LECTURE 02. CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC.

The Varieties of Religious Experience

LECTURE II. CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC.

Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise

definition of what its essence consists of. Some of these would‐be

definitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this course,

and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now.

Meanwhile the very fact that they are so many and so different from one

another is enough to prove that the word “religion” cannot stand for any

single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name. The

theorizing mind tends always to the over‐simplification of its materials.

This is the root of all that absolutism and one‐sided dogmatism by which

both philosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall

immediately into a one‐sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit

freely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence, but many

characters which may alternately be equally important in religion. If we

should inquire for the essence of “government,” for example, one man might

tell us it was authority, another submission, another police, another an

army, another an assembly, another a system of laws; yet all the while it

would be true that no concrete government can exist without all these

things, one of which is more important at one moment and others at

another. The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles

himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying

an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would

naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a

thing more misleading than enlightening. And why may not religion be a

conception equally complex?(9)

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Consider also the “religious sentiment” which we see referred to in so

many books, as if it were a single sort of mental entity.

In the psychologies and in the philosophies of religion, we find the

authors attempting to specify just what entity it is. One man allies it to

the feeling of dependence; one makes it a derivative from fear; others

connect it with the sexual life; others still identify it with the feeling

of the infinite; and so on. Such different ways of conceiving it ought of

themselves to arouse doubt as to whether it possibly can be one specific

thing; and the moment we are willing to treat the term “religious

sentiment” as a collective name for the many sentiments which religious

objects may arouse in alternation, we see that it probably contains

nothing whatever of a psychologically specific nature. There is religious

fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But

religious love is only man’s natural emotion of love directed to a

religious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so

to speak, the common quaking of the human breast, in so far as the notion

of divine retribution may arouse it; religious awe is the same organic

thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only

this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations;

and similarly of all the various sentiments which may be called into play

in the lives of religious persons. As concrete states of mind, made up of

a feeling _plus_ a specific sort of object, religious emotions of course

are psychic entities distinguishable from other concrete emotions; but

there is no ground for assuming a simple abstract “religious emotion” to

exist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself, present in

every religious experience without exception.

As there thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a

common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, so

there might conceivably also prove to be no one specific and essential

kind of religious object, and no one specific and essential kind of

religious act.

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The field of religion being as wide as this, it is manifestly impossible

that I should pretend to cover it. My lectures must be limited to a

fraction of the subject. And, although it would indeed be foolish to set

up an abstract definition of religion’s essence, and then proceed to

defend that definition against all comers, yet this need not prevent me

from taking my own narrow view of what religion shall consist in _for the

purpose of these lectures_, or, out of the many meanings of the word, from

choosing the one meaning in which I wish to interest you particularly, and

proclaiming arbitrarily that when I say “religion” I mean _that_. This, in

fact, is what I must do, and I will now preliminarily seek to mark out the

field I choose.

One way to mark it out easily is to say what aspects of the subject we

leave out. At the outset we are struck by one great partition which

divides the religious field. On the one side of it lies institutional, on

the other personal religion. As M. P. Sabatier says, one branch of

religion keeps the divinity, another keeps man most in view. Worship and

sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity,

theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials

of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it,

we should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning

the favor of the gods. In the more personal branch of religion it is on

the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the centre

of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his

incompleteness. And although the favor of the God, as forfeited or gained,

is still an essential feature of the story, and theology plays a vital

part therein, yet the acts to which this sort of religion prompts are

personal not ritual acts, the individual transacts the business by himself

alone, and the ecclesiastical organization, with its priests and

sacraments and other go‐betweens, sinks to an altogether secondary place.

The relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between

man and his maker.

Now in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch

entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to consider

as little as possible the systematic theology and the ideas about the gods

themselves, and to confine myself as far as I can to personal religion

pure and simple. To some of you personal religion, thus nakedly

considered, will no doubt seem too incomplete a thing to wear the general

name. “It is a part of religion,” you will say, “but only its unorganized

rudiment; if we are to name it by itself, we had better call it man’s

conscience or morality than his religion. The name ‘religion’ should be

reserved for the fully organized system of feeling, thought, and

institution, for the Church, in short, of which this personal religion, so

called, is but a fractional element.”

But if you say this, it will only show the more plainly how much the

question of definition tends to become a dispute about names. Rather than

prolong such a dispute, I am willing to accept almost any name for the

personal religion of which I propose to treat. Call it conscience or

morality, if you yourselves prefer, and not religion—under either name it

will be equally worthy of our study. As for myself, I think it will prove

to contain some elements which morality pure and simple does not contain,

and these elements I shall soon seek to point out; so I will myself

continue to apply the word “religion” to it; and in the last lecture of

all, I will bring in the theologies and the ecclesiasticisms, and say

something of its relation to them.

In one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more

fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches, when once

established, live at second‐hand upon tradition; but the _founders_ of

every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct

personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the

Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects

have been in this case;—so personal religion should still seem the

primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete.

There are, it is true, other things in religion chronologically more

primordial than personal devoutness in the moral sense. Fetishism and

magic seem to have preceded inward piety historically—at least our records

of inward piety do not reach back so far. And if fetishism and magic be

regarded as stages of religion, one may say that personal religion in the

inward sense and the genuinely spiritual ecclesiasticisms which it founds

are phenomena of secondary or even tertiary order. But, quite apart from

the fact that many anthropologists—for instance, Jevons and

Frazer—expressly oppose “religion” and “magic” to each other, it is

certain that the whole system of thought which leads to magic, fetishism,

and the lower superstitions may just as well be called primitive science

as called primitive religion. The question thus becomes a verbal one

again; and our knowledge of all these early stages of thought and feeling

is in any case so conjectural and imperfect that farther discussion would

not be worth while.

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean

for us _the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their

solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to

whatever they may consider the divine_. Since the relation may be either

moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the

sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical

organizations may secondarily grow. In these lectures, however, as I have

already said, the immediate personal experiences will amply fill our time,

and we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all.

We escape much controversial matter by this arbitrary definition of our

field. But, still, a chance of controversy comes up over the word “divine”

if we take it in the definition in too narrow a sense. There are systems

of thought which the world usually calls religious, and yet which do not

positively assume a God. Buddhism is in this case. Popularly, of course,

the Buddha himself stands in place of a God; but in strictness the

Buddhistic system is atheistic. Modern transcendental idealism,

Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract

Ideality. Not a deity _in concreto_, not a superhuman person, but the

immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the

universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address to

the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson

famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was

what made the scandal of the performance.

“These laws,” said the speaker, “execute themselves. They are out

of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance: Thus, in

the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant

and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who

does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts

off impurity thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just,

then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of

God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with justice. If a

man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of

acquaintance with his own being. Character is always known. Thefts

never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of

stone walls. The least admixture of a lie—for example, the taint

of vanity, any attempt to make a good impression, a favorable

appearance—will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth,

and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of

the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear your

witness. For all things proceed out of the same spirit, which is

differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different

applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the

several shores which it washes. In so far as he roves from these

ends, a man bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries. His being

shrinks ... he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until

absolute badness is absolute death. The perception of this law

awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious

sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its

power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the

embalmer of the world. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and

the silent song of the stars is it. It is the beatitude of man. It

makes him illimitable. When he says ‘I ought’; when love warns

him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great

deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from supreme

wisdom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for

he can never go behind this sentiment. All the expressions of this

sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity.

[They] affect us more than all other compositions. The sentences

of the olden time, which ejaculate this piety, are still fresh and

fragrant. And the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind, whose

name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of this

world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion.”(10)

Such is the Emersonian religion. The universe has a divine soul of order,

which soul is moral, being also the soul within the soul of man. But

whether this soul of the universe be a mere quality like the eye’s

brilliancy or the skin’s softness, or whether it be a self‐conscious life

like the eye’s seeing or the skin’s feeling, is a decision that never

unmistakably appears in Emerson’s pages. It quivers on the boundary of

these things, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes the other, to suit the

literary rather than the philosophic need. Whatever it is, though, it is

active. As much as if it were a God, we can trust it to protect all ideal

interests and keep the world’s balance straight. The sentences in which

Emerson, to the very end, gave utterance to this faith are as fine as

anything in literature: “If you love and serve men, you cannot by any

hiding or stratagem escape the remuneration. Secret retributions are

always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is

impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and

monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar.

Settles forevermore the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote,

and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.”(11)

Now it would be too absurd to say that the inner experiences that underlie

such expressions of faith as this and impel the writer to their utterance

are quite unworthy to be called religious experiences. The sort of appeal

that Emersonian optimism, on the one hand, and Buddhistic pessimism, on

the other, make to the individual and the sort of response which he makes

to them in his life are in fact indistinguishable from, and in many

respects identical with, the best Christian appeal and response. We must

therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these godless or

quasi‐godless creeds “religions”; and accordingly when in our definition

of religion we speak of the individual’s relation to “what he considers

the divine,” we must interpret the term “divine” very broadly, as denoting

any object that is god_like_, whether it be a concrete deity or not.

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But the term “godlike,” if thus treated as a floating general quality,

becomes exceedingly vague, for many gods have flourished in religious

history, and their attributes have been discrepant enough. What then is

that essentially godlike quality—be it embodied in a concrete deity or

not—our relation to which determines our character as religious men? It

will repay us to seek some answer to this question before we proceed

farther.

For one thing, gods are conceived to be first things in the way of being

and power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there is no escape.

What relates to them is the first and last word in the way of truth.

Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true might at

this rate be treated as godlike, and a man’s religion might thus be

identified with his attitude, whatever it might be, towards what he felt

to be the primal truth.

Such a definition as this would in a way be defensible. Religion, whatever

it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total

reaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions are different from

casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or

professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the foreground

of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual

cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing,

lovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses. This sense of

the world’s presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual

temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous,

gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and

inarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all

our answers to the question, “What is the character of this universe in

which we dwell?” It expresses our individual sense of it in the most

definite way. Why then not call these reactions our religion, no matter

what specific character they may have? Non‐religious as some of these

reactions may be, in one sense of the word “religious,” they yet belong to

_the general sphere of the religious life_, and so should generically be

classed as religious reactions. “He believes in No‐God, and he worships

him,” said a colleague of mine of a student who was manifesting a fine

atheistic ardor; and the more fervent opponents of Christian doctrine have

often enough shown a temper which, psychologically...