act by which the entire mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the
principle from which it draws life. This act is prayer, by which I
understand no vain exercise of words, no mere repetition of certain
sacred formulas, but the very movement itself of the soul, putting
itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of
which it feels the presence--it may be even before it has a name
by which to call it. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there
is no religion; wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and
stirs the soul, even in the absence of forms or doctrines, we have
religion.[1]
[Footnote 1: A. Sabatier: _Esquisse d'une Philosophie de la
Religion_ (ed. 1897), pp. 24-26.]
In prayer, furthermore, we may hope to find not the fulfillment
of our desires, but what our desires really are. We
are released temporarily from tension of temporal and selfish
longings. We hold a tranquil and reverential speech with a
power not ourselves, and in communion with the infinite
purge ourselves of the dross of immediate personal needs.
In such a peaceful interlude we may find at once clarity and
rest. Prayer, at its highest, might be defined as audible meditation,
controlled by the sense of the divinity of the power we
are addressing. So that the truly spiritual man prays not for
the fulfillment of his own accidental longings, but pleads
rather: "Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of
my heart be acceptable in thy sight, 0 Lord, my strength and
my redeemer."
FEAR AND AWE. Man's attitude toward the divine was
noted to have arisen partly in his feeling of dependence on
personal forces incomparably superior to himself, and in his
urgent need for winning their favor. In primitive man this
sense of dependence was certainly bound up with a feeling of
fear.
It must be borne in mind that uncivilized peoples had
pathetically little understanding or control of the forces of
Nature. In consequence on being afflicted with some sudden
catastrophe of famine or disease, on experiencing a sudden
revelation in storm, wind, or volcanic eruption, of the terrible
magnificence of elemental forces, he must have been struck
with dread. He was living in a world that appeared to him
much less ordered and regular than ours appears to us. His
prayers and sacrifices were not always friendly and confidential
intercourse with the gods; they were as often ways of averting
the evils of malicious and terrifying demons. The enemies of
religion have been fond of pointing out how much of it has
been a quaking fear of the supernatural. It is in this spirit
that Lucretius's bitter attack is conceived.
When the life of man lay foul to see and grovelling upon the earth,
crushed by the weight of religion, which showed her face from the
realms of heaven, lowering upon mortals with dreadful mien, 't was
a man of Greece who dared first to raise his mortal eyes to meet her,
and first to stand forth to meet her; him neither the stories of the
gods nor thunderbolts checked, nor the sky with its revengeful roar,
but all the more spurred the eager daring of his mind to yearn to
be the first to burst through the close-set bolts upon the doors of
nature.[1]
[Footnote 1: Lucretius: _De Rerum Natura_, book I; lines 28-38.]
Primitive man feared the gods as much as he needed them.
Jane Harrison points out, for example, that as great a part of
Greek religion was given over to the exorcising of the evil and
jealous spirits of the underworld, as in friendly communion
with the beautiful and gracious Olympians.
But what appears in the ignorant and harassed savage as
fear may be transformed in civilized man into awe. Long
after man's crouching physical terror of the divine has passed
away, he may still live awed by the ultimate power that orders
the universe. He may, "at twilight, or in a mountain gorge,"
at a cañon or waterfall, experience an involuntary thrill and
breathlessness, a deepened sense of the divinity which so
orders these things. He may have the same feeling at the
crises of life, at birth, disease, and death. He may sense on
occasion that overwhelming and infinite power of which Job
becomes aware, as he listens to the voice out of the whirlwind:
Who hath divided a water course for the overflowing of waters, or a
way for the lightning of thunder?
To cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness,
wherein there is no man;
To satisfy the desolate and waste ground; and to cause the bud of the
tender herb to spring forth? ...
Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, or loose the
bands of Orion? ...
Knowest thou the ordinances of Heaven? Canst thou set the
dominion thereof in the earth? ...
Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go and say unto thee,
Here we are?
Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? Or who hath given
understanding to the heart?
Where man experiences such awe, he will become reverential,
and, if articulate, will express his reverence in prayer,
again not the prayer of practical requests for favors from God,
but a hushed meditation upon the assured eternity in which
the precarious and finite lives of men are set.
REGRET, REMORSE--REPENTANCE AND PENANCE. Regret is a
sufficiently common human experience. There are for most
men wistful backward glances in which they realize what
might have been, what might have been done, what might
have been accomplished. For many this never rises above
pique and bitterness over personal failure, a chagrin, as it
were, over having made the wrong move. But to some regret
may take on a deeply spiritual quality. Instead of regretting
merely the successes which he hoped, as it proved vainly, to
attain, a man may become passionately aware of his own
moral and spiritual shortcomings. This sense of dereliction
and delinquency may take extreme forms. James quotes a
reminiscence of Father Gratry, a Catholic philosopher:
... All day long without respite I suffered an incurable and
intolerable desolation, verging on despair. I thought myself, in fact,
rejected by God, lost, damned! I felt something like the suffering
of hell. Before that I had never even thought of hell.... Now,
and all at once, I suffered in a measure what is suffered there.[1]
[Footnote 1: Quoted by James in his _Varieties_, p. 146.]
Normal individuals may come to a deep consciousness of
having left undone the things they ought to have done, of
having done the things they ought not to have done. This
realization may be at once a "consciousness of sin," and a
desire for a new life. If it is the consciousness of sin which
becomes predominant, then a desolate and tormenting remorse
engulfs the individual. But the consciousness of sin
for the religious becomes simply a prelude to entrance upon a
better life. The awareness of past sins is combined in the
religious, especially in devout Christians, with faith in God's
mercy, and in his welcoming of the penitent sinner:
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite
heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.
Have mercy upon me, O God; according to thy loving kindness, blot
out my transgressions.
Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.
Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be
whiter than snow.
Again the New Testament call to repentance is symbolic of
the experience of millions of religious people. "Repent ye,
for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand." There is a terrible
intensity and immediate imperativeness about this call. But
to all there comes at one time or another an urgent sense of
spiritual shortcoming and the desire to lead a better life.
The lamenting of sins becomes the least part; what is important
is the immense new impetus toward a better life. The
records of religious conversion are full of instances where men
by this sudden penitential revulsion from their past life and a
startled realization of new spiritual possibilities, have broken
away permanently from lifelong habitual vices. James cites
a case of an exceedingly belligerent and pugilistic collier
named Richard Weaver, who was by a sudden conversion to
religion not only made averse to fighting, but persistently
meek and gentle under provocation. Similar cases, genuine
and well documented, fill the archives of religious psychology.
The religious man in repenting knows that God will, if his
repentance is sincere, forgive him, and sustain and support
him in his new life.
I say unto you that likewise Joy shall be in Heaven over one sinner
that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons which
need no repentance.
I say unto you there is joy in the presence of the angels of God
over one sinner that repenteth.[1]
[Footnote 1: Luke, 15: 7,10.]
While regret over sin, alienation from a past life of evil, and
a persistent dedication to a purified and righteous existence
constitute, spiritually, the phenomena of repentance and conversion,
repentance has had in religion certain fixed outward
forms. If sin had been committed, merely inward spiritual
realization was not sufficient, penance must be done. Penance
in the early days of the Christian Church was public.
Later penance became a private matter (public penance was
suppressed by an ordinance of Pope Leo I in 461 A.D.).
Private penance took various familiar forms, such as scourgings,
fastings on bread and water, reciting a given number
of psalms, prayers, and the like. Later penalties could be
redeemed by alms. A penitent would be excused from the
prescribed works of penance at the cost, _e. g._, of equipping a
soldier for the crusade, of building a bridge or road. Gradually
in the history of the Christian religion, penances have
been lightened. In the Protestant Church, with the enunciation
of the principle of justification through faith alone
there could be no sacrament of penance.
One form in which the penitential mood receives expression
is in confession in which the penitent acknowledges his sins.
There is no space here to trace the development of this practice
in religion. It must suffice to point out that psychologically
it is a cleansing or purgation. It clears the moral atmosphere.
It is a relief to the tormented and remorseful
soul to say "Peccavi," and to confide either directly or indirectly
to the divine the burden of his sins. It is for many
people the necessary pre-condition, as it is in the Catholic
Church, to penitence and the actual performance of penance.
The psychological value of confession varies with individual
temperaments; for many it is high. There are few so self-contained
and self-sufficient that they do not seek to express their
emotions to others. It is not surprising that the gregarious
human creature should find confession a restorative and a
solace. Human beings are not only natively responsive to
the emotions of others, but by nature tend to express their
own emotions and to be gratified by a sympathetic response.
Emotions of any sort, joyous or sorrowful, find some articulation.
The oppressive consciousness of sin particularly must
find an outlet in expression. And the expression of sin must
somewhere be received. The wrong done rankles heavily in
the private bosom. The crucified soul demands a sympathetic
spirit to receive its painful and personal revelation.
He that would confess his sins requires a listener of a large
and understanding heart. Just such a merciful, forgiving, and
understanding friend is the God whom Christianity pictures.
God waits with infinite patience for the confessions and the
surrender of the contrite heart. The normal human desire
to rid one's self of a tormenting secret, to "exteriorize one's
rottenness," finds satisfaction on an exalted plane in confession
to God, or to his appointed ministers.
JOY AND ENTHUSIASM--FESTIVALS AND THANKSGIVINGS. So
far our account has been confined to experiences in which man
felt the need or fear of the divine, because of his own desires,
weaknesses, or sins. But humans find religious expression
for more joyous emotions. Even primitive man lives not
always in terror or in tribulation. There are occasions, such
as plentiful harvests, successful hunting, the birth of children,
which stir him to expressions of enthusiastic appreciation and
gratitude toward the divine. Some of the so-called Dionysiac
festivals in ancient Greece are examples of the enthusiasm,
joy, and abounding vitality to which religion has, among so
many other human experiences, given expression. In the
religion of the Old Testament, again, we find that the Psalmist
is time and again filled with rejoicing:
O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good, and his mercy endureth
forever.
Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, whom he hath redeemed from
the hand of the enemy.
And he gathered them out of the lands from the east and from the
west, from the north and from the south.
They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no
city to dwell in.
Hungry and thirsty their soul fainted in them.
Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered
them out of their distresses.
And he led them forth by the right way that they might go to a city
of habitation.
O that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his
wonderful works to the children of men.
For he satisfieth the longing soul and filleth the hungry heart with
goodness.
Nor need this rejoicing be always an explicit thanksgiving
for favors received. It may be, as were the dithyrambic
festivals of Greece, the riotous overflow of enthusiasm, a
joyous, sympathetic exuberance with the vital processes of
Nature. Dionysos stood for fertility, life, gladness, all the
positive, passionate, and jubilant aspects of Nature. And the
well-known satyr choruses, the wine and dance and song of
the Greek spring festivals, are classic and beautiful illustrations
of the religion of enthusiasm. Euripides gives voice to
this spirit in the song of the Mænads in the _Bacchoe_:
"Will they ever come to me, ever again,
The long, long dances,
On through the dark till the dim stars wane?
Shall I feel the dew on my throat and the stream
Of wind in my hair? Shall our white feet gleam
In the dim expanses?
O feet of a fawn to the greenward fled,
Alone in the grass and the loveliness?"[1]
[Footnote 1: Euripides: _Bacchoe_ (Gilbert Murray translation).]
Every religion has its festival as well as its fast days. Sacrifices
come to be held less as offerings to jealous gods than as
sacrificial feasts, in which the worshipers themselves partake,
as opportunities for communal rejoicings and for friendly
fellowship with divinity. At sacrificial feasts it is as if the
gods themselves were at table.
Dance and song are a regular accompaniment of primitive
religion. Students of Greek drama, such as Jane Harrison
and Gilbert Murray, trace Greek tragedy back to the choruses
and dances of early Dionysiac festivals. Throughout the
history of religion not only have man's sorrow and need been
expressed, but also his sympathetic gladness with vitality,
fertility, and growth, his rejoicings over the fruitions and glad
eventualities of experience. Man has felt the decay and
evanescence of human goods. He has felt also the exuberance
of natural processes, the triumph of life over death when
a child is born, the renewal of life by food, the recurrence of
growth and fertility in the processes of the seasons, of sowing
and of harvest. And for all these enrichments and enlargements
of life, he has rejoiced, and found rituals to express his
rejoicings. He has had the impulse and the energy to sing
unto the Lord a new song.
THEOLOGY. Thus far we have discussed the religious experience
_as_ an experience, as normal, natural, and inevitable as
are love and hate, melancholy and exaltation, joy and sorrow.
Like these latter, the religious experience is subjected to
rationalization. Like all other emotions, that of religion
finds for itself a logic and a justification. But so profoundly
influential is "cosmic emotion" on men's lives that when it is
reasoned upon, the results are nothing less than an attitude
taken toward the whole of reality. Theology arises as a
world view formulated in accordance with a reasoned interpretation
of the religious experience. It must be noted again
that the experience is primary. If men had not first had the
experience of religion, they would not have reflected about it.
Every contact of the individual with the world to some degree
arouses emotion and provokes thought. It is not different
with religion. That theologies should differ and conflict is not
surprising. No two individuals, no two groups or ages have
precisely the same experiences of the world, and their reasonings
upon their religious feelings are bound to differ, overlap,
and at times to conflict. The variety of world views are
testimony to the genuineness of the religious experience as it
fulfills the different needs, emotions, and desires of different
ages, groups, and generations of men.
THE DESCRIPTION OF THE DIVINE. Reasonings upon religion
exhibit, like the religious emotions, certain recurrent features.
There is, in the first place, a certain universality in the
description of the objects of veneration. These are nearly always
regarded as self-sufficient in contrast with man. Man
seeks, strives, desires, has partial triumphs and pitiful failures,
is always in travail after some ideal. His life is incomplete;
at best it is a high aspiration; it is never really fulfilled.
But divinity has nearly always been regarded as seeking
nothing, asking nothing, needing nothing. This is what
infinity in practical terms means. And, with certain
exceptions presently to be noted, the divine power has always
been regarded as infinite. Thus Aristotle says that in man's
best moments, when he lives in reflection a life of self-sufficiency,
he lives just such a life as God lives continually. And
Plato describes the philosopher as a man who because he can
live, at least temporarily, amid eternal, changeless beauty
and truth, "lives in recollection among those things among
which God always abides, and in beholding which God is
what he is." Lucretius also gives a simple picture of the
even calmness and still, even security of the life of the gods
as he and all the Epicureans conceived it. Tennyson paraphrases
the picture:
"...The Gods, who haunt
The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm!"[1]
[Footnote 1: Tennyson: _Lucretius_.]
Divinity has, again, quite universally been recognized as
exerting over the individual a compelling power, and of
insistently arousing his veneration. The psychological origins
of this phenomenon have already been noted. Men fear,
need, feel themselves dependent on the gods. But further
than this many religious thinkers hold that man cannot even
be aware of the divine power without wishing to adjust himself
harmoniously to it. And they hold, as did Immanuel
Kant, that man is born with an awareness of the divine.
The attributes of divinity have been differently assigned at
different times in the history of religion. In general two
qualities have been regarded as characteristic: power and
goodness. In primitive belief, the first received the predominant
emphasis; the higher religions have emphasized the
second. For savage man, as we have seen, the divine personages
were conceived in effect as human beings with superhuman
powers. They were feared and flattered, needed and
praised. Adjustment to them was a practical, imperative
necessity. They combined infinite capacity with human and
finite caprice. The attention they received from humans was
distinctly utilitarian in character. These forces of wind and
sun and rain might be brutal or benignant. Primitive man
established, therefore, a system of magic, sacrifice, and prayer,
whereby he might minimize the precariousness of existence,
and keep the gods on his side.
In the more spiritualistic monotheistic religions, while the
power of God has been insistently reiterated, there has been
an increasing emphasis upon the divine goodness. The
Psalmist is continually referring to both:
Praise ye the Lord. O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good:
for his mercy endureth forever.
Who can utter the mighty acts of the Lord?
. . . . .
Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his
wonderful works to the children of men!
For he hath broken the gates of brass, and cut the bars of iron in
sunder.
Wrath and terror gradually give place to mercy and benevolence
as the primary attributes of the divine. The power of
God, in Christianity, for example, is still regarded as unlimited,
but it is completely expended in the loving salvation of mankind.
Where the divinity has ceased to be a willful power and
has become instead the God of mercy and loving kindness, it is
no longer necessary to placate him by material sacrifice, to
win his favor by trivial earthly gifts. Divine favor is sought
rather by aspiration after and the practice of a better life.
The mighty but capricious deity gives place to the God of
unfailing charity and love. One earns God's mercies by walking
in the ways of the Lord. "Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they shall see God.... Blessed are they which do hunger
and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled."
In both Christianity and Judaism, God's grace and mercies
go always to the pure in heart, and the righteous in spirit.
"What doth the Lord require of thee," proclaims Micah, "but
to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy
God?"
THE DIVINE AS THE HUMAN IDEAL. There has been in certain
latter-day philosophies, a tendency to interpret the divine as
the objectification of human ideals. That is, according to this
theory, men have found in their imagined divinities the
fulfillment of ideals that they could never have realized on earth.
Men, says this theory, long to be immortal, so they imagine
gods who are. Finite man has infinite desires. In God is
infinite fulfillment through eternity. No men are all good;
some desire to be. Such fulfillment they find in the divine.
Our conception of God is an index of our own ideals. When
men were savages, their divinity was a jealous monster. In
the refinement and spiritualization of the human imagination,
divinity becomes all-beautiful and all-benevolent as well as
the wielder of infinite power. John Stuart Mill gives possibly
the clearest expression to this attitude which is, if not in the
strictest sense religious, at least deeply spiritual:
Religion and poetry address themselves, at least in one of their
aspects, to the same part of the human constitution; they both
supply the same want, that of ideal conceptions grander and more
beautiful than we see realized in the prose of human life. Religion,
as distinguished from poetry, is the product of the craving to know
whether these imaginative conceptions have realities, answering to
them in some other world than ours. The mind, in this state, eagerly
catches at any rumors respecting other worlds, especially when
delivered by persons whom it deems wiser than itself. To the poetry of
the supernatural, comes to be thus added a positive belief and expectation,
which unpoetical minds can share with the poetical. Belief
in a God or gods, and in a life after death, becomes the canvas which
every mind, according to its capacity, covers with such ideal pictures
as it can either invent or copy. In that other life each hopes to find
the good which he has failed to find on earth, or the better which is
suggested to him by the good which on earth he has partially seen
and known. More especially this belief supplies the finer minds with
material for conceptions of beings more awful than they _can_ have
known on earth, and more excellent than they probably _have_ known.[1]
[Footnote 1: Mill: _Three Essays on Religion_ (Henry Holt & Co.),
pp. 103-04.]
In his religion, Mill maintains, man thus finds the fulfillment
of unfulfilled desire. Religion is thus conceived as an imaginative
enterprise of a very high and satisfying kind. It
peoples the world with perfections, not true perhaps to actual
experience, but true to man's highest aspirations. It gives
man companionship with divinity at least in imagination.
It enables him to live, at least spiritually, in such a universe as
his highest hopes and desires would have him live in, in fact.
It must be pointed out, however, that the devoutly religious
do not regard their God as a beautiful fiction, but as a dear
reality whom they can serenely trust and love, and whose
existence is the certain faith by which they live.
THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, THEOLOGY, AND SCIENCE. It has
already been pointed out that theology is the reasoned formulation
of the religious experience which comes to men with
varying degrees of intensity, or the revelation by which some
man, a Moses or a Mohammed, has been inspired. Such a
formulation has a dual importance. For the individual it
brings clarity, order, and stability into his religious experience.
For the group, it makes possible the social transmission of
religious conceptions and ideals.
Reason in a man's religion, as in any other experience, introduces
stability, consistency, and order. It makes distinctions;
it resolves doubts, confusions, and uncertainties. It
is true that there have been in religion, as in politics and
morals, rebels against reason. There have been mystics who
preferred their warm ecstatic visions to the cold formulations
and abstractions of theology. But there have been, on the
other hand, those gifted or handicapped, according to one's
point of view, by an insistence on reason as well as rapture in
their religion. These have not been satisfied with an intuition
of God. They have wished to know God, as the highest
possible object of knowledge. Thus in the Middle Ages
philosophy and science were regarded as the Handmaids of
Theology. All was dedicated to, as nothing could be more
important than, a knowledge of God. So we have, in contrast
with ecstatic visions of God, the plodding analysis of the
scholastics, the subtle and clean-cut logic by which such men
as Saint Anselm sought to give form, clarity, and ultimacy
to their sense of the reality of God. There has possibly
nowhere in the history of thought been subtler and more
thoroughgoing analysis than some of the mediæval schoolmen
lavished upon the clarification and demonstration of the
concept of God. The necessity for reasoning upon one's sense
of the reality of the divine, as it was felt by many mediæval
schoolmen, is thus stated by one historian:
Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury ... is the true type of the
schoolman; firmly convinced of the truth of the dogmas and yet
possessed of a strong philosophical impulse, he seeks to prove to
reason what has to be accepted on authority. He bravely includes
in his attempt to rationalize the faith not only such general
propositions as the existence of God, but the entire church scheme of
salvation, the Trinity, and Incarnation, and the Redemption of man. We
must believe the Catholic doctrine--that is beyond cavil--but we
should also try to understand what we believe, understand _why_ it is
true.[1]
[Footnote 1: Thilly: _History of Philosophy_, p. 169.]
But theology has public as well as purely private importance.
It must not be forgotten that religion is a social habit
as well as a personal activity. From primitive life down to
our own day, religion has been intimately associated with the
other social activities of a people, and has indeed been one of
the chief institutions of moral and social control. Ethical
standards have been until very recent times in the history of
Christian Europe almost exclusively derived from religion.
Where the religious experience is of such crucial importance, it
has been necessary to give it a fixed form and content which
might be used to initiate the young and the outsider.
Theology, though essentially a product of reflection upon
the religious experience itself, tends to incorporate extra-religious
material into its system. In its demonstration of the
divine order and of man's relationship to the divine, it incorporates
both science and history. Science becomes for it the
manifestation of the divine arrangements of the universe;
history becomes a revelation of the divine purpose and its
realization. In primitive belief science and religion are practically indistinguishable from each other. The way of the
gods is the way of the universe. The attribution of personal
motives to the gods was primitive man's literal and serious
way of conceiving the government of the cosmos. He believed
himself actually to be living in a world governed by living
and personal powers, an animistic world. The myths which
describe the birth and life of the gods, the creation of
man, the bestowing of the gift of fire are conceived as the
literal and natural history of creation.
Christianity affords a striking example of how theology
incorporates science and natural history into its world view.
For the early Christian Fathers, natural science was interesting
and useful in so far as it illustrated, which it did, the ways
of God upon earth.
"The sole interest [of the Fathers] in natural fact," writes Henry
Osborn Taylor, "lay in its confirmatory evidence of Scriptural truth.
They were constantly impelled to understand facts in conformity
with their understanding of Scripture, and to accept or deny accordingly.
Thus Augustine denies the existence of Antipodes, men on
the opposite side of the earth, who walk with their feet opposite to
our own. That did not harmonize with his general conception of
spiritual cosmogony."[1]
[Footnote 1: H. O. Taylor: _The Medioeval Mind_, vol. I, pp. 75-76.]
All the natural science current, as represented, for example,
in the compilation called the _Physailogus_, is used as
symbolical of the ways of the Lord to man.
The Pelican is distinguished by its love for its young. As these
begin to grow they strike at their parents' faces, and the parents
strike back and kill them. Then the parents take pity, and on the
third day the mother comes and opens her side and lets the blood
flow on the dead young ones, and they become alive again. Thus
God cast off mankind after the Fall, and delivered them over to
death; but he took pity on us, as a mother, for by the Crucifixion He
awoke us with His blood to eternal life.[2]
[Footnote 2: Thilly: _loc. cit._, p. 76.]
History is treated in the same way. Nearly all the histories
written by the early Christian Fathers were written in deliberate
advocacy of the Faith. It was to silence the heresies of
those who attributed to the Church the entrance of Alaric into
Rome that Augustine wrote his famous _City of God_. The
whole of history is a revelation of the divine purpose which is
eventually to be fulfilled. Orosius, again, a disciple of Augustine,
wrote his _Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans_ to
prove the abundance of calamities which had afflicted mankind
before the birth of Christ. He gathers together all the
evidence he can to exhibit at once the patience and the power
of God. "Straitened and anxious minds" might not be able
to see the purpose always, but all was ordained for one end.
Thus he writes at the beginning of his seventh book:
The human race from the beginning was so created and appointed
that living under religion with peace without labor, by the fruit of
obedience it might merit eternity; but it abused the Creator's goodness,
turned liberty into wilful license, and through disdain fell into
forgetfulness; now the patience of God is just and doubly just, operating
that this disdain might not wholly ruin those whom He wished
to spare ... and also so that He might always hold out guidance
although to an ignorant creature, to whom if penitent He would
mercifully restore the means to grace.[1]
[Footnote 1: Orosius: _Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans_, II, 3.]
History thus comes to reveal the fulfillment of the divine
purpose, as science reveals the divine arrangements of the
universe.
It has already been noted that theology, certainly Christian
theology, maintains that God is all-good. In consequence the
natural world which scientific inquiry reveals must be all-good
in its operations and its fruits. The history of the universe
must be a steady and unfaltering fulfillment of the
divine, of the beneficent eternal purpose. The ways of the
Almighty, so theology tells us, are just ways, and the universe
in which we live, so theology tells us, is a revelation of
that justice. The eighteenth century "natural theologians"
spent much energy in demonstrating how perfectly adapted to
his needs are man's natural environment and his organic structure.
They pointed to the eye with its delicate membranes
so subtly adapted to the function of sight. All Nature was
a continuous and magnificent revelation of God's designs,
which were good. Christian Wolff, for example, a rationalistic
theologian of the late eighteenth century, writes:
God has created the sun to keep the changeable conditions on the
earth in such an order that living creatures, men and beasts, may
inhabit its surface.... The sun makes daylight not only on our
earth, but also on the other planets; and daylight is of the utmost
utility to us; for by its means we can commodiously carry on those
occupations which in the night-time would either be quite impossible,
or at any rate impossible without our going to the expense of artificial
light.[2]
[Footnote 2: Christian Wolff: _Vernünftige Gedanken von den
Absichten der natürlichen Dinge_, 1782, pp. 74 ff.; quoted by
James in _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p.492.]
MECHANISTIC SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. With the rise of mechanistic
science there has come about a sharp collision between
the conception of the goodness of the universe as theology declares
it, and of its blindnesses and indifference as science seems
to unfold it to us. Contrast the picture of a cosmos which
was deliberately and considerately made by God to serve
every exigency of man's welfare, with the picture earlier
quoted from Bertrand Russell as the natural scientist gives it
to us. It is no longer easy to say the Heavens declare the
glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork. As
far as we can see natural processes go on without the slightest
reference to the welfare of man, who is but an accidental
product of their indifferent forces. The universe is a system
of blind regularities. "Omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless
way." Nature is thoroughly impersonal, and indeed,
were it to be judged by personal or human standards, it could
with more accuracy be maintained that it is evil than that it is
good. As Mill puts it in a famous passage:
In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or
imprisoned for doing to one another, are Nature's everyday
performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws,
Nature does once to every being that lives, and in a large proportion
of cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters
whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow-creatures....
Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel,
casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death,
crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves
them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick
or slow venom of her exhalations.... A single hurricane destroys
the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts or an inundation desolates a
district; a trifling chemical change in an edible root starves a million
of people.[1]
[Footnote 1: Mill: _Three Essays on Religion_ (Holt), pp. 28-30.]
The theology which insists on the patent and ubiquitous
evidences of God's beneficent purpose, attempts, as already
pointed out, to demonstrate that purpose in the history of
mankind. Orthodox Christian doctrine, for example, insists
that man has been especially created by God, as were the
other animals each after their kind, and that man's ultimate
and unique destiny is salvation through God's grace. Man
was created in perfection in the Garden of Eden, sinned, and
will, through God's mercy, find eventual redemption.
Following the publication of Darwin's _Origin of Species_, in
1859, the rapid spread of evolutionary doctrine aroused violent
opposition on the part of Christian thinkers and devout
Christians generally. In the first place it conflicted sharply
with the orthodox version of special creation. Secondly, it
made more difficult the insistence on marks of design or purpose
in Nature. These two points will be clearer after a brief
consideration of the nature of Darwinian evolution, with
whose thoroughgoing mechanical principles nineteenth-century
theology came most bitterly in conflict. The theory
explains the origins of species, somewhat as follows:
The variety of species now current developed out of simpler
forms of animal life, from which they are lineally descended.
Their present forms and structures are modifications from the
common forms possessed by their remote ancestors. These
modifications are, in the stricter forms of Darwinian evolution,
explained in mechanical terms by the theory of the "survival
of the fittest." That is, those animals with variations
adapted to their environment survive; those without, perish.
In consequence when any individual in a species happens to be
born with a variation specially adapted to its environment, in
the sharp "struggle for existence" that characterizes animal
life in a state of nature, it alone will be able to survive and
reproduce its kind. All the variations of species current are,
therefore, examples of this continuous process of descent with
adaptive modifications. The origin of the human species
came about through just such a variation or mutation from
one of the higher mammals (we have reason to believe, a
species similar to that of the anthrapoid ape). Man's
ancestry, it seems, from the scientific evidence which has been
marshaled, may be traced back biologically, in an almost
unbroken chain to unicellular animals.[1]
[Footnote 1: For detailed discussion see Scott: _Theory of Evolution_.]
This theory profoundly affected theological thinking. In
the first place, the evolutionary account not only of the origin
of man, but of the origin of all species, as a descent with
modification from simpler-animal forms, conflicts with the account
of special creation, certainly in the literal form of the Biblical
story. Secondly, the arguments from design which had been
drawn from the adaptation of organic life to environment were,
if not disproved, at least rendered dubious. Although evolution
did not account for the first appearance of life on earth,
it did account for the processes of adaptation, and without
invoking design or purpose.
The eye, for example, as explained by the theory of evolution,
came to its present perfection through a series of fortunate
and cumulative variations through successive generations.
Even in its imperfect form, it was a variation with
high "survival value." Even when it was no more than a
pigmented spot peculiarly sensitive to light, so the theory
holds, it was a variation that enabled a species to survive and
perpetuate its kind. Those not possessing these fortunate
variations were wiped out. The process of Nature, certainly,
in the development of biological life thus appears to be no
economical convergence of means upon an end. Nature has
been recklessly prodigal. Millions more seeds of life are
produced than ever come to fruition. And only animals perfectly
adapted to their environment survive, while an incomparably
greater number perish.
Theology, when it incorporates science and sets itself up as
a direct and factual description of the universe, thus comes
sharply in rivalry with modern mechanistic science. The
conflict is crucial with regard to the purpose which theology
holds to be evident in the universe, and the lack of purpose,
the purely blind regularity, which science seems to reveal.
The mechanical laws by which natural processes take place
exhibit a fixed and changeless regularity, in which man's good
or ill counts absolutely nothing. The earth instead of being
the center of the solar system, is a cosmic accident thrown
out into space. Man instead of being a little lower than the
angels is revealed by science as a little higher than the ape.
There is no space in these pages to trace the various
reconciliations that have been made between theology and science.
It must be pointed out, however, that Christian theology has
increasingly accepted modern mechanistic doctrines, including
the doctrine of evolution. But it has attempted to show
that, granting all the facts of physical science, the universe
does still exhibit the divine purpose and its essential beneficence.
The very order and symmetry of physical law have
been taken as testimony of divine instigation. Mechanism
was set in motion by God. In answer to this, it is pointed
out by the non-theologian that then God's goodness cannot
be maintained. Mechanical processes are indiscriminate in
their distribution of goods and evils to the just and the unjust:
All this Nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of
mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest,
indifferently with the meanest and worst; upon those who are
engaged in the highest and worthiest enterprises, and often as the
direct consequence of the noblest acts; and it might almost be imagined
as a punishment for them. She mows down those on whose
existence hangs the well-being of a whole people; perhaps the
prospects of the human race for generations to come, with as little
compunction as those whose death is a relief to themselves, or a blessing
to those under their noxious influence.[1]
[Footnote 1: Mill: _Three Essays on Religion_ (Holt), p. 29.]
Modern theology sometimes grants the apparent reality of
the evils which are current in a mechanistic world, but insists
that they are making for goods which we with our finite
understanding cannot comprehend. Were our intelligence
infinite, as is God's, we should see how "somehow good
will be the final goal of ill."
Evolution has also been explained as God's method of
accomplishing his ends. By some evolutionists, Driesch and
Bergson for example, evolution itself, in its steady production
of higher types, has been held to be too purposive in character
to permit of a purely mechanical explanation. The process of
evolution has itself thus come to be taken by some theologians
as a clear manifestation of God's beneficent power at work
in the universe.
But theology, in the more spiritualistic religions, has always
insisted on the primacy of God's goodness. There has
been, therefore, in certain theological quarters the tendency
to surrender the conception of divine omnipotence in the face
of the genuine human evils that are among the fruits of blind
mechanical forces. The idea of a finite God who is infinitely
good in his intentions, but limited in his powers, has been
advocated by such various types of mind as John Stuart Mill,
William James, and H. G. Wells. The first mentioned of
these writes:
One only form of belief in the supernatural--one theory respecting
the origin and government of the universe--stands wholly clear
both of intellectual contradiction and of moral obliquity. It is that
which, resigning irrevocably the idea of an omnipotent creator, regards
Nature and Life not as the expression throughout of the moral
character and purpose of the Deity, but as the product of a struggle
between contriving goodness and an intractable material, as was
believed by Plato, or a principle of evil as was believed by the
Manicheans. A creed like this ... allows it to be believed that all the
mass of evils which exists was undesigned by, and exists not by the
appointment of, but in spite of the Being whom we are called upon
to worship.[1]
[Footnote 1: Mill: _loc, cit._, p. 116.]
RELIGION AND SCIENCE. While there have thus been genuine
points of conflict between theology and science, these are
essentially irrelevant to the religious experience itself. Man
is still moved by the same emotions, sensations, needs, and
desires which have, from the dawn of history, provoked in
him a sense of his relationship with the divine. There comes
to nearly all individuals at some time, not without rapture,
a sudden awareness of divinity.
It is the terror and beauty of phenomena, the "promise" of the
dawn and of the rainbow, the "voice" of the thunder, the "gentleness"
of the summer rain, the "sublimity" of the stars, and not the
physical laws which these things follow, by which the religious mind
continues to be most impressed; and just as of yore, the devout man
tells you that in the solitude of his room or of the fields he still feels
the divine presence, that inflowing of help come in reply to his
prayers, and that sacrifices to this unseen reality fill him with
security and peace.[1]
[Footnote 1: James: _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 498.]
Modern man, just as his savage ancestor cowering before
forces he did not understand, realizes sometimes--some
persons realize it always--how comparatively helpless is man
amid the magnificent and eternal forces in which his own
life is infinitesimally set. Even when one has been educated
to the sober prose of science, one feels still the ancient emotions
of joy, sorrow, and regret. Birth and death, sowing and
harvest, conquest or calamity, as of old, evoke a sympathetic
feeling with the movement of cosmic processes. All of these
emotions to-day, as in less sophisticated times, may take
religious form.
Nor does the universe because we understand it better
seem, to many, less worthy of worship. The most thorough-going
scientific geniuses have felt most deeply the nobility
and grandeur of that infinite harmony and order which their
own genius has helped to discover. It has been well said the
"undevout astronomer is mad." And it is not only the student
of the stars who has intimations of divinity. As Professor
Keyser puts it: "The cosmic times and spaces of modern
science are more impressive and more mysterious than
a Mosaic cosmogony or Plato's crystal spheres. Day is just
as mysterious as night, the mystery of knowledge is more
wonderful and awesome than the darkness of the unknown."[2]
It is significant that such men as Newton, Pasteur, and Faraday,
giants of modern physical inquiry, were devoutly religious.
[Footnote 2: Keyser: _Science and Religion_, p. 30.]
It would appear indeed that the objects which men revere
are not the subject-matter of science. Physics and chemistry
can tell us what Nature is like; they cannot tell us to what in
Nature we shall give our faith and our allegiance. Religion
remains, as ever, "loyalty to the highest values of life."
Science instead of making the world less awesome has made it
more mysterious than ever. Origins and destinies are still
unknown. Science tells how; it describes. It does not tell
why things occur as they do; or what is the significance of
their occurrence. Worship can never be reduced to molecules
or atoms. While man lives and wonders, hopes and fears,
feels the clear beauty, the infinite mystery, and the eternal
significance of things, the religious experience will remain, and
men will find objects worthy of their worship.
THE CHURCH AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION. Religion being so
crucial a set of social habits, institutions arise for the perpetuation
of its traditions, and for the social expression of the religious
life. The churches perpetuate the religious tradition in
a number of ways. Fixed ecclesiastical systems, recitals and
definitions of creeds, the regular and meticulous performance
of rites and ceremonies, become powerful instruments for the
transmission of religious ideas and standards. Rites frequently
performed by men in mass have a deep and moving
influence. They have at once all the pressure and prestige of
custom, confirmed by the mystery and awe that attends any
expression of man's relationship to the divine. The church,
moreover, by the mere fact of being an institution, having a
hierarchy, an ordered procedure, a definite assignment and
division of ecclesiastical labor, becomes thereby an incomparable
preserver and transmitter of traditional values.
Churches, ecclesiastical organizations in general, may be
said to arise because of the necessity felt by men for
intermediaries between themselves and the divine. We have
already seen of what vast practical moment in savage life was
communication with the gods. Upon the success of such
addresses to deity, depended not only the salvation of the soul,
but the actual welfare of the body--shelter, harvest, and
victory. The gods among many tribes were held to be
meticulous about the forms and ceremonies which men addressed
to them. In consequence it became important to have,
as it were, experts in the supernatural, men who knew how to
win the favor of these watchful powers. The priests were
originally identical with medicine men and magicians. They
knew the workings of the providential forces. In their hands
lay, at least indirectly, the welfare of the tribe. Their
principal duties were to administer and give advice as to the worship
of the gods. Often it was necessary for them to point out to
the lay members of the tribe which gods to worship on special
occasions. The priests being accredited with a superior
knowledge of the ways of the gods, they were required to
influence the wind and rain, to cause good growth, to ensure
success in hunting and fishing, to cure illness, to foretell the
future, to work harm upon enemies.[1]
[Footnote 1: For a detailed discussion see Hastings: _Encyclopoedia
of Religion and Ethics_, vol. II, pp. 278-335.]
There is more than one criterion by which men may be set
apart as priests. Sometimes they are those who in a mystic
state of ecstasy are supposed to be inspired by the gods.
During their trance such men are questioned as to the will of
the divine. Sometimes they become renowned through their
reputed performance of an occasional miracle. Again, as
magical and religious ceremonies become more complicated,
there is a deliberate training of an expert class to perform
these essential acts. And, whatever be the source of the
selection of the priestly class, the immense influence which
their functions are regarded as having on the welfare of the
tribe causes them to be particularly revered and often feared
by the lay members of the tribe. In more civilized and
spiritual religions, the priestly or professional ecclesiastical
class is no longer regarded as possessed of magical powers by
which it can coerce divinity. It is the official administrator
of the ceremonies of religion, is especially trained, versed and
certificated in doctrine, is empowered to receive confession,
fix penance, and the like. It is still an intermediary between
man and the divine, although itself not possessing any supernatural
powers.
Where ecclesiastical organization is highly developed and
has become controlling in the life of a people, it may be one of
the most powerful forces in social life. Such, for example,
might be said of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages:
A life in the Church, for the Church, through the Church; a life
which she blessed in mass at morning and sent to peaceful rest by
the vesper hymn; a life which she supported by the constantly recurring
stimulus of the sacraments, relieving it by confession, purifying
it by penance, admonishing it by the presentation of visible objects
for contemplation and worship--this was the life which they of the
Middle Ages conceived as the rightful life of Man; it was the actual
life of many, the ideal of all.[1]
[Footnote 1: Bryce: _Holy Roman Empire_, p. 423.]
Churches may also come to acquire political functions.
The history of the Church is for many centuries the leading
factor in the political history of Europe, nor is it only in
Christendom that political institutions have been inextricably
associated with religion.
Religious institutions may, as pointed out in the case of
primitive tribes, acquire educational functions. The initiation
ceremonies in Australian tribes have a markedly religious
character. In the higher and more modern religions educational
functions still persist. The Catholic Church has been
regarded as the educator of Europe. Charlemagne's endowment
and encouragement of education was largely made
effectual through the Church. The grammarians and didactic
writers, the poets, the encyclopædists, the teachers whom
Charlemagne endowed and gathered about him, the heads of
the schools which he founded, were all churchmen. Until
very recently in the history of Europe the universities and
education in general were nearly all under the domination of
the Church. The secularization of primary education in
England took place only late in the nineteenth century, and it
is not yet a generation since the battle over the secularization
of education was waged in France. All religious sects
maintain on a smaller or larger scale educational functions.
Parochial and convent schools and denominational colleges
are contemporary examples.
THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF INSTITUTIONALIZED RELIGION. The
consequences of institutionalized religion in social development
have been very marked. The mere association of large
groups in a common faith and a common religious interest has
been a considerable factor in their integration. There is to
be noted in the first place the common emotional sympathies
aroused by the participation of great numbers in identical
rites and ceremonies. Any widespread social habit becomes
weighted with emotional values for its members. Particularly
is this true of religious habits, the mystery and magnificence
associated with which deeply intensify their emotional
influence. Again religious habits are given a unanimous and
high social approval, especially where the prohibitions and
commands enforced by religion are conceived intimately to
affect the welfare of the tribe. The prophets reiterated to the
people of Israel that their calamities were the result of their
having ceased to follow in the ways of the Lord. The possession
of a common religious history and tradition may also give
a people a deepened sense of group solidarity. The national
development of the ancient Hebrews was undoubtedly promoted
by their sense of being the chosen people, of possessing
exclusively the law of Jehovah.
Again religious sanction is given to codes of belief, modes of
conduct, and to institutions, thus at once strengthening them
and making change difficult. It is not merely customs that
are obeyed and disobeyed, but the sacred commands. A
premium is put upon the regular and traditional because of
the divine sanction associated with them. To violate a
prohibition, even a slight one, becomes thus the most terrible
sacrilege. Customs that, like the hygienic rules of the Mosaic
code, may have started as genuine social utilities are maintained
because they have become fixed in the religious traditions
as enjoined by the Lord. In consequence there may be a
Pharisaical insistence on the performance of the letter of the
law, long after its practical utility or spiritual significance is
forgotten. It is this persistence in the literal fulfillments of
religious commands at the expense of the spirit, that the
Hebrew prophets so vehemently condemned. Thus proclaims
Isaiah:
To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? Saith
the Lord: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed
beasts....
Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto
me....
Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they
are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them....
Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from
before mine eyes; cease to do evil;
Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the
fatherless, plead for the widow.[1]
[Footnote 1: Isaiah I: 11-17.]]
Institutions and modes of life, even when they are not,
strictly speaking, part of the religious tradition proper, are
given tremendous sanction and confirmation when they become
embodied in the religious tradition. The institution of
the family, for example, through the strong religious sanctions
and values implied in the marriage ceremony and relationship
(especially the marriage sacrament of the Catholic Church),
comes to be strongly fortified and entrenched. Change in
the form of an institution so hallowed by religion is something
more than change; it is sacrilege. Governments and dynasties,
again, when they have a religious sanction, when the
King rules by "divine right," acquire a strong additional
source of persistence and power. The imperial character of
the Japanese government to-day, for example, is said to be
greatly enhanced in prestige by the widespread popular belief
that the Emperor is lineally descended from divinity.
Sometimes religious sanctions have inspired and promoted
zeal for social enterprise. The Crusades stand out as classic
instances, but in the name of religion men have done more
than build cathedrals and go on pilgrimages. In the Middle
Ages, bridges and roads were constructed, alms were given,
pictures were painted, books illuminated, encyclopædias
made, education conducted, all under the auspices and
inspiration of the Church. The mediæval universities started
as church schools. In our own day, the expansion of the
churches in the direction of welfare work and social reform,
the use of the church as a community center, are examples of
this development. Men have found justification by good
works as well as faith.
INTOLERANCE AND INQUISITION. The influence of religious
tradition over the minds of its followers has had, among many
noble and beautiful consequences, the dark fruits of intolerance,
persecution, inquisition, and torture. Part of the bitter
narrow-mindedness which has characterized the history of
ecclesiastical institutions is not to be attributed specifically
to religion. It is rather to be explained by the general uneasiness
which the gregarious human creature feels at any
deviation from the accustomed. In addition men have felt
frequently that any divergence from the divinely ordained
would bring destruction upon the whole group. In the Christian
tradition there was an additional reason for intolerance:
the heretic was willfully losing his own soul, and it was only
humane to compel him to come "into the fold, to rescue him
from the pains he would otherwise suffer in Hell."
The profound conviction that those who did not believe in its
doctrines would be damned eternally, and that God punishes theological
error as if it were the most heinous of crimes, led naturally to
persecution. It was a duty to impose on men the only true doctrine,
seeing that their own eternal interests were at stake, and to hinder errors
from spreading. Heretics were more than ordinary criminals, and
the pains that man could inflict on them were as nothing to the
tortures awaiting them in hell.[1]
[Footnote 1: Bury: _History of Freedom of Thought_, pp. 52-53.]
In fevered zeal for the Faith began that long hunting and
punishment of heresy, which has done so much to darken the
history of religion in Western Europe. There were, as in the
Albigensian Crusade, wholesale burnings and hangings of men,
women, and children.[1] Heresy was hunted out in secret retreats.
"It was the foulest of crimes; to prevail against it
was to prevail against the legions of Hell." The culmination
of intolerance was, of course, the Inquisition. One need not
pause to recall its espionage system, its search for the spreaders
of false doctrine, its use of any and every witness against the
suspect, its granting of indulgences to any one who should
bear witness against him, its "relaxing of the criminal to the
secular arm," which unfailingly punished him with death. It
must be pointed out that in the instance of the Inquisition,
just as in the case of all religious persecution, the motives
were most frequently of the noblest. "In the Middle Ages
and after, men of kindly temper and the purest zeal were
absolutely devoid of mercy when heresy was suspected." Nor
are intolerance and persecution to be laid exclusively at the
door of any one religion. In Protestant countries, in England
and Scotland, the persecution and torture of alleged witches is
one of the most painful instances of the cruelties into which
men can be led by loyalty to their religious convictions. And
Mohammedanism vividly taught men how a faith might be
spread by fire and sword.
[Footnote 1: _Ibid._, pp. 56-57.]
QUIETISM AND CONSOLATION--OTHER-WORLDLINESS. Many
religions, including Christianity, have emphasized "other-worldliness."
This has most frequently taken the form of
emphasis on the life to come. This world has been conceived,
as it were, as a prelude to eternity. In the Christian world
scheme, as most clearly expounded and universally accepted
during the Middle Ages, man's chief imperative business was
salvation. All else was trivial in comparison with that
incomparable eternal bliss which would be the reward of the
virtuous, and that unending agony which would be the penalty
for the damned. "Salvation was the master Christian motive.
The Gospel of Christ was a gospel of salvation unto
eternal life. It presented itself in the self-sacrifice of divine
love, not without warnings touching its rejection."[1]
[Footnote 1: H. O. Taylor: _Medioeval Mind_, vol. I, p. 61.]
Where interest is centered on a world to come, there not
infrequently results a loss of interest and discrimination in the
goods of earthly life. "For what shall it profit a man if he
shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" The
beauties, goods, and distinctions of this world coalesce into an
indiscriminate triviality in comparison with that infinite glory
hereafter to be attained. One does not trouble one's self
about the furniture of earthly life any more than one would
take pains with the beautification of a room in which one happens
to be lodged for a night.
Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and
rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.
But lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven, where neither moth
nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor
steal.
Though on earth you may live in squalor, poverty, and disease,
yet "in my Father's house are many mansions."
Poverty, indeed, became in the Middle Ages one of the vows
of monastic orders. In the New Testament it is prescribed,
"Blessed are the poor in spirit" and the doctrine was in many
cases literally accepted.
If any one of you will know whether he is really poor in spirit, let
him consider whether he loves the ordinary consequences and effects
of poverty, which are hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, and the denudation
of all conveniences. See if you are glad to wear a worn-out
habit full of patches. See if you are glad when something is lacking
to your meal, when you are passed by in serving it, when what you
receive is distasteful to you, when your cell is out of repair. If you
are not glad of these things, if instead of loving them you avoid
them, then there is proof that you have not attained the perfection
of poverty of spirit.[2]
[Footnote 2: Alfonso Rodriguez: _Pratique de la Perfection Chrétienne_,
part III, treatise III, chap. VI; quoted in James's _Varieties of
Religious Experience_, p. 315.]
Contempt for this world's goods, when generalized, promotes
an attitude of indifference to the social conditions in
which men live. The history of the saints is filled with
references to their endurance of pain, ill health, poverty, and
disease. And the "world, the flesh, and the devil" are for
some types of religious mind all one. For such, to be
engaged in social betterment is an irrelevant business, it is to
be lost in the world. People's souls must be saved; not their
bodies.
Religions, on the other hand, have frequently emphasized
man's social duty. In Christianity this is largely a derivative
of the highly regarded virtue of Charity. Interest in one's
own well-being was a prerequisite for the devout, but interest
in the welfare of others was equally enjoined. To help the
poor and the needy, the widowed and the fatherless, to bring
succor to the oppressed and justice to the downtrodden, have
been part of the religion whose Founder taught that all men
were the children of their Father in Heaven. The mendicant
orders of the Middle Ages were devoted to philanthropic works;
and with religious institutions, throughout their history, have
been associated works of philanthropy and social welfare.
Very recently urban churches in this country have been showing
a tendency to reorganize with emphasis on the church as an
instrument of social coöperation rather than as an aloof
exponent of dogmatic theology. It is the ideal of some liberal
theologians to use the churches chiefly as instruments for
giving social effectiveness to the religious impulse and at the
same time for making social betterment a spiritual enterprise.
CHAPTER XIII
ART AND THE ÆSTHETIC EXPERIENCE
ART _VERSUS_ NATURE. In the Career of Reason man has gradually
learned to control the world in which he lives in the interests
of his own welfare as he imaginatively contemplated it.
Deliberate control has been made necessary because of the
fact that man is born into a world which was not made for
him, but in which he must, if anywhere, grow; in a world which
was not designed to fulfill his desires, but where alone his
desires can find fulfillment. Art may thus, in the broadest
sense, be set over against Nature. It is the activity by which
man realizes ideals. He may realize them practically, as when
he builds a house which he has first imagined, or reaps a
harvest in anticipation of which he has first sown the seeds. He
may realize them imaginatively, as when in color, form, or
sound he creates some desiderated beauty out of the crude
miscellaneous materials of experience. Art, in the broad
sense of control or direction of Nature, arises in the double
fact of man's instinctive activities and desires and the
inadequacy of the environment as it stands to afford them
satisfaction. Because nature is not considerate of his needs, man
must himself take forethought, and devise means by which
the forces and the materials of Nature may be exploited to his
own good. And the realization of this forethought is made
possible through the fact that natural conditions do lend
themselves to modification. Nature, though indifferent to man's
welfare, is yet partly congruous with it. While the wind
blows careless of the good or ill it does to him, yet man may
learn by means of windmills or sailboats to turn the wind to
his own interest. Though the river may flow on forever,
oblivious to the men that come and go along its shores, yet
the passing generations may transform this undeliberate
flowing into the power that yields them clothing, machinery,
and transportation. All civilization is, as Mill says, an
exhibition of Art or Contrivance; it is illustrated by
the junction by bridges of shores which Nature had made separate,
the draining of Nature's marshes, the excavation of her wells, the
dragging to light of what she has buried at immense depths in the
earth; the turning away of her thunderbolts by lightning rods; of her
inundations by embankments, of her oceans by breakwaters.[1]
[Footnote 1: Mill: _Three Essays on Religion_, p. 19 (essay on "Nature").]
By irrigation man has learned to make the "wilderness blossom
as the rose." By railways, telegraphs, and telephones, he
has learned to minimize the obstacles that time and space offer
to the fulfillment of his desires. By controlling, by means of
education and social organization, his own instincts in the
light of the purposes he would attain, by studying "the secret
processes of Nature," man has learned to make the world a fit
habitation for himself. To dig, to plough, to sow, to reap, are
instances of the means whereby man has applied intelligent
control to his half-friendly, half-hostile environment.
Man's deliberate control of Nature arises thus under the
sharp pressure of practical necessity. Man is inherently
active, but, as pointed out in an earlier connection, his activity
takes coherent and consecutive form primarily under the compulsion
of satisfying his physical wants, of finding food, clothing,
and shelter. The greater part of human energy, certainly
under primitive conditions, is devoted to maintaining a
precarious equilibrium among the mysterious and terrifying
forces of a half-understood environment. There is not much
time for leisure, play, or art, where food is a continuously
urgent problem, where one's shelter is likely to be destroyed by
storm or wind, where one is threatened incessantly by beasts
of prey, and, as primitive man supposed, by capricious supernatural
powers. Under such circumstances, life is largely
spent in instrumental or imperative pursuits. Action is
fixed by necessity. It is controlled with immediate and urgent
reference to the business of keeping alive. There is scarcely
time for the activity of art, which is spontaneous and free.
In civilized life, also, the greater part of human energy
must be spent in necessary or instrumental business. Men
must, as always, be fed, clothed, and housed, and the fulfillment
of these primary human demands absorbs the greater
part of the waking hours of the majority of mankind. Our
civilization is predominantly industrial; it is devoted almost
entirely to the transforming of the world of nature into products
for the gratification of the physical wants of men. These
wants have, of course, become much complicated and refined:
men wish not only to live, but to live commodiously and well.
They want not merely a roof over their heads, but a pleasant
and comfortable house in which to live. They want not
merely something to stave off starvation, but palatable foods.
In the satisfaction of these increasingly complicated demands
a great diversity of industries arises. With every new want to
be fulfilled, there is a new occupation, pursued not for its own
sake, but for the sake of the good which it produces. There
are industrial leaders, of course, who find in the development
and control of the productive energies of thousands of men,
in the manipulation of immense natural resources, satisfactions
analogous to that of the fine artist. But for most
men engaged in the routine operations of industry, the work
they do is clearly not pursued on its own account. Industry,
viewed in the total context of the activities of civilization,
is a practical rather than a fine art. Its ideal is efficiency,
which means economy of effort. Its interest is primarily in
producing many goods cheaply.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE FINE ARTS. In the sharp struggle of
man with his environment, those instincts survived which
were of practical use. The natural impulses with which a
human being is at birth endowed, are chiefly those which
enable him to cope successfully and efficiently with his
environment. But even in primitive life, so exuberant and resilient
is human energy that it is not exhausted by necessary labors.
The plastic arts, for example, began in the practical business
of pottery and weaving. The weaver and the potter who
have acquired skill and who have a little more vitality than
is required for turning out something that is merely useful,
turn out something that is also beautiful. The decorations
which are made upon primitive pottery exhibit the excess
vitality and skill of the virtuoso. Similarly, religious ritual,
which, as we have seen, arises in practical commerce with
the gods, comes to be in itself cherished and beautiful. The
chants which are prescribed invocations of divinity, become
songs intrinsically interesting to singer and listener alike; the
dance ceases to be merely a necessary religious form and becomes
an occasion of beauty and delight. Jane Harrison has
shown in detail how ritual arises out of practical need, and
art out of ritual.[1] Thus the Greek drama had its beginnings
in Greek religion; the incidental beauty of the choruses of
the Greek festivals developed into the eventual tragic art of
Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Ceasing to be a practical
invocation to the gods it became an artistic enterprise
in and for itself. Repeatedly we find in primitive life that
activity is not exhausted in agriculture, hunting, and handicraft,
or in a desperate commerce with divinity. Harvest
becomes a festival, pottery becomes an opportunity for decoration,
and prayer, for poetry. Even in primitive life men
find the leisure to let their imaginations loiter over these
intrinsically lovely episodes in their experience.
The potter may be more interested in making a beautifully
moulded and decorated vessel than merely in turning out a
thing of use; the maker of baskets may come to "play with
his materials," to make baskets not so much for their usefulness
as for the possible beauty of their patterns. When this
interest in beauty becomes highly developed, and when
circumstances permit, the fine arts arise. The crafts come to
be practiced as intrinsically interesting employments of the
creative imagination. The moulding of miscellaneous materials
into beautiful forms becomes a beloved habitual practice.
[Footnote 1: See Jane Harrison: _Ancient Art and Ritual_, especially chap. I.]
The context in which art appears in primitive life is paralleled
in civilized society. The energies of men are still largely
consumed in necessary pursuits. Men must, as of old, by the
inadequacy of the natural order in which they find themselves,
find means by which to live; and, being by nature constituted
so that they must live together, they must find ways
of living together justly and harmoniously. "Industry,"
writes Santayana, "merely gives to Nature that form which,
if more thoroughly humane, she might already have possessed
for our benefit." It is creative in so far as it transforms matter
from its crude indifferent state to forms better adapted to
human ideals. It makes cotton into cloth, wool into clothing,
wheat into flour, leather into shoes, coal into light and power,
iron into skyscrapers. It is devoted to annulling the discrepancies
between nature and human nature. It turns refractory
materials and obdurate forces into commodious goods
and useful powers.
But, in the broadest sense, industry is a means to an end.
Interesting and attractive it may well become, as when a
bookbinder or a printer takes a craftsman's proud delight in
the manner in which he performs his work, and in the quality
of its product. But the industrial arts, for the most part,
serve more ultimate purposes. It is imaginable that Nature
might have provided clothing, food, and shelter ready to our
hand. It is questionable whether under such circumstances
men would out of deliberate choice continue industries which
are now made imperative through necessity. The mines and
the stockyards are necessary rather than beautiful or intrinsically
attractive occupations. But in the world of fact, those
things which are necessary to us are not ready to our hand.
Our civilization is predominantly industrial, and must be so,
if the billion and a half inhabitants of our world are to be
maintained by the resources at our command.
Nevertheless despite the absorption of a large proportion of
contemporary society in activities pursued not for their own
sakes, but for the goods which are their fruits, there is still, as
it were, energy left over. This excess vitality may, as it does
for most men, take the form of mere unorganized play or
recreation. But not so for those born with a singular gift for
realizing in color or form or sound the ideal values which they
have imagined. For these "play" is creative production.
The fine arts are, in a sense, the play of the race. They are
the fruits of such energy as is, through some fortunate accident
of temperament or circumstance, not caught up in the
routine and mechanics of industry or the trivialities of sport
or pleasure. They are human activities, freed from the limitations
imposed by the exigencies of practical life, and controlled
only by the artist's imagined visions. Creative activity is
most explicit and most successful in the fine arts, because in
these there are fewer obstacles to the material realization of
imagined perfections. "The liberal arts bring to spiritual
fruition the matter which either nature or industry has prepared
and rendered propitious."
The industrial arts are, as already pointed out, man's
transformation of natural resources to ideal uses. In the same
way political and social organization are human arts, enterprises,
at their best, in the moulding of men's natures to their
highest possible realization. But in the world of action,
whether political or industrial, there are incomparably greater
hindrances to the realization in practice of imagined goods
than there are, at least to the gifted, in the fine arts. Every
ideal for which men attempt to find fulfillment in the world of
action is subject to a thousand accidental deflections of circumstance.
Every enterprise involves conflicting wills; the
larger the enterprise, the more various and probably the more
conflicting the interests involved. Social movements have
their courses determined by factors altogether beyond the control
of their originators. Statesmen can start wars, but cannot
define their eventual fruits. A man may found a political
party, and live to see it wander far from the ideal which he
had framed. But in the fine arts, to the imaginatively and
technically endowed, the materials are prepared and controllable.
In the hands of a master, action does not wander
from intent. Language to the poet, for example, is an
immediate and responsive instrument; he can mould it precisely
to his ideal intention. The enterprise of poetry is less
dependent almost than any other undertaking on the accidents
of circumstance, outside the poet's initial imaginative resources.
In music, even so simple an instrument as a flute
can yield perfection of sound. The composer of a symphony
can invent a perpetual uncorroded beauty; the sculptor an
immortality of irrefutably persuasive form. This explains in
part why so many artists, of a reflective turn of mind, are
pessimists in practical affairs. The world of action with its
perpetual and pitiful frustrations, failures, and compromises,
seems incomparably poor, paltry, and sordid, in comparison
with the perfection that is attainable in art.
Haunting foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm of
imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of
reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines
and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of
change, remote from the failures and disenchantment of the world of
fact. In the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will
shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the
world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs
whatever is capable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.[1]
[Footnote 1: Bertrand Russell: _Philosophical Essays_, pp. 65-66.]
The creative artist gives such form to the miscellaneous
materials at his disposal that they give satisfaction not only
to the senses or the intellect, but to the imagination. What
constitute some of the chief elements in the æsthetic experience,
we shall presently examine. It must first be pointed
out that in general in the fine arts creative genius has found
ways of imaginatively attaining perfections not usually accorded
in the experiences of the senses, in the life of society,
or in the life of the mind.
The region called imagination has pleasures more airy and luminous
than those of sense, more massive and rapturous than those of
intelligence. The values inherent in imagination, in instant
intuition, in sense endowed with form, are called æsthetic values; they are
found mainly in nature and in living beings, but also in man's artificial
works, in images evoked by language, and in the realm of sound.[1]
[Footnote 1: Santayana: _Reason in Art_, p. 15.]
The painter imagines and seeks to realize hues and intensities
of color more satisfying and more suggestive than those
commonly experienced in nature, save in the occasional grace
of sunset on a mountain lake, or the miracle of moonlight
on the ocean. The artist takes his hints from nature, but
clothes the suggestions of sense with the values and motives
which exist only in his own mind and imagination. A Turner
sunset is, as Oscar Wilde points out, in a sense incomparably
superior to one provided by nature. It not only gives the
beautiful sensations to be had in a landscape suffused with
the sunset glow; it infuses into this experience the passionate
and penetrating insight of a genius. The artist, to an extent,
imitates nature. But, if that were all he did, he would be no
more than a photographer. He pictures nature, but gives it
"tint and melody and breath"; he gives it a value and significance
derived from his own imaginative vision. The musician
combines sounds more significant, ordered, and rhythmical
than those miscellaneous noises which, in ordinary
experience, beat indifferently or painfully upon our ears.
The poet selects words whose specific music, rhythmical
combinations, and lyrical context produce a something more
evocative, compelling, and euphonic than the casual and
raucous instrument of communication which constitutes
ordinary speech.
Not only do poets give imaginative and ideal extensions to
sense experience; they do as much with and for social life.
In the dreaming of Utopias, in the building of the Perfect
City, men have found compensations for the imperfect cities
which have been their experiences on earth. They build
themselves in imagination a world where all injustices are
erased, where beauty is perennial, where truth, courage,
kindliness, and merriment are the pervasive colors of life.
In the activity of creative art, man's imagination has reached
out beyond the confines of nature and of history, and built
itself, in marble and in music, in lyrics and in legends, hints
of that enchanting possible, of which the impoverished actual
gives tentative and tenuous hints.
In some men sensitivity to the imaginative possibilities of
the materials of Nature is so high, that they can find satisfactory
activity nowhere else than in one or another of the
fine arts. These are the poets, the musicians, and the sculptors,
who seek to give realization in the arts in the technique
of which they are especially gifted, to that imagined beauty
by the intimate experience of which they live. In one way or
another the creative artist seeks to give form and dimension to
"The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet's dream."
This creative impulse may find its realization, as already
pointed out, in industry, though, with the highly routine
character of most men's occupations in present-day industrial
life, there is not much opportunity for imaginative activity.
That both work and happiness would be promoted by the
encouragement of the craftsman ideal goes without saying.
Whether or not it is possible to utilize the creative impulses
in the processes of industry as now organized, there are instances
where the joy of craftsmanship may be exploited both
for the happiness of the worker and the good of the work.
The William Morris ideal of the artist-worker may be hard to
attain, but it is none the less desirable, both for the sake of the
worker and his work.
In science the uses of the imagination have been frequently
commented on, not least by scientists. The patient
collection of facts, the digging and measurement and
inquiry that characterize so much of scientific investigation
are not the whole of it. Inference, the forming of a generalization,
is frequently described "as a leap from the known to
the unknown," and this discovery of a binding principle that
brings together a wide variety of disconnected facts is not
unlike the process of the creative artist. The same unconscious
method by which a poet hits upon an appropriate epithet, a
musician upon a melody, a painter upon an effect of color
or line is displayed in that sudden vivid flash of insight by
which a scientist sees a mass of facts that have long seemed
bafflingly contradictory, gathered up under a single luminous
law. In his famous essay on "The Scientific Uses of the
Imagination," Tyndall writes:
We are gifted with the power of Imagination, ... and by this
power we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of the
senses. There are tories even in science who regard imagination as
a faculty to be feared and avoided rather than employed. They had
observed its action in weak vessels and were unduly impressed by its
disasters. But they might with equal justice point to exploded
boilers as an argument against the use of steam. Bounded and
conditioned by coöperant Reason, imagination becomes the mightiest
instrument of the physical discoverer. Newton's passage from a
falling apple to a falling moon was, at the outset, a leap of the
imagination. When William Thomson tries to place the ultimate
particles of matter between his compass points, and to apply to them
a scale of millimetres, he is powerfully aided by this faculty. And
in much that has been recently said about protoplasm and life, we
have the outgoings of the imagination guided and controlled by the
known analogies of science. In fact, without this power, our knowledge
of Nature would be a mere tabulation of coexistences and
sequences. We should still believe in the succession of day and
night, of summer and winter; but the soul of Force would be
dislodged from our universe; causal relations would disappear, and
with them that science which is now binding the parts of nature into
an organic whole.[1]
[Footnote 1: Tyndall: _Fragments of Science_, pp. 130-31.]
As we shall presently see, this imaginative leap is guarded
and controlled, so that no flash of insight, however attractive,
is uncritically accepted. But the origin of every eventually
accepted hypothesis lies in the upshoot of irresponsible fancy,
differing not at all from the images in the mind of a poet or
painter or the melodies that unpredictably occur to a musician.
THE ÆSTHETIC EXPERIENCE. Art is, on its creative side, as we
have seen, the control of Nature in the practical or imaginative
realization of ideals. The industrial arts are pursued out
of necessity, because man must find himself ways of living
in a world which he must inhabit, though it is not _a prior_
arranged for his habitation. The fine arts are pursued as
ends in themselves.[1] The genuinely gifted sing, paint, write
poetry, apart from fame and reward, for the sheer pleasure of
creation. But the products of these creative activities themselves
become satisfactions on a par with other natural goods.
The objects of art--poems, paintings, statues, symphonies--are
themselves prized and sought after. They afford satisfaction
to that large number of persons who are sensitive to
the beautiful without having a gift for its creation.
[Footnote 1:
Many industrial processes exhibit elements of the fine arts. This is the
case whenever there is opportunity for the worker to feel, and to have some
ground for the feeling, that he is not merely turning out a product, but turning
out a well-made or a beautiful one, to which his own skill is contributing.
The makers of fine books or bindings or furniture, of fine embroidery and the
like, are examples. But such conditions occur chiefly in the so-called luxury
trades. There is very little opportunity for the display of creative talent in
quantity manufacture.
On the other hand, every fine art involves some elements of merely technical
skill or craftsmanship, which is important in achieving an imaginative
result, but is the skill of the mechanic rather than the vision of the artist.
In surveying the finished product of art as it appears in a painting by a
Turner or a Cezanne, we may forget the "dust and ointment of the calling,"
but it is none the less there. The drudgery of art, the practicing of scales.
the mixing of colors, the rehearsing of plays, are, as it were, the necessary preliminary industry in art.]
Æsthetic appreciation is indeed shared by all men, and is
called out by other objects than paintings or poems. There is
hardly anything men do which is not affected by what has
been called "an irrelevant access of æsthetic feeling." We saw
in another connection how our estimates of persons and situations
are qualified by love and hate, sympathy and revulsion.
In the same way all our experiences have an æsthetic coloring.
It may be nothing more than the curious jubilance and
vivacity, the thrill and tingle of the blood that comes upon a
crisp autumn day. It may be, as Mill pointed out, the largeness
of thought and vision promoted by habitually working
in a spacious and dignified room. Æsthetic influences are
always playing upon us; they determine not only our tastes in
the decoration of our houses, our choices of places to walk and
to eat, but even such seemingly remote and abstract matters
as a scientific theory or a philosophy of life. Even the industrial
ideal of efficiency has, "with its suggestion of Dutch
neatness and cleanliness," order and symmetry, an æsthetic
flavor. Similarly is there an appeal to our æsthetic sensibilities
in the grouping of a wide variety of facts under sweeping
inclusive and simple generalizations. There is, as has often
been pointed out, scarcely anything to choose from as regards
the relative plausibility of the Copernican over the Ptolemaic
system. The former we choose largely because of its greater
symmetry and simplicity in accounting for the facts. Even a
world view may be chosen on account of its artistic appeal.
One feels moved imaginatively, even if one disagrees with the
logic of those philosophies which see reality as one luminously
transparent conscious whole, in which every experience is
delicately reticulated with every other, where discord and
division are obliterated, and the multiple variety of mundane
facts are gathered up into the symmetrical unity of the eternal.
APPRECIATION _VERSUS_ ACTION. Every human experience has
thus its particular and curious æsthetic flavor, as an inevitable
though undetected obligato. Æsthetic values enter into and
qualify our estimates of persons and situations, and help to
determine that general sympathy or revulsion, that love or
hate for people, institutions, or ideas, which make the pervasive
atmosphere of all human action. But in the world of
action, we cannot emphasize these irrelevant æsthetic feelings.
The appreciative and the practical moods are sharply contrasted.
In the latter we are interested in results, and insist
on the exclusion of all considerations that do not bear on
their accomplishment. The appreciative or æsthetic mood is
detached; it is interested not to act, but to pause and consider;
it does not want to use the present as a point of departure.
It wants to bask in the present perfection of color, word, or
sound. The practical man is interested in a present situation
for what can be done with it; he wants to know, in the vernacular,
"What comes next?" "Where do we go from here?"
The appreciator wishes to remain in the lovely interlude of
perfection which he experiences in music, poetry, or painting.
The æsthetic mood is obviously at a discount in the world
of action. To bask in the charm of a present situation, to
linger and loiter, as it were, in the sun of beauty, is to accomplish
nothing, to interrupt action. It is precisely for this
reason that persons with extremely high æsthetic sensibilities
are at such a discount in practical life. They are too easily
dissolved in appreciation. They are too much absorbed, for
practical efficiency, in the tragic, the whimsical, the beautiful,
or the comic aspects of men and affairs. The same sensitivity
to the innuendoes and colors of life that enable some of
such men to give an exquisite and various portraiture of
experience, incapacitates them for action. The practical man
must not observe anything irrelevant to his immediate business.
He must not be dissolved, at every random provocation,
into ecstacy, laughter, or sorrow. There is too much to
be done in business, government, mechanics, and the laboratory,
to allow one's attention to wander dreamingly over the
tragic, the beautiful, the pathetic, the comic, and the
grotesque qualities of the day's work. To take an extreme case,
it would, as Jane Harrison observes, be a monstrosity, when
our friend was drowning, to note with lingering appreciation
the fluent white curve of his arm in the glimmering waters of
the late afternoon. The man to whom every event is flooded
with imaginative possibilities and emotional suggestions is a
useless or a dangerous character in situations where it is
essential to discriminate the immediate and important bearings
of facts. We cannot select an expert accountant on the
basis of a pleasant smile, nor a chauffeur for his sense of
humor.
But while, in the larger part of the lives of most men, observation
of facts is controlled with reference to their practical
bearings, observation may sometimes take place for its own
sake. The glory of a sunset is not commonly prized for any
good that may come of it; nobody but a general on a campaign
or a fire warden looks out from a mountain peak upon
the valley below for reasons other than the pleasure of the
beholding. In the case of persons, also, we are not always
interested in them for their uses; we are sometimes delighted
with them in themselves. We pause to watch merry or
quaint children, experts at tennis, beautiful faces, for their
own sakes.
While even in nature and in social experience, we thus sometimes
note specifically æsthetic values, the objects of fine art
have no other justification than the immediate satisfactions
they produce in their beholder. Those intrinsic pleasures
which go by the general name of beauty are various and
complicated. Our joy may be in the sheer delight of the senses,
as in the hearing of a singularly lucid and sustained note of a
clarinet, a flute, a voice, or a violin. It may be in the appreciation
of form, as in the case of the symmetry of a temple, an
arch, or an altar. It may be in the simultaneous stirring of
the senses, the imagination, and the intellect, by the presentation
of an idea suffused with music and emotion, as in the case
of an ode by Wordsworth or a sonnet by Milton.
In all these instances we are not interested in anything beyond
the experience itself. The objects of the fine arts are
not drafts on the future, anticipations of future satisfactions
eventually to be cashed in. They are immediate and intrinsic
goods, absolute fulfillments. They are not signals to action;
they are releases from it. A painting, a poem, a symphony,
do not precipitate movement or change. They invite a restful
absorption. It was this that made Schopenhauer regard art
as a rest from reality. During these interludes, at least, we
live amid perfections, and are content there to move and have
our being.
SENSE SATISFACTION. Appreciation of the arts begins in the
senses. Sight and sound, these are unquestionably the chief
avenues by which the imagination is stirred.[1]
[Footnote 1: The so-called lower senses are not regarded as
yielding æsthetic
values. Smell, taste, and touch are not generally, certainly
in Occidental art, made
much of.]
In the words of Santayana:
For if nothing not once in sense is to be found in the intellect,
much less is such a thing to be found in the imagination. If the
cedars of Lebanon did not spread a grateful shade, or the winds
rustle through the maze of their branches, if Lebanon had never
been beautiful to sense, it would not now be a fit or poetic subject of
allusion.... Nor would Samarcand be anything but for the mystery
of the desert, and the picturesqueness of caravans, nor would an
argosy be poetic if the sea had no voices and no foam, the winds and
oars no resistance, and the rudder and taut sheets no pull. From
these real sensations imagination draws its life, and suggestion its
power.[2]
[Footnote 2: Santayana: _Sense of Beauty_, p. 68.]
Satisfaction in sounds arises from the regular intervals of
the vibrations of the air by which it is produced. The rapidity
of these regular beats determines the pitch. But sounds also
differ in _timbre_ or quality, depending on the number of overtones
which occur in different modes of production. This explains
why a note on the scale played on the piano, differs
from the same note played on the 'cello or the organ. From
these fundamental sensuous elements of sound, elaborate
symphonic compositions may be built up, but they remain
primary nevertheless. Unless the sensuous elements of sound
were themselves pleasing it is difficult to imagine that a musical
composition could be. Music would then be like an orchestra
whose members played in unison, but whose violins were
raucous and whose trumpets hoarse.
Color again illustrates the æsthetic satisfactions that are
found in certain kinds of sense stimulation, apart from the
form they are given or the emotions or ideas they express.
The elements of color, _as_ color, may be reduced to three simple
elements: First may be noted _hue_, as yellow or blue; second,
_value_ (or _notan_) dark or light red; and third _intensity_ (or
brightness to grayness), as vivid blue or dull blue. Specific
vivid æsthetic combinations and variations are made possible
by variations or combinations of these three elements of
color. If a color scheme is displeasing, the fault may be in the
wrong selection of hues, in weak values, in ill-matched intensities
or all three.
Dutch tiles, Japanese prints and blue towels, Abruzzi towels,
American blue quilts, etc., are examples of harmony built up with
several values of one hue.
With two hues innumerable variations are possible. Japanese
prints of the "red and green" period are compositions in light
yellow-red, middle green, black, and white....
Color varies not only in hue and value [_notan_] but in intensity--ranging
from bright to gray. Every painter knows that a brilliant
bit of color, set in grayer tones of the same or neighboring hues, will
illuminate the whole group--a distinguished and elusive harmony.
The fire opal has a single point of intense scarlet, melting into pearl;
the clear evening sky is like this when from the sunken sun the red-orange
light grades away through yellow and green to steel gray.[1]
[Footnote 1: Dow: _Composition_, p. 109.]
These variations in hue, value, and intensity of color afford
specific æsthetic satisfactions. The blueness of the sky is its
specific beauty; the greenness of foliage in springtime is its
characteristic and quite essential charm. Apart from anything
else, sensations themselves afford satisfaction or the
reverse. A loud color, a strident or a shrill sound may cause
a genuine revulsion of feeling. A soft hue or a pellucid note
may be an intrinsic pleasure, though a formless one, and one
expressive of no meaning at all.
FORM. While the imagination is stirred most directly by
the immediate material beauty, by the satisfaction of the
senses, beauty of form is an important element in the enhancement
of appreciation. In the plastic arts and in music,
it is, next to the immediate appeal of the sensuous elements
involved, the chief ingredient in the effects produced. And
even in those arts which are notable for their expressive values,
poetry, fiction, drama and painting, the appeal of form, as
in the plot of a drama, or the structure of an ode or it sonnet
is still very high. Certain dispositions of line and color in
painting; of harmony and counterpoint in music; rhythm,
refrain, and recurrence in poetry; symmetry and balance in
sculpture; all have their specific appeal, apart from the materials
used or the emotions or ideas expressed. Certain harmonic
relations are interesting in music apart from the particular
range of notes employed, or the particular melody upon
which variations are made. The pattern of a tapestry may
be interesting, apart from the color combinations involved.
The structure of a ballade or a sonnet may be beautiful, apart
from the melody of the words or the persuasiveness of the
emotion or idea. Out of the factors which enter into the
appreciation of form certain elements stand out.
There is, in the first place, _symmetry_, the charm of which
lies partly in recognition and rhythm. "When the eye runs
over a façade, and finds the objects that attract it at equal
intervals, an expectation, like the anticipation of an inevitable
note or requisite word, arises in the mind, and its non-satisfaction
involves a shock."[1]
[Footnote 1: Santayana: _The Sense of Beauty_, p. 92.]
Similarly, form given to material brings a variety of details
under a comprehensive unity, enabling us to have at once the
stimulation of diversity and the clarification of a guiding
principle. We cherish sensations in themselves, when they
consist of elements like limpidness of color and lucidity of
sound. But too much miscellany of sensation is disquieting;
it has an effect analogous to noise. A baby or a barbarian
may delight in loud heterogeneity and vivid confusion, but
extravagance of sensation does not constitute an æsthetic
experience.
The discovery of the one in the many, the immediate apprehension
of the fluent tracing of a pattern, a form, or a structure,
is intrinsically delightful. The pattern of a tapestry
design is as striking and suggestive as the colors themselves.
When musical taste has passed from a sentimental intoxication
with the sensuous beauty of the sounds themselves, the
beauty we admire is primarily beauty of form or structure.
The musical connoisseur likes to trace the recurrence of a
theme in a symphony, its deviations and disappearances, its
distribution in the various choirs of wood-wind, brass, and
strings, its interweaving with other themes, its resilient,
surprising, and apposite emergences, its pervasive penetration of
the total scheme.
The æsthetic experience, indeed, as specifically æsthetic,
rather than merely sensuous or intellectual, is, it might be
said, almost wholly a matter of form. It is the artist's function,
as it is occasionally his achievement, to give satisfying,
determinate forms to the indeterminate and miscellaneous
materials at his command. Formlessness is for the creator of
beauty the unpardonable sin. To give clarity and coherence
to the vague ambiguous scintillations of sound, to chisel a
specific perfection out of the indefinite inviting possibilities
of marble, to form precise and consecutive suggestions out of
the random and uncertain music of words, is to achieve, in so
far, success in art. Nor does form mean formality. Experience
is so various and fertile, and so far outruns the types under
which human invention and imagination can apprehend
it, that inexhaustible novelty is possible. Novelty, on the
other hand, does not mean formlessness. The artist must, if
he is to be successful, always remain something of an artisan.
However beautiful his vision, he must have sufficient command
of the technical resources to his craft to give a specific
and determinate embodiment to his ideal.
Every one has haunting premonitions of beauty; it is the
business of the artist to give realization in form to the hints of
the beautiful which are present in matter as we meet it in
experience, and to the imaginative longings which they provoke.
In which forms different individuals will find satisfaction
depends on all the circumstances which go to make one individual
different from another. There cannot be in the case of
art, any more than in any other experience, absolute standards.
We can be pleased only with those arrangements of sound
or color to which our sensibilities have early been educated.
Even the most catholic of tastes becomes restricted in the
course of education. To Western ears, there is at first no
music at all in Chinese music, and Beethoven would appear to
the Chinese as barbarous as their compositions appear to us.
But while in a wide sense, conformity to the average determines
or limits our possible appreciation of the beautiful,
within these limits certain elements are intrinsically more
pleasing than others. Those elements of experience, in the
first place, more readily acquire æsthetic values, which in
themselves strikingly impress the senses. Thus tallness in a
man, because it is in the first place striking, becomes readily
incorporated into our standard of the beautiful. And all elements
in themselves beautiful, the human eye, the curve of
the arm, the wave of the hair, come to be emphasized. These
outstanding elements may themselves become conventionalized
and standardized, so that objects of art which conform
to them are insured thereby of a certain degree of recognition
as beautiful. Too close a conformity produces monotonous
formalities, cloying classicisms. Too wide a divergence
results in shock and unpleasantness. The history of all the arts,
however, is full of instances of how the taste of a people can be
educated to new forms. Ruskin had to educate the English
people to an appreciation of Turner. The poets of the Romantic
period were condemned by the critics brought up on
the rigid classic models. The so-called Romantic movements
in the arts are, at their best, departures from old forms, not
into formlessness, but into new, various, and more fruitful
forms. Romanticism at its worst dissolves into mere formlessness
and inarticulate ecstacies. Infinite variety of forms
the world of experience may be made to wear, but sensations,
emotions, and ideas must be given some form, if they are to
pass from a fruitless yearning after beauty into its positive
incarnation in objects of art.
All forms have their characteristic emotional effects, as have
all materials, even apart from the emotions or ideas they express.
The glitter of gold and the sparkle of diamonds, the
strength of marble, the sturdiness of oak--we hardly can
think of these materials without thinking of the associations
which go with them. Similarly the symmetry of the colonnades
of a temple, the multiplicity and variety of Gothic
architecture, even so simple a form as a circle, provoke a
great or slight characteristic emotional reaction. Likewise,
a staccato or a fluent rhythm in music, a march, or a dance
movement, have, even apart from their unconscious or intentional
expressiveness, specific emotional values. In literature,
also, where the value of the words themselves might
be expected to give place entirely to the emotions or ideas of
which they are the expressive instruments, poems may themselves,
by their form and music, be provocative of specific
emotional effects.
"...And over them the sea wind sang,
Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down
By zigzag paths and juts of pointed rock,
Came on the shining levels of the lake.
Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves,
And barren chasms, and all to left and right,
The bare black cliff clanged round him, as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang,
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels--
And on a sudden, lo! the level lake,
And the long glories of the winter moon."[1]
[Footnote 1: From Tennyson's _Morte d'Arthur_.]
Here the effect lies partly in the form, but more especially in
the _timbre_ and reverberation of the words themselves. In
other cases, it is the form that is the chief ingredient in the
effect produced. In Alfred Noyes's "The Barrel Organ,"
apart from the meaning, it is the rhythmic form that is of chief
æsthetic value:
"Come down to Kew in lilac time, in lilac time, in lilac time,
Come down to Kew in lilac time, it is n't far from London,
And you shall wander hand-in-hand with love in summer's wonderland.
Come down to Kew in lilac time; it is n't far from London.
"The cherry trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and sweet perfume.
The cherry trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near to London!)
And there they say, when dawn is high, and all the world's a blaze of sky,
The cuckoo, though he's very shy, will sing a song for London."
Apart from all considerations of meaning, set the easy fluent
grace of this lyric over against the march and majesty of the
"Battle Hymn of the Republic."
"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.
"He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on."
EXPRESSION. The objects of art, as we have seen, are interesting
and attractive in themselves, for the material of
which they are formed, and for the form which the artist has
given them. But they are interesting in another and possibly
as important a way: they are instruments of expression.
That is, a painting is something more than an intrinsically
interesting disposition of line and color, a statue something
more than an exquisite or sublime chiseling of marble, a poem
more than a rhythmic combination of the music of words.
All of these are expressive. Something in their form is
associated with something in our past experience. Thus, as
James somewhere suggests, "a bare figure by Michelangelo,
with unduly flexed joints, may come somehow to suggest the
moral tragedy of life." Something in the face of an old man
painted by Rembrandt may recall to us a similar outward
evidence of inner seriousness, wistfulness, and resignation
which we have ourselves beheld in living people. And we
clearly value the poems of a Wordsworth, a Milton, a Matthew
Arnold, not solely for the magnificent form and music
of their words, but also for the sober beauty of their meaning.
We may come to appreciate even the highly immediate
sensuous and formal pleasure of music for the reverie or
rapture into which by suggestion it throws us. "Expression may,
therefore, make beautiful by suggestion, things in themselves
indifferent, or it may come to heighten the beauty which they
already possess."
The objects of art may be appreciated chiefly either for
their material and form, or for the values which they express.
In some cases the actual object may be beautiful; sometimes
the beauty may lie almost wholly in the image, emotion, or
idea evoked. "Home, Sweet Home," for example, may be
plausibly held to win admiration rather for the sentimental
associations which it evokes in the singer or hearer than for its
verbal or melodic beauty. The enjoyment which people without
any musical gifts, out on a camping or canoeing trip,
experience from singing a rather cheap and frayed repertory
is obviously for sentimental rather than for æsthetic satisfaction.
Similarly, we may cherish the mementos of a lost
friend or child, not for their intrinsic worth, but for the
tenderness of the memories they arouse. The situation is
delicately described in Eugene Field's "Little Boy Blue":
"The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and staunch he stands,
And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
And his musket moulds in his hands.
Time was when the little toy dog was new,
And the soldier was passing fair,
And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue
Kissed them and put them there."
Some objects of art may indeed become beautiful almost
completely through their expressiveness. There are certain
poets whose music is raucous and who make little appeal
through clarity of form. These survive almost completely by
virtue of the persistent strength and enduring sublimity of the
ideas which they express. Much of Whitman may be put in
this class, and also much of Browning. Similarly a sculptor
may not captivate us by the fluent beauty of his marble, but
by the power and passion which his crude mighty figures express.
In such cases we may even come to regard what, from
a purely formal point of view, is unlovely, as a thing of the
most extreme beauty. Even the roughness in such direct
revelations of strength, may come to be regarded as elements
of the beautiful. And where massiveness of effect does not
suffice to retrieve a work of art from its essential crudities, we
may still come to accept it as beautiful, as it were, in intention,
and for what comes to be regarded as its essence, namely,
the idea or emotion it expresses. We forgive the imperfections
of form as we forgive the stammerings and stutterings of
persons whose broken sayings are yet full of wisdom.
Usually even where the object, emotion, or idea expressed is
beautiful, we demand certain formal and material elements of
beauty. A telegram may convey the very apex of felicity,
yet be not at all felicitous in its form or in the music of its
words. If in such cases, we speak of beauty, the term is
altogether metaphorical and imputed; we are using it in the
same analogical sense as when we speak of a "beautiful operation"
or a "beautiful deed"; it is a moral rather than an
æsthetic term. We may find the letter of a friend expressive of
the gentleness, fidelity, and charm that have endeared him to
us, but unless these have attained sufficiently clear and explicit
form and determinate unmistakable music, the letter will
have a meaningful beauty only in the light of the peculiar
relation existing between us and the writer. From an impartial
æsthetic point of view, the epistle can only by affectionate
exaggeration be called beautiful.
But the arts, through their beauty of form, may present
pleasingly objects, emotions, ideas, not in themselves beautiful
or pleasing. The clearest case of this kind is tragedy,
where we may enjoy at arm's length and through the medium
of art, experiences which would in the near actualities of life be
only unmitigated horror. Refracted through the medium of
poetry and drama, they may appear beautiful pervasively
and long.
We are enabled through the arts to survey sympathetically
universal emotions, those by which our own lives have been
touched, or to which they are liable; we are enabled to survey
bitterness and frustration calmly because they are set in a
perspective, a beautiful perspective, in which they shine out clear
and persuasive, purified of that bitter personal tang which
makes sorrow in real life so different in tone from the beauty
with which in tragedy it is halved. Any sensation, as Max
Eastman justly remarks in his "Enjoyment of Poetry," may,
if sufficiently mild, become pleasing. And there is hardly any
human action or experience, however terrible, which cannot
in the hands of a master be made appealing and sublime in its
emotional effect.
The beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which,
in more or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in
life. In the spectacle of death, in the endurance of intolerable pain,
and in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness,
an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the
inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage
of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In
these moments of insight we lose all eagerness of temporary desire,
all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial
things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of day
by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft, illumined by the flickering
light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling
waves we toss for a brief hour.[1]
[Footnote 1: Bertrand Russell: _Philosophical Essays_, pp. 67-68.]
But emotions and experiences that in real life are displeasing
can be made pleasing in art chiefly by virtue of the qualities
of material and form already discussed. The disappointment,
disillusion, or terror which tragedy so vividly reveals is
made tolerable chiefly through the intrinsic beauty of the vehicle
in which it is set forth. The high and breathless beauty
of rhythm, the verve, the mystery, and music with which evils
are set forth, may make them not only tolerable but tender
and appealing. What would be as immediate experience
altogether heartrending, for example the torturing remorse of
a Macbeth, is made splendid and moving in the incisive
majesty and penetration of his monologues. At the end of
Hamlet, the utter wreck, unreason, and confusion is made
bearable and beautiful by the tender finality of Hamlet's
dying words to Horatio:
"Absent thee from felicity awhile
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story."
Greek tragedy had the additional accouterments of a
chorus, of music, of production in a vast amphitheater to give
an atmosphere of outward grandeur to the glory of its intent.
Tragedy often relieves the net horror which is its burden by
the pomp and circumstance of the associations it suggests:
We have palaces for our scene, rank, beauty, and virtues in our
heroes, nobility in their passions and in their fate, and altogether a
sort of glorification of life without which tragedy would lose both in
depth of pathos--since things so precious are destroyed--and in
subtlety of charm, since things so precious are manifested.[1]
[Footnote 1: Santayana: _Sense of Beauty_, p. 228.]
Tragedy still more subtly attains the beauty of expressiveness
by making the very evils and confusions and terrors it
presents somehow the exemplifications of a serene eternal
order. The function of the chorus in Greek tragedy was indeed
chiefly to indicate in solemn strophe and antistrophe the
ordered and harmonious verities of which these particular
follies and frustrations were so tender and terrible an
illustration. They catch up the present and particular evil into
the calm and splendid interplay of cosmic forces. Thus at the
end of Euripides's play _Medea_, when the heroine has slain
the children she has borne to Jason and in her fury refuses to
let him gather up their dead bodies, when Jason in utter
inconsolable despair, casts himself upon the earth, out of all
this wrack and torture the chorus raises the audience into a
contemplation of the ordered eternity by which these things
come to be. It sings:
"Great treasure halls hath Zeus in Heaven,
From whence to man strange dooms be given,
Past hope or fear;
And the end men looked for cometh not,
And a path is there where no man thought:
So hath it fallen here."[1]
[Footnote 1: Euripides: _Medea_ (Gilbert Murray translation).]