Part 11 (1/2)
But, chief among the causes why savage religion has been so misrepresented, is the almost universal co-existence of a popularized form of religion addressed to the imagination, with that which speaks to the understanding alone. As has already been said, man's imagination is at war with his intelligence when supersensible realities, such as G.o.d and the soul, are in question. Without figures we cannot think; yet the timeless and s.p.a.celess world can ill be figured after the likeness of things limited by time and s.p.a.ce. This mental law is the secret of the invariable a.s.sociation of mythology with religion. Setting aside the problem as to how the truths of natural religion (_sc._ that there is a G.o.d the rewarder of them that seek Him) are first brought home to man, it is certain that if he does not receive them embedded in history or parable, in spoken or enacted symbolism, he will soon fix and record them in some such language for himself. Christ recognized the necessity of speaking to the mult.i.tude in parables, not attempting to precise or define the indefinable; but contenting Himself with: ”The Kingdom of Heaven is _like_,” &c. ”I am content,” says Sir Thomas Browne, ”to understand a mystery without a rigid definition, in an easie and Platonick description,” and it is only through such easie and Platonick descriptions that spiritual truth can slowly be filtered into the popular mind. Still when we consider how p.r.o.ne all metaphors are to be pressed inexactly, either too far, or else not far enough, how abundant a source they are of misapprehension, owing to the curiosity that will not be content to have the gold in the ore, but must needs vainly strive to refine it out, we can well understand how mythology tends to corrupt and debase religion if it be not continually watched and weeded; and how, being, from the nature of the case, ever to the front, ever on men's lips and mingling with their lives, it should seem to the outsider to be not the imperfect garment of religion, but a subst.i.tute for it.
Yet in some sense these mythologies are a safeguard of reverence in that they provide a theme for humour and profanity and rough handling, which is thus expended, not on the sacred realities themselves, but on their shadows and images. Among certain savages G.o.d's personal name is too holy to be breathed but in mysteries; yet His mythological subst.i.tute is represented to be as grotesque, freakish, and immoral as the Zeus of the populace. We can hardly enter into such a frame of mind, though possibly the irreverences and buffooneries of some of the miracle-plays of the middle ages are similarly to be explained as the rebound from the strain incident to a continual sense of the nearness of the supernatural; and perhaps the _Messer Domeniddio_ of the Florentines stood rather for a mental effigy that might be played with, than for the reasoned conception of the dread Deity. If we possessed a minutely elaborated history of the Good Shepherd and His adventures, or of the Prodigal's father, or of the Good Samaritan, interspersed with all manner of ludicrous and profane incidents, and losing sight of the original purport of the figure, we should have something like a mythology. Were it not stereotyped as part of an inspired record, the mere romancing tendency of the imagination would easily have added continually to the original parable, wholly forgetful of its spiritual significance.
It is part of the very economy of the Incarnation to meet this weakness, to provide for this want of the human mind; to satisfy the imagination as well as the intelligence. Here Divine truth has received a Divine embodiment, has been set forth in the language of deeds, in a real and not in a fict.i.tious history. Sacrifice and sacrament, and every kind of natural religious symbolism, has been appropriated and consecrated to the service of truth and to the fullest utterance of G.o.d that such weak accents will stretch to. Here the channel of communication between Heaven and earth is not of man's creation but of G.o.d's; or at least is of G.o.d's composition. This is the great difference between the ethnic religions and a religion that professes to be revealed--that is, spoken by G.o.d and put into language by Him. The latter is, so to say, cased in an incorruptible body, its very expression being chosen and sealed for ever with Divine approval, and rescued from the fluent and unstable condition of religions whose clothes are the works of men's hands. Here it is that Catholic Christianity stands out as altogether catholic and human, adapted as it is to the world-wide cravings of the religious instinct; satisfying the imagination and the emotions, no less than the intellect and the will; and yet saving us from the perils of the myth-making tendency of our mind.
The same thought is pressed upon us when we view the collective evidence as to the universal demand for a mediatorial system--for intercessors, and patrons, for a heavenly court surrounding the Heavenly Monarch; a demand often created by and tending to a degradation of purer religion, yet most surely embodying and expressing a spiritual instinct which is only fully explained and satisfied by the Catholic doctrine of the communion of saints and souls in one great society, labouring for a conjoint salvation and beat.i.tude. We Catholics know well enough that the degraded and superst.i.tious will pervert saint-wors.h.i.+p as they pervert other good things to their own hurt and to G.o.d's dishonour, but we also know that of itself the doctrine of the Heavenly Court is altogether in the interests of the very highest and purest religion. In all this matter, needless to say, Mr. Lang is not with us; but the affinities of Catholicism with universal religion, which he marks to our prejudice, are really in some sort proof of our contention that the Church is the divinely conceived fulfilment of all man's natural religious instincts, providing harmless and healthy outlets for humours otherwise dangerous and morbid; never forgetful of man's double nature and its claims, neither wearying him with an impossible intellectualism--a religion of pure philosophy--not suffering him to be the prey of mere imagination and sentiment, but tempering the divine and human, the thought and the word, so as to bring all his faculties under the yoke of Christ.
Mr. Lang's concern is with the universality of belief in G.o.d the Rewarder, not with its origin nor even its value; though he seems at times to imply that the solution may be found in a primitive revelation of some sort. For ourselves, accordant as such a notion would be with popular Christian tradition, we do not think that the adduced evidence needs that hypothesis; but is explained sufficiently by ”the hypothesis of St. Paul,” which, as Mr. Lang admits, ”seem not the most unsatisfactory.” The mere verbal tradition of a primitive ”deposit” not committed to any authorized guardians would, to say the least, be a hazardous and conjectural way of accounting for the facts; nor is there any evidence offered to show that such religious beliefs are held, as the Catholic religion is, on the authority of antiquity, interpreted by a living voice. The substance of this elementary religion--the existence of G.o.d the Rewarder of them that seek Him--is naturally suggested to the simple-minded by the data of unspoilt conscience, confirmed and supplemented by the spectacle of Nature. That the truth would be borne-in on a solitary and isolated soul we need not maintain; for in solitude and isolation man is not man, and neither reason nor language can develop aright. Further we may allow that as Nature or G.o.d provides for society, and therefore for individuals, by an equal distribution of gifts and talents, giving some to be politicians, others poets, others philosophers, others inventors, so He gives to some what might be called natural religious genius or talent or spiritual insight, for the benefit of the community. Thus whatever be true of the individual savage, we cannot well suppose that any tribe or people, taken collectively, should fail to draw the fundamental truths of religion from the data of conscience and nature. In this sense no doubt they would become traditional--the common property of all--so that the innate facility of each individual mind in regard to them would be stimulated and supplemented by suggestion from without.
How far G.o.d can be said actually to ”speak” to the soul through conscience or through Nature so as to make faith, in the strict sense of reliance on the word of another, possible, is for theologians to discuss. If besides expressing these truths in creation or in conscience, He also expresses in some way His intention to reveal them to the particular soul, we have all that is requisite. In what way, or innumerable ways He makes His voice heard in every human heart day by day, and causes general truths to be brought near and recognized and received as a particular message, each can answer best for himself.
But undoubtedly the results of comparative religion are, so far, almost entirely favourable to the doctrine of G.o.d's all-saving will; and in many other points confirmatory of received beliefs. Even where, for example, in the question of the origin and meaning of sacrifice, they seem to necessitate a modification of the somewhat elaborate _a priori_ definition, popular in some modern schools (though not in them all), yet that modification is altogether favourable to the sounder conception of the Eucharistic Sacrifice as a food-offering complementary to the Sacrifice of the Cross. Above all it is in bringing out the unity of type between natural ethnic religions, and that revealed Catholic religion which is their correction and fulfilment, that the studies of Mr. Lang and Mr. Jevons are of such service. The militant Protestant delights to dwell on the a.n.a.logies between Romanism and Paganism; we too may dwell on them with delight, as evidence of that substantial unity of the human mind which underlies all surface diversities of mode and language, and binds together, as children of one family, all who believe in G.o.d the Rewarder of them that seek Him, who is no respecter of persons. What man in his darkness and sinfulness has feebly been trying to utter in every nation from the beginning, that G.o.d has formulated and written down for him in the great Catholic religion of the Word made Flesh--
Which he may read that binds the sheaf Or builds the house, or digs the grave, And those wild eyes that watch the wave In roarings round the coral reef.
True, even could it be established beyond all doubt that belief in the one G.o.d were universal among rude and uncultivated races, this would not add any new proof to the truth of religion, unless it could be shown that it was really an instinctive, inwritten judgment, and not one of those many natural fallacies into which all men fall until they are educated out of them. Still, for those who do not need conviction on this point, it is no slight consolation to be a.s.sured that simplicity and savagery do not shut men out from the truths best worth knowing; that even where the earthen vessel is most corrupted, the heavenly treasure is not altogether lost; that it is only those who deliberately go in search of obscurities who need stumble. It was not the crowds of pagandom that St. Paul censured, but the philosophers. G.o.d made man's feet for the earth, and not for the tight-rope. Whatever be the truth about Idealism, man is by nature a Realist; and similarly he is by nature a theist, until he has studiously learnt to balance himself in the non-natural pose.
Will a man be excused for deliberately das.h.i.+ng his foot against a stone because forsooth he has persuaded himself with Zeno, that there is no such thing as motion; or with Berkeley, that the externality of the world is a delusion; or will he be pardoned in his unbelief because he could not justify by philosophy the truth which conscience and nature are dinning into his ears: that there is a G.o.d the Rewarder of them that seek Him?
_Sept. Oct._ 1898.
Footnotes:
[Footnote 1: ”A hysterical fit indicates a lamentable instability of the nervous system. But it is by no means certain _a priori_ that every symptom of that instability, without exception, will be of a degenerative kind. The nerve-storm, with its unwonted agitations, may possibly lay bare some deep-lying capacity in us which could scarcely otherwise have come to light. Recent experiments on both sensation and memory in certain abnormal states have added plausibility to this view, and justify us in holding that in spite of its frequent a.s.sociation with hysteria, ecstasy is not necessarily in itself a morbid symptom.”
(F.W.H. Myers, _Tennyson as a Prophet_.)]
[Footnote 2: _The Retreat_. By Henry Vaughan.]
XXII.
ADAPTABILITY AS A PROOF OF RELIGION.
Much as we may think of the abstract and objective value of the treatise _De vera religione_, which forms the usual introduction to those _cursus theologici_ whose multiplication of late has been so remarkable, it can hardly be denied that its cogency is much diminished for the large number of those thinkers who repudiate the philosophical presuppositions upon which that treatise rests. As long as negation halted before that minimum of religious truth which is in some way accessible to reason,--before belief in G.o.d and in immortality; as long as the principles and methods of proof by which ”natural theology” reached its conclusion were admitted even by those who denied those conclusions, an apologetic such as we are speaking of had an undoubted practical value--not indeed as sufficing to bring conviction to the unwilling or ill-disposed, not as a cause of faith, but as removing an obstacle which existed in the supposed incompatibility of revealed truth with these same rational principles and processes.
Apart from this preparation of the intellect, to which perhaps the name ”apologetic” should be more strictly reserved, a prior and more important need was the disposing of the will and affections to the acceptance of the truth. For, in a very real sense, love is the root of faith; and the wish that a thing should be true, not only stimulates the mind to inquire and investigate, but also creates a fear of self-deception and a spirit of incredulity which is the fruitful parent of intellectual difficulties.
Such an appeal to the affections is really outside the province of theological science and belongs rather to the rhetorician, the poet, or the prophet. Yet it was a work at all times needful for the extension and maintenance of the faith, in even a greater degree than the more dispensable preparation of the intellect. For the great mult.i.tude of men who are innocent of any really independent thought, who professedly or unconsciously take all their beliefs from some individual or society, there is really no need of scientific apologetic--the sole need being to win or maintain their confidence, their loyalty, their reverence, in regard to some teacher or leader, to Christ or the Church.
It was only towards the close of last century when scepticism was beginning to reach the very root from which the Christian apologetic sprang, and the former philosophic methods had themselves fallen in disrepute, that the necessity of accommodating the remedy to the disease began to be recognized here and there, and of framing an argument that would appeal to the perverse and erratic mind of the day, rather than to an abstract and perfectly normal mind, which, if it existed, would ”need no repentance.” That a given medicine is the best, avails nothing if it be not also one which the patient is willing to take. If a man has closed his teeth against everything that savours of scholasticism, we must either abandon him or else see if there be any among the methods he will submit to, which may in any wise serve our purpose. And, indeed, among the jangle of philosophies there is surely in all something that is a common heritage of the human mind, a unity which a little skill can detect lurking under that diversity of form which unfortunately it is the delight of most men to emphasize. To suppose that Christianity is pledged to more than this common substratum which none deny, except through verbal confusion, that there is no road to faith but through what is peculiar to scholasticism, or that my first step in converting a man to Christ must be to convert him to Aristotle, is about as intelligent as to suppose that because the Church has adopted Latin as her official language she means to discredit every other.
It was then with a view of meeting the exigencies of the world as it is, not as it might or ought to have been, that such a work as the _Genie du Christianisme_ strove to find an apologetic in what previously had been regarded as outside the domain of theology and more properly the concern of the preacher. The beauty, the solace, the adaptation to our higher needs of Christian teaching had been one thing; its truth, quite another. By dilating eloquently on the first, men might be won to the love of such an ideal, to wish that it might be true; and then disposed to profit by the distinct and independent labours of the apologist whose theme was, not the utility or beauty of the Catholic religion, but solely its truth.
But now that the ”scholastic” [1] apologetic was in disgrace with all but those who stood least in need of it, some more acceptable method had to be sought out, and amongst many others there was that of Chateaubriand, which strove to find an argument for the intellect in the very appeal which Christianity made to the will and affections. Because a religion is fair and much to be desired, because, if true, it would give unity and meaning to man's higher cravings, and turn human life from a senseless chaos into an intelligible whole, therefore, and for this reason, it _is_ true.
It is hardly wonderful that such a method should incur the charge of sentimentalism. ”It would be so nice to believe it, therefore it must be true,” sounds like a shameless abandonment of reasonableness. The fact that a belief is ”consoling,” quite independently of its truth or falsehood, creates a bias towards its acceptance. That it is pleasant to believe oneself very clever and competent will incline one to that belief until something important depends, not on our thinking ourselves so, but on our being so. Before an examination, the wish to succeed will make me sceptical about my prospects, much as I should like to think them the brightest; afterwards, when self-deception can only console and can do no harm, I shall be credulous of any flattery that is offered me.
In one case, my interest depends upon the facts, and therefore the wish to believe makes me critical and even sceptical; in the other, on my belief concerning the facts, and the wish to believe, makes me uncritical and credulous.
It was seemingly a bold and hazardous venture to justify this same credulity, and to affirm that an argument could be drawn from the wish to believe in just those cases where its influence would seem most suspicious; yet this was practically what the new apologetic amounted to. It was an argument from the utility of beliefs to their truth; from the fact that certain subjective convictions produced good results, to the correspondence of such convictions with objective reality. The advantages to the individual and to society of a firm belief in G.o.d the righteous Judge, in the sanction of eternal reward and penalty, in the eventual adjustment of all inequalities, in the reversible character of sin through repentance, in the divine authority of conscience, of Christianity, of the Catholic Church, are to a great extent independent of the truth of those beliefs. No amount of hypnotic suggestion will enable a man to subsist upon cinders, under the belief that they are a very nutritious diet; for the effect depends upon their actual nature, and not wholly upon his belief concerning their nature; but the salutary fear of h.e.l.l or hope of Heaven, depends not on the existence of either state, but on our belief in its existence. The fact that the denial of these and many similar beliefs would bring chaos into our spiritual and moral life, that it would extinguish hopes which often alone make life bearable, that it would issue for society at large in such a grey, meaningless, uninspired existence as Mr. F. W. Myers prognosticates in his admirable essay on ”The Disillusionment of France,” [2] all this and much more makes it our interest, if not our duty, to cling to such convictions at all costs. ”If these things are not true, it might be said, then life is chaos; and if life be chaos, what does truth matter?