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.(14) 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.”(15)
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.”(16)
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?”(17)
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.”(18)
It is a good rule in physiology, when we are studying the meaning of an
organ, to ask after its most peculiar and characteristic sort of
performance, and to seek its office in that one of its functions which no
other organ can possibly exert. Surely the same maxim holds good in our
present quest. The essence of religious experiences, the thing by which we
finally must judge them, must be that element or quality in them which we
can meet nowhere else. And such a quality will be of course most prominent
and easy to notice in those religious experiences which are most one‐
sided, exaggerated, and intense.
Now when we compare these intenser experiences with the experiences of
tamer minds, so cool and reasonable that we are tempted to call them
philosophical rather than religious, we find a character that is perfectly
distinct. That character, it seems to me, should be regarded as the
practically important _differentia_ of religion for our purpose; and just
what it is can easily be brought out by comparing the mind of an
abstractly conceived Christian with that of a moralist similarly
conceived.
A life is manly, stoical, moral, or philosophical, we say, in proportion
as it is less swayed by paltry personal considerations and more by
objective ends that call for energy, even though that energy bring
personal loss and pain. This is the good side of war, in so far as it
calls for “volunteers.” And for morality life is a war, and the service of
the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for
volunteers. Even a sick man, unable to be militant outwardly, can carry on
the moral warfare. He can willfully turn his attention away from his own
future, whether in this world or the next. He can train himself to
indifference to his present drawbacks and immerse himself in whatever
objective interests still remain accessible. He can follow public news,
and sympathize with other people’s affairs. He can cultivate cheerful
manners, and be silent about his miseries. He can contemplate whatever
ideal aspects of existence his philosophy is able to present to him, and
practice whatever duties, such as patience, resignation, trust, his
ethical system requires. Such a man lives on his loftiest, largest plane.
He is a high‐hearted freeman and no pining slave. And yet he lacks
something which the Christian _par excellence_, the mystic and ascetic
saint, for example, has in abundant measure, and which makes of him a
human being of an altogether different denomination.
The Christian also spurns the pinched and mumping sick‐room attitude, and
the lives of saints are full of a kind of callousness to diseased
conditions of body which probably no other human records show. But whereas
the merely moralistic spurning takes an effort of volition, the Christian
spurning is the result of the excitement of a higher kind of emotion, in
the presence of which no exertion of volition is required. The moralist
must hold his breath and keep his muscles tense; and so long as this
athletic attitude is possible all goes well—morality suffices. But the
athletic attitude tends ever to break down, and it inevitably does break
down even in the most stalwart when the organism begins to decay, or when
morbid fears invade the mind. To suggest personal will and effort to one
all sicklied o’er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest
the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his
very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and
secures him, all decaying and failing as he is. Well, we are all such
helpless failures in the last resort. The sanest and best of us are of one
clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the
robustest of us down. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the
vanity and provisionality of our voluntary career comes over us that all
our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and
all our well‐doing as the hollowest substitute for that well‐_being_ that
our lives ought to be grounded in, but, alas! are not.
And here religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her hands.
There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in
which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by
a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and
waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become
the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned
into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and
that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present,
with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not
held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and
washed away.
We shall see abundant examples of this happy state of mind in later
lectures of this course. We shall see how infinitely passionate a thing
religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath, like hope,
ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it
adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible
from anything else. This enchantment, coming as a gift when it does
come,—a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of
God’s grace, the theologians say,—is either there or not there for us, and
there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can
fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command. Religious feeling
is thus an absolute addition to the Subject’s range of life. It gives him
a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer
world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which
otherwise would be an empty waste.
If religion is to mean anything definite for us, it seems to me that we
ought to take it as meaning this added dimension of emotion, this
enthusiastic temper of espousal, in regions where morality strictly so
called can at best but bow its head and acquiesce. It ought to mean
nothing short of this new reach of freedom for us, with the struggle over,
the keynote of the universe sounding in our ears, and everlasting
possession spread before our eyes.(19)
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.”(20)
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.(21) 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.
Having the phenomenon of our study in its acutest possible form to start
with, we can shade down as much as we please later. And if in these cases,
repulsive as they are to our ordinary worldly way of judging, we find
ourselves compelled to acknowledge religion’s value and treat it with
respect, it will have proved in some way its value for life at large. By
subtracting and toning down extravagances we may thereupon proceed to
trace the boundaries of its legitimate sway.
To be sure, it makes our task difficult to have to deal so much with
eccentricities and extremes. “How _can_ religion on the whole be the most
important of all human functions,” you may ask, “if every several
manifestation of it in turn have to be corrected and sobered down and
pruned away?” Such a thesis seems a paradox impossible to sustain
reasonably,—yet I believe that something like it will have to be our final
contention. That personal attitude which the individual finds himself
impelled to take up towards what he apprehends to be the divine—and you
will remember that this was our definition—will prove to be both a
helpless and a sacrificial attitude. That is, we shall have to confess to
at least some amount of dependence on sheer mercy, and to practice some
amount of renunciation, great or small, to save our souls alive. The
constitution of the world we live in requires it:—
“Entbehren sollst du! sollst entbehren!
Das ist der ewige Gesang
Der jedem an die Ohren klingt,
Den, unser ganzes Leben lang
Uns heiser jede Stunde singt.”
For when all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on
the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort,
deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our
only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall
short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of
necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without
complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice
are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings‐up are added in order
that the happiness may increase. _Religion thus makes easy and felicitous
what in any case is necessary_; and if it be the only agency that can
accomplish this result, its vital importance as a human faculty stands
vindicated beyond dispute. It becomes an essential organ of our life,
performing a function which no other portion of our nature can so
successfully fulfill. From the merely biological point of view, so to call
it, this is a conclusion to which, so far as I can now see, we shall
inevitably be led, and led moreover by following the purely empirical
method of demonstration which I sketched to you in the first lecture. Of
the farther office of religion as a metaphysical revelation I will say
nothing now.
But to foreshadow the terminus of one’s investigations is one thing, and
to arrive there safely is another. In the next lecture, abandoning the
extreme generalities which have engrossed us hitherto, I propose that we
begin our actual journey by addressing ourselves directly to the concrete
facts.
LECTURE III. THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN.
Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and
most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief
that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in
harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment
are the religious attitude in the soul. I wish during this hour to call
your attention to some of the psychological peculiarities of such an
attitude as this, of belief in an object which we cannot see. All our
attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due
to the “objects” of our consciousness, the things which we believe to
exist, whether really or ideally, along with ourselves. Such objects may
be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought. In
either case they elicit from us a _reaction_; and the reaction due to
things of thought is notoriously in many cases as strong as that due to
sensible presences. It may be even stronger. The memory of an insult may
make us angrier than the insult did when we received it. We are frequently
more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the moment of
making them; and in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is
based on the fact that material sensations actually present may have a
weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts.
The more concrete objects of most men’s religion, the deities whom they
worship, are known to them only in idea. It has been vouchsafed, for
example, to very few Christian believers to have had a sensible vision of
their Saviour; though enough appearances of this sort are on record, by
way of miraculous exception, to merit our attention later. The whole force
of the Christian religion, therefore, so far as belief in the divine
personages determines the prevalent attitude of the believer, is in
general exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing in
the individual’s past experience directly serves as a model.