CHAPTER X [p194]
HIGH RELIGION AND THE MODERN WORLD
1. _Popular Religion and the Great Teachers_
In popular thought it is taken for granted that to be religious is to accept in some form or other the theocratic view that God governs the universe. If that assumption is correct then the orthodox who inveigh against the godlessness of contemporary thought and the militant atheists who rejoice in this godlessness are both right when they insist that religion is disappearing. Insofar as religion is identical with a belief in theocracy, it has indeed lost much of its reality for modern men.
There is little doubt, I think, that popular religion has been always and everywhere theocratic in principle. If, then, we are to define as religion that which the overwhelming majority of mankind have cherished, it would be necessary to concede at once that the dissolution of the belief in a supernatural government of human affairs is a dissolution of religion itself. But if that is conceded, then it is necessary to concede also that many whom the world recognizes as its greatest religious teachers were not themselves religious men. For it could be demonstrated, I think, that in the central intuition of Aristotle, of the author of the Fourth Gospel, of Buddha, of Spinoza, to name only originating minds, the theocratic principle is irrelevant. No one of these teachers held the belief, [p195] which is at the heart of theocratic religion, that the relationship between God and man is somehow analogous with that of a king to his subjects, that the relationship is in any sense a transaction between personalities involving, however subtly, a quid pro quo, that God’s will and the human will are interacting forces.
In place of the popular conception of religion as a matter of commandments and obedience, reward and punishment, in a word, as a form of government, these great teachers placed their emphasis upon the conversion, the education, and the discipline of the human will. Such beliefs as they had about God were not in the nature of oaths of allegiance to a superior; their concern was not to placate the will of God but to alter the will of man. This alteration of the human will they conceived as good not because God commands it, but because it is intrinsically good for man, because by the test of experience it yields happiness, serenity, whole-heartedness. Belief is not, as it is in popular religion, an act which by creating a claim upon divinity insures man’s salvation; the force of belief, as Mr. Whitehead has put it, is in “cleansing the inward parts.” Thus religion becomes “the art and the theory of the internal life of man, so far as it depends on the man himself and on what is permanent in the nature of things.”
The difference between religion conceived as the art and theory of the internal life of man and religion conceived as cosmic government is the great difference between the religion of these great sages and the religion of the multitude. Though in matters of this kind the distinction is not always absolutely clear in every case, [p196] on the whole it cannot be disputed, I believe, that the difference is real and of fundamental importance. If we observe popular religions as they are administered by ecclesiastical establishments, it is overwhelmingly plain that their main appeal rests upon the belief that through their offices the devout are able to obtain eternal salvation, and even earthly favors, from an invisible king. But if we observe truly, I think, we shall see also that side by side with the popular religion, sometimes in open conflict with it, sometimes in outward conformity with it, there is generally to be found in cultivated communities a minority to whom religion is primarily a reconditioning of their own souls. They may be mystics like Eckhart, they may be platonists like Origen or Dean Inge, they may be protestants like St. Augustine and Luther in certain phases of their thought, they may be humanists like Erasmus and Montaigne; as of Confucius, it may be said of them that “the subjects on which the Master did not talk were: extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings.” They may be inside the churches or outside them, but in intention, in the inner meaning of their religion, they are wholly at variance with the popular creeds. For in one form or another they reject the idea of attaining salvation by placating God; in one form or another they regard salvation as a condition of the soul which is reached only by some kind of self-discipline.
It must be obvious that religion, conceived in this way, “as the art and theory of the internal life of man,” is not dissolved by what I have been calling the acids of modernity. It is the popular religion which is dissolved. [p197] But just because this vast dissolution is destroying the disposition to believe in a theocratic government of the universe, just because men no longer find it wholly credible that their affairs are subject to the ordinances of a heavenly king, just because they no longer vividly believe in an invisible power which regulates their lives, judges them, and sustains them, their only hope of salvation lies in a religion which provides an internal discipline.
The real effect of modernity upon religion, therefore, is to make the religion which was once the possession of an aristocracy of the spirit the only possible kind of religion for all modern men.
2. _The Aristocratic Principle_
To those who want salvation cheap, and most men do, there is very little comfort to be had out of the great teachers. Spinoza might have been speaking for all of them when he said:
If the way which I have pointed out ... seems exceedingly hard, it may nevertheless be discovered. Needs must it be hard, since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.
But why, we may ask, is salvation by almost all men neglected? The answer is that they do not desire that which they have never learned to desire. “One cannot,” as Voltaire said, “desire that which one does not know.” Can a man love good wine when he has drunk nothing but ginger beer? Did we have naturally and instinctively [p198] a taste for that which constitutes the happiness of the saved, we should already be saved, and their happiness would be ours. We lack the taste, which is, I suppose, another way of saying what the theologians meant when they spoke of original sin. To be saved, in the sense which the sages had in mind, is by conversion, education, and self-discipline to have achieved a certain quality and harmony of the passions. Then the good life is possible. But although men have often heard this said, and have read about it, unless in some measure they already desire it, the whole teaching remains mere words and abstractions which are high, cold, and remote. As long as they feel that the way to happiness is through a will other than their own, and that somehow events can in this fashion be made to yield to their unregenerate wishes, in this world or another, the wisdom of the sages will not touch their hearts, and the way which is pointed out will be neglected.
Wisdom will seem inhuman. In a sense it is inhuman, for it is so uncommon. Those who have it speak a strange language, of which the words perhaps have a familiar sound, but the meaning is too high and abstract; their delights are strange delights, and unfathomable, like a passion which we have never known. And if we encounter them in their lives or in their writings, they seem to us a mixture of grandeur and queerness. For they are at once more deeply at home in the world than the transients who make up most of mankind; yet, because of the quality of their passions, they are not wholly of the world as the worldling understands it. But unless the worldling is entirely without the capacity to transcend himself, he is [p199] bound in such an encounter to catch a glimpse now and then of an experience where there is a serenity he himself has never known, a peace that passes his understanding, an ecstasy exquisite and without regret, and happiness so clarified that it seems like brilliant and kindly light.
Yet no teacher has ever appeared in the world who was wise enough to know how to teach his wisdom to all mankind. In fact, the great teachers have attempted nothing so utopian. They were quite well aware how difficult for most men is wisdom, and they have confessed frankly that the perfect life was for a select few. It is arguable, in fact, that the very idea of teaching the highest wisdom to all men is the recent notion of a humanitarian and romantically democratic age, and that it is quite foreign to the thought of the greatest teachers. Gautama Buddha, for example, abolished caste within the religious order which he founded, and declared that the path to Nirvana was open to the lowest outcast as well as to the proudest Brahman. But it was necessary to enter the order and submit to its stringent discipline. It is obvious that Buddha never believed that very many could or would do that. Jesus, whom we are accustomed to think of as wholly catholic in his sympathies, spoke the bitter words: “Give not what is holy to the dogs and cast not your pearls before swine.” In Mohammedanism that which is mystical is esoteric: “all those emotions are meant only for a small number of chosen ones ... even some of the noblest minds in Islam restrict true religious life to an aristocracy, and accept the ignorance of the multitude as an irremediable evil.”
There is an aristocratic principle in all the religions [p200] which have attained wide acceptance. It is significant that Jesus was content to leave the governance of the mass of men to Caesar, and that he created no organization during his lifetime beyond the appointment of the Apostles. It is significant, because it shows how much more he was concerned with the few who could be saved than with arranging the affairs of the mass of mankind. Plato, who was a more systematic teacher than either Jesus or Buddha, did work out an elaborate social order which took account not only of the philosophers, but of all the citizens of the state. But in that very attempt he rested upon the premise that most men will not attain the good life, and that for them it is necessary to institute the laws. “The worthy disciples of philosophy will be but a small remnant,” he said, “... the guardian ... must be required to take the longer circuit, and toil at learning as well as at gymnastics, or he will never reach the highest knowledge of all which is his proper calling.”
Perhaps because they looked upon the attempts as hopeless, perhaps because they did not know how to go about it, perhaps because they were so wise, the greatest teachers have never offered their full wisdom to the multitude. Like Mr. Valiant-for-truth in _The Pilgrim’s Progress_ they said: “My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it.”
3. _The Peculiarity of the Modern Situation_
But because the teaching of the sages was incomprehensible, the multitude, impressed but also bewildered, ignored them as teachers and worshipped them as gods. [p201] In their wisdom the people were not interested, but in the legends of their power, which rumor created, there was something understandable. And thus, the religions which have been organized around the names of great spiritual teachers have been popular in proportion, one might almost say, to the degree in which the original insight into the necessity for conversion and self-discipline has been reduced to a system of commands and promises which the common man can understand.
For popular religion is suited to the capacities of the unconverted. The adherents of a popular religion necessarily include an enormous number of people who are too young, or too feeble, too dull or too violent, too unstable or too incurious, to have any comprehension whatsoever of anything but the simplest scheme of rewards and punishments. An organized religion cannot neglect them if it has any pretensions to being universal. The great ecclesiastical establishments have often sheltered spiritual lives, and drawn new vitality from them. But fundamentally the great churches are secular institutions; they are governments preoccupied inevitably with the regulation of the unregenerate appetites of mankind. In their scriptures there is to be found the teaching that true salvation depends upon internal reform of desire. But since this reform is so very difficult, in practice the churches have devoted themselves not so much to making real conversions, as to governing the dispositions of the unconverted multitude.
They are immensely engaged by the task of administering their moral codes, persuading their congregations with promises, and threatening them with punishments [p202] if they do not keep their childish lusts within bounds. The fact that they use rewards and punishments, and appeal even to Caesar, is evidence enough that they are dealing with the unconverted. The fact that they invoke authority is in itself evidence that they are speaking to the naive. The fact that they pretend to have certain knowledge about the constitution of the universe is evidence that they are interested in those who are not wise enough to understand the limitations of knowledge. For to the few who are converted, goodness is pleasant, and needs no sanctions. It needs no authority, for it has been verified by experience. But when men have to be coerced into goodness, it is plain that they do not care for it.
Now although the great teachers saw clearly enough the difference between the popular religion and their own insight, they were under no great compulsion to try and overcome it. They accepted the fact that the true religion was esoteric and for the few. They saw that it demanded the re-education of desire, but they had no systematic and tested knowledge of how new habits can be formed. Invincible as was their insight into the principle of happiness, they were compelled to depend upon introspection, and to generalize from a limited observation. They understood that the good life was in some degree an acquired disposition; they were aware that it is not easily or naively acquired.
For those who somehow had the disposition, the teachers instituted stern disciplines which were really primitive experiments in the re-education of desire. But there was no very urgent practical need which impelled them to search for ways of making disciplines more [p203] widely available. Those who submitted to them were in general individuals who were already out of the ordinary. The mass of mankind lived solidly within the framework of custom and the psychological compulsions of theocracy. There was no pressing reason, as there is to-day, now that this ancestral order is dissolved, why anyone should seek to formulate a mode of life by which ordinary men, thrown upon their own resources, can find their way without supernatural rules, commands, punishments, and compensations. In the past there were a few men here and there who had somehow, for reasons which we do not understand, outgrown the ancestral society in which they lived. But the society itself remained. It sheltered them. And it ruled the many.
The peculiarity of our modern situation is that multitudes, instead of a few, are compelled to make radical and original adjustments. These multitudes, though they have lost the ancient certainties, have not outgrown the needs to which they ministered. They need to believe, but they cannot. They need to be commanded, but they cannot find a commander. They need support, and there is none. Their situation is adult, but their dispositions are not. The religion of the spirit would suit their needs, but it would seem to be beyond their powers.
4. _The Stone Which the Builders Rejected_
The way of life which I have called high religion has in all ages seemed so unapproachably high that it has been reserved for a voluntary aristocracy of the spirit. It has, in fact, been looked upon not only as a kind of splendid idiosyncrasy of a few men here and there, but [p204] as incompatible, in essence, with the practical conditions under which life is lived. It is for these reasons, no doubt, that the practice of high religion has almost invariably been associated either with a solitary asceticism or with a specially organized life in monastic establishments. High religion has been regarded as something separate from the main concerns of mankind.
It is not difficult to see why this was so if we realize that the insight into the value of disinterestedness, which is the core of high religion, was not a sudden discovery nor a complete one, anywhere or any time. Like all other things associated with evolutionary man, this insight must have had very crude beginnings; it would be possible to show, I think, that there have been many tentative and partial perceptions of it which, under the clarifying power of men of genius, have at times become coherent. When we remember that we are dealing with an insight into the qualities of a matured personality, there is no reason to suppose that the full significance of this insight has ever been completely exhausted. It seems far more likely that the sages demonstrated the existence of the realm of the spirit, but that it still remains to be thoroughly explored.
If that is true then the attempt to live by these partial insights must necessarily have presented inordinate practical difficulties. Pythagoras, for example, seems to have grasped the idea that the disinterested study of mathematics and music was cleansing to the passions and also that in order to be disinterested it was necessary to have purity of mind. So when he established his society in Southern Italy he evidently attempted to combine the [p205] serious pursuit of science with an ascetic discipline. But the pursuit of science was too much for the mass of the faithful who assumed that “to follow Pythagoras meant to go barefoot and to abstain from animal flesh and beans.” And this in turn was too much for the dignity of the learned who proceeded to dissociate themselves from the disciplinary aspect of the Pythagorean teaching. It is a fair conclusion, I think, that the breakdown of this early experiment must have been due fundamentally to the fact that Pythagoras could not have known any tested method either of equipping his followers to appreciate science or anything beside a crude asceticism as a means of moral discipline. If this is true, then the reason for the failure lay in the fact that though the original insight was marvelously good, it was not implemented with the necessary technical knowledge for applying it. Only a few, we may suppose, who were already by the accidents of nature and nurture suited to the Pythagorean ideal, can ever have successfully applied it.
In the Christian pursuit of the higher religious life the practical difficulties presented themselves in a different way. In its beginning Christianity was a sect of obscure men and women who were out of touch with the intellectual interests of the Roman world. They were persecuted aliens both in Palestine and elsewhere, and they came to the conclusion that the Roman Empire and all its concerns was the Kingdom of Satan. This, together with the widespread belief in the Second Coming of Christ, dissociated the Christian life at the outset from the life of the world. Later on, when Christianity became the official religion of the Empire, and the Church a great [p206] secular institution which concerned itself with government and property and diplomacy and war, those who wished to live as nearly as possible according to the original meaning of the Gospels were quite evidently compelled to withdraw and live a separated life. “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.”
Although for some centuries the monasteries were the centers of what learning there was, the impressions left by monasticism on mankind seems to have been that the highest type of religious life is not disinterested in human affairs, but uninterested; that it requires not merely the renunciation of worldly desires, but of the world itself. The insight was imperfect, and therefore as an example to mankind the practice was abortive and confusing. Yet only an uncomprehending person can fail to see that the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience proceeded from a profound, if partial, understanding of human nature and its most perfect harmony. Plainly all manner of disorder both in society and in the individual result from greed, uncontrollable sexual desire, arrogance, and imperiousness. That was so plain to the early Christians, and on the other hand it was so little plain how those powerful passions could be civilized, that the monastics in effect gave up and attempted to excise them entirely from their natures. In this they did not succeed.
Had they known any way of curing the fever of human [p207] passion except by attempting to excise it, the insight of high religion would have had some practicable meaning for those who did not withdraw from the world. But no way was known, and therefore the practice of high religion had to mean separation from human society and violence to human nature. But why was there no other way known of overcoming the chaos of the passions? Was it because there is no other way? If that were so then the world is as hopeless as the early Christians thought it was; indeed it is more hopeless because it does not show any signs, as they believed, of coming to an end. Was it because the early Christian Fathers were not wise enough to discover a way? It is always a good rule, I think, to discard any idea based on the premise that the best minds of another age were congenitally inferior to our own. My conviction is that necessity is the mother of discovery and invention, and that the reason why the insight of high religion and the methods of practicing it were so imperfectly developed, is that there was no practical necessity for developing them.
The mass of men lived in an ancestral order which was regulated by custom and authority, and made endurable by usage and compensatory consolations. The organic quality of that society into which they fitted took care of their passions; those who had outgrown such a society, or were so constituted that they did not fit it, were the exceptions. From them came the insight of high religion; for them a separated life was a possible solution of their personal problems. There was nothing in the nature of things to compel men to work out a way of life, I won’t say for all men, but at least for many men, by which [p208] they could govern their own natures. Behind any such effort there would almost certainly have to be an urgent need. For the inertia of the human race is immense.
It is my thesis that because the acids of modernity have dissolved the adjustments of the ancestral order, there exists to-day on a scale never before experienced by mankind and of an urgency without a parallel, the need for that philosophy of life of which the insight of high religion is a prophecy. For it is immature and unregenerate desire which creates the disorders and the frustrations that confound us. The preoccupation of the popular religion has been to find a way of governing these disorders and of compensating for their frustrations. The preoccupation of high religion is with the regeneration of the passions that create the disorders and the frustrations. Insofar as modernity has dissolved the power of the popular religion to govern and to compensate, the need for a high religion which regenerates becomes imperative, and what was once a kind of spiritual luxury of the few has, under modern conditions, become an urgent necessity of the many. The insight of high religion which has hitherto indicated a kind of bypath into rare experiences is now a trail which the leaders of mankind are compelled to take.
There is implied in this a radical displacement in the field of morals. The main interest of the practical moralist in the past has been to interpret, administer, and enforce a moral code. He knew what was right. The populace acknowledged that he knew what was right. His task was to persuade and compel them to do what was right. There was a tacit assumption, which was [p209] quite correct, that very often the populace and even the moralist himself would much rather have done what was wrong. Very often they did it. Then they were punished in this world or in the next. But to-day the moralist finds himself in a different position. He is no longer absolutely sure that he knows what is right. The populace, even if it respects him, is disinclined to believe that a thing is right simply because he says it is. The populace continues very frequently to prefer what was once regarded as wrong. It no longer knows whether it is right or wrong, and of course it gives itself the benefit of the doubt. The result is that there no longer exists a moral code which the moralist can interpret, administer, and enforce. The effect of that is moral anarchy within and without. Since there is no principle under modern conditions which authorizes the re-establishment of a moral code, the moralist, unless he revises his premises, becomes entirely ineffectual. To revise his premises can, under the circumstances, mean only one thing: that he occupies himself with the problem of how to encourage that growth into maturity, that outgrowing of naive desire, that cultivation of disinterestedness, which render passion innocent and an authoritative morality unnecessary.
The novelty of all this lies in the fact that the guardians of morality among the people are compelled at last to take seriously what the teachers of wisdom have taught. The insight of high religion may be said, then, to be a discovery in the field of human experience comparable with those prophetic conceptions in the natural sciences which, after being looked upon for long periods as a [p210] curiosity, are at last, because circumstances are ripe, seen to be the clue to otherwise insoluble perplexities. The concept of evolution was discovered by sheer insight innumerable times before the time of Darwin. Not much came of it until the rapid evolution of human affairs after the industrial revolution had somehow brought this neglected insight into focus with men’s interests. There are many conceptions in the science of the Greeks which are true intimations of what modern physicists have found. But an insight of this sort comes into its own only when circumstances conspire to make it inevitably appropriate. It is my contention that in the field of morals circumstances are producing a somewhat analogous condition: that the insight of the sages into the value of disinterestedness has become the clue to otherwise insoluble perplexities.
PART III [p211]
THE GENIUS OF MODERNITY
_Where is the way where light dwelleth?_ Job 38:19.