LECTURE 02. CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC.
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LECTURE II. CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC.
Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise
definition of what its essence consists of. Some of these would‐be
definitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this course,
and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now.
Meanwhile the very fact that they are so many and so different from one
another is enough to prove that the word “religion” cannot stand for any
single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name. The
theorizing mind tends always to the over‐simplification of its materials.
This is the root of all that absolutism and one‐sided dogmatism by which
both philosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall
immediately into a one‐sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit
freely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence, but many
characters which may alternately be equally important in religion. If we
should inquire for the essence of “government,” for example, one man might
tell us it was authority, another submission, another police, another an
army, another an assembly, another a system of laws; yet all the while it
would be true that no concrete government can exist without all these
things, one of which is more important at one moment and others at
another. The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles
himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying
an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would
naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a
thing more misleading than enlightening. And why may not religion be a
conception equally complex?(9)
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Consider also the “religious sentiment” which we see referred to in so
many books, as if it were a single sort of mental entity.
In the psychologies and in the philosophies of religion, we find the
authors attempting to specify just what entity it is. One man allies it to
the feeling of dependence; one makes it a derivative from fear; others
connect it with the sexual life; others still identify it with the feeling
of the infinite; and so on. Such different ways of conceiving it ought of
themselves to arouse doubt as to whether it possibly can be one specific
thing; and the moment we are willing to treat the term “religious
sentiment” as a collective name for the many sentiments which religious
objects may arouse in alternation, we see that it probably contains
nothing whatever of a psychologically specific nature. There is religious
fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But
religious love is only man’s natural emotion of love directed to a
religious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so
to speak, the common quaking of the human breast, in so far as the notion
of divine retribution may arouse it; religious awe is the same organic
thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only
this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations;
and similarly of all the various sentiments which may be called into play
in the lives of religious persons. As concrete states of mind, made up of
a feeling _plus_ a specific sort of object, religious emotions of course
are psychic entities distinguishable from other concrete emotions; but
there is no ground for assuming a simple abstract “religious emotion” to
exist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself, present in
every religious experience without exception.
As there thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a
common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, so
there might conceivably also prove to be no one specific and essential
kind of religious object, and no one specific and essential kind of
religious act.
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The field of religion being as wide as this, it is manifestly impossible
that I should pretend to cover it. My lectures must be limited to a
fraction of the subject. And, although it would indeed be foolish to set
up an abstract definition of religion’s essence, and then proceed to
defend that definition against all comers, yet this need not prevent me
from taking my own narrow view of what religion shall consist in _for the
purpose of these lectures_, or, out of the many meanings of the word, from
choosing the one meaning in which I wish to interest you particularly, and
proclaiming arbitrarily that when I say “religion” I mean _that_. This, in
fact, is what I must do, and I will now preliminarily seek to mark out the
field I choose.
One way to mark it out easily is to say what aspects of the subject we
leave out. At the outset we are struck by one great partition which
divides the religious field. On the one side of it lies institutional, on
the other personal religion. As M. P. Sabatier says, one branch of
religion keeps the divinity, another keeps man most in view. Worship and
sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity,
theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials
of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it,
we should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning
the favor of the gods. In the more personal branch of religion it is on
the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the centre
of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his
incompleteness. And although the favor of the God, as forfeited or gained,
is still an essential feature of the story, and theology plays a vital
part therein, yet the acts to which this sort of religion prompts are
personal not ritual acts, the individual transacts the business by himself
alone, and the ecclesiastical organization, with its priests and
sacraments and other go‐betweens, sinks to an altogether secondary place.
The relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between
man and his maker.
Now in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch
entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to consider
as little as possible the systematic theology and the ideas about the gods
themselves, and to confine myself as far as I can to personal religion
pure and simple. To some of you personal religion, thus nakedly
considered, will no doubt seem too incomplete a thing to wear the general
name. “It is a part of religion,” you will say, “but only its unorganized
rudiment; if we are to name it by itself, we had better call it man’s
conscience or morality than his religion. The name ‘religion’ should be
reserved for the fully organized system of feeling, thought, and
institution, for the Church, in short, of which this personal religion, so
called, is but a fractional element.”
But if you say this, it will only show the more plainly how much the
question of definition tends to become a dispute about names. Rather than
prolong such a dispute, I am willing to accept almost any name for the
personal religion of which I propose to treat. Call it conscience or
morality, if you yourselves prefer, and not religion—under either name it
will be equally worthy of our study. As for myself, I think it will prove
to contain some elements which morality pure and simple does not contain,
and these elements I shall soon seek to point out; so I will myself
continue to apply the word “religion” to it; and in the last lecture of
all, I will bring in the theologies and the ecclesiasticisms, and say
something of its relation to them.
In one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more
fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches, when once
established, live at second‐hand upon tradition; but the _founders_ of
every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct
personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the
Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects
have been in this case;—so personal religion should still seem the
primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete.
There are, it is true, other things in religion chronologically more
primordial than personal devoutness in the moral sense. Fetishism and
magic seem to have preceded inward piety historically—at least our records
of inward piety do not reach back so far. And if fetishism and magic be
regarded as stages of religion, one may say that personal religion in the
inward sense and the genuinely spiritual ecclesiasticisms which it founds
are phenomena of secondary or even tertiary order. But, quite apart from
the fact that many anthropologists—for instance, Jevons and
Frazer—expressly oppose “religion” and “magic” to each other, it is
certain that the whole system of thought which leads to magic, fetishism,
and the lower superstitions may just as well be called primitive science
as called primitive religion. The question thus becomes a verbal one
again; and our knowledge of all these early stages of thought and feeling
is in any case so conjectural and imperfect that farther discussion would
not be worth while.
Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean
for us _the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their
solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to
whatever they may consider the divine_. Since the relation may be either
moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the
sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical
organizations may secondarily grow. In these lectures, however, as I have
already said, the immediate personal experiences will amply fill our time,
and we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all.
We escape much controversial matter by this arbitrary definition of our
field. But, still, a chance of controversy comes up over the word “divine”
if we take it in the definition in too narrow a sense. There are systems
of thought which the world usually calls religious, and yet which do not
positively assume a God. Buddhism is in this case. Popularly, of course,
the Buddha himself stands in place of a God; but in strictness the
Buddhistic system is atheistic. Modern transcendental idealism,
Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract
Ideality. Not a deity _in concreto_, not a superhuman person, but the
immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the
universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address to
the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson
famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was
what made the scandal of the performance.
“These laws,” said the speaker, “execute themselves. They are out
of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance: Thus, in
the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant
and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who
does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts
off impurity thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just,
then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of
God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with justice. If a
man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of
acquaintance with his own being. Character is always known. Thefts
never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of
stone walls. The least admixture of a lie—for example, the taint
of vanity, any attempt to make a good impression, a favorable
appearance—will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth,
and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of
the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear your
witness. For all things proceed out of the same spirit, which is
differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different
applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the
several shores which it washes. In so far as he roves from these
ends, a man bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries. His being
shrinks ... he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until
absolute badness is absolute death. The perception of this law
awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious
sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its
power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the
embalmer of the world. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and
the silent song of the stars is it. It is the beatitude of man. It
makes him illimitable. When he says ‘I ought’; when love warns
him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great
deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from supreme
wisdom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for
he can never go behind this sentiment. All the expressions of this
sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity.
[They] affect us more than all other compositions. The sentences
of the olden time, which ejaculate this piety, are still fresh and
fragrant. And the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind, whose
name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of this
world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion.”(10)
Such is the Emersonian religion. The universe has a divine soul of order,
which soul is moral, being also the soul within the soul of man. But
whether this soul of the universe be a mere quality like the eye’s
brilliancy or the skin’s softness, or whether it be a self‐conscious life
like the eye’s seeing or the skin’s feeling, is a decision that never
unmistakably appears in Emerson’s pages. It quivers on the boundary of
these things, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes the other, to suit the
literary rather than the philosophic need. Whatever it is, though, it is
active. As much as if it were a God, we can trust it to protect all ideal
interests and keep the world’s balance straight. The sentences in which
Emerson, to the very end, gave utterance to this faith are as fine as
anything in literature: “If you love and serve men, you cannot by any
hiding or stratagem escape the remuneration. Secret retributions are
always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is
impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and
monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar.
Settles forevermore the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote,
and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.”(11)
Now it would be too absurd to say that the inner experiences that underlie
such expressions of faith as this and impel the writer to their utterance
are quite unworthy to be called religious experiences. The sort of appeal
that Emersonian optimism, on the one hand, and Buddhistic pessimism, on
the other, make to the individual and the sort of response which he makes
to them in his life are in fact indistinguishable from, and in many
respects identical with, the best Christian appeal and response. We must
therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these godless or
quasi‐godless creeds “religions”; and accordingly when in our definition
of religion we speak of the individual’s relation to “what he considers
the divine,” we must interpret the term “divine” very broadly, as denoting
any object that is god_like_, whether it be a concrete deity or not.
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But the term “godlike,” if thus treated as a floating general quality,
becomes exceedingly vague, for many gods have flourished in religious
history, and their attributes have been discrepant enough. What then is
that essentially godlike quality—be it embodied in a concrete deity or
not—our relation to which determines our character as religious men? It
will repay us to seek some answer to this question before we proceed
farther.
For one thing, gods are conceived to be first things in the way of being
and power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there is no escape.
What relates to them is the first and last word in the way of truth.
Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true might at
this rate be treated as godlike, and a man’s religion might thus be
identified with his attitude, whatever it might be, towards what he felt
to be the primal truth.
Such a definition as this would in a way be defensible. Religion, whatever
it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total
reaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions are different from
casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or
professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the foreground
of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual
cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing,
lovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses. This sense of
the world’s presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual
temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous,
gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and
inarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all
our answers to the question, “What is the character of this universe in
which we dwell?” It expresses our individual sense of it in the most
definite way. Why then not call these reactions our religion, no matter
what specific character they may have? Non‐religious as some of these
reactions may be, in one sense of the word “religious,” they yet belong to
_the general sphere of the religious life_, and so should generically be
classed as religious reactions. “He believes in No‐God, and he worships
him,” said a colleague of mine of a student who was manifesting a fine
atheistic ardor; and the more fervent opponents of Christian doctrine have
often enough shown a temper which, psychologically...
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