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Typos — p. 28: commmunities [= communities]
Chapter II The Meaning of Religion In the previous chapter it was pointed out that the traditional function of religion has been to ease man's nagging curiosity about those aspects of the world about him which, despite diligent scrutiny and research, remain inexplicable, unaccountable and mysterious; and to establish means whereby he may get into relation with the forces or powers the existence of which he suspects or postulates behind phenomena. Hume expressly denies this. In reply to the question, "What passion can explain an effect of such mighty consequence as religion?" he replies, "Not speculative curiosity merely, or the pure love of truth, but" — and what follows may be briefly summarized as "Fear" (N.H.R. Chap. I). This is also Bertrand Russell's opinion. "Fear", he says, "is the basis of the whole thing, fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death" (W. Chap. I); whilst even William James seems to lend it some countenance when he says, "The ancient saying that the first maker of the gods was fear receives voluminous corroboration from every age of religious history" (V.R.E. Lecture III). Much may be said for this point of view, implied as it is in Frazer's idea of religion; but it can hardly be the "whole thing". If man were encompassed only by dangers which drove him to implore the protection of benign supernatural forces against their opposite, fear would adequately explain the matter. But man, and above all unscientific and ignorant man, is also surrounded by wonders not necessarily always of a menacing kind. Everywhere his senses apprehend something that he can neither do, control, nor understand; and we have but to observe the overpowering curiosity of the lower animals, which makes even the least intelligent of them, If then we conclude that religion is probably a blend of both curiosity and fear, it seems justifiable to assume that as man's mastery over Nature gradually increased until it established him in the relatively secure position he has enjoyed for several centuries, at least in the civilized world, the factor curiosity is probably that which has recently played the predominant part in fostering the religious attitude of mind. Thus, at bottom, religion satisfies two major human needs: it answers man's questions about origins, and furnishes him with guesses about the "power behind phenomena" and his relationship to that power. These are religion's fundamental meaning and function, and its most essential features are probably its tenets concerning the power in question and man's relationship to it. For, given the fact of such a power, nothing could be more vitally important than to know what to expect of it, what it expects of man, and how to obtain contact with it. Thus, Professor J. B. Pratt defines religion as "the serious and social attitude of individuals or commmunities toward the power or powers which they conceive as having ultimate control over their interests and destinies". (T.R.C. Chap. I). William James comes to more or less the same conclusion. "Religion", he says, "means the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in any relation to whatever they may consider divine." He also agrees that "it will prove to contain some elements which morality pure and simple does not contain" (V.R.E. Lecture II). In Lecture III he says further, that the life of religion "consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto". This is why we so often find the practice of propitiatory rites constantly performed to keep the unseen power in a good temper. Nor is the idea of propitiation, either by works or faith absent from the religion of Christ (see, for instance, the General Epistle of James, especially Chap. ii). One recent and learned investigator has even defined religion as propitiation. In The Golden Bough (1911, For these reasons, if for no other, it is an elementary mistake to assume, as so many have done, that religion is primarily or chiefly a code of morals. This is a peculiarly Protestant and Anglo-Saxon heresy. It reduces religion to a set of rules of behaviour which, if scrupulously observed, exhaust the demands made upon the faithful. So that if a man treats his wife, his children, his neighbours, his charwoman and his cat and dog, properly, he is doing all that religion requires of him. Although he was probably only expressing what was the popular point of view in England in his day, and has remained so ever since, Pope was one of the first Englishmen openly to state this principle when, in 1733, he wrote: "For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight; His can't be wrong whose life is in the right." (Essay on Man, Epistle III) Thomas Paine, sixty years later, professed the same belief. "My religion", he said, "is to do good" (R.O.M. Chap. V). Emerson, a typical Anglo-Saxon, implied the same principle when he said, "All the religion we have is the ethics of one or another holy person" (Journals, 1865); whilst elsewhere he says, "The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals." Sir Francis Galton also leads one to infer that he took much the same view; for, in his Inquiries Into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883: Section on "Early Sentiments"), he says, "The word religion may fairly be applied to any group of sentiments or persuasions that are strong enough to bind us to do that which intellectually we may acknowledge to be our duty." But the worst offender, because in the popular view the most authoritative, was Matthew Arnold who, in Literature and Dogma (1873, Chap. I. Part I), said, "When we are asked, what is the object of religion? Let us reply: Conduct." This gratuitous restriction of religion to a code of behaviour, besides overlooking the strongest and deepest of the religious man's motives, prompts the suspicion that those capable of it have probably never understood or been moved by the impulses Professor A. C. Bradley, on the other hand, although he defines religion in accordance with Thouless's and our own view by saying that it "is worship", and "an activity of the whole soul or personality containing a mode of belief about God and about the self and the world in their relation to him, a mode of feeling concerning him, a direction of the will towards him or a union of the will with his will"; rather implies by what he adds-namely, that religion is incompatible with wickedness — that he too thinks of it mainly as morality. "A mere belief about God is not religion", he says; "a man may believe and believe and be a villain". (I.O.R. Chap. I, sections 1 and 2). In Chapter II he again more than hints at the same idea; whilst in Chapter IV, unless I have misunderstood him, he rather romantically goes over to the side that identify religion with morals by making what he calls "The Religion of Ideal Humanity" a form of morality worship. Thouless's attitude to the question seems more reasonable, not only because it is more in harmony with all we know of human nature, but also because the very idea of religion as merely morality involves a truncation of both its functions and the imperative human needs it satisfies. Professor A. Boyce Gibson, in a very interesting article, lends his support to this view by declaring "the moment of worship" as "central in religion" (H. October 1958. Dr. T. H. Hughes concurs: R.P. Chap. IV); and Whichever derivation we ascribe to religion, whether we trace it from relegere (to gather together), because men, called "religious", were supposed to reflect on all that appertained to the worship of the gods; or whether we trace it from religare (to bind back, to fasten), because religion involves the idea of man's binding obligation to an invisible god, it is plain that the operative notion behind both derivations is man's relationship and attitude to the power he believes to be the Author of life and the Universe, which, as we have seen, is the whole crux of the matter. In view of what has been said, it therefore seems probable that the nature of the deity and man's approach to it, are felt by all religious founders and most of their followers as of paramount importance, and that the tendency to regard religion as merely a code of morals is tantamount to admitting an inadequate grasp of it. This may be due either to a lack of profundity or else to the absence of any experience that has revealed the need of religious leanings. In fairness to those, like Thomas Paine, Emerson, Matthew Arnold and their sympathizers, to whom religion is no more than a code of morals, it should, however, be pointed out that they could plead high scriptural authority for their opinion, seeing that in the General Epistle of James (Chap. i. 27), we find a statement which plainly teaches this very idea. "Pure religion and undefiled," says James, "before God the Father is this. To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted in the world." This clearly implies that "pure religion" is simply good moral conduct. But, although James is reputed to have been the Lord's brother (Galatians i. 19), one may I hope disagree with him and even claim that by this one statement alone, despite his alleged exalted family connections, he reveals an imperfect understanding of the true religious spirit. By confining religious observance to conformity to a pattern of social behaviour, we leave out altogether its transcendental aspects, with all the emotions, passions and loyalties that accompany every personal relationship even to an ordinary fellow-being. In the case of a divinity we omit, in addition, the piety and devotion which we express in acts of homage and worship; for, as Thouless remarks, "In worship in its simplest Indeed, this is what we often see happening, especially in Protestant communities. People, who are satisfied that they are leading moral lives, will affirm with all the assurance peculiar to the utterance of a truism, that they are fulfilling all the demands of their religion and that attendance at a place of worship would amount almost to overdoing it. The necessary consequence of this attitude is that in countless cases the faithful, in order to be induced to attend a place of worship at all, will eventually expect some kind of extra lure, in return as it were for their "trouble". Hence, there arises among those who regard religion merely as morality, a tendency to enliven, if not to vulgarize, the act of religious observance so as to make it attractive, with the result that its sacrificial character and the means it affords of expressing the believer's homage and reverence to the Supreme Power whom he acknowledges as his god, is minimized if not wholly ignored. This result is clearly manifested in Protestant countries by the prevalence of the view that a church or chapel service should be above all a source of diversion, in fact a good "draw", if a large congregation is to be expected. Such a point of view is tantamount to admitting that the act of worship is not a duty to be performed willy-nilly by every believer, but is contingent on the degree of distraction provided at the service at which the act is performed. Should the claim that this attitude is prevalent, if not endemic, in Protestant countries, shock the reader and seem to him false, let him consider how often in every Anglo-Saxon and Protestant community he has heard of the need of "bright services" if a church or chapel is to be filled; how often he has been told that empty pews and sparse congregations, whether at church or chapel, are due to the incumbent's or minister's "dull" services; and how often he has known a decline in worshippers ascribed to a recent change of ministers — the implication being that the previous minister gave his congregation "brighter" services. Who- Addressing a meeting of some kind in November 1957, the Right Rev. Dr. H. Morris, Bishop of St. Edmundsbury and Ipswich, imprudently allowed it to be inferred that he too countenanced the deplorable principle that the duty of performing an act of worship was contingent on its attractiveness; for he is reported to have said that "he could understand why some people did not go to church if the service was dull" (Suffolk Chronicle & Mercury, 23.11.57). Support is lent to the claim that Protestants are particularly prone to this view of worship by Professor J. B. Pratt who, in comparing the ideals of Catholicism and Protestantism, says: "the leading purpose of the Mass is the worship of God, that of the Protestant service is the subjective impression upon the minds and hearts of the worshippers" (T.R.C. Chap. XIV). Goethe took a rather different view. Speaking of the decline in the number of Protestant worshippers in his time, and their tendency to split up into sects, he blamed the lack of sacraments in the Protestant forms of worship and argued that the latter had "too little depth and richness and too little consistency" ("zu wenig Fülle und Konsequenz." A.M.L. 2 Teil 7tes Buch). It is possible that what he also had in mind was the mistaken and wholly gratuitous assumption on the part of Protestants that aesthetics and poetry, whether in the rites or merely pictorial aspects of a religious service, can play no legitimate part in worship. It is true that the art of music may be said to have been retained as an element in Protestant worship; but with curious inconsistency most other aesthetic contributions have been ruthlessly, if not savagely, banned. It may well be that in this criticism, Goethe pointed to one at least of the causes of the extraordinary development of the factor of entertainment in the Protestant service; but that this develop- Thus, the whittling down of man's relationship and approach to the power behind phenomena to an occasional spiritual exercise which has as its conditio sine qua non the certainty that it will be diverting, is so alien to the most modest estimate of what this relationship should be and of how it should be felt by the humbler party to it, that it seems reasonable to deny those who are capable of it, both the emotions, the intellectual grasp and the appreciation of a truly religious attitude. Nor, when we reflect on the close association of this trivial view of religion with the belief that religion is only morality, does it seem unfair to regard the one as probably conditioned by, or else as conditioning, the other. An alternative interpretation of their constant co-existence would be to imagine their common root in a failure to form an adequate conception of the infinite resource and overwhelming might of the power or powers behind phenomena. I speak of an "adequate conception" in this respect; but the words are really misleading; for there is no need of any such mental feat, since the compelling evidence of the infinite resource and overwhelming might in question forces itself on the attention of every observant man and woman almost every minute of the day. It is not so much imagination that is lacking in those who reveal this twofold misunderstanding of religion and religious observance, as plain everyday observation — vision. Eyes have they and they see not. At bottom what ails them is intellectual indolence — a tendency to take things for granted in order to escape the necessity of thought. This is not a mere euphemism for stupidity, which is a more serious infirmity whose I shall return to this question when I discuss how a modern thinker, abreast of the latest findings of science and philosophy, may with intellectual uprightness picture and approach the power behind phenomena, and what he may expect of it. |
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