usual to get rid of the antagonism by adopting one of two alternative
methods.
(1) Of these the first is a suggested division of territory, in which
religion is allotted to faith, and philosophy and science to reason.
Such an expedient, though not uncommonly, and perhaps even wisely,
adopted by individuals, who refuse to give up either of two truths
because they cannot harmonize them, becomes ridiculous when seriously
proposed as a solution of the difficulty. Moreover the proposed
division of territory is unfair to start with. 'Give us the Knowable,
and you shall have the rest, which is far the larger half,' sounds
like a liberal offer made by science to religion, till we remember
that every advance in knowledge transfers something from the side of
the unknown to the side of the known, in violation of the original
agreement. Mr. Herbert Spencer calls this division of territory a
'reconciliation[61].' But if anything in the world could make religion
hate and fear science and oppose the advance of knowledge, it is to
find itself compelled to sit still and watch the slow but sure
filching away of its territory by an alien power. We say nothing here
of the fact that Mr. Herbert Spencer's division ignores the truth that
knowledge of correlatives must be of the same kind[62], and that if
knowledge has to do with one and faith with the other, either faith
must be a sort of knowledge, or knowledge a sort of faith. We merely
notice the unfairness of a division which assumes rationality for
science, and leaves irrationality to religion.
Curiously enough, however, there are many devout people, who would be
horrified at the thought that they had borrowed from Agnosticism, and
who have nevertheless made a similar division of territory. They are
the people who stake all upon what reason cannot do. They have no
interest in the progress of knowledge. The present gaps in science are
their stronghold, and they naturally resist every forward step in
knowledge as long as they can, because each new discovery limits the
area in which alone, according to their imperfect view, faith can
live. Every triumph of science on this theory, as on Mr. Herbert
Spencer's, becomes a loss, not a gain, to religion. The very existence
of God is bound up with that part of His work in nature which we
cannot understand, and, as a consequence, we reach the paradox that
the more we know of His working, the less proof we have that He
exists. Modern apologetic literature abounds in this kind of argument.
It is the devout form of the worship of the unknowable. Yet it is no
wonder that people who take refuge in gaps find themselves awkwardly
placed when the gaps begin to close.
(2) The other alternative is even more commonly adopted, for it fits
in well with the vagueness and want of precision in language, which is
at a premium in dealing with religious questions. This consists in
frittering away the meaning of definite terms till they are available
for anything, or adopting a neutral term which, by a little management
and stretching, will include opposites. This is the method of
indefinite inclusion. The strength of the former alternative lay in
the appearance of sharp scientific delimitation of territory: the
strength of the latter in its unlimited comprehensiveness. A term is
gradually stripped of the associations which make it what it is, it is
'defecated to a pure transparency,' and then it is ready for use. The
term 'God' is made merely 'a synonym for nature[63]'; religion becomes
'habitual and permanent admiration[64],' or 'devout submission of the
heart and will to the laws of nature[65]'; enthusiasm does duty for
worship, and the antagonism between religion and anything else
disappears.
Now so far as this represents, negatively, a reaction against
intolerance and narrowness, and positively a desire for unity, there
is not a word to be said against it. Its tone and temper may be both
Christian and Catholic. But the method is a radically false one. It is
not a real, but only an abstract, unity which can be reached by
thinking away of differences. As Dr. Martineau says, in his excellent
criticism of this method, 'You vainly propose an _cirenicon_ by
corruption of a word.' 'The disputes between science and faith can no
more be closed by inventing "religions of culture" than the boundary
quarrels of nations by setting up neutral provinces in the air[66].'
'A God that is merely nature, a Theism without God; a Religion
forfeited only by the "nil admirari" can never reconcile the secular
and the devout, the Pagan and the Christian mind[67].' As well might
we attempt to reconcile the partizans of the gold and silver shields
by assuring them that in reality the shields were silver gilt.
We are left, then, face to face with the opposition between the
religious and the philosophic or scientific view of God. The
counter-charges of superstition and anthropomorphism on the one side,
and of pantheism and rationalism on the other, serve to bring out the
antithesis of the two views. No division of territory is possible.
There may be many sciences, each with its defined range of
subject-matter; but there can be only one God. And both religion and
philosophy demand that He shall fill the whole region of thought and
feeling. Nor can any confusion or extension of terms help us to a
reconciliation, or blind us long to the true issue. The conflict is
too real and too keenly felt to admit of any patched-up peace. The
idea of God, which is to claim alike the allegiance of religion and
philosophy, must not be the result of compromise, but must really and
fully satisfy the demands of both.
III. What then are these demands considered in abstraction from one
another? We are at once met by the difficulty of defining religion.
But if we cannot define religion, or trace it back to its hidden
source, we can at least discover its characteristics, as we know it
after it has emerged from the obscurity of prehistoric times, and
before any conscious attempt has been made to reconcile religion and
philosophy, or find a middle term between them.
Now traditional definitions of religion, given as it were from within,
and constructed with no view of opposition to, or reconciliation with,
philosophy, are agreed in representing religion as a relation between
man and the object or objects of his worship, and this implies, not
only the inferiority of the worshipper to that which he worships, but
also something of likeness between the related terms, since, as even
Strauss allows, in our inmost nature we feel a kinship between
ourselves and that on which we depend[68]. It is quite indifferent
which of the rival etymologies of the word 'religion' we adopt[69].
S. Augustine[70], following Lactantius, speaks of religion as 'the
bond which binds us to One Omnipotent God.' S. Thomas[71] adopts
almost unchanged the definition given by Cicero: it is 'that virtue
which has to do with the worship of a higher nature known as the
Divine.' It is not too much to say that, for the modern religious
world, religion implies at least the practical belief in a real and
conscious relation between the inner life of man and an unseen Being.
And whatever of mystery there may be about that unseen Being, it would
seem as if a real relationship demands so much of likeness in the
related terms, as is implied in personality.
It is here that we reach the point at which we are able to distinguish
between the religious and the philosophical ideas of God. It is not
that religion and philosophy necessarily contradict or exclude one
another, but that they approach the problem with different interests.
Religion demands a personal object, be that object one or many. It is
committed to the belief in a moral relationship between God and man.
Philosophy demands unity, whether personal or impersonal. For
philosophy is nothing if it does not completely unify knowledge. And
it seems as if each finds lacking in the other that which it values
most and thinks of first. The only hope, then, of reconciliation is in
the idea of God as personal, and yet one. So long as religion retains
a trace of polytheism or dualism, philosophy can have nothing to say
to it. So long as philosophy has no room for a personal God, religion
must exclude philosophy. The whole issue of the controversy lies here.
If the belief in a personal God is to be called anthropomorphism,
religion is hopelessly anthropomorphic. With the disappearance of
anthropomorphism in this sense, as Professor Fiske rightly sees[72],
religion disappears. But we cannot escape anthropomorphism, though our
anthropomorphism may be crude or critical[73]. We do not read our full
selves into the lower world, because we are higher than it; we do not
transfer to God all that belongs to our own self-consciousness,
because we know that He is infinitely greater than we are. But we
should be wrong not to interpret Him by the highest category within
our reach, and think of Him as self-conscious life. Christianity
refuses to call this anthropomorphism, though it stands or falls with
the belief that, in his personality, man is in the image of God. An
anthropomorphic view of God for a Christian means heathenism or
heresy: a theomorphic view of man is of the essence of his faith[74].
The religious idea of God may, of course, become philosophical without
ceasing to be religious. If there is to be a religion for man as a
rational being it must become so. But there is a point beyond which,
in its desire to include philosophy, religion cannot go. It cannot
afford to give up its primary assumption of a moral relationship
between God and man. When that point is surrendered or obscured the
old religious terms become increasingly inapplicable, and we find
ourselves falling back more and more on their supposed philosophical
equivalents, the 'Infinite' or the 'Absolute,' or the Universal
Substance, or the Eternal Consciousness, or the First Cause, or the
Omnipresent Energy. But these terms, which metaphysicians rightly
claim, have no meaning for the religious consciousness, while, in
metaphysics proper 'God' is as much a borrowed term as 'sin' is in
non-religious ethics. Moral evil is 'sin' only to those who believe in
God; and the infinite is only 'God' to those in whom it suggests a
superhuman personality with whom they are in conscious relation. Even
when religion and philosophy both agree to speak of God as 'the
Infinite,' for the one it is an adjective, for the other a
substantive. The moment we abandon the idea of God as personal,
religion becomes merged in philosophy, and all that properly
constitutes religion disappears. God may exist for us still as the
keystone in the arch of knowledge, but He is no longer, except as a
metaphor, 'our Father, which is in heaven.'
IV. Religion then, properly and strictly, and apart from extensions of
the term made in the interests of a reconciliation, assumes a moral
relationship, the relationship of personal beings, as existing between
man and the Object of his worship. When this ceases, religion ceases:
when this begins, religion begins. But of the beginnings of religion
we know nothing. Prehistoric history is the monopoly of those who have
a theory to defend. But we may take it as proven that it is at least
as true that man is a religious, as that he is a rational, animal.
'Look out for a people,' says Hume, 'entirely destitute of religion.
If you find them at all, be assured that they are but few degrees
removed from brutes[75].' Hume's statement is confirmed by the fact
that those who would prove that there is no innate consciousness of
Deity are driven to appeal to the case of deaf mutes and degraded
savages[76]. Whether monotheism was a discovery or a recovery, whether
it rose on the ruins of polytheism, or whether polytheism is a
corruption of a purer faith, is a question we need not attempt to
settle. Nor need we decide the priority of claim to the title of
religion as between nature-worship, or ancestor-worship, or
ghost-worship. The farther we go back in history the more obviously
true is the charge of anthropomorphism so commonly brought against
religion. The natural tendency to treat the object of religion as
personal, exists long before any attempt is made to define the
conditions or meaning of personality, and includes much which is
afterwards abandoned. For religion in its earliest stages is
instinctive, not reasoned. It is 'naively objective.' It is little
careful to clear up its idea of the nature and character of its God.
It is still less anxious to prove His existence. It is only when
conscience grows strong, and dares to challenge the religion which had
been instinctively accepted, that men learn to see that God not only
is, but must be, the expression of the highest known morality. It is
only when the light of conscious reason is turned back upon religious
ideas, that polytheism becomes not merely untrue, but impossible and
inconceivable. What religion starts with is not any theory of the
world, but an unreasoned belief in a Being or beings, however
conceived of, who shall be in a greater or less degree like the
worshipper, but raised above him by the addition of power, if not
omnipotence; greatness, if not infinity; wisdom, if not omniscience.
But, while implying from the first something of a moral relationship
between man and the object of his worship, religion does not always
conceive of that Object as necessarily holy or perfectly wise. There
are religions which are both immoral and childish. They have in them
no principle of growth, and therefore they are the opponents alike of
moral and intellectual progress. _Tantum relligio potuit suadere
malorum_ is the reflexion of Christian apologists, as well as of the
Roman poet, on the religions of heathenism. Hence, it is argued,
'Religion is the enemy of morals and of science. Away with it. It is a
mere matter of feeling, which cannot and ought not to stand before the
imperious challenge of conscience and reason.' Such a view has both
truth and falsehood in it. The religious idea of God must be able to
justify itself to our moral and to our rational nature, on pain of
ceasing to exist. But religion cannot be thus shut up to one part of
our nature, nor can one part of our nature be set against the rest.
There is, as Herbert Spencer is fond of pointing out[77], a kind of
idolatry of reason in the present day. Reason has exposed many
superstitions only to become itself the final object of superstition.
Men forget that, after all, reasoning is only 're-coordinating states
of consciousness already coordinated in certain simpler ways,' and
that that which is unreasoned is not always irrational. Rationality in
man is not shut up in one air-tight compartment. 'There is no feeling
or volition which does not contain in it an element of knowledge[78].'
This is the truth which Hegel has seized when he speaks of religion as
'reason talking naively.' You can no more shut up faith to the
compartment of feeling than reason to the compartment of the
intellect. Religion claims the whole man, and true religion is that
which can make good its claim.
The natural history of religion, then, is the history of the process
by which that which has its secret birthplace behind all the
distinctions of modern psychology, establishes its claim on man,
absorbing into itself all that is best and truest in his moral and
intellectual being, as conscience and reason successively emerge into
conscious activity: while, from another point of view, it is the
progressive purification of the religious idea of God till He is
revealed as, what He is to a thinking Christian of to-day, the Object
of reverent worship, the moral ideal, the truth of nature and of man.
Such an end is not attained in a moment. It is the result of a process
with which we are familiar elsewhere, viz. evolution by antagonism.
The true has to be separated from the false. Immoral and irrational
conceptions of God have to be thrown aside. It is only after what
looks like an internecine struggle between religion and morality that
man learns the truth about the character of God, and only after a
conflict with philosophy and science, which seems to threaten the very
life of religion, that he learns what can be known of the Divine
Nature. For among religions, too, there is a struggle for existence,
in which the fittest survive. And the test of fitness is the power to
assimilate and promote moral and intellectual truth, and so to satisfy
the whole man. An ideally perfect religion is not 'morality touched by
emotion,' but a worship which reflects itself in the highest known
morality, and is interpreted and justified to itself by reason. It is
this process, as we know it in history, that we proceed to examine.
V. The statement that religion, even in its most elementary forms,
takes for granted some relationship of likeness between the worshipper
and the Object or objects of his worship, by no means implies that all
religion associates the highest morality with its idea of God. On the
contrary, we know that not only are there immoral religions, but that
immorality sometimes lingers on in religion long after it is condemned
elsewhere, and that a people will permit as a religious duty what,
according to their thinking, nothing but religion would justify. We
cannot, then, at all accurately gauge the moral condition of a people
by the received teaching about its gods, for morality is often far in
advance of religion, and the character which in a god or goddess is
protected by a religious halo is looked upon as hateful or impure in
man or woman. The sense of dependence, which, though it does not
constitute the whole, is yet an essential element in the religious
consciousness, the awe which, in a low state of development, shews
itself in a grovelling fear of the invisible beings, makes it
impossible for the worshipper to judge his god by the standard he
applies to his fellow man. The god may be lustful, but his lusts must
be respected; he is strong and vengeful and must by all means be kept
in a good temper, cajoled, or outwitted, or bribed, or humoured. His
commands must be obeyed, without question or resistance. But by and
bye the moral nature learns its strength, and begins to assert its
independent right to speak. Morality outgrows religion. The relations
between religion and morals become more strained. Some heretic dares
to say that the Gods are immoral; that they are men 'writ large,' and
bad men too. Their claim to reverence is challenged. There is a moral
awakening. Soon the old religion is treated with scorn and contempt,
and either a new religion takes its place, coming in as it were on the
crest of the wave of moral reformation, or the old religion is
purified and becomes the foster-mother of the new morality, giving to
it a divine sanction, and receiving from it in turn new strength and
vitality. Or failing these, men abandon religion in the supposed
interest of morals. A religion with mysteries may be tolerated, but a
religion once seen to be immoral is at an end. For a time ethics, with
a background of metaphysics or politics, prevails, but gradually it
tends to drift into a mere prudentialism, while a merely mystical
philosophy tries in vain to satisfy those deeper instincts which reach
out to the unseen.
In the history of Greek thought the collision came in the days of
Xenophanes. Long before what is sometimes called the era of conscious
morality, Greece had outgrown its traditional religion. Greek
philosophy at its birth was mythology rationalized, and the beginning
of independent morality in Greece shewed itself in a criticism of the
religious teaching of Homer and Hesiod. The scathing satire of
Xenophanes reminds us at times of the way in which Isaiah speaks of
the idolatry of his day. It is not only wrong, it is capable of a
_reductio ad absurdum_. Anthropomorphism, immorality, childish
folly--these are the charges which Xenophanes brings against the
worship of Magna Graecia. Anaxagoras had already been banished for
suggesting that the god Helios was a mass of molten iron, but
Xenophanes turns into open ridicule the religion of his day.
'Homer and Hesiod,' he says, 'ascribe to the gods all that among men
is held shameful and blameworthy, theft, adultery, and deceit[79].'
'One God there is mightiest among gods and men, who neither in form
nor thought is like to men. Yet mortals think the gods are born and
have shape and voice and raiment like themselves. Surely if lions and
cows had hands, and could grave with their hands and do as men do,
they too would make gods like themselves, horses would have horse-like
gods, and cows gods with horns and hoofs[80].'
When the age of moral philosophy begins, amidst the unsettlement of
the sophistic period, the same protest is taken up by Plato. In
Xenophanes the protest of the reason and the conscience went together.
In Plato the criticism of the received theology is more distinctly a
moral criticism. God cannot lie or deceive. He cannot be the cause of
evil. He is good, and only the source of good. He is true in word and
deed. If not, we cannot reverence Him. It cannot be true that the gods
give way to violent emotions, still less to sensuality and envy and
strife[81]. 'For God cannot be unrighteous, He must be perfectly
righteous, and none is like Him save the most righteous among
men[82].'
Here we have a collision between an immoral religious conception of
God and a morality which is becoming conscious of its own strength.
And what was the result? Religion in Greece received its death blow.
It had no real recuperative power. It could not absorb and claim the
new morality. Homer and Hesiod, the 'Bible' of the Athenian, were too
profoundly immoral. A Kephalus might go back in silent protest to his
sacrifice, but the youth of Athens turned from religion to morality.
When we pass from Plato to Aristotle, the last trace of religion in
morals has disappeared. Theology has become Metaphysics, and has no
place in the world of practical life. The religious element has
disappeared from philosophy, and is only revived in the mysticism of
Neo-Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism. In metaphysics and science we
owe everything to the Greeks; in religion, as distinguished from
theology, we owe nothing.