I can best undertake my brief initial study of the way in which the
experience of the individual human being is a source of religious
insight by meeting an objection that a reading of my printed programme
may have aroused in the minds of some of you. My list of the sources
of religious insight, as contained in the titles of these lectures,
makes no express reference to a source which some of you will be
disposed to regard as the principal source, namely, Revelation. Here,
some of you will already have said, is a very grave omission. Man's
principal insight into the need and the way of salvation comes, and
must come, you will say, from without, from the revelation that the
divine power which saves, makes of itself, through Scripture or
through the Church. Now, so far as this thesis forms part of the
doctrine of a particular religion, namely, in your own case, of
Christianity, I shall in these lectures omit any direct discussion of
that thesis. The reason for the omission I have already pointed out.
These lectures undertake a limited task, and must be judged by their
chosen limitations. But in so far as revelation is a general term,
meaning whatever intercourse there may be between the divine and the
human, all these lectures, in dealing with sources of religious
insight, will be dealing with processes of revelation. And in what
sense this {20} assertion is true we shall see as we go on with our
undertaking. This first mention of revelation enables me, however,
both to state and to answer the objection to my programme which I have
just mentioned, and in doing so to vindicate for the experience of any
religiously disposed individual its true significance as a source of
insight. Hereby, as I hope, I can forthwith show that even the present
deliberately limited undertaking of these lectures has an importance
which you ought to recognise, whatever your own views about revelation
may be.
Let me suppose, then, that an objector, speaking on behalf of
revelation as the main source of religious insight, states his case
briefly thus: "Man learns of his need for salvation chiefly through
learning what God's will is, and through a consequent discovery that
his own natural will is not in conformity with God's will. He learns
about the way of salvation by finding out by what process God is
willing to save him. Both sorts of knowledge must be principally
mediated through God's revelation of himself, of his will, and of his
plan of salvation. For, left to himself, man cannot find out these
things. Apart from revelation, they are divine secrets. Hence the
principal source of religious insight must be revelation."
Whoever states his case thus brings to our attention at this point
what I may venture to name: The Religious Paradox, or, to use other
terms. The Paradox of Revelation. I call attention to this {21}
paradox in no spirit of mere cavilling or quibbling. The importance of
the matter the whole course of these lectures will show. The religious
paradox, as we shall define it, is one of the deepest facts in all
religious history and experience. It will meet us everywhere; and
every devout soul daily faces it. Moreover, as we shall see, it is a
special case of a paradox regarding our human insight which is as
universal and pervasive, in its significance for us, as is our human
intelligence itself. I call it here the religious paradox. I shall
later show you that it might be called, just as correctly, the paradox
of common-sense, the paradox of reason, the paradox of knowledge, yes,
the paradox of being thoughtfully alive in any sense whatever.
The religious paradox, viewed as it first comes to us, may be stated
thus: Let a man say: "I have this or this religious insight because
God has revealed to me, thus and thus, his will about me and his
plans; has taught me my need of salvation and the divine way of
salvation.
"'Man is blind because of sin;
Revelation makes him sure;
Without that who looks within,
Looks in vain; for all's obscure.'"
Let a man say this. At once, addressing this believer in a revelation,
we must ask, in no jesting spirit, but with the fullest sense of the
tragic gravity of the issue: "By what marks do you personally {22}
distinguish a divine revelation from any other sort of report?"
Consider for an instant what this question implies. A depositor at a
bank, in signing a cheque, reveals to his bank his will that such and
such funds, which he already has on deposit at the bank, shall be paid
to the order of a certain person. How is the bank able to recognise
this revelation of the depositor's will? The answer is: The bank,
acting in the usual order of business, regards this revelation as
genuine because its officers already know, with sufficient assurance,
the depositor's signature, and can therefore recognise it at sight,
subject, of course, to a certain usually negligible risk of forgery.
Apply the principle here involved to the case of the one who
acknowledges the genuineness of a divine revelation. In asserting: "I
know that this revelation is from God," the believer in the revelation
asserts, in substance, that in some sense and by some means he
personally knows, as it were, the divine signature; knows by what
marks the divine being reveals himself. This is the vast presumption,
if you will, upon which the believer in revelation depends for his
assurance. He knows God's autograph. Now, how shall such a knowledge
of the divine autograph have arisen in the mind of the individual
believer? Has this believer first wandered through all the worlds to
learn how the various orders of beings express themselves, what marks
of their wisdom and of their interest in humanity {23} they show, and
who amongst them are, or who alone is, actually divine?
I repeat--the stupendous question thus suggested is one which I
mention not in any spirit of cavil, but solely for the sake of
directing us on our further way, and of calling attention at the
outset to a fact upon which all that is most vital in the religious
consciousness has in every age depended. Every acceptance of a
revelation, I say, depends upon something that, in the individual's
mind, must be prior to this acceptance. And this something is an
assurance that the believer already knows the essential marks by which
a divine revelation is to be distinguished from any other sort of
report. In other words, a revelation can be viewed by you as a divine
revelation only in case you hold, for whatever reason, or for no
reason, that you already are acquainted with the signature which the
divine will attaches to its documents, that you know the marks of any
authentic revelation by which a divine will can make itself known to
you. Unless, then, you are to make one supposed revelation depend for
its warrant upon another in an endless series, you must presuppose
that somewhere there is found a revelation that proves its genuineness
by appealing to what your own interior light, your personal
acquaintance with the nature of a divine being, enables you to know as
the basis of all your further insight into the divine. The one who
appeals to revelation for guidance cannot then escape from basing his
appeal {24} upon something which involves a personal and individual
experience of what the need and the way of salvation is and of what
the divine nature and expression essentially involves.
Nor is this remark merely the unsympathetic comment of a philosophical
critic of what passes for revelation. The truth of the remark is
acknowledged by all those who have in one way or another insisted
that, without the witness of the spirit in the heart, no external
revelation could enlighten those who are in darkness; that miracles by
themselves are inadequate, because signs and wonders cannot teach the
divine will to those whom grace, working inwardly, does not prepare
for enlightenment; and that, in brief, if there is any religious
insight whatever accessible, it cannot come to us without our
individual experience as its personal foundation.
Now, the religious paradox is this: What one pretends or at least
hopes to know, when there is any question of religious insight, is
something which has to do with the whole nature and destiny and duty
and fate of man. For just such matters are in question when we talk,
not of how to earn our living or of how to get this or that worldly
prosperity, but about our need of salvation and about how to be saved.
So deep and so weighty are these matters, that to pretend to know
about them seems to involve knowing about the whole nature of things.
And when we conceive of the whole nature {25} of things as somehow
interested in us and in our salvation, as the religiously minded very
generally do, we call this nature of things divine, in a very familiar
sense of that word. Hence the higher religions generally undertake to
know, as they say, the divine. And by the divine they mean some real
power or principle or being that saves us or that may save us. But how
is this divine to be known? By revelation? But knowledge through
revelation can enlighten only the one in whose personal experience
there is somewhere an adequate interior light, which shines in the
darkness, and which permits him to test all revelations by a prior
acquaintance with the nature and marks and, so to speak, signature of
the divine will. Hereupon arises the question: How should I, weak of
wit as I am, ignorant, fallible, a creature of a day, come to possess
that intimate acquaintance with the plan of all things, and with the
meaning of life, and with the divine, which I must obtain in case I am
to pass upon the marks whereby any revelation that can save me is to
be tested? The paradox is that a being who is so ignorant of his duty
and of his destiny as to need guidance at every point, so weak as to
need saving, should still hope, in his fallible experience, to get
into touch with anything divine. The question is, how is this
possible? What light can my individual experience throw upon vast
problems such as this?
{26}
V
I have stated what I call the religious paradox. The whole of what I
have hereafter to tell you is needed in order to throw such light as I
can here attempt to throw upon the solution of the paradox. You will
not expect, then, an immediate answer to the question thus brought
before you. Yet you see our present situation: Unless there is
something in our individual experience which at least begins to bring
us into a genuine touch, both with the fact that we need salvation and
with the marks whereby we may recognise the way of salvation, and the
essentially divine process, if such there be, which alone can
save--unless, I say, there is within each of us something of this
interior light by which saving divine truth is to be discerned,
religious insight is impossible, and then no merely external
revelation can help us. Let us then, without further delay, turn
directly to the inner light, if such light there be, and ask what,
apart from tradition, apart from external revelation, apart from
explicit theories or reports concerning the universe, apart from all
other sources, our own individual experience can tell us as to the
need and the way of salvation, and as to the marks by which we may
recognise whatever real influences, or divine beings, can intervene to
help us in our need. We shall not upon this occasion answer the
question; but we may do something to clarify the issue.
{27}
My dear friend, the late William James, in his book called "The
Varieties of Religious Experience," defined, for his own purposes,
religious experience as the experience of individuals who regard
themselves as "alone with the divine." In portraying what he meant by
"the divine," James emphasised, although in language different from
what I am using, the very features about the objects of religious
experience which I have just been trying to characterise in my own
way. Those who have religious experience, according to James, get into
touch with something which, as he says, gives "a new dimension" to
their life. As a result of their better and more exalted religious
experience, they win a sense of unity with "higher powers," whose
presence seems to them to secure a needed but otherwise unattainable
spiritual unity, peace, power in their lives. This "divine" thus
accomplishes inwardly what the individual "alone with the divine"
feels to be saving, to be needed, to be his pearl of great price. This
is James's way of defining the objects of religious experience.
Now James's whole view of religious experience differs in many ways
from mine. But just at the present point in our inquiry, where it is a
question of what I should call the most elementary and intimate, but
also the crudest and most capricious source of religious insight,
namely, the experience of the individual "alone with the divine," I
feel my own account to be most dependent upon that of {28} James and
my own position to be most nearly in agreement with his.
Let me refer you, then, at this stage, to James's great collection and
analysis of the facts of individual religious experience. Let me
presuppose some personal acquaintance, on your part, with individual
experiences of the various types that James so wonderfully portrays.
And then, in my own way, and as independently of James's special
theories as possible, let me tell you what, to my mind, is the
essential substance of these elementary religious experiences which
may come to the individual when he is alone with the problem of his
own salvation and alone with his efforts to know the divine that can
save. Let me try to show you that the individual, thus isolated, is
indeed in touch with a genuine source of insight. Let me try to
indicate both the value and the limitations of that source in such
wise as to prepare us to view this first source in its needed relation
to the sources hereafter to be studied.
The religious experience of the individual may concern three objects:
First, his Ideal, that is, the standard in terms of which he estimates
the sense and the value of his own personal life; secondly, his Need
of salvation, that is, the degree to which he falls short of attaining
his ideal and is sundered from it by evil fortune, or by his own
paralysis of will, or by his inward baseness; thirdly, the presence or
the coming or the longing for, or the {29} communion with something
which he comes to view as the power that may save him from his need,
or as the light that may dispel his darkness, or as the truth that
shows him the way out, or as the great companion who helps him--in a
word, as his Deliverer. The Ideal, the Need, the Deliverer--these are
the three objects which the individual experience, as a source of
religious insight, has always undertaken to reveal. James's collection
of the facts of religious experience richly illustrates what I here
have in mind. To that collection, and to your own individual
experience, I appeal as my warrant for thus characterising our first
source of insight. Can we say that this source gives us genuine
insight and is trustworthy? Does it teach us about anything that is
real; and if this be so, how far does this source of insight go? What
is the extent, what are the limitations of the truth that one can hope
in this way to gain?
As to the first two objects of the individual religious experience,
namely, the individual's own personal ideal and his sense of his need,
you will readily agree that one's private experience is, indeed, a
source of genuine insight. You will, however, find it hard at first to
define just how far that insight extends. For the world of a man's
private ideals and estimates is a world of precious caprices, because
not only does one man's private feelings or intuitions about ideals
and values differ from another man's, but every man's own ideals, and
his sense of {30} need, tend to alter endlessly with the play of his
passions, with the waxing and waning of all his natural powers, with
his health, with his age. One form of the religious paradox may, in
fact, be stated thus: Without intense and intimate personal feeling,
you never learn any valuable truths whatever about life, about its
ideals, or about its problems; but, on the other hand, what you know
only through your feelings is, like the foam of the sea, unstable--
like the passing hour, doomed to pass away.
James, as a psychologist, well knew this truth about the value and the
limitations of private experience; yet it was characteristic of his
enterprising soul that he was always looking, in his "pluralistic
universe," for the strange, new religious experiences of other and
still other individuals, without being able thereby even to define
what all these ardent souls were seeking, namely, some genuine home
land of the spirit, some place or experience or insight in which is to
be revealed that for the sake of which all the feelings, the caprices,
the longings, the efforts of individuals are justified--and fulfilled.
Now the best way of defining what it is which our inner experience of
our ideal and of our need shows us is, I think, this: We are indeed,
and so far just as the Buddhists said, naturally the creatures of
transient feelings, of passing caprices, of various and wilful
longings. But, just because of this fact, we can get an insight, as
intimate as it is fragmentary, into one absolutely valuable ideal. I
do not {31} think that the Buddhists best expressed our ideal by the
words "the extinction of desire." It is rather the ideal of triumph
over our unreason. It is the ideal that the reign of caprice ought to
be ended, that the wounds of the spirit ought to be healed. In the
midst of all our caprices, yes, because of our caprices, we learn the
value of one great spiritual ideal, the ideal of spiritual unity and
self-possession. And both our ideal and our need come to consciousness
at once. We need to bring our caprices into some sort of harmony; to
bind up the wounds of what James calls the divided "self"; to change
the wanderings of chance passion into something that shall bring the
home land of the spirit, the united goal of life into sight. And so
much all the great cynics, and the nobler rebels, and the prophets and
the saints and the martyrs and the sages have in common taught us. So
much Socrates and Plato and Marcus Aurelius, and our modern teachers
of the wisdom of life, and, in his noblest words, the Buddha also, and
Jesus, have agreed in proclaiming as the ideal and the need revealed
to us by all that is deepest about our individual experience: We need
to give life sense, to know and to control our own selves, to end the
natural chaos, to bring order and light into our deeds, to make the
warfare of natural passion subordinate to the peace and the power of
the spirit. This is our need. To live thus is our ideal. And because
this need is pressing and this ideal is far off from the natural man,
we need salvation.
{32}
So much, I say, our individual experience can bring before us. This
ideal and this need can become the objects of an insight that is as
intimate as it is, by itself, unsatisfying. This need, I think, all
the devout share, however unlearned their speech, however simple their
minds, however various their creeds. Unity of Spirit, conformity to an
universal Will, peace with power--this is our need.
It remains for the individual experience to show to us, if it can, the
presence of our Deliverer, the coming of that which we shall recognise
as divine, just because it truly and authoritatively reveals to the
Self the fulfilment that we need, by bringing us into touch with the
real nature of things. We need to find the presence that can give this
unity and self-possession to the soul. This presence is what all the
higher religions seek to reveal. But if we are to learn of such an
object of insight we must, indeed, come into touch with a Power or a
Spirit that is in some true sense not-Ourselves. And so we must be
able somehow to transcend the boundaries of any _merely_ individual
experience. Our individual experience must become some sort of
intercourse with Another. And this Other must be in some sense the
Master of Life, the Might that overcometh the world, the revealer of
final truth. Without ceasing to be personal and intimate, our
experience must in some way come into direct touch with the very
nature of reality.
Is such a direct touch with the divine possible? The mystics of all
ages have maintained that it is {33} possible. Are they right? To
answer this question adequately would be to solve the religious
paradox. It would be to show whether and how the individual, even in
his isolation, "alone with the divine," can come to be nevertheless in
unity with all other spirits, in touch with all that lies beneath and
above himself, and with all that constitutes the essence of reality.
Perhaps this is indeed possible. Unless it is possible, revelation, as
we have seen, loses precisely its most intimate significance, as an
appeal of the divine spirit directly to the interior light. But, on
the other hand, all the mystics confess that, _if_ this is possible,
and if it happens in their own cases, they alone, viewing their
experience merely as an individual experience, know not _how_ it
happens, but must accept their revelation as an insight without
knowing in what precise sense it is insight.
It follows that individual experience remains a source of religious
insight as indispensable and as fundamental as it is, by itself,
inadequate and in need of supplement. Unless you have inwardly felt
the need of salvation, and have learned to hunger and thirst after
spiritual unity and self-possession, all the rest of religious insight
is to you a sealed book. And unless, in moments of peace, of
illumination, of hope, of devotion, of inward vision, you have seemed
to feel the presence of your Deliverer, unless it has sometimes
_seemed_ to you as if the way to the home land of the spirit were
opened to your sight by a revelation as from the divine, unless this
{34} privilege has been yours, the way to a higher growth in insight
will be slow and uncertain to you. But, on the other hand, no one who
remains content with his merely individual experience of the presence
of the divine and of his deliverer, has won the whole of any true
insight. For, as a fact, we are all members one of another; and I can
have no insight into the way of my salvation unless I thereby learn of
the way of salvation for all my brethren. And there is no unity of the
spirit unless all men are privileged to enter it whenever they see it
and know it and love it.
Individual Experience, therefore, must abide with us to the very end
of our quest, as one principal and fundamental source of insight. But
it is one aspect only of Religious Experience. We shall learn to
understand and to estimate it properly only when we have found its
deeper relations with our Social Experience. In passing to our social
experience, however, we shall not leave our individual experience
behind. On the contrary, through thus passing to our social experience
as a source of religious insight, we shall for the first time begin to
see what our individual experience means.
{35}