The Approach to Philosophy Part 5

In this faith Judaism merges into Christianity.[94:12] In the whole course of this evolution G.o.d is regarded as the friend of his people, but his people learn to find a new significance in his friendship. That which is altered is the conduct which that friendship requires and the expectation which it determines. The practical ideal which the relationship sanctions, changes gradually from that of prudence to that of goodness for its own sake. G.o.d, once an instrument relevant to human temporal welfare, has come to be an object of disinterested service.

No such transformation as this was absolutely realized during the period covered by the writings of the Old Testament, nor has it even yet been realized in the development of Christianity. But the evolution of both Judaism and Christianity has taken this direction. The criterion of this evolution is manifestly both ethical and metaphysical. A Christian avows that he rates purity of character above worldly prosperity, so that the former cannot properly be prized for the sake of the latter.

Furthermore, he shares more or less unconsciously such philosophical and scientific opinions as deny truth to the conception of special interferences and dispensations from a supernatural agency. Therefore he looks for no fire from heaven to consume his sacrifice. But his religion is nevertheless a practical expectation. He believes that G.o.d is good, and that G.o.d loves him and sustains him. He believes that there obtains between himself, in so far as good, and the universe _sub specie eternitatis_, a real sympathy and reciprocal reenforcement. He believes that he secures through the profoundly potent forces of the universe that which he regards as of most worth; and that somewhat is added to these forces by virtue of his consecration. The G.o.d of the Christians cannot be defined short of some such account as this, inclusive of an ideal, an att.i.tude, and an expectation. In other words the G.o.d of the Christians is to be known only in terms of the Christlike outlook upon life, in which the disciple is taught to emulate the master. When moral and intellectual development shall have discredited either its scale of values, or its conviction that cosmical events are in the end determined in accordance with that scale of values, then Christianity must either be transformed, or be untenable for the wise man. If we have conceived the essence of Christianity too broadly or vaguely, it does not much matter for our present purposes. Its essence is, at any rate, some such inwardness of life resolving ideality and reality into one, and drawing upon objective truth only to the extent required for the confirming of that relation.

[Sidenote: The Cognitive Factor in Religion.]

- 34. We conclude, then, our attempt to emphasize the cognitive factor in religion, with the thesis that every religion centres in a practical secret of the universe. _To be religious is to believe that a certain correlation of forces, moral and factual, is in reality operative, and that it determines the propriety and effectiveness of a certain type of living. Whatever demonstrates the futility, vanity, or self-deception of this living, discredits the religion. And, per contra, except as they define or refute such practical truth, religion is not essentially concerned with theoretical judgments._

[Sidenote: The Place of Imagination in Religion.]

- 35. But neither religion nor any other human interest consists in essentials. Such a practical conviction as that which has been defined inevitably flowers into a marvelous complexity, and taps for its nourishment every spontaneity of human nature. If it be said that only the practical conviction is essential, this is not the same as to say that all else is superfluous. There may be no single utterance that my religion could not have spared, and yet were I to be altogether dumb my religion would, indeed, be as nothing. For if I believe, I accept a presence in my world, which as I live will figure in my dreams, or in my thoughts, or in my habits. And each of these expressions of myself will have a truth if it do but bear out my practical acceptance of that presence. The language of religion, like that of daily life, is not the language of science except it take it upon itself to be so. There is scarcely a sentence which I utter in my daily intercourse with men which is not guilty of transgressions against the canons of accurate and definite thinking. Yet if I deceive neither myself nor another, I am held to be truthful, even though my language deal with chance and accident, material purposes and spiritual causes, and though I vow that the sun smiles or the moon lets down her hair into the sea. Science is a special interest in the discovery of unequivocal and fixed conceptions, and employs its terms with an unalterable connotation. But no such algebra of thought is indispensable to life or conversation, and its lack is no proof of error. Such is the case also with that eminently living affair, religion. I may if I choose, and I will if my reasoning powers be at all awakened, be a theologian. But theology, like science, is a special intellectual spontaneity. St. Thomas, the master theologian, did not glide unwittingly from prayer into the _quaestiones_ of the "Summa Theologiae," but turned to them as to a fresh adventure.

Theology is inevitable, because humanly speaking adventure is inevitable. For man, with his intellectual spontaneity, every object is a problem; and did he not seek sooner or later to define salvation, there would be good reason to believe that he did not practically reckon with any. But this is _similarly_ and _independently_ true of the imagination, the most familiar means with which man clothes and vivifies his convictions, the exuberance with which he plays about them and delights to confess them. The imagination of religion, contributing what Matthew Arnold called its "poetry and eloquence," does not submit itself to such canons as are binding upon theology or science, but exists and flourishes in its own right.

The indispensableness to religion of the imagination is due to that faculty's power of realizing what is not perceptually present. Religion is not interested in the apparent, but in the secret essence or the transcendent universal. And yet this interest is a practical one.

Imagination may introduce one into the vivid presence of the secret or the transcendent. It is evident that the religious imagination here coincides with poetry. For it is at least one of the interests of poetry to cultivate and satisfy a sense for the universal; to obtain an immediate experience or appreciation that shall have the vividness without the particularism of ordinary perception. And where a poet elects so to view the world, we allow him as a poet the privilege, and judge him by the standards to which he submits himself. That upon which we pa.s.s judgment is the _fitness of his expression_. This expression is not, except in the case of the theoretical mystic, regarded as const.i.tuting the most valid form of the idea, but is appreciated expressly for its fulfilment of the condition of immediacy. The same sort of critical att.i.tude is in order with the fruits of the religious imagination. These may or may not fulfil enough of the requirements of that art to be properly denominated poetry; but like poetry they are the translation of ideas into a specific language. They must not, therefore, be judged as though they claimed to excel in point of validity, but only in point of consistency with the context of that language. And _the language of religion is the language of the practical life_. Such translation is as essential to an idea that is to enter into the religious experience, as translation into terms of immediacy is essential to an idea that is to enter into the appreciative consciousness of the poet. No object can find a place in my religion until it is conjoined with my purposes and hopes; until it is taken for granted and acted upon, like the love of my friends, or the courses of the stars, or the stretches of the sea.

[Sidenote: The Special Functions of the Religious Imagination.]

- 36. The religious imagination, then, is to be understood and justified as that which brings the objects of religion within the range of living.

The central religious object, as has been seen, is an _att.i.tude_ of the residuum or totality of things. To be religious one must have a sense for the _presence of an att.i.tude_, like his sense for the presence of his human fellows, with all the added appreciation that is proper in the case of an object that is unique in its mystery or in its majesty. It follows that the religious imagination fulfils its function in so far as it provides the object of religion with properties similar to those which lend vividness and reality to the normal social relations.

The presence of one's fellows is in part the perceptual experience of their bodies. To this there corresponds in religion some extraordinary or subtle appearance. The G.o.ds may in visions or dreams be met with in their own proper embodiments; or, as is more common, they may be regarded as present for practical purposes: in some inanimate object, as in the case of the fetish; in some animal species, as in the case of the totem; in some place, as in the case of the shrine; or even in some human being, as in the case of the inspired prophet and miracle worker.

In more refined and highly developed religions the medium of G.o.d's presence is less specific. He is perceived with

"--a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man."

G.o.d is here found in an interpretation of the common and the natural, rather than in any individual and peculiar embodiment. And here the poet's appreciation, if not his art, is peculiarly indispensable.

But, furthermore, his fellows are inmates of "the household of man" in that he knows their history. They belong to the temporal context of actions and events. Similarly, the G.o.ds must be historical. The sacred traditions or books of religion are largely occupied with this history.

The more individual and anthropomorphic the G.o.ds, the more local and episodic will be the account of their affairs. In the higher religions the acts of G.o.d are few and momentous, such as creation or special providence; or they are identical with the events of nature and human history when these are _construed_ as divine. To find G.o.d in this latter way requires an interpretation of the course of events in terms of some moral consistency, a faith that sees some purpose in their evident destination.

There is still another and a more significant way in which men recognize one another: the way of address and conversation. And men have invariably held a similar intercourse with their G.o.ds. To this category belong communion and prayer, with all their varieties of expression. I have no G.o.d until I address him. This will be the most direct evidence of what is at least from my point of view a social relation. There can be no general definition of the form which this address will take. There may be as many special languages, as many att.i.tudes, and as much playfulness and subtlety of symbolism as in human intercourse. But, on the other hand, there are certain utterances that are peculiarly appropriate to religion. In so far as he regards his object as endowed with both power and goodness the worshipper will use the language of adoration; and the sense of his dependence will speak in terms of consecration and thanksgiving.

"O G.o.d, thou art my G.o.d; early will I seek thee: My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee, In a dry and weary land, where no water is.

So have I looked upon thee in the sanctuary, To see thy power and thy glory.

For thy loving-kindness is better than life; My lips shall praise thee."

These are expressions of a hopeful faith; but, on the other hand, G.o.d may be addressed in terms of hatred and distrust.

"Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?

I think myself; yet I would rather be My miserable self than He, than He Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace.

"The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou From whom it had its being, G.o.d and Lord!

Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred, Malignant and implacable."[104:13]

In either case there may be an indefinite degree of hyperbole. The language of love and hate, of confidence and despair, is not the language of description. In this train of the religious consciousness there is occasion for whatever eloquence man can feel, and whatever rhetorical luxuriance he can utter.

[Sidenote: The Relation between Imagination and Truth in Religion.]

- 37. Such considerations as these serve to account for the exercise and certain of the fruits of the religious imagination, and to designate the general criterion governing its propriety. But _how is one to determine the boundary between the imaginative and the cognitive_? It is commonly agreed that what religion says and does is not all intended literally.

But when is expression of religion only poetry and eloquence, and when is it matter of conviction? If we revert again to the cognitive aspect of religion, it is evident that there is but one test to apply: _whatever either fortifies or misleads the will is literal conviction_.

This test cannot be applied absolutely, because it can properly be applied only to the intention of an individual experience. However I may express my religion, that which I express, is, we have seen, an expectation. The degree to which I literally mean what I say is then the degree to which it determines my expectations. Whatever adds no item to these expectations, but only recognizes and vitalizes them, is pure imagination. But it follows that it is entirely impossible from direct inspection to define any given _expression_ of religious experience as myth, or to define the degree to which it is myth. It submits to such distinctions only when viewed from the stand-point of the concrete religious experience which it expresses. Any such given expression could easily be all imagination to one, and all conviction to another.

Consider the pa.s.sage which follows:

"And I saw the heaven opened; and behold, a white horse, and he that sat thereon, called Faithful and True; and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. And his eyes are a flame of fire, and upon his head are many diadems; and he hath a name written, which no one knoweth but he himself. And he is arrayed in a garment sprinkled with blood: and his name is called The Word of G.o.d."[106:14]

Is this all rhapsody, or is it in part true report? There is evidently no answer to the question so conceived. But if it were to express my own religious feeling it would have some specific proportion of literal and metaphorical significance, according to the degree to which its detail contributes different practical values to me. It might then be my guide-book to the heavens, or only my testimony to the dignity and mystery of the function of Christ.

The development of religion bears in a very important way upon this last problem. The factor of imagination has undoubtedly come to have a more clearly recognized role in religion. There can be no doubt that what we now call myths were once beliefs, and that what we now call poetry was once history. If we go back sufficiently far we come to a time when the literal and the metaphorical were scarcely distinguishable, and this because science had not emerged from the early animistic extension of social relations. Men _meant_ to address their G.o.ds as they addressed their fellows, and expected them to hear and respond, as they looked for such reactions within the narrower circle of ordinary intercourse. The advance of science has brought into vogue a description of nature that inhibits such expectations. The result has been that men, continuing to use the same terms, essentially expressive as they are of a practical relationship, have come to regard them as only a general expression of their att.i.tude. The differences of content that are in excess of factors of expectation remain as poetry and myth. On the other hand, it is equally possible, if not equally common, for that which was once imagined to come to be believed. Such a transformation is, perhaps, normally the case when the inspired utterance pa.s.ses from its author to the cult. The prophets and sweet singers are likely to possess an exuberance of imagination not appreciated by their followers; and for this reason almost certainly misunderstood. For these reasons it is manifestly absurd to fasten the name of myth or the name of creed upon any religious utterance whatsoever, unless it be so regarded from the stand-point of the personal religion which it originally expressed, or unless one means by so doing to define it as an expression of his own religion. He who defines "the myth of creation," or "the poetical story of Samson," as parts of the pre-Christian Judaic religion, exhibits a total loss of historical sense. The distinction between cognition and fancy does not exist among objects, but only in the _intending_ experience; hence, for me to attach my own distinction to any individual case of belief, viewed apart from the believer, is an utterly confusing projection of my own personality into the field of my study.

[Sidenote: The Philosophy Implied in Religion and in Religions.]

- 38. Only after such considerations as these are we qualified to attack that much-vexed question as to whether religion deals invariably with a personal G.o.d. It is often a.s.sumed in discussion of this question that "personal G.o.d," as well as "G.o.d," is a distinct and familiar kind of ent.i.ty, like a dragon or centaur; its existence alone being problematical. This is doubly false to the religious employment of such an object. If it be true that in religion we mean by G.o.d a practical interpretation of the world, _whatsoever be its nature_, then the personality of G.o.d must be a derivative of the att.i.tude, and not of the nature of the world. Given the practical outlook upon life, there is no definable world that cannot be construed under the form of G.o.d. My G.o.d is my world practically recognized in respect of its fundamental or ultimate att.i.tude to my ideals. In the sense, then, conveyed by this term _att.i.tude_ my G.o.d will invariably possess the characters of personality. But the degree to which these characters will coincide with the characters which I a.s.sign to human persons, or the terms of any logical conception of personality, cannot be absolutely defined.

Anthropomorphisms may be imagination or they may be literal conviction.

This will depend, as above maintained, upon the degree to which they determine my expectations. Suppose the world to be theoretically conceived as governed by laws that are indifferent to all human interests. The practical expression of this conception appears in the naturalism of Lucretius, or Diogenes, or Omar Khayyam. Living in the vivid presence of an indifferent world, I may picture my G.o.ds as leading their own lives in some remote realm which is inaccessible to my pet.i.tions, or as regarding me with sinister and contemptuous cruelty. In the latter case I may shrink and cower, or return them contempt for contempt. I mean this literally only if I look for consequences following directly from the emotional coloring which I have bestowed upon them. It may well be that I mean merely to regard myself _sub specie eternitatis_, in which case I am _personifying_ in the sense of free imagination. In the religion of enlightenment the divine att.i.tude tends to belong to the poetry and eloquence of religion rather than to its cognitive intent. This is true even of optimistic and idealistic religion. The love and providence of G.o.d are less commonly supposed to warrant an expectation of special and arbitrary favors, and have come more and more to mean the play of my own feeling about the general central conviction of the favorableness of the cosmos to my deeper or moral concerns. But the factor of personality cannot possibly be entirely eliminated, for the religious consciousness _creates_ a social relationship between man and the universe. Such an interpretation of life is not a case of the pathetic fallacy, unless it incorrectly _reckons with_ the inner feeling which it attributes to the universe. It is an obvious practical truth that the total or residual environment is significant for life. Grant this and you make rational a recognition of that significance, or a more or less constant sense of coincidence or conflict with cosmical forces. Permit this consciousness to stand, and you make some expression of it inevitable. Such an expression may, furthermore, with perfect propriety and in fulfilment of human nature, set forth and transfigure this central belief until it may enter into the context of immediacy.

Thus any conception of the universe whatsoever may afford a basis for religion. But there is no religion that does not virtually make a more definite claim upon the nature of things, and this entirely independently of its theology, or explicit attempt to define itself.

Every religion, even in the very living of it, is naturalistic, or dualistic, or pluralistic, or optimistic, or idealistic, or pessimistic.

And there is in the realm of truth that which justifies or refutes these definite practical ways of construing the universe. But no historical religion is ever so vague even as this in its philosophical implications. Indeed, we shall always be brought eventually to the inner meaning of some individual religious experience, where no general criticism can be certainly valid.

There is, then, a place in religion for that which is not directly answerable to philosophical or scientific standards. But there is always, on the other hand, an element of hope which conceives the nature of the world, and means to be grounded in reality. In respect of that element, philosophy is indispensable to religion. The meaning of religion is, in fact, the central problem of philosophy. There is a virtue in religion like that which Emerson ascribes to poetry. "The poet is in the right att.i.tude; he is believing; the philosopher, after some struggle, having only reasons for believing." But whatever may be said to the disparagement of its dialectic, philosophy is the justification of religion, and the criticism of religions. To it must be a.s.signed the task of so refining positive religion as to contribute to the perpetual establishment of true religion. And to philosophy, with religion, belongs the task of holding fast to the idea of the universe. There is no religion except before you begin, or after you have rested from, your philosophical speculation. But in the universe these interests have a common object. As philosophy is the articulation and vindication of religion, so is religion the realization of philosophy. In philosophy thought is brought up to the elevation of life, and in religion philosophy, as the sum of wisdom, enters into life.

FOOTNOTES:

[83:1] As Plato interprets the scepticism of Protagoras to mean that one state of mind cannot be more _true_ than another, but only _better_ or worse. Cf. _Theaetetus_, 167.

[88:2] Quoted with some omissions from _I Kings_, 18:21-29. The Hebrew term _Yahweh_, the name of the national deity, has been subst.i.tuted for the English translation, "the Lord."

[90:3] _Iliad_, Book IX, lines 467 _sq._ Translation by Chapman.

[91:4] The supposed abode of departed spirits.

[91:5] Lucretius: _De Rerum Natura_, Book III, lines 1 _sq._ Translated by Munro.

[91:6] _Ibid._, Book II, lines 644 _sq._

[92:7] It would be interesting to compare the equally famous criticism of Greek religion in Plato's _Republic_, Book II, 377 _sq._

[92:8] Cf. W. Robertson Smith's admirable account of the Semitic religions:

"What is requisite to religion is a practical acquaintance with the rules on which the deity acts and on which he expects his worshippers to frame their conduct--what in II Kings, 17:26 is called the 'manner,' or rather the 'customary law' (_mishpat_), of the G.o.d of the land. This is true even of the religion of Israel. When the prophets speak of the knowledge of G.o.d, they always mean a practical knowledge of the laws and principles of His government in Israel, and a summary expression for religion as a whole is 'the knowledge and fear of Jehovah,' _i. e._, the knowledge of what Jehovah prescribes, combined with a reverent obedience." _The Religion of the Semites_, p. 23.

[93:9] _Proverbs_, 18:10; 11:19; 21:3.

[93:10] _Ecclesiastes_, 2:13 _sq._

[94:11] _Psalms_, 51:17; _Isaiah_, 57:15.