The Life of Reason Part 24

The essence of the good not advent.i.tious but expressive.--A universal religion must interpret the whole world.--Double appeal of Christianity.--Hebrew metaphors become Greek myths.--Hebrew philosophy of history identified with Platonic cosmology.--The resulting orthodox system.--The brief drama of things.--Mythology is a language and must be understood to convey something by symbols Pages 83-98

CHAPTER VII

PAGAN CUSTOM AND BARBARIAN GENIUS INFUSED INTO CHRISTIANITY

Need of paganising Christianity.--Catholic piety more human than the liturgy.--Natural pieties.--Refuge taken in the supernatural.--The episodes of life consecrated mystically.--Paganism chastened, Hebraism liberalised.--The system post-rational and founded on despair.--External conversion of the barbarians.--Expression of the northern genius within Catholicism,--Internal discrepancies between the two.--Tradition and instinct at odds in Protestantism.--The Protestant spirit remote from that of the gospel.--Obstacles to humanism.--The Reformation and counter-reformation.--Protestantism an expression of character.--It has the spirit of life and of courage, but the voice of inexperience.--Its emanc.i.p.ation from Christianity Pages 99-126

CHAPTER VIII

CONFLICT OF MYTHOLOGY WITH MORAL TRUTH

Myth should dissolve with the advance of science.--But myth is confused with the moral values it expresses.--Neo-Platonic revision.--It made mythical ent.i.ties of abstractions.--Hypostasis ruins ideals.--The Stoic revision.--The ideal surrendered before the physical.--Parallel movements in Christianity.--Hebraism, if philosophical, must be pantheistic.--Pantheism, even when psychic, ignores ideals.--Truly divine action limited to what makes for the good.--Need of an opposing principle.--The standard of value is human.--Hope for happiness makes belief in G.o.d Pages 127-147

CHAPTER IX

THE CHRISTIAN COMPROMISE

Suspense between hope and disillusion.--Superficial solution.--But from what shall we be redeemed?--Typical att.i.tude of St. Augustine.--He achieves Platonism.--He identifies it with Christianity.--G.o.d the good.--Primary and secondary religion.--Ambiguous efficacy of the good in Plato.--Ambiguous goodness of the creator in Job.--The Manicheans.--All things good by nature.--The doctrine of creation demands that of the fall.--Original sin.--Forced abandonment of the ideal.--The problem among the Protestants.--Pantheism accepted.--Plainer scorn for the ideal.--The price of mythology is superst.i.tion. Pages 148-177

CHAPTER X

PIETY

The core of religion not theoretical.--Loyalty to the sources of our being.--The pious aeneas.--An ideal background required.--Piety accepts natural conditions and present tasks.--The leadership of instinct is normal.--Embodiment essential to spirit.--Piety to the G.o.ds takes form from current ideals.--The religion of humanity.--Cosmic piety Pages 178-192

CHAPTER XI

SPIRITUALITY AND ITS CORRUPTIONS

To be spiritual is to live in view of the ideal.--Spirituality natural.--Primitive consciousness may be spiritual.--Spirit crossed by instrumentalities.--One foe of the spirit is worldliness.--The case for and against pleasure.--Upshot of worldly wisdom.--Two supposed escapes from vanity: fanaticism and mysticism.--Both are irrational.--Is there a third course?--Yes, for experience has intrinsic, inalienable values.--For these the religious imagination must supply an ideal standard Pages 193-213

CHAPTER XII

CHARITY

Possible tyranny of reason.--Everything has its rights.--Primary and secondary morality.--Uncharitable pagan justice is not just.--The doom of ancient republics.--Rational charity.--Its limits.--Its mythical supports.--There is intelligence in charity.--Buddhist and Christian forms of it.--Apparent division of the spiritual and the natural Pages 214-228

CHAPTER XIII

THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE

The length of life a subject for natural science.--"Psychical"

phenomena.--Hypertrophies of sense.--These possibilities affect physical existence only.--Moral grounds for the doctrine.--The necessary a.s.sumption of a future.--An a.s.sumption no evidence.--A solipsistic argument.--Absoluteness and immortality transferred to the G.o.ds.--Or to a divine principle in all beings.--In neither case is the individual immortal.--Possible forms of survival.--Arguments from retribution and need of opportunity.--Ign.o.ble temper of both.--False optimistic postulate involved.--Transition to ideality Pages 229-250

CHAPTER XIV

IDEAL IMMORTALITY

Olympian immortality the first ideal.--Its indirect attainment by reproduction.--Moral acceptance of this compromise.--Even vicarious immortality intrinsically impossible.--Intellectual victory over change.--The glory of it.--Reason makes man's divinity and his immortality.--It is the locus of all truths.--Epicurean immortality, through the truth of existence.--Logical immortality, through objects of thought.--Ethical immortality, through types of excellence Pages 251-273

CHAPTER XV

CONCLUSION

The failure of magic and of mythology.--Their imaginative value.--Piety and spirituality justified.--Mysticism a primordial state of feeling.--It may recur at any stage of culture.--Form gives substance its life and value. Pages 274-279

REASON IN RELIGION

CHAPTER I

HOW RELIGION MAY BE AN EMBODIMENT OF REASON

[Sidenote: Religion certainly significant.]

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's, that "a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." In every age the most comprehensive thinkers have found in the religion of their time and country something they could accept, interpreting and ill.u.s.trating that religion so as to give it depth and universal application. Even the heretics and atheists, if they have had profundity, turn out after a while to be forerunners of some new orthodoxy. What they rebel against is a religion alien to their nature; they are atheists only by accident, and relatively to a convention which inwardly offends them, but they yearn mightily in their own souls after the religious acceptance of a world interpreted in their own fashion. So it appears in the end that their atheism and loud protestation were in fact the hastier part of their thought, since what emboldened them to deny the poor world's faith was that they were too impatient to understand it. Indeed, the enlightenment common to young wits and worm-eaten old satirists, who plume themselves on detecting the scientific inept.i.tude of religion--something which the blindest half see--is not nearly enlightened enough: it points to notorious facts incompatible with religious tenets literally taken, but it leaves unexplored the habits of thought from which those tenets sprang, their original meaning, and their true function. Such studies would bring the sceptic face to face with the mystery and pathos of mortal existence. They would make him understand why religion is so profoundly moving and in a sense so profoundly just. There must needs be something humane and necessary in an influence that has become the most general sanction of virtue, the chief occasion for; art and philosophy, and the source, perhaps, of the best human happiness. If nothing, as Hooker said, is "so malapert as a splenetic religion," a sour irreligion is almost as perverse.

[Sidenote: But not literally true.]

At the same time, when Bacon penned the sage epigram we have quoted he forgot to add that the G.o.d to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them. It would be pitiful indeed if mature reflection bred no better conceptions than those which have drifted down the muddy stream of time, where tradition and pa.s.sion have jumbled everything together.

Traditional conceptions, when they are felicitous, may be adopted by the poet, but they must be purified by the moralist and disintegrated by the philosopher. Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself. What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak. In the rare circ.u.mstances where a choice is possible, he may, with some difficulty, make an exchange; but even then he is only adopting a new convention which may be more agreeable to his personal temper but which is essentially as arbitrary as the old.

[Sidenote: All religion is positive and particular.]

The attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular. A courier's or a dragoman's speech may indeed be often unusual and drawn from disparate sources, not without some mixture of personal originality; but that private jargon will have a meaning only because of its a.n.a.logy to one or more conventional languages and its obvious derivation from them. So travellers from one religion to another, people who have lost their spiritual nationality, may often retain a neutral and confused residuum of belief, which they may egregiously regard as the essence of all religion, so little may they remember the graciousness and naturalness of that ancestral accent which a perfect religion should have. Yet a moment's probing of the conceptions surviving in such minds will show them to be nothing but vestiges of old beliefs, creases which thought, even if emptied of all dogmatic tenets, has not been able to smooth away at its first unfolding. Later generations, if they have any religion at all, will be found either to revert to ancient authority, or to attach themselves spontaneously to something wholly novel and immensely positive, to some faith promulgated by a fresh genius and pa.s.sionately embraced by a converted people. Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries propounds are another world to live in; and another world to live in--whether we expect ever to pa.s.s wholly into it or no--is what we mean by having a religion.

[Sidenote: It aims at the Life of Reason.]

What relation, then, does this great business of the soul, which we call religion, bear to the Life of Reason? That the relation between the two is close seems clear from several circ.u.mstances. The Life of Reason is the seat of all ultimate values. Now the history of mankind will show us that whenever spirits at once lofty and intense have seemed to attain the highest joys, they have envisaged and attained them in religion.

Religion would therefore seem to be a vehicle or a factor in rational life, since the ends of rational life are attained by it. Moreover, the Life of Reason is an ideal to which everything in the world should be subordinated; it establishes lines of moral cleavage everywhere and makes right eternally different from wrong. Religion does the same thing. It makes absolute moral decisions. It sanctions, unifies, and transforms ethics. Religion thus exercises a function of the Life of Reason. And a further function which is common to both is that of emanc.i.p.ating man from his personal limitations. In different ways religions promise to transfer the soul to better conditions. A supernaturally favoured kingdom is to be established for posterity upon earth, or for all the faithful in heaven, or the soul is to be freed by repeated purgations from all taint and sorrow, or it is to be lost in the absolute, or it is to become an influence and an object of adoration in the places it once haunted or wherever the activities it once loved may be carried on by future generations of its kindred. Now reason in its way lays before us all these possibilities: it points to common objects, political and intellectual, in which an individual may lose what is mortal and accidental in himself and immortalise what is rational and human; it teaches us how sweet and fortunate death may be to those whose spirit can still live in their country and in their ideas; it reveals the radiating effects of action and the eternal objects of thought.

Yet the difference in tone and language must strike us, so soon as it is philosophy that speaks. That change should remind us that even if the function of religion and that of reason coincide, this function is performed in the two cases by very different organs. Religions are many, reason one. Religion consists of conscious ideas, hopes, enthusiasms, and objects of worship; it operates by grace and flourished by prayer.

Reason, on the other hand, is a mere principle or potential order, on which, indeed, we may come to reflect, but which exists in us ideally only, without variation or stress of any kind. We conform or do not conform to it; it does not urge or chide us, nor call for any emotions on our part other than those naturally aroused by the various objects which it unfolds in their true nature and proportion. Religion brings some order into life by weighting it with new materials. Reason adds to the natural materials only the perfect order which it introduces into them. Rationality is nothing but a form, an ideal const.i.tution which experience may more or less embody. Religion is a part of experience itself, a ma.s.s of sentiments and ideas. The one is an inviolate principle, the other a changing and struggling force. And yet this struggling and changing force of religion, seems to direct man toward something eternal. It seems to make for an ultimate harmony within the soul and for an ultimate harmony between the soul and all the soul depends upon. So that religion, in its intent, is a more conscious and direct pursuit of the Life of Reason than is society, science, or art.

For these approach and fill out the ideal life tentatively and piecemeal, hardly regarding the goal or caring for the ultimate justification of their instinctive aims. Religion also has an instinctive and blind side, and bubbles up in all manner of chance practices and intuitions; soon, however, it feels its way toward the heart of things, and, from whatever quarter it may come, veers in the direction of the ultimate.