Part 40 (1/2)
In my next lecture I will try to complete my rough description of religious experience; and in the lecture after that, which is the last one, I will try my hand at formulating conceptually the truth to which it is a witness.
Lecture XIX
OTHER CHARACTERISTICS
We have wound our way back, after our excursion through mysticism and philosophy, to where we were before: the uses of religion, its uses to the individual who has it, and the uses of the individual himself to the world, are the best arguments that truth is in it. We return to the empirical philosophy: the true is what works well, even though the qualification ”on the whole” may always have to be added. In this lecture we must revert to description again, and finish our picture of the religious consciousness by a word about some of its other characteristic elements. Then, in a final lecture, we shall be free to make a general review and draw our independent conclusions.
The first point I will speak of is the part which the aesthetic life plays in determining one's choice of a religion. Men, I said awhile ago, involuntarily intellectualize their religious experience. They need formulas, just as they need fellows.h.i.+p in wors.h.i.+p. I spoke, therefore, too contemptuously of the pragmatic uselessness of the famous scholastic list of attributes of the deity, for they have one use which I neglected to consider. The eloquent pa.s.sage in which Newman enumerates them[301] puts us on the track of it. Intoning them as he would intone a cathedral service, he shows how high is their aesthetic value. It enriches our bare piety to carry these exalted and mysterious verbal additions just as it enriches a church to have an organ and old bra.s.ses, marbles and frescoes and stained windows.
Epithets lend an atmosphere and overtones to our devotion. They are like a hymn of praise and service of glory, and may sound the more sublime for being incomprehensible. Minds like Newman's[302] grow as jealous of their credit as heathen priests are of that of the jewelry and ornaments that blaze upon their idols.
[301] Idea of a University, Discourse III. Section 7.
[302] Newman's imagination so innately craved an ecclesiastical system that he can write: ”From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion.” And again speaking of himself about the age of thirty, he writes: ”I loved to act as feeling myself in my Bishop's sight, as if it were the sight of G.o.d.” Apologia, 1897, pp. 48, 50.
Among the buildings-out of religion which the mind spontaneously indulges in, the aesthetic motive must never be forgotten. I promised to say nothing of ecclesiastical systems in these lectures. I may be allowed, however, to put in a word at this point on the way in which their satisfaction of certain aesthetic needs contributes to their hold on human nature. Although some persons aim most at intellectual purity and simplification, for others RICHNESS is the supreme imaginative requirement.[303] When one's mind is strongly of this type, an individual religion will hardly serve the purpose. The inner need is rather of something inst.i.tutional and complex, majestic in the hierarchic interrelatedness of its parts, with authority descending from stage to stage, and at every stage objects for adjectives of mystery and splendor, derived in the last resort from the G.o.dhead who is the fountain and culmination of the system. One feels then as if in presence of some vast incrusted work of jewelry or architecture; one hears the mult.i.tudinous liturgical appeal; one gets the honorific vibration coming from every quarter. Compared with such a n.o.ble complexity, in which ascending and descending movements seem in no way to jar upon stability, in which no single item, however humble, is insignificant, because so many august inst.i.tutions hold it in its place, how flat does evangelical Protestantism appear, how bare the atmosphere of those isolated religious lives whose boast it is that ”man in the bush with G.o.d may meet.”[304] What a pulverization and leveling of what a gloriously piled-up structure! To an imagination used to the perspectives of dignity and glory, the naked gospel scheme seems to offer an almshouse for a palace.
[303] The intellectual difference is quite on a par in practical importance with the a.n.a.logous difference in character. We saw, under the head of Saintliness, how some characters resent confusion and must live in purity, consistency, simplicity (above, p. 275 ff.). For others, on the contrary, superabundance, over-pressure, stimulation, lots of superficial relations, are indispensable. There are men who would suffer a very syncope if you should pay all their debts, bring it about that their engagements had been kept, their letters answered their perplexities relieved, and their duties fulfilled, down to one which lay on a clean table under their eyes with nothing to interfere with its immediate performance. A day stripped so staringly bare would be for them appalling. So with ease, elegance, tributes of affection, social recognitions--some of us require amounts of these things which to others would appear a ma.s.s of lying and sophistication.
[304] In Newman's Lectures on Justification Lecture VIII. Section 6, there is a splendid pa.s.sage expressive of this aesthetic way of feeling the Christian scheme. It is unfortunately too long to quote.
It is much like the patriotic sentiment of those brought up in ancient empires. How many emotions must be frustrated of their object, when one gives up the t.i.tles of dignity, the crimson lights and blare of bra.s.s, the gold embroidery, the plumed troops, the fear and trembling, and puts up with a president in a black coat who shakes hands with you, and comes, it may be, from a ”home” upon a veldt or prairie with one sitting-room and a Bible on its centre-table. It pauperizes the monarchical imagination!
The strength of these aesthetic sentiments makes it rigorously impossible, it seems to me, that Protestantism, however superior in spiritual profundity it may be to Catholicism, should at the present day succeed in making many converts from the more venerable ecclesiasticism. The latter offers a so much richer pasturage and shade to the fancy, has so many cells with so many different kinds of honey, is so indulgent in its multiform appeals to human nature, that Protestantism will always show to Catholic eyes the almshouse physiognomy. The bitter negativity of it is to the Catholic mind incomprehensible. To intellectual Catholics many of the antiquated beliefs and practices to which the Church gives countenance are, if taken literally, as childish as they are to Protestants. But they are childish in the pleasing sense of ”childlike”--innocent and amiable, and worthy to be smiled on in consideration of the undeveloped condition of the dear people's intellects. To the Protestant, on the contrary, they are childish in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods.
He must stamp out their delicate and lovable redundancy, leaving the Catholic to shudder at his literalness. He appears to the latter as morose as if he were some hard-eyed, numb, monotonous kind of reptile.
The two will never understand each other--their centres of emotional energy are too different. Rigorous truth and human nature's intricacies are always in need of a mutual interpreter.[305] So much for the aesthetic diversities in the religious consciousness.
[305] Compare the informality of Protestantism, where the ”meek lover of the good,” alone with his G.o.d, visits the sick, etc., for their own sakes, with the elaborate ”business” that goes on in Catholic devotion, and carries with it the social excitement of all more complex businesses. An essentially worldly-minded Catholic woman can become a visitor of the sick on purely coquettish principles, with her confessor and director, her ”merit” storing up, her patron saints, her privileged relation to the Almighty, drawing his attention as a professional devote, her definite ”exercises,” and her definitely recognized social pose in the organization.
In most books on religion, three things are represented as its most essential elements. These are Sacrifice, Confession, and Prayer. I must say a word in turn of each of these elements, though briefly.
First of Sacrifice.
Sacrifices to G.o.ds are omnipresent in primeval wors.h.i.+p; but, as cults have grown refined, burnt offerings and the blood of he-goats have been superseded by sacrifices more spiritual in their nature. Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism get along without ritual sacrifice; so does Christianity, save in so far as the notion is preserved in transfigured form in the mystery of Christ's atonement. These religions subst.i.tute offerings of the heart, renunciations of the inner self, for all those vain oblations. In the ascetic practices which Islam, Buddhism, and the older Christianity encourage we see how indestructible is the idea that sacrifice of some sort is a religious exercise. In lecturing on asceticism I spoke of its significance as symbolic of the sacrifices which life, whenever it is taken strenuously, calls for.[306] But, as I said my say about those, and as these lectures expressly avoid earlier religious usages and questions of derivation, I will pa.s.s from the subject of Sacrifice altogether and turn to that of Confession.
[306] Above, p. 354 ff.
In regard to Confession I will also be most brief, saying my word about it psychologically, not historically. Not nearly as widespread as sacrifice, it corresponds to a more inward and moral stage of sentiment. It is part of the general system of purgation and cleansing which one feels one's self in need of, in order to be in right relations to one's deity. For him who confesses, shams are over and realities have begun; he has exteriorized his rottenness. If he has not actually got rid of it, he at least no longer smears it over with a hypocritical show of virtue--he lives at least upon a basis of veracity. The complete decay of the practice of confession in Anglo-Saxon communities is a little hard to account for. Reaction against popery is of course the historic explanation, for in popery confession went with penances and absolution, and other inadmissible practices. But on the {453} side of the sinner himself it seems as if the need ought to have been too great to accept so summary a refusal of its satisfaction. One would think that in more men the sh.e.l.l of secrecy would have had to open, the pent-in abscess to burst and gain relief, even though the ear that heard the confession were unworthy.
The Catholic church, for obvious utilitarian reasons, has subst.i.tuted auricular confession to one priest for the more radical act of public confession. We English-speaking Protestants, in the general self-reliance and unsociability of our nature, seem to find it enough if we take G.o.d alone into our confidence.[307]
[307] A fuller discussion of confession is contained in the excellent work by Frank Granger: The Soul of a Christian, London, 1900, ch. xii.
The next topic on which I must comment is Prayer--and this time it must be less briefly. We have heard much talk of late against prayer, especially against prayers for better weather and for the recovery of sick people. As regards prayers for the sick, if any medical fact can be considered to stand firm, it is that in certain environments prayer may contribute to recovery, and should be encouraged as a therapeutic measure. Being a normal factor of moral health in the person, its omission would be deleterious. The case of the weather is different.