CHAPTER IV THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF HUMANITY
1. The Social Element in Religion
Religion is not merely a phenomenon of the individual and inner life: it is also a social and historical phenomenon. Psychology lays bare its root, but history alone reveals its power and range.
This social action of religion springs from its very essence. The phrase "communion of souls" is of religious origin and hue. The thing expressed by it—one of the most wonderful phenomena of collective moral life—is never perfectly realised save in religion and by religion. An identic faith, a common act of adoration, not merely brings souls together: it makes them live in each other, blends them into one soul in which each of them finds itself, multiplied, as it were, by all the rest. That is what is properly called "edification," by which I mean that feeling of joy, of force, of fulness of life, produced by the common act of worship in those who sincerely take part in it. That is the reason why men of the same religion have no more imperious need than that of praying and worshipping together. State police have always failed to confine growing religious sects within the sanctuary or the home. Their members have never been resigned to this comparatively solitary life; they have braved all interdicts and persecutions in order to turn it into social life and fraternal communion.
God, it is said, is the place where spirits blend. In rising towards Him man of necessity passes beyond the limits of his own individuality. He feels instinctively that the principle of his being is also the principle of the life of his brethren; that that which gives him safety must give it to all. In the same Religion, souls the most diverse, being affected in the same manner, become related to each other, and form a real family, united by closer, stronger bonds than those of blood. The religious life is a higher region. Those who rise into it feel the barriers fall which hemmed in their existence. They become free; they penetrate the souls of their neighbours and feel themselves to be penetrated by them; and all live one life, which, although it be larger and almost universal, is none the less very personal and very intense. Have you ever been present in a crowd excited and exalted by religious enthusiasm? Have you felt the contagion? Then you can never forget it. It is said the early Christians were of one heart and one soul. Their community of faith, of hope, of love, went so far as to make them forget the idea of property and put their goods in common. In how many monastic orders or mystic sects has not this same need of equality and unity gone to the point of identity in costume and deportment, and even of the loss of name and personal individuality?
It is not surprising therefore that religion, capable of creating in modern times those moral societies called "Churches," should, in all ages, have been the strongest bond of natural societies, primitive families, savage tribes, great empires, civilised peoples. The first stone of every hearth was a sacred stone. The first tombstone was a monument of piety, and burial is an essentially religious ceremony. Before they were regarded as protectors without, tribal gods were the internal bonds of the tribe itself. All the individuals of the tribe saw in the god a father and an ever present head, so that religion came to double by this moral kinship their blood relationship. In this matter the great civilisations do not differ from the rest. All have a religious soul that differentiates and explains them. It is not merely morals and philosophy that are affected by religion, but literature, art, politics, social economy, and in a general way the whole destiny of men. The secret of a race is hidden in its religion. It is there that the forces of life and resistance to the causes of dissolution are concentrated.... Let us enter with deep piety therefore on the history of religion on the earth.... That history is still in embryo. The comparative study of religions has arisen within our time; it is still at its beginnings.... The idea of religious progress is a great and luminous idea, but it is not possible to apply it to all the details of history. Progress has not taken place along a single or continuous line.... On four or five points the progress is undeniable; it must suffice to point them out and mark their direction in order that we may foresee the supreme end to which this faltering and laborious march is tending.
In religions there are differences of degree and differences of kind: the one mark in the scale of evolution the successive movements of the religious consciousness in time; the others express the diversity and simultaneity of religions in space. The first are explained by inequalities of moral development; the second by variety of races, climates, civilisations. Take, for example, the Hebrew tradition; follow it in broad outline, and you will note religious forms which give birth one to another and constitute an historical development—the religion of the ancient Beni-Israel, prophetism, rabbinical pharisaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism: there, in a continuous evolution, you have what may be called differences of degree. But, on the other hand, consider the Mongolian or Chinese religions, those of ancient Mexico, of India, Egypt, or Greece: you have differences of kind which you cannot classify in a single scale. And, as some of these peoples have disappeared, and others been arrested in their growth, and as they have never marched abreast, it is impossible to compare them or to put into one category the religious forms which their history presents. But some attempt must be made to trace them out.
2. Progress in the Outward Forms of Religion
In this universal religious evolution the progress that is most apparent because most outward is the enlargement of the form of religion itself, the movement, often interrupted but never stopped, from the narrowest particularism to the most human universalism.... It is characteristic of all religion to propagate itself: that is the implicit affirmation that it is made for all men. Even when it is abased to the level of a recipe and of a magical secret that is hidden with a jealous selfishness, or even from a ferocious patriotism, there is the avowal that it might be serviceable to others.... But we must see how this passage from the particular to the universal is effected.
The beginnings of religion are everywhere the same. The number of cults at first is almost endless, but they vary very little from each other. It is impossible to write the history of barbarous religions, and it is useless to enumerate them. Nothing is more monotonous than the descriptions that have been attempted of them. Their most characteristic feature is, that at first they are confined to the family. Religion at this stage is a matter of instinct, and instinctive matters are always uniform. In mental life, diversity only appears with reflection and consciousness.
To the domestic and tribal succeeds the national stage of religion. Political federations are formed, and the religious as well as the social consciousness of the people is enlarged. This phenomenon is seen in Greece in its most interesting form. The religion of Greece, as witness the Homeric poems, was a confederation of local cults and deities, just as Hellas was a federation of previously unconnected tribes.
The conquests of Alexander and the extension of the Roman Empire greatly enlarged the horizon of ancient thought. The philosophers in the time of Cicero and Seneca had already risen from the national idea to that of the human race. It must not be supposed, however, that the universal religion sprang from the philosophic or religious syncretism of the later ages of Graeco-Roman civilisation. The dissolution of the national religions had preceded that of political nationalities, and, so far from creating anything universal, the morbid curiosity of minds denuded of all national tradition abandoned itself to individual superstitions the most exotic and monstrous. Christianity was born, not in Greece, in the schools, nor in Rome, at the foot of the throne of the Cæsars, but in a race the narrowest, the most fanatical and intolerant that ever existed, and in the heart of a Son of Israel whom no extra-Palestinian influence seems ever to have reached.
Nowhere is a universal religion the fruit of an unconscious evolution, produced by the action of fatal and external laws. It presents itself everywhere as an individual creation, as the free and moral work of a few elect souls, in whom tradition by a profound crisis is purified and enlarged. This was the rôle of Confucius, of Buddha, of Socrates, of the prophets of Israel, of Mohammed in Arabia. All of them were reformers of the religion of their ancestors.... They did not discover the universal religion outside themselves, but in their consciousness and personal piety. Passing through their souls as through a filter, the traditional religion of their race was gradually clarified and freed from foreign or material elements, and it was found that, in the end, the new faith appeared the more human and universal as it had become more strictly religious, more inward, and more pure.... Not that all the ancient cults were capable of transformation or all the prophets equally inspired. Often the revelation would appear uncertain or incomplete. On only one point and in only one consciousness would it be seen to end in a clear and definitive conclusion. Progress implies selection. As we rise from one stage to another in the history of religious evolution we see the ranks enlightened and the number diminished of concurrent religions. At the lowest stage, the savage cults are almost innumerable. The great national or ethnic religions were much fewer. Only three are frankly universalist: Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity. And these three are universalist, if I may so say, in a very unequal degree.
Mohammedanism was far from being an original religion. The element which gives to it a higher moral and religious value came to it from Judaism and Christianity. Its monotheism, its horror of idolatry, the comparative purity of its ethics, have no other source, and, without paradox, it has been possible to represent it as an inferior form of Christianity accommodated to the needs and to the stature of semi-civilised Semitic peoples. But, alongside this Christian spiritualism it has conserved naturalistic elements, gross remnants of old Arab cults which, having made its fortune, perhaps, in its early days, now embarrass it and paralyse it. Moreover, in spite of its conquests, it has always remained an Oriental religion with Mecca as its centre and its head. If it would survive, it must reform itself; it must enter into the path of moral and intellectual progress, free itself from local superstitions, from its gross hopes, its hatred of the infidel, its doctrine of good works; in other words, it will have to cast off its old nature, and receive a new effusion of the Christian spirit. It can only become universal in so far as it approaches the moral principle of Christianity, in order, in the end, to become one with it.
Buddhism has a more profound originality, but it also is afflicted with an inward dualism which will ruin it. From the beginning there have been two Buddhisms: the one an esoteric philosophy for the use of sages convinced by experience of the vanity of all things, suffering from the essential evil of existence and aspiring to Nirvana. It is an unfruitful mysticism because it is Atheistic. The other is popular Buddhism, which sinks and dies into puerile superstitions and into the grossest polytheism. From which we may conclude that Buddhism only becomes universalist when it ceases to be a positive religion, and that where it still remains a religion it is anything but universalist.
With Christianity it is altogether different. The terms "universal religion" and "Christian religion" coincide so exactly that if a form of Christianity is not universalist on any side, on that particular side it ceases to be Christian. In fact there cannot here be either division or esoterism, nor consequently limitation or narrowness. We are here in the absolute freedom of spirit. Christ did not propound the theory of the unity of the human race; but He did something quite different and much better: He gave us the gospel. Between His gospel and the humanitarian philosophy there is all the difference that there is between abstraction and life, between idea and love. All men enter into the kingdom of God by the same door, and that door cannot be shut by any one; for it is the door of humility, of confidence, of self-renunciation, of the higher righteousness fulfilling itself by fraternal charity. Rank in that kingdom is determined by the measure of devotedness. The greatest is the one that humbles himself the most, and the only way of being master is to serve. In the religion of Jesus there is nothing religious but that which is authentically moral, and nothing moral in human life that is not truly religious. The perfect religion coincides with the absolute morality, and this naturally extends to and is obligatory on all mankind. Jesus not only proclaimed the only God, or even the God who is spirit, whose worship could not thenceforth be confined to anything material or particular in time and space: He showed us the Father who loves all His children with an equal affection, and desires to dwell in the humblest as well as in the highest consciousness. This divine Fatherhood, in proportion as it is realised in our hearts, produces in them human brotherhood. The religious and the human ideals here join, no more to be separated. Having begun in the animal man, with the grossest form of religion, humanity finds itself completed in the perfect religion.
3. Progress in Representations of the Divine
To represent the divine, man has never had any but the resources which are in himself. These representations have varied therefore with the general progress of experience and of thought.... From beginning to end the evolution of religious images and notions is based on the idea of spirit. It is in this idea that the resemblance and the kinship of man to his God is based; only by this can there be understanding, converse, harmony between them. Primitive religions, doubtless, are neither spiritualist nor materialist; they are animistic. A simple animism gives to men their first conceptions. The child projects the life which animates him; he endows the things around him with a personality similar to his own. For him there is nothing dead or inert; the world is peopled with living beings with which he contends, and talks, and is angry, to which he gives his love and his caresses. Do not let us smile too much at this simplicity. The latest steps of philosophy are rejoining our earliest thoughts. We are coming to see that in sum we know nothing but ourselves, that our science is but the projection of our consciousness without, and that it is solely on this condition that the world becomes intelligible to us. Man never worships anything purely material, anything that cannot hear and answer him. When he perceives that the object of his worship is inanimate, he thinks his god has deserted him, and he sets himself to pursue him. He usually finds him and retains him under other names and forms. By faith in ghosts, and by the memory of his dreams, he has learnt to double himself, and to oppose his will to his thought, his interior ego to his body, which he calls his house. He may easily quit this for another. Nothing is more ancient than the idea of the transmigration of souls. But at the same time he doubles the being of his gods; he distinguishes between the god and the object in which he habitually resides. This is the period at which idolatry begins. It will only be completed when the spirit-god has broken the bonds which bind him to its visible prison and its material image; when He shall speak who says that "God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." From that moment, mythology transforms itself into theology, and external rites into inward piety.
Necessarily polytheistic in its origins, religion tended nevertheless towards monotheism. The subordination which disciplined the heads of the tribes on earth also ranged the divinities under the authority of a supreme head. Force at first gave this supremacy. Zeus was the king of gods and men because he was stronger than all of them put together. This is the natural order of ideas. Force first imposed itself on weakness; then intelligence conquered force; lastly, justice and love, which is the supreme form and flower of righteousness, obtain supremacy over intelligence itself. The highest and the chiefest is no longer the strongest, or the wisest, but the best. In becoming moral, man has moralised his gods, who, in their turn, becoming models and authorities, have greatly helped to moralise the race.
It is very surprising that this evolution in the direction of moral monotheism did not complete itself in the Indo-European family. But the fact is that that family encountered an invincible barrier in the very nature of its primitive mythology. The Greek and Hindu philosophers, no doubt, pushed the notion of God to that of His spirituality and unity, but they did not succeed in transforming the religion of their race. Their rational criticism had power to dissolve, but not to change. Their monotheism remained always an object of speculation more or less esoteric. When, in the second and third centuries of our era, in competition with Christianity, Graeco-Roman polytheism endeavoured to reach a sort of monotheism, it could only return to the most glorious mythus of its infancy, to the worship of the Sun, and raise it to supremacy among the symbols of their faith.
The transition from polytheism to monotheism was only made in Palestine and in the tradition of the Hebrews. There were two reasons for this, both of which bear witness to the divine vocation of that people: its religious predispositions and the powerful action of its prophets, of those men of God raised up in it from Moses to Christ. The desert is not monotheistic, as M. Renan was pleased at first to say, nor are nomads, shepherds, or freebooters nearer to the only God than sedentary and agricultural peoples. But, owing to the special turn of mind of the Hebrew family, its primitive polytheism, of which the plural, elohim, still reminds us, had an abstract character, and was reduced to a sort of anonymous plurality from which no divine genealogy could spring. All these elementary spirits, these elohim of the air, the earth, the waters, were so similar to each other that the thought of the Semite never succeeded in discerning and discriminating them. They entered into one another, and ended by forming a sort of collective and abstract power, analagous to that which is represented in our language by the word "divinity." Add to this that, by the idea of holiness, Jehovah, the national elohim, was equally separated from Nature, and that, gradually divested of all corporeal form, He was predestined to become the God of conscience, the invisible Creator of all things, the Judge and the rewarder of all human actions.
Neither these original predispositions, however, nor these general causes, account for the marvellous progress of the religion of Israel. The faith of the prophets is a creation of the moral order; it is the work of individual consciousnesses, of the religious heroes whom the divine Spirit raised up in succession for more than a thousand years. We shall explain elsewhere this heroic and age-long struggle of the prophets of Jehovah against the customs, the tendencies, and even the temperament of their people. Suffice it here to indicate the constant direction of their efforts, the precision and the fixedness of their ideal, the power of the common inspiration that animated them, the vigorous and vivacious feeling in each one of them that makes their work divine and carries them beyond their individual thoughts and hopes. Like us they laboured on an infinitely vaster plane than they conceived.
But their conception of a divine ideal of righteousness still left God outside the consciousness. The image of His sanctity awakened in their souls the sense of sin and raised a tragic conflict between the human will enslaved by evil and the essentially inflexible law of God. God and man were found to be more profoundly separated by this moral antithesis of righteousness and sin than they had before been by the antithesis of strength and feebleness. How was this hostility to cease? A supreme revelation is about to respond to this cry of distress. God will become internal to the consciousness; He will manifest Himself, in man himself, as the principle of justification and salvation. He who was called El, Allah, the Mighty God, in patriarchal days,—He who from the times of Moses had been named Jehovah, the living God, the vigilant guardian of the Covenant,—will reveal Himself as the Father in the filial consciousness of Jesus Christ. The revelation of love comes to crown the revelation of force and righteousness. God desires to dwell in human souls. The Heavenly Father lives within the Son of Man, and the dogma of the God-Man, interpreted by the piety of each Christian, not by the subtle metaphysics of the doctors and the schools, becomes the central and distinguishing dogma of Christianity. Do not spoil its religious meaning, leave the mystery intact, see what is wrapped up in it: the sin of man effaced, the ancient conflicts ended, harmony restored, the whole moral and spiritual life enrooted in the eternal life of God, the Divine Life shed abroad in the heart of man. Try to comprehend this consummation of the religious unity of the Divine and the human sought for, cried for, in the dim desire of consciousness, and you will also comprehend that, at this point of view, as at all the others, the precedent religious evolution found its raison d'être and its final aim in the soul and in the work of Christ. The orphaned human soul and the distant unknown God are re-united and embraced in filial love, to be no more divided or estranged.
4. The History of Prayer
The living expression of the relations of man to his God, prayer is the very soul of religion. It brings to God the miseries of man, and brings back to man the communion and the help of God. Nothing better reveals the worth and moral dignity of a religion than the kind of prayer it puts into the lips of its adherents. Now, progress is more apparent here than anywhere else. The savage beats his fetish when it is not complacent enough. The Christian in his greatest distresses repeats the prayer of Jesus in the Garden: "Father, not my will, but Thine be done!" What a long road man has travelled between these two extreme points of religion!
At the outset, prayer would seem to have had nothing religious in it except the vague trust which men placed in its efficiency. It was almost everywhere conceived and practised as a sort of constraint put by the worshipper on the will that he wished to master. There were mysterious syllables, which, pronounced correctly, would produce an irresistible effect. To the voice were added rites and ceremonies, i.e. gestures menacing or wheedling, whose object was to move the god and bind his will to that of man. Primitive stories and legends are full of this idea. Out of it sprang magic, sorcery, necromancy.
With the supernatural beings around him man does as with other neighbours. He seeks to induce them to help him, and that by the self-same means. There is very little respect in these primary relations. Ruse, violence, seduction by bribes or threats,—these are the forms of that strange supplication. It is human selfishness addressing itself naïvely to the selfishness of the gods. Regular contracts are made between these two egoisms, each of which arms itself against the other with the Do ut des. The god who fails in his promise deserves to be chastised, and privations, and even blows, do not fail to follow and punish his felony.
Sacrifice at first was merely a form of prayer. Man never approaches his superior or his master with empty hands. To secure his favour or appease his wrath he brings the offerings he believes to be the most agreeable. The gods, like mortals, e.g., have need of nourishment. For them, therefore, are reserved the first-fruits of the human repast; libations, presents of honey and fine flour, the most luscious fruits, the most delicious viands. What difficulty man has had in believing in the goodness of his gods! He saw the effects of their anger in the evils which befell him, and if good fortune came to him he felt obliged to offer a sacrifice to turn aside the jealousy of higher powers. Was a god supposed to have been offended? They trembled for years beneath the strokes of his wrath; they offered in expiatory sacrifices all possible equivalents; they invented penances, humiliations, tortures, without being sure that the divine vengeance ever was appeased. These are universal religious phenomena.
The religious is so different from the moral sense that, at the outset, it exists by itself, and expresses itself in the most selfish and ferocious manner. How many crimes have been committed in the name of religion! with what baseness and sordidness has it not been sincerely connected! But here also we must note the new revelation made in the souls of prophets and of sages in order to raise the religion of naturalism to morality. Confucius, Buddha, the prophets of Israel, the philosophers of Greece, came simultaneously to feel that the true relation of man to God must be a moral relation, that righteousness is the only link which binds earth to heaven, that sacred words, rites, interested offerings, outward compensations, can do nothing, and mean nothing, the moment the religious man rises above the law of Nature and enters upon the higher life of the spirit. If God be righteous, there is only one means henceforth of putting one's self into harmony and peace with Him—to become like Him. Thus religion and morality were destined to approach each other and to penetrate each other more and more, until the perfect religion should be recognised by this sign: the highest piety under the form of the ideal morality. At bottom, Christianity has no other principle, and it is for this reason more than for any other that it is not only the highest form of religion, but the universal and final religion. "The absolute religion" and "the absolute moral life" are identical terms. The ancient dualism is surmounted in the unity of Christian consciousness. It is not surprising, therefore, that prayer should, in its turn, be transformed, and that, having at first been the most violently interested act of life, it should come in the end to be a pure act of trust and self-abandonment, of disinterestedness the most religious and complete. Is there need of many words for a child to make its father understand? It is the heathen, says Jesus, who make many prayers. The Father knows your needs before you ask Him. It is a mark of unbelief to be anxious about food and raiment and the future. The essential thing is not to multiply petitions, but to live near Him and feel Him ever near. Is He not Almighty and all-good? Does He not love you better than you love yourselves? Does He not make all things work together for the good of His children? If trials come, or dangers threaten, what ought we to do? Submit to God, as Jesus did. What is such prayer as His but the defeat of egoism and the perfect liberation of the individual spirit in the feeling of its plenary union with God?
Such was the prayer of Jesus. It did not consist in an outward flow of words, but in a constant, silent state of soul which made Him say in turning towards His Father: "I know that Thou hearest me always." Confidence increases with renunciation. Admirable progress of religion! Sublime reversal of rôles! At the beginning the ambition of the pious man was to bend the Divine will to his own; at the end his peace, his happiness, is to subordinate his wishes and desires to the will of a Father who knows how to be gracious, righteous, perfect!
There is another aspect of this progress. In all religions there is a double gamut of feeling: the one, which rules in primitive religions, and whose dominant note is fear and sadness; the other, which prevails in the end, in which the dominant note is confidence and joy. It is a natural effect of the progressive victory of the religious consciousness gradually surmounting the contradictions in the midst of which it is born and developed. At the outset, man, alone and defenceless, finds no fewer enemies in heaven than on earth. He feels as if surrounded by hostile and mysterious powers before which he cringes in fear, awaiting their decisions with respect to him. But everything changes when there rises within his soul the luminous dawn of the moral revelation of God. With the darkness, vanish all the frightful phantoms of the night. In the God whom he adores he sees his own interior law glorified and become henceforth the supreme law of things. That law of righteousness is, at bottom, a law of love. Nothing can trouble me any more except the sense of my own failure—that is, of my own sin, which alone can separate me from the very principle of righteousness and life. But, see, justice manifests itself as justifying grace! God gives it as He gives life to those who thirst for it. Reconciliation is complete. The orphan has found his Father; the Father, His child. The sinner, trembling, begins his prayer, prostrated; he ends it upright, with the confidence and freedom of a child that feels itself at home within the Father's house. The Gospel bids us to rejoice; it makes of joy an obligation, while distrust and sadness are the marks of selfishness and unbelief.
5. Conclusion
Such has been the course of religion through the centuries of human history, and amid the complex and confused development of particular faiths. The progress has not been on a straight line and by successive additions, as in the scientific sphere. Religious evolution is more like the evolution of art, in which the experience of the past is only fruitful when translated by a higher inspiration and a mightier creative force. There are periods of recrudescence of the religious sentiment in which the passions of a past that seemed to have been abolished are revived. These are the times of superstition. There are also periods of religious inertia, when the soul seems to empty itself of its eternal content, and divert itself into a frivolous activity and a superficial wisdom. These are the ages of incredulity. Lastly, there are epochs of crisis and confusion, in which mingle religious traditions the most diverse, and currents of thought the most contrary. We must pass over all these accidents and vicissitudes. In the religious evolution of humanity there is a sequence, an order, a progress which, in spite of all interruptions and reactions, manifest themselves as soon as we rise high enough to embrace it in its vast entirety.
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A few years ago there assembled in Chicago what the Americans called the Parliament of Religions. The official representatives of all the principal religions of the new world and the old met together under a common feeling of religious brotherhood. They did not discuss the value of their rites or dogmas; their object was to approach each other, to edify each other, and, for the first time in the world's history, to present the spectacle of a universal religious communion. When it came to the point, three things became clear: first, the common name under which they were able to call upon God—the Father; secondly, the Lord's Prayer was adopted and recited by all; thirdly, Christ Himself, apart from all theological definition, was unanimously recognised and venerated as the Master and Initiator of the higher religious life.
In my own consciousness, this practical demonstration is completed. I can hardly help being religious; but if I am seriously to be religious I can only be so under the Christian form. I can hardly help praying; but if I desire to pray, if moral anguish or intellectual doubt constrain me to seek some form of prayer that I can use in all sincerity, I never find but these words: "Our Father which art in heaven." Lastly, I may disdain the inner life of the soul, and divert myself from it by the distractions of science, art, and social life; but if, wearied by the world of pleasure or of toil, I wish to find my soul again and live a deeper life, I can accept no other guide and master than Jesus Christ, because, in Him alone, optimism is without frivolity, and seriousness without despair.
