The foregoing discussion may seem to have led us far from the study of
our social experience as a source of religious insight. But in fact it
is a necessary preliminary to that study and leads us very near to it.
If one principal source of our need of salvation is the natural
narrowness of our view of the meaning {55} of our own purposes and
motives, and the consequent fickleness and the forgetful inconsistency
with which we usually live out our days, it seems right, in searching
for a way that may lead toward salvation, to get such help as we can
by looking to our normal social experience for whatever guidance it
can give. The social world is wide, even if it is still full of
conflict. It broadens our outlook at every turn. A man corrects his
own narrowness by trying to share his fellow's point of view. Our
social responsibilities tend to set limits to our fickleness. Social
discipline removes some of our inner conflicts, by teaching us not to
indulge caprices. Human companionship may calm, may steady our vision,
may bring us into intercourse with what is in general much better than
a man's subliminal self, namely, his public, his humane, his greater
social self, wherein he finds his soul and its interests writ large.
Perhaps, then, whatever the ultimate goal, the way out of the
distractions of the natural self, the way toward the divine insight
and power that we need, lies through our social experience.
No wonder, then, that in the religious discussions of to-day our
social experience is that source of insight upon which a great number
of our teachers, whether they are professional religious teachers or
not, most frequently insist. Our present time is an age of great
concern with social problems and reforms. No wonder, then, that we
have all learned to widen our vision, and to control our {56}
waywardness, by remembering that man is a being who can be neither
understood nor directed in case you try to view him in isolation. As
for salvation, many of our most influential leaders now teach us that
the problem of our day is the problem of saving, not the individual as
an individual, but the social order as a whole. The two tendencies
which seem to be most potent in the political realm are the general
tendencies known by the admittedly vague names of democracy and
socialism. Solidarity, collectivism, the common life--these are the
watchwords of some of the most widely influential movements of our
time.
And these watchwords have, for many of us, not only a political, but a
religious meaning. I need not remind you of the popular influence of
such dramas as "The Servant in the House," or of the numbers of
clergymen to whom the preaching of religion has come to mean, in the
main, the preaching of beneficent social reforms. If teachers who thus
view religion as, on the whole, a movement toward the increase of
social welfare are asked what their counsel is to the individual
regarding the salvation of his soul, they will reply: "If you want to
be saved, come out of yourself." Some of them would add: "Forget
yourself." But whether they use this latter extremely ambiguous and
doubtful form of advice, they very generally agree that to seek to
save your own soul by any merely or mainly inward and non-social
process is to secure perdition. "It is love that saves," they are fond
of {57} telling us. And in this doctrine, as interpreted in the light
of our modern social movements, many see the entire essence of
Christianity adapted to our present situation.
Nor is the tendency here in question limited to the practical counsels
of which I have just reminded you. There are those students of the
psychology and the philosophy of religion who are disposed to conceive
that the whole essence of the religion of all times, the entire
meaning of religious beliefs and practices, can be exhaustively and
accurately described in the purely human and social terms which these
practical counsels attempt to embody. A recent writer on the
psychology of religion defines religion as man's consciousness of his
highest social values, and maintains that all religious beliefs are
attempts to express this consciousness in whatever terms a given stage
of civilisation makes natural and possible.
One can easily suggest to any student of general history some of the
facts which such a writer has in mind. Have not the gods often been
conceived as tribal deities, and so simply as representatives of the
welfare and of the will of the community over against the waywardness
and the capriciousness of the individual? Was not the transition from
polytheism to the various forms of pantheism and of monotheism
determined by the social processes that formed kingdoms or empires,
and that finally led over to the modern appreciation of the value of
the {58} common interest of an ideally united humanity? Were not the
prophets of Israel social reformers? Was not the work of Jesus an
anticipation and a prophecy of the coming consciousness of the
brotherhood of man, as the lovers of mankind now conceive that
brotherhood? What has religion had to teach us, some will insistently
ask, more saving, unifying, sustaining, than this love of man for man?
From such a point of view, as you see, our social experience is our
principal source of religious insight. And the salvation that this
insight brings to our knowledge is salvation through the fostering of
human brotherhood. Such salvation accrues to the individual so far as
he gives himself over to the service of man, and to mankind in so far
as men can only be saved together and not separately.
I am just now depicting, not judging, a view concerning the solution
of religious problems which you know to be, in our day, as potent as
it is varied and problematic in its teaching. Can this view satisfy?
Does this way of stating the case really indicate to us any adequate
source of religious insight, any way in which we can define the true
salvation of man?
V
We cannot answer this question without taking account of the views of
those of our recent teachers to whom this purely social theory of the
religious {59} objects and values is indeed profoundly unsatisfactory.
That such opponents of the adequacy of the interpretation of religion
just suggested are to be found amongst the believers in familiar
religious traditions, we need not at any length set forth. The
traditions of the great religions of the world do not interpret the
old faiths in this way, just because these religious traditions all
agree in regarding the human social order as something which exists
for the sake of an essentially superhuman order. As these various
faiths assert, man can never be saved by purely human means, whether
you call these means preventive medicine, or socialism, or universal
brotherhood, or even love, so long as love means simply human love. As
for Christianity, in all its older forms, it has emphasised the love
of man, but always in a certain union with the love of God which
tradition could never conceive as adequately expressible in terms of
our recent social movements. The "Servant in the House" is supposed to
be a modern apparition of the Christ; but he is explicitly a heretic
regarding the old faith of the church.
But with tradition as tradition, these lectures have to do only by way
of occasional illustration. What interests us more, for our present
purpose, is the fact that, despite the predominance of the social
interpretations of religion of which I have just reminded you, there
are still some of our recent teachers who stoutly insist that our
social {60} experience does not adequately show us any way of
salvation whatever.
And here first I must call attention to certain of the most modern and
least theologically disposed of our leaders, namely, to those who
emphasise the most characteristic recent forms of individualism. I
have mentioned Nietzsche in my former lecture. Surely he stands for
opposition to tradition and he expresses tendencies that are potent
to-day. But while he lived and wrote, he aspired to be a sort of
Antichrist, and preached the doctrine that a religion of love can
never save, because, as he insists, what the self needs is power, and
power is not to be won by attempting to please a world of slaves.
Nietzsche may seem to you, as he has seemed to so many, a hopeless
abnormity; but his Titanism is in fact a wayward modern expression of
a motive that has always played its notable part in the search for
salvation, ever since heroism and the resolute will were first
discovered by man. Nietzsche's insight too, such as it is, is a social
insight. It comes through noting that, even if the individual needs
his social world as a means of grace and a gateway to salvation, the
social order, in its turn, needs individuals that are worth saving,
and can never be saved unless it expresses itself through the deeds
and the inner life of souls deeply conscious of the dignity of
selfhood, of the infinite worth of unique and intensely conscious
personal life.
{61}
As a fact, individualism is as potent an ethical motive in the life of
to-day as is the collectivism just characterised. Each of these
tendencies, in our present social order, feeds upon and intensifies
the other. Socialism opposes, and yet inevitably encourages, the
purposes of the very individual who feels his social ties as a galling
restraint. It preaches solidarity and brotherhood and love; but wins a
ready hearing from those who view all these tendencies mainly as means
whereby they may hope to have their own way, and to become, as
Nietzsche's Superman, "beyond good and evil"--masters in the coming
world of triumphant democracy. The social experience of our time is
full of ambiguous lessons. Its way toward salvation leads not only
over the Hill of Difficulty, but both ways around the hill; and it
shows us no one straight and narrow road to peace. Whoever would
traverse its wilderness and reach salvation needs to supplement his
social insight by a use of other and deeper sources.
And as to what these deeper sources of insight are, the teacher whom I
have already repeatedly cited--William James--asserts a doctrine that,
as you already know, I do not regard as adequate, but that I must
again here emphasise, because its contrast with that social theory of
religion which I just characterised is so instructive.
James, in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," shows the utmost
liberality toward differences of {62} faith, and insists in the
opening chapters of his book that religious experience is a field
where one must beware of defining sharp boundary lines or of showing a
false exclusiveness. Yet _one_ boundary line he himself defines with
the greatest sharpness; and in respect of _one_ matter he is rigidly
exclusive. Religious experience, he insists, is, as you will remember
from our first lecture, the experience of an individual who feels
himself to be "alone with the divine." And the social types of
religious experience James rigidly excludes from the "varieties"
whereof he takes account. And James's reason for this procedure is
explicit. In its social aspects religion, so he insists, always
becomes, or has already become, conventional. James no longer finds in
the religious life of communities the novelty and independence of
vision which he prizes. The essence of true religious experience lies,
for him, in its originality, in its spontaneity, and so in the very
solitude which is a condition, to James's mind, for the discovery of
that which saves.
The words "originality" and "spontaneity" emphasise the features
which, as I think, James most meant to emphasise. The problem of
salvation, for James, must be an essentially individual problem; for
nobody else ever faced _your_ need of salvation, or had your personal
issues to meet. If you win religious insight, you will have to win it
very much as you will have to die--alone. Of course James does not
hesitate to test the value of religious {63} experience, in his
pragmatic fashion, by its social as well as by its individual
consequences. The fruits of the spirit accrue to the general
advantage; and the saint, in James's opinion, must indeed undertake to
edify, not only himself, but also his brethren. But the effects of
religious insight must not be confused with the sources. James insists
that the sources are mainly from within the individual and are only
incidentally social. A religious discovery has in common with a poetic
creation the fact that the religious genius, like the artist, sees his
vision, and produces his spiritual miracle, in solitude.
If you ask whether this position which James assumes is anything more
than his own private opinion, and if you want to know his grounds for
it, a closer examination of his book will show you why he thus
deliberately turns his back upon the favourite recent interpretation
of religion as an essentially social phenomenon. James, in common with
the traditional faiths, although not in conformity with their
formulas, always conceived religious experience as an intercourse with
objects and with powers that, whatever their deeper bases in our
"subliminal" nature, do not adequately express themselves in our
everyday, worldly, overt human nature. And in our social life, where
the conventional reigns, where man imitates man or contends with man,
where crowds bustle and the small-talk or the passionate struggle of
the day fill the mind, where lovers pursue their beloved and are
jealous {64} of their rivals, and laborers toil and sweat, and worldly
authorities display their pomp, you meet not the solution, but the
problem of life. James, as man, was full of social interests, and, as
psychologist, was fond of studying social processes. But when a man
wants peace and spiritual triumph, James observes that, as an
empirical fact, he does not readily find them in the market-place, or
on the battle-field, or in the law courts, unless, indeed, he comes to
these places already full of the light that the saintly souls have
often found in the wilderness or in their meditations. In brief, James
always emphasises the mystical element in religious experience and is
full of the assurance that religion cannot find its food in the
commonplace; while our social life is a realm where the commonplace
holds sway. Or again, James holds that when the faithful have thought
of their religious experience as an intercourse with beings of a level
wholly superhuman, they may, indeed, have been wrong in their creeds,
but were right in holding that man as he lives in his social world can
never save man. Our social consciousness is too barefaced and open in
its union of triviality and pathos. What we want as the saving power
is, for a teacher such as James, something more mysterious, deep,
subconscious or superconscious, and in this sense, indeed, superhuman.
Still I am only depicting, not yet judging. I have now briefly stated
opinions that favour and opinions {65} that oppose an interpretation
of religious insight in terms of our social experience. But what are
the merits of the case? In what sense can there be a religion of the
social consciousness?