishable from, and in many
respects identical with, the best Christian appeal and response. We must
therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these godless or
quasi‐godless creeds “religions”; and accordingly when in our definition
of religion we speak of the individual’s relation to “what he considers
the divine,” we must interpret the term “divine” very broadly, as denoting
any object that is god_like_, whether it be a concrete deity or not.
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But the term “godlike,” if thus treated as a floating general quality,
becomes exceedingly vague, for many gods have flourished in religious
history, and their attributes have been discrepant enough. What then is
that essentially godlike quality—be it embodied in a concrete deity or
not—our relation to which determines our character as religious men? It
will repay us to seek some answer to this question before we proceed
farther.
For one thing, gods are conceived to be first things in the way of being
and power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there is no escape.
What relates to them is the first and last word in the way of truth.
Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true might at
this rate be treated as godlike, and a man’s religion might thus be
identified with his attitude, whatever it might be, towards what he felt
to be the primal truth.
Such a definition as this would in a way be defensible. Religion, whatever
it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total
reaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions are different from
casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or
professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the foreground
of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual
cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing,
lovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses. This sense of
the world’s presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual
temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous,
gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and
inarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all
our answers to the question, “What is the character of this universe in
which we dwell?” It expresses our individual sense of it in the most
definite way. Why then not call these reactions our religion, no matter
what specific character they may have? Non‐religious as some of these
reactions may be, in one sense of the word “religious,” they yet belong to
_the general sphere of the religious life_, and so should generically be
classed as religious reactions. “He believes in No‐God, and he worships
him,” said a colleague of mine of a student who was manifesting a fine
atheistic ardor; and the more fervent opponents of Christian doctrine have
often enough shown a temper which, psychologically considered, is
indistinguishable from religious zeal.
But so very broad a use of the word “religion” would be inconvenient,
however defensible it might remain on logical grounds. There are trifling,
sneering attitudes even towards the whole of life; and in some men these
attitudes are final and systematic. It would strain the ordinary use of
language too much to call such attitudes religious, even though, from the
point of view of an unbiased critical philosophy, they might conceivably
be perfectly reasonable ways of looking upon life. Voltaire, for example,
writes thus to a friend, at the age of seventy‐three: “As for myself,” he
says, “weak as I am, I carry on the war to the last moment, I get a
hundred pike‐thrusts, I return two hundred, and I laugh. I see near my
door Geneva on fire with quarrels over nothing, and I laugh again; and,
thank God, I can look upon the world as a farce even when it becomes as
tragic as it sometimes does. All comes out even at the end of the day, and
all comes out still more even when all the days are over.”
Much as we may admire such a robust old gamecock spirit in a
valetudinarian, to call it a religious spirit would be odd. Yet it is for
the moment Voltaire’s reaction on the whole of life. _Je m’en fiche_ is
the vulgar French equivalent for our English ejaculation “Who cares?” And
the happy term _je m’en fichisme_ recently has been invented to designate
the systematic determination not to take anything in life too solemnly.
“All is vanity” is the relieving word in 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)
Surely all the usual associations of the word “religion” would have to be
stripped away if such a systematic _parti pris_ of irony were also to be
denoted by the name. For common men “religion,” whatever more special
meanings it may have, signifies always a _serious_ state of mind. If any
one phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase would be, “All
is _not_ vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.”
If it can stop anything, religion as commonly apprehended can stop just
such chaffing talk as Renan’s. It favors gravity, not pertness; it says
“hush” to all vain chatter and smart wit.
But if hostile to light irony, religion is equally hostile to heavy
grumbling and complaint. The world appears tragic enough in some
religions, but the tragedy is realized as purging, and a way of
deliverance is held to exist. We shall see enough of the religious
melancholy in a future lecture; but melancholy, according to our ordinary
use of language, forfeits all title to be called religious when, in Marcus
Aurelius’s racy words, the sufferer simply lies kicking and screaming
after the fashion of a sacrificed pig. The mood of a Schopenhauer or a
Nietzsche,—and in a less degree one may sometimes say the same of our own
sad Carlyle,—though often an ennobling sadness, is almost as often only
peevishness running away with the bit between its teeth. The sallies of
the two German authors remind one, half the time, of the sick shriekings
of two dying rats. They lack the purgatorial note which religious sadness
gives forth.
There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude
which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if
sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being _solemn_
experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. So I
propose—arbitrarily again, if you please—to narrow our definition once
more by saying that the word “divine,” as employed therein, shall mean for
us not merely the primal and enveloping and real, for that meaning if
taken without restriction might well prove too broad. The divine shall
mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to
respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.
But solemnity, and gravity, and all such emotional attributes, admit of
various shades; and, do what we will with our defining, the truth must at
last be confronted that we are dealing with a field of experience where
there is not a single conception that can be sharply drawn. The
pretension, under such conditions, to be rigorously “scientific” or
“exact” in our terms would only stamp us as lacking in understanding of
our task. Things are more or less divine, states of mind are more or less
religious, reactions are more or less total, but the boundaries are always
misty, and it is everywhere a question of amount and degree. Nevertheless,
at their extreme of development, there can never be 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)