The Sources of Religious Insight Part 1

The Sources Of Religious Insight.

by Josiah Royce.

THE BROSS FOUNDATION

The Bross Lectures are an outgrowth of a fund established in 1879 by the late William Bross, Lieutenant-Governor of Illinois from 1866 to 1870. Desiring some memorial of his son, Nathaniel Bross, who died in 1856, Mr. Bross entered into an agreement with the "Trustees of Lake Forest University," whereby there was finally transferred to them the sum of forty thousand dollars, the income of which was to acc.u.mulate in perpetuity for successive periods of ten years, the acc.u.mulations of one decade to be spent in the following decade, for the purpose of stimulating the best books or treatises _"on the connection, relation, and mutual bearing of any practical science, the history of our race, or the facts in any department of knowledge, with and upon the Christian Religion."_ The object of the donor was to _"call out the best efforts of the highest talent and the ripest scholarship of the world to ill.u.s.trate from science, or from any department of knowledge, and to demonstrate the divine origin and the authority of the Christian Scriptures; and, further, to show how both science and revelation coincide and prove the existence, {vi} the providence, or any or all of the attributes of the only living and true G.o.d, 'infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.'"_

The gift contemplated in the original agreement of 1879 was finally consummated in 1890. The first decade of the acc.u.mulation of interest having closed in 1900, the Trustees of the Bross Fund began at this time to carry out the provisions of the deed of gift. It was determined to give the general t.i.tle of "The Bross Library" to the series of books purchased and published with the proceeds of the Bross Fund. In accordance with the express wish of the donor, that the "Evidences of Christianity" of his "very dear friend and teacher, Mark Hopkins, D.D.," be purchased and "ever numbered and known as No. 1 of the series," the Trustees secured the copyright of this work, which has been republished in a presentation edition as Volume I of the Bross Library.

The trust agreement prescribed two methods by which the production of books and treatises of the nature contemplated by the donor was to be stimulated:

1. The Trustees were empowered to offer one or more prizes during each decade, the compet.i.tion for which was to be thrown open to "the scientific men, the Christian philosophers and historians of all {vii} nations." In accordance with this provision, a prize of $6,000 was offered in 1902 for the best book fulfilling the conditions of the deed of gift, the competing ma.n.u.scripts to be presented on or before June 1, 1905. The prize was awarded to the Reverend James Orr, D.D., Professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology in the United Free Church College, Glasgow, for his treatise on "The Problem of the Old Testament," which was published in 1906 as Volume III of the Bross Library. The next decennial prize will be awarded in 1915, and the announcement of the conditions may be obtained from the President of Lake Forest College.

2. The Trustees were also empowered to "select and designate any particular scientific man or Christian philosopher and the subject on which he shall write," and to "agree with him as to the sum he shall receive for the book or treatise to be written." Under this provision the Trustees have, from time to time, invited eminent scholars to deliver courses of lectures before Lake Forest College, such courses to be subsequently published as volumes in the Bross Library. The first course of lectures, on "Obligatory Morality," was delivered in May, 1903, by the Reverend Francis Landey Patton, D.D., LL.D., President of Princeton Theological Seminary. The copyright of the lectures is now the property of the Trustees of the Bross Fund. The second course of {viii} lectures, on "The Bible: Its Origin and Nature," was delivered in May, 1904, by the Reverend Marcus Dods, D.D., Professor of Exegetical Theology in New College, Edinburgh.

These lectures were published in 1905 as Volume II of the Bross Library. The third course of lectures, on "The Bible of Nature," was delivered in September and October, 1907, by Mr. J. Arthur Thomson, M.A., Regius Professor of Natural History in the University of Aberdeen. These lectures were published in 1908 as Volume IV of the Bross Library. The fourth course of lectures, on "The Religions of Modern Syria and Palestine," was delivered in November and December, 1908, by Frederick Jones Bliss, Ph.D., of Beirut, Syria. These lectures are in process of publication as Volume V of the Bross Library. The fifth course of lectures, on "The Sources of Religious Insight," was delivered November 13 to 19, 1911, by Professor Josiah Royce, Ph.D., of Harvard University. These lectures are embodied in the present volume.

JOHN SCHOLTE NOLLEN, _President of Lake Forest College._

Lake Forest, Illinois, _March_, 1912.

I

THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM AND THE HUMAN INDIVIDUAL

My first task must be to forestall possible disappointments regarding the scope of our inquiry. In seven lectures upon a vast topic very little can at best be accomplished. I want to tell you at the outset what are some of the limitations to which I propose to subject my undertakings.

I come before you as a philosophical inquirer addressing a general audience of thoughtful people. This definition of my office implies from the outset very notable limitations. As a philosophical inquirer I am not here to preach to you, but to appeal to your own thoughtfulness. Again, since my inquiry concerns the Sources of Religious Insight, you will understand, I hope, that I shall not undertake to present to you any extended system of religious doctrine.

Upon sources of insight we are to concentrate our attention. What insight may be obtained from those sources we shall only attempt to indicate in the most general way, not at length to expound. What theologians would call a system of dogmas, I shall not undertake to define. What {4} philosophers would regard as a comprehensive philosophy of religion I shall have no time to develop within our limits. I am to make some comments upon the ways in which religious truths can become accessible to men. What truths thus become accessible you must in large measure discover by your own appeal to the sources of which I shall try to tell you.

These somewhat narrow limitations may have, as I hope, their correlative advantages. Since I am to speak of sources, rather than of creeds or of philosophies, I may be able to appeal to people of decidedly various opinions without directing undue attention to the motives that divide them. I need not presuppose that my hearers are of the company of believers or of the company of doubters; and if they are believers, it matters little, for my present purpose, to what household of the faith they belong. I am not here to set people right as to matters of doctrine, but rather to point out the way that, if patiently followed, may tend to lead us all toward light and unity of doctrine. If you listen to my later lectures you may, indeed, be led to ask various questions about my own creed, which, in these lectures, I shall not attempt to answer. But I shall be content if what I say helps any of you, however little, toward finding for yourselves answers to your own religious questions.

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The limitations of my task, thus indicated, will become still clearer if I next try to define the term Religious Insight as I intend it to be here understood.

And first I must speak briefly of the word Insight. By insight, whatever the object of insight may be, one means some kind of knowledge. But the word insight has a certain richness of significance whereby we distinguish what we call insight from knowledge in general.

A man knows the way to the office where he does his business. But if he is a successful man, he has insight into the nature and rules of his business and into the means whereby success is attained. A man knows the names and the faces of his acquaintances. But he has some sort of insight into the characters of his familiar friends. As these examples suggest, insight is a name for a special sort and degree of knowledge. Insight is knowledge that unites a certain breadth of range, a certain wealth of acquaintance together with a certain unity and coherence of grasp, and with a certain closeness of intimacy whereby the one who has insight is brought into near touch with the objects of his insight. To repeat: Insight is knowledge that makes us aware of the unity of many facts in one whole, and that at the same time brings us into intimate personal contact with these facts {6} and with the whole wherein they are united. The three marks of insight are breadth of range, coherence and unity of view, and closeness of personal touch. A man may get some sort of _sight_ of as many things as you please. But if we have insight, we view some connected whole of things, be this whole a landscape as an artist sees it, or as a wanderer surveys it from a mountain top, or be this whole an organic process as a student of the sciences of life aims to comprehend it, or a human character as an appreciative biographer tries to portray it.

Again, we have insight when, as I insist, our acquaintance with our object is not only coherent but close and personal. Insight you cannot obtain at second hand. You can learn by rote and by hearsay many things; but if you have won insight, you have won it not without the aid of your own individual experience. Yet experience is not by itself sufficient to produce insight unless the coherence and the breadth of range which I have just mentioned be added.

Insight may belong to the most various sorts of people and may be concerned with the most diverse kinds of objects. Many very unlearned people have won a great deal of insight into the matters that intimately concern them. Many very learned people have attained almost no insight into anything. Insight is no peculiar possession of the students of any technical specialty or of any one calling. Men of science aim to reach insight into {7} the objects of their researches; men of affairs, or men of practical efficiency, however plain or humble their calling, may show insight of a very high type, whenever they possess knowledge that bears the marks indicated, knowledge that is intimate and personal and that involves a wide survey of the unity of many things.

Such, then, is insight in general. But I am to speak of Religious Insight. Religious insight must be distinguished from other sorts of insight by its object, or by its various characteristic objects. Now, I have no time to undertake, in this opening discourse, any adequate definition of the term Religion or of the features that make an object a religious object. Religion has a long and complex history, and a tragic variety of forms and of objects of belief. And so religion varies prodigiously in its characteristics from age to age, from one portion of the human race to another, from one individual to another.

If we permitted ourselves to define religion so as merely to insist upon what is common to all its forms, civilised and savage, our definition would tend to become so inclusive and so attenuated as to be almost useless for the purposes of the present brief inquiry. If, on the other hand, we defined religion so as to make the term denote merely what the believer in this or in that creed thinks of as his own religion, we should from the start cut ourselves off from the very breadth of view which I myself suppose to be essential to the highest sort of {8} religious Insight. n.o.body fully comprehends what religion is who imagines that his own religion is the only genuine religion. As a fact, I shall therefore abandon at present the effort to give a technically finished definition of what const.i.tutes religion, or of the nature of the religious objects. I shall here limit myself to a practically useful preliminary mention of a certain feature that, for my present purpose, shall be viewed as the essential characteristic of religion, and of religious objects, so far as these lectures propose to discuss religion.

The higher religions of mankind--religions such as Buddhism and Christianity--have had in common this notable feature, namely, that they have been concerned with the problem of the Salvation of Man.

This is sometimes expressed by saying that they are redemptive religions--religions interested in freeing mankind from some vast and universal burden, of imperfection, of unreasonableness, of evil, of misery, of fate, of unworthiness, or of sin. Now, for my present purposes, this _interest in the salvation of man_ shall be made, in these lectures, the essential feature of religion in so far as religion shall here be dealt with. The religious objects, whatever they otherwise may prove to be, shall be defined as objects such that, when we know them, and in case we can know them, this knowledge of them helps to show us the way of salvation. The central and essential postulate of whatever religion we, in these lectures, are to consider, is _the postulate that man {9} needs to be saved_. And religious insight shall for us mean insight into the way of salvation and into those objects whereof the knowledge conduces to salvation.

This preliminary definition, thus somewhat abruptly stated, will arouse in the minds of many of you serious doubts and questions. And only the whole course of our study can serve to furnish such answer to these doubts and questions as I can hope to supply to you. Yet a further word or two of purely preliminary explanation may help to prevent your thoughts, at this point, from being turned in a wrong direction. I have defined religious insight as insight into the way of salvation. But what, you may ask, do I mean by the salvation of man or by man's need of salvation? To this question I still owe you a brief preliminary answer.

II

The word salvation naturally first suggests to your own mind certain familiar traditions which have played a great part in the history of Christianity. I do not mean to make light of those traditions nor yet of the significance of the historical Christianity to which they belong. Yet, as I have already told you, these lectures will have no dogmatic religious system to expound, and, for that very reason, will not attempt the grave task of any extended discussion of Christianity.

I propose at {10} some future time, not in these lectures, but upon a wholly different occasion, to attempt an application of some of the principles that underlie the present lectures to the special problems which Christianity offers to the student of religion. But these lectures are not to be directly concerned with this special task of expounding or interpreting or estimating Christian doctrines. I repeat: My limited undertaking is to consider in company with you the sources of religious insight, not the contents of any one religion.

You will understand, therefore, that when I define religious insight as insight into the way of salvation, I use the word salvation in a sense that I wish you to conceive in terms much more general than those which certain Christian traditions have made familiar to you.

I have already said that both Buddhism and Christianity are interested in the problem of the salvation of mankind, and share in common the postulate that man needs saving. I could have named still other of the world's higher religions which are characterised by the same great interest. Had I the time and the technical knowledge, I could show you how far backward in time, how deep down into the very essence of some of the religions that seem to us extremely primitive, this concern for man's salvation, and for a knowledge of the way of salvation, extends.

But the history of religion does not fall within my present scope. And to the varieties of religious doctrine I can only allude by {11} way of ill.u.s.tration. Yet the mere mention of such varieties may serve, I hope, to show you that whole nations and races, and that countless millions of men, have conceived of their need for salvation, and have sought the way thereto, while they have known nothing of Christian doctrine, and while they have not in the least been influenced by those dogmas regarding the fall of man, the process of redemption, or the future destiny of the soul of man which are brought to your minds when you hear the word salvation.

Be willing, then, to generalise our term and to dissociate the idea of salvation from some of the settings in which you usually have conceived it. Since there is thus far in our discussion no question as to whose view of the way of salvation is the true view, you can only gain by such a dissociation, even if it be but a temporary effort at generalisation. The cry of humanity for salvation is not a matter of any one time or faith. The pathos of that cry will become only the deeper when you learn to see why it is so universal a cry. The truth, if there be any accessible truth, regarding the genuine way of salvation will become only the more precious to you when you know by how widely sundered paths the wanderers in the darkness of this world have sought for the saving light.

So let me next attempt to define salvation in a sufficiently general sense. Man is an infinitely needy creature. He wants endlessly numerous {12} special things--food, sleep, pleasure, fellowship, power in all its Protean shapes, peace in all its elusive forms, love in its countless disguises--in brief, all the objects of desire. But amongst these infinitely manifold needs, the need for salvation stands out, in the minds of those who feel it, as a need that is peculiarly paramount, so that, according to their view of life, to desire salvation is to long for some pearl of great price, for the sake of which one would be ready to sell all that one has. The idea that man needs salvation depends, in fact, upon two simpler ideas whereof the main idea is const.i.tuted. _The first is the idea that there is some end or aim of human life which is more important than all other aims, so that, by comparison with this aim all else is secondary and subsidiary, and perhaps relatively unimportant, or even vain and empty. The other idea is this: That man as he now is, or as he naturally is, is in great danger of so missing this highest aim as to render his whole life a senseless failure by virtue of thus coming short of his true goal_. Whoever has been led to conceive human life in these terms, namely, to think that there is for man some sort of highest good, by contrast with which all other goods are relatively trivial, and that man, as he is, is in great danger of losing this highest good, so that his greatest need is of escape from this danger--whoever, I say, thus views our life, holds that man needs salvation.

Now, I beg you to observe that such a view of {13} life as this is in no wise dependent upon any one dogma as to a future state of reward and punishment, as to heaven and h.e.l.l, as to the fall of man, or as to any point of the traditional doctrine of this or of that special religion. Philosophers and prophets, and even cynics, learned and unlearned men, saints and sinners, sages and fanatics, Christians and non-Christians, believers in immortality and believers that death ends all, may agree, yes, have agreed, in viewing human life in the general spirit just characterised. A very few examples may serve to show how wide-spread this longing for salvation has been and how manifold have also been its guises.

I have already mentioned Buddhism as a religion that seeks the salvation of man. The central idea of the original southern Buddhism, as you know, is pessimistic. Man, so the Buddha and his earlier followers taught, is naturally doomed to misery. This doom is so pervasive and so fatal that you in vain would seek to escape from it through any luxuries, or, so to speak, excesses, of good fortune. On the throne or in the dungeon, wealthy or a beggar, man is always (so the Buddhist insists) the prisoner of desire, a creature of longing, consumed by the fires of pa.s.sion--and therefore miserable. For man's will is insatiable, and hence always disappointed. Now we are here not in the least concerned with estimating this pessimism. This gloomy ancient Indian view of existence may be as false as {14} you please.

Enough--millions of men have held it, and therefore have longed for salvation. For if, as the early Buddhists held, the evil of human life is thus pervasive and paramount, then the aim of escaping from such fatal ill must be deeper and more important than any economic aim or than any intent to satisfy this or that special desire. If man is naturally doomed to misery, the escape from this natural doom must be at once the hardest and the highest of human tasks. The older Buddhism undertakes to accomplish this task by teaching the way to "the extinction of desire" and by thus striking at "the root of all misery." In Nirvana, those who have attained the goal have won their way beyond all desire. They return not. They are free from the burden of human existence. Such is one view of the need and the way of salvation.

If we turn in a wholly different direction, we find Plato, in the great myth of the "Phaedrus," in the arguments and myths of the "Republic," and in various other famous pa.s.sages, defining what he regards as the true goal of the human soul, portraying how far we have naturally come short of that goal, and pointing out a way of salvation. And, in another age, Marcus Aurelius writes his "Thoughts"

in the interest of defining the end for which it is worth while to live, the bondage and failure in which the foolish man actually lives, and the way out of our foolishness.

But are the partisans of ways of salvation {15} confined to such serious and unworldly souls as were the early Buddhists and the ancient moralists? No; turn to modern times. Read the stanzas into which Fitzgerald, in a highly modern spirit, very freely translated the expressions of an old Persian poet--Omar Khayyam; or, again, read the great programme of Nietzsche's ethical and religious revolt as set forth only a few years since in his "Zarathustra"; or recall Goethe's "Faust"; remember even Byron's "Manfred"; and these few instances from amongst a vast wealth of more or less recent literary examples will show you that the idea of salvation and the search for salvation are matters that belong to no one type of piety or of poetry or of philosophy. Cynics and rebels, ancient sages and men who are in our foremost rank of time, can agree, and have agreed, in maintaining that there is some goal of life, conceivable, or at least capable of being, however dimly, appreciated--some goal that, if accessible, would fulfil and surpa.s.s our lesser desires, or would save us from our bondage to lesser ills, while this goal is something that we naturally miss, or that we are in great danger of missing--so that, whatever else we need, we need to be saved from this pervasive and overmastering danger of failure.

"Oh love, could thou and I with fate conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would we not shatter it to bits and then, Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?"

{16} Thus Fitzgerald's Omar expresses, in rebellious speech, the need of salvation. "What is your greatest hour?"--so begins Nietzsche's Zarathustra in his opening address to the people. And he replies: "It is the hour of your great contempt"--the hour, so he goes on to explain, when you despise all the conventional values and trivial maxims of a morality and a religion that have become for you merely traditional, conventional, respectable, but infinitely petty. Now, if you observe that St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, despite its utterly different religious ideas, begins with an a.n.a.logous condemnation of the social world as it was, or as it always naturally is, you may learn to appreciate the universal forms in which the need for salvation comes to men's consciousness, however various their creed.

Swinburne's well-known chorus sums up man's life as it is, thus:

"He weaves and is clothed with derision, Sows, and he shall not reap; His life is a watch or a vision Between a sleep and a sleep."

Such, then, is man's need. "Here we have no continuing city, we seek a city out of sight"--such is another expression of this same need. What I ask you to do, just here, is to catch a glimpse of this universal form of the need for salvation. As you see, there is always a certain element of gloom and tragedy involved in the first conception of this need. {17} All depends, for the further fortunes of one's religious consciousness, upon whether or not one can get insight into the true nature of this need and into the way toward the needed salvation.

III

Religious Insight means then, for my present purposes, _insight into the need and into the way of salvation_. If the problem of human salvation has never come home to your mind, as a genuine problem of life and of experience, you will feel no interest in religion in the sense to which the present lectures will arbitrarily confine the term.

If, on the other hand, your live personal experience has made you intimate with any form or phase of this problem of the pathetic need and cry of man for salvation, then I care not, at least at the outset of these discourses, whether you have thought of this problem in theological or in secular, in reverent or in rebellious, or in cynical terms, whether you have tried to solve it by scientific or by sentimental or by traditional means, or whether the problem now takes shape in your mind as a problem to be dealt with in a spirit of revolt or of conformity, of sceptical criticism or of intuitive faith, of hope or of despair. What we want is insight, if insight be possible, into the way of salvation. The problem with which these lectures are to deal is: What are the sources of such insight?

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At the outset of our effort to deal with this problem, I shall try to show how the experience of the individual human being is related to the issues that are before us. That is, in this and in part of our next lecture, I shall discuss the sense in which the individual experience of any one of us is a source of insight into the need and the way of salvation. Hereby we shall erelong be led to our social experience as a source of still richer religious insight. And from these beginnings we shall go on to a study of sources which are at once developments from these first mentioned sources, and sources that are much more significant than these first ones would be if they could be isolated from such developments. I ask you to follow my discourse in the same spirit of tolerance for various opinions and with the same effort to understand the great common features and origins of the religious consciousness--with the same spirit and effort, I say, by which I have tried to be guided in what I have already said to you in this introduction. It is always easy to see that, in religion, one man thinks thus and another man thinks otherwise, and that no man knows as much as we all wish to know. But I want to lay stress upon those perennial sources from which human insight has flowed and for ages in the future will continue to flow. To understand what these sources are will help us, I believe, toward unity of spirit, toward co-operation in the midst of all our varieties of faith, and toward insight itself and the fruits of insight.

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