The Psychological Origin and the Nature of Religion/Chapter 6

by James Henry Leuba

CHAPTER VI

CONCLUDING REMARKS ON THE NATURE AND THE FUNCTION OF RELIGION

The organised, historical Religions are sufficiently described, in their objective aspect, as systems of practical relations with unseen, hyperhuman, and personal Beings. The experiences in which this type of Religion consists, when subjectively considered, are the states of consciousness correlated with the aforesaid relations. Judged according to this definition, several savage tribes and a very large number of persons among civilised peoples would have to be accounted non-religious. Most of them may, however, lay claim to what we have called Passive Religiosity. In these concluding pages we propose to give increased precision and coherence to the conception of Religion presented in this essay. We shall do so under two heads, (1) Passive and (2) Godless Religions.

1. Andrew Lang’s polemic against Frazer’s definition of Religion will serve as a convenient text for the introduction of what we wish to say under the first head. According to the habit of anthropologists, Frazer has put forward as the mark of Religion the propitiation or the conciliation of personal beings superior to man and believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life. Lang objects, and very properly, that this definition is too narrow. ‘I mean by Religion,’ says he, ‘what Mr. Frazer means and more. The conciliation of higher powers by prayer and sacrifice is Religion, but it need not be the whole of Religion. The belief in a higher power who sanctions conduct and is a father and a loving one to mankind is also Religion,’^[1] although it should not be accompanied by request for benefits. The presence in the higher societies and even at the dawn of civilisation of persons strangers to any religious rite, yet influenced by a belief in divine beings cannot be denied. With regard to the most barbarous of the Australian savages Howitt writes: ‘If Religion is defined as being the formulated worship of a divinity, then these savages have no Religion; but I venture to assert that it can be no longer maintained that they have no belief which can be called Religion, that is, in the sense of beliefs which govern tribal and individual morality under a supernatural sanction.’^[2] The reader will remember that we included under the term Religion the amorphous relations to which Howitt alludes. But the difference, objective and subjective, between the organised Religions, let us say that of Saint Ignatius, and the guiding and restraining influence exercised upon an African savage or a Parisian deist by the apprehension of a Great Ruler, justifies the use of the differentiating appellations, Passive and Active Religion,

We take this opportunity of remarking how difficult it is even for particularly clear-headed persons to keep Religion distinct from philosophy. Lang was ill-advised enough to write in the same place, ‘If men believe in a potent being who originally made or manufactured . . . things, that is an idea so far religious that it satisfies, by the figment of a supernatural agent, the speculative faculty.’ What has ‘the speculative faculty’ to do with Religion? As little as the gratification of the aesthetic or of any other ‘faculty,’ i.e. nothing at all. The outcome of speculative thinking is philosophy, of which Religion may make use, but that is not a reason for confusing it with philosophy. The religious experience consists not in seeking to understand God, but in fearing Him, in feeding upon Him, in finding strength and joy in Him. If believers in Ruling Powers may be called religious, it is not because they possess an idea of these powers, but in virtue of the guiding and inspiring influence these powers exert upon them.

2. The Godless Religions.—We have found it convenient up to this point to speak as if Power had to be personal in order to become the centre of a Religion. That view would exclude original Buddhism, the Religion of Humanity, and several other varieties of mental attitudes generally regarded as religious. The significant fact that until recently every existing historical Religion was a worship of a personal Divinity, is not a sufficient reason for refusing to recognise other types. The affinity between the worship of a God and certain relations maintained with non-personal sources of power is substantial enough to be recognised by the use of a name common to both.

What are the Religions that dispense with a God? Original Buddhism, and the Religion of Humanity formulated by A. Comte, are the only ones possessing a somewhat definite form and organisation. The Buddha Gautama discovered and offered to man a way of salvation in which the efficient power was not an external, personal power, but an indwelling, psychic principle. But the disciples speedily deified the Master who had enjoined them to adore no one, and substituted for his teaching the worship of the God Gautama. So that, almost as soon as born. Buddhism ceased to exist as a Godless Religion.

‘Humanity’ is qualified to become the centre of a Religion because its service accomplishes for man in essence and by similar methods precisely what the acknowledged Religions do for their disciples.^[3] I quote from A. Comte: ‘Around this Real, Great Being, immediate instigator of each individual and collective existence, our feelings and desires centre as spontaneously as do our ideas and actions . . . More readily accessible to our feelings as well as to our thinking [than the chimerical beings of the existing Religions], because of an identity of nature which does not preclude its superiority over all its servants, a Supreme Being such as this excites deeply an activity destined to preserve and to improve it [the Supreme Being].’^[4] The claim of original Buddhism and of Comtism to be called Religions is, in our opinion, legitimate, because they each provide an inclusive, non-material source of power and a method of drawing upon it.

But the term Religion is used by some in a still wider sense. Professor J. R. Seeley, for instance, bestows that valued name upon ‘any habitual and permanent admiration.’^[5] Should we concur in this extension, it would be difficult to stop anywhere. We should have to admit almost anything which any one may have a fancy for designating by that much-abused word, even to ‘the sense of eternity in connection with our higher experiences,’ and ‘the feeling of reality and permanence of all we most value.’ But since the function of words is to delimitate, one defeats the purpose of language by stretching the meaning of a word until it has lost all precision and unity of meaning. We would therefore throw out of our definition anything which did not include:—(1) A belief in a great and superior psychic power—whether personal or not. (2) A dynamic relation—formal and organised or otherwise—between man and that Higher Power tending to the preservation, the increase, and the ennobling of life. This conception is broad enough to include even the uncrystallised form of Religion conditioned, in the words of Professor James, by ‘an assurance that this natural order is not ultimate, but a mere sign or vision, the external staging of a many-storied universe, in which spiritual forces have the last word and are eternal.’

Active Religion may properly be looked upon as that portion of the struggle for life, in which use is made of the Power we have roughly characterised as psychic and superhuman, and for which other adjectives, ‘spiritual,’ ‘divine,’ for instance, are commonly used. In this biological view of Religion, its necessary and natural spring is the same as that of non-religious life, i.e. the ‘will to live’ in its multiform appearances, while the ground of differentiation between the religious and the secular is neither specific feelings nor emotions, nor yet distinctive impulses, desires, or purposes, but the nature of the force which it is attempted to press into service. The current terms, ‘religious feeling,’ ‘religious desire,’ ‘religious purpose,’ are deceptive if they are supposed to designate affective experiences, desires and purposes met with only in religious life.

The conception of the Source of Psychic Energy, without the belief in which no Religion can exist, has undergone very interesting transformations in the course of historical development. The human or animal form ascribed to the gods in the earlier Religions became less and less definite. At the same time the number of gods decreased. The culmination of this double process was Monotheism, in which the One, Eternal, Creator and Sustainer of life was no longer necessarily framed in the shape of man or beast: though still anthropopathic, he might be formless. Sympathy, love, and justice were among his attributes. In a second phase, this formless, but personal, God was gradually shorn of all the qualities and defects which make individuality. He became the passionless Absolute in which all things move and have their being. Thus, the personifying work of centuries is undone, and humanity, after having, as it were, lived throughout its infancy and youth under the controlling eye and with the active assistance of personal divinities, on reaching maturity, finds itself bereft of these sources of life. The present religious crisis marks the difficulty in the way of an adaptation to the new situation. As belief in a God seems no longer possible, man seeks an impersonal, efficient substitute, belief in which will not mean disloyalty to science. For man will have life, and have it abundantly, and he knows from experience that its sources are not only in meat and drink, but also in ‘spiritual faith.’ It is this problem which the Comtists, the Immanentists, the Ethical Culturists, the Mental Scientists are all trying to solve. Any solution will have the right to the name Religion that provides for the preservation and the perfectioning of life by means of faith in a superhuman psychic Power.

Notes

1. Magic and Religion, pp. 48-49, 69.
2. ‘On some Australian Customs of Initiation,’ Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xiii, (1883-1884), p. 459.
3. Frederic Harrison, Moral and Religious Socialism, New Year’s Address, 1891.
4. A. Comte, Catéchisme Positiviste, ed. Apostolique (1891), pp. 53, 55. Google Book Search
5. Natural Religion, Macmillan (1882), p. 74. Google Book Search