Part 27 (1/2)
”...The G.o.ds, who haunt The lucid inters.p.a.ce of world and world, Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind, Nor ever falls the least white star of snow, Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans, Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar Their sacred everlasting calm!”[1]
[Footnote 1: Tennyson: _Lucretius_.]
Divinity has, again, quite universally been recognized as exerting over the individual a compelling power, and of insistently arousing his veneration. The psychological origins of this phenomenon have already been noted. Men fear, need, feel themselves dependent on the G.o.ds. But further than this many religious thinkers hold that man cannot even be aware of the divine power without wis.h.i.+ng to adjust himself harmoniously to it. And they hold, as did Immanuel Kant, that man is born with an awareness of the divine.
The attributes of divinity have been differently a.s.signed at different times in the history of religion. In general two qualities have been regarded as characteristic: power and goodness. In primitive belief, the first received the predominant emphasis; the higher religions have emphasized the second. For savage man, as we have seen, the divine personages were conceived in effect as human beings with superhuman powers. They were feared and flattered, needed and praised. Adjustment to them was a practical, imperative necessity. They combined infinite capacity with human and finite caprice. The attention they received from humans was distinctly utilitarian in character. These forces of wind and sun and rain might be brutal or benignant. Primitive man established, therefore, a system of magic, sacrifice, and prayer, whereby he might minimize the precariousness of existence, and keep the G.o.ds on his side.
In the more spiritualistic monotheistic religions, while the power of G.o.d has been insistently reiterated, there has been an increasing emphasis upon the divine goodness. The Psalmist is continually referring to both:
Praise ye the Lord. O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good: for his mercy endureth forever.
Who can utter the mighty acts of the Lord?
Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men!
For he hath broken the gates of bra.s.s, and cut the bars of iron in sunder.
Wrath and terror gradually give place to mercy and benevolence as the primary attributes of the divine. The power of G.o.d, in Christianity, for example, is still regarded as unlimited, but it is completely expended in the loving salvation of mankind.
Where the divinity has ceased to be a willful power and has become instead the G.o.d of mercy and loving kindness, it is no longer necessary to placate him by material sacrifice, to win his favor by trivial earthly gifts. Divine favor is sought rather by aspiration after and the practice of a better life.
The mighty but capricious deity gives place to the G.o.d of unfailing charity and love. One earns G.o.d's mercies by walking in the ways of the Lord. ”Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see G.o.d.... Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.”
In both Christianity and Judaism, G.o.d's grace and mercies go always to the pure in heart, and the righteous in spirit.
”What doth the Lord require of thee,” proclaims Micah, ”but to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy G.o.d?”
THE DIVINE AS THE HUMAN IDEAL. There has been in certain latter-day philosophies, a tendency to interpret the divine as the objectification of human ideals. That is, according to this theory, men have found in their imagined divinities the fulfillment of ideals that they could never have realized on earth.
Men, says this theory, long to be immortal, so they imagine G.o.ds who are. Finite man has infinite desires. In G.o.d is infinite fulfillment through eternity. No men are all good; some desire to be. Such fulfillment they find in the divine.
Our conception of G.o.d is an index of our own ideals. When men were savages, their divinity was a jealous monster. In the refinement and spiritualization of the human imagination, divinity becomes all-beautiful and all-benevolent as well as the wielder of infinite power. John Stuart Mill gives possibly the clearest expression to this att.i.tude which is, if not in the strictest sense religious, at least deeply spiritual:
Religion and poetry address themselves, at least in one of their aspects, to the same part of the human const.i.tution; they both supply the same want, that of ideal conceptions grander and more beautiful than we see realized in the prose of human life. Religion, as distinguished from poetry, is the product of the craving to know whether these imaginative conceptions have realities, answering to them in some other world than ours. The mind, in this state, eagerly catches at any rumors respecting other worlds, especially when delivered by persons whom it deems wiser than itself. To the poetry of the supernatural, comes to be thus added a positive belief and expectation, which unpoetical minds can share with the poetical. Belief in a G.o.d or G.o.ds, and in a life after death, becomes the canvas which every mind, according to its capacity, covers with such ideal pictures as it can either invent or copy. In that other life each hopes to find the good which he has failed to find on earth, or the better which is suggested to him by the good which on earth he has partially seen and known. More especially this belief supplies the finer minds with material for conceptions of beings more awful than they _can_ have known on earth, and more excellent than they probably _have_ known.[1]
[Footnote 1: Mill: _Three Essays on Religion_ (Henry Holt & Co.), pp. 103-04.]
In his religion, Mill maintains, man thus finds the fulfillment of unfulfilled desire. Religion is thus conceived as an imaginative enterprise of a very high and satisfying kind. It peoples the world with perfections, not true perhaps to actual experience, but true to man's highest aspirations. It gives man companions.h.i.+p with divinity at least in imagination.
It enables him to live, at least spiritually, in such a universe as his highest hopes and desires would have him live in, in fact.
It must be pointed out, however, that the devoutly religious do not regard their G.o.d as a beautiful fiction, but as a dear reality whom they can serenely trust and love, and whose existence is the certain faith by which they live.
THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, THEOLOGY, AND SCIENCE. It has already been pointed out that theology is the reasoned formulation of the religious experience which comes to men with varying degrees of intensity, or the revelation by which some man, a Moses or a Mohammed, has been inspired. Such a formulation has a dual importance. For the individual it brings clarity, order, and stability into his religious experience.
For the group, it makes possible the social transmission of religious conceptions and ideals.
Reason in a man's religion, as in any other experience, introduces stability, consistency, and order. It makes distinctions; it resolves doubts, confusions, and uncertainties. It is true that there have been in religion, as in politics and morals, rebels against reason. There have been mystics who preferred their warm ecstatic visions to the cold formulations and abstractions of theology. But there have been, on the other hand, those gifted or handicapped, according to one's point of view, by an insistence on reason as well as rapture in their religion. These have not been satisfied with an intuition of G.o.d. They have wished to know G.o.d, as the highest possible object of knowledge. Thus in the Middle Ages philosophy and science were regarded as the Handmaids of Theology. All was dedicated to, as nothing could be more important than, a knowledge of G.o.d. So we have, in contrast with ecstatic visions of G.o.d, the plodding a.n.a.lysis of the scholastics, the subtle and clean-cut logic by which such men as Saint Anselm sought to give form, clarity, and ultimacy to their sense of the reality of G.o.d. There has possibly nowhere in the history of thought been subtler and more thoroughgoing a.n.a.lysis than some of the mediaeval schoolmen lavished upon the clarification and demonstration of the concept of G.o.d. The necessity for reasoning upon one's sense of the reality of the divine, as it was felt by many mediaeval schoolmen, is thus stated by one historian:
Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury ... is the true type of the schoolman; firmly convinced of the truth of the dogmas and yet possessed of a strong philosophical impulse, he seeks to prove to reason what has to be accepted on authority. He bravely includes in his attempt to rationalize the faith not only such general propositions as the existence of G.o.d, but the entire church scheme of salvation, the Trinity, and Incarnation, and the Redemption of man. We must believe the Catholic doctrine--that is beyond cavil--but we should also try to understand what we believe, understand _why_ it is true.[1]
[Footnote 1: Thilly: _History of Philosophy_, p. 169.]
But theology has public as well as purely private importance.
It must not be forgotten that religion is a social habit as well as a personal activity. From primitive life down to our own day, religion has been intimately a.s.sociated with the other social activities of a people, and has indeed been one of the chief inst.i.tutions of moral and social control. Ethical standards have been until very recent times in the history of Christian Europe almost exclusively derived from religion.
Where the religious experience is of such crucial importance, it has been necessary to give it a fixed form and content which might be used to initiate the young and the outsider.
Theology, though essentially a product of reflection upon the religious experience itself, tends to incorporate extra-religious material into its system. In its demonstration of the divine order and of man's relations.h.i.+p to the divine, it incorporates both science and history. Science becomes for it the manifestation of the divine arrangements of the universe; history becomes a revelation of the divine purpose and its realization. In primitive belief science and religion are practically indistinguishable from each other. The way of the G.o.ds is the way of the universe. The attribution of personal motives to the G.o.ds was primitive man's literal and serious way of conceiving the government of the cosmos. He believed himself actually to be living in a world governed by living and personal powers, an animistic world. The myths which describe the birth and life of the G.o.ds, the creation of man, the bestowing of the gift of fire are conceived as the literal and natural history of creation.