Essays & addresses, on the philosophy of religion

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ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES

Contents

PAGS

I, OmciAL Authority and Living Religion ♦ ♦ i

IL The Place and Function of the Historical Element

II

The deadlock, then, would seem to be indeed complete — at least for such souls as, fully awake, cannot allow mere useless ballast or clogging hindrances upon or within their spiritual lives — lives already strained and difficult in many ways. Should we not then throw all such social, institutional, official Authority overboard? It has often been said in the past, and is still often said in the present, that a grown man, at least an Anglo-Saxon or Teuton, requires no support or check except those of his own mind and conscience ♦ Are not such sayings true? And note, pray, that these objections have now gained a treble reinforcement. For first, as historians, we now know that the institution of the Church is far less directly and completely attributable to Our Lord than used to be believed. Secondly, as scholars, desirous, at all legitimate cost, of being fair and candid, we feel more and more keenly how dangerously mischievous is any direct interference of Officiality in these delicate matters; and how perhaps the surest way to vitiate our very capacity to learn in these matters, is to bring to them what we should rather fight within ourselves — an official bias. And thirdly, as students of human nature and of its history in such-like matters, we may now, surely more than ever, quail before the obvious dangers and inevitable abuses incident to the maintenance of such a privileged class, and before the quasi -impossibility of its ever coming to be, for our modern conditions, more of a help than of a hindrance.

And yet: no, and again, no. Such a rejection would be an all the more dangerous mistake, as it would readily look, and at first feel, like an act of manly simplification and spiritual interiorisation. For let us note how, in each of the seven antinomies which we have dwelt on, it is not difficult to show how, in each pair, officialism stands for something which, if necessarily unpopular and irritating to the strenuous soul and to all souls in their strenuous moments, is nevertheless, in those seven respects, an essential factor in that souFs solid growth and balance and usefulness to others*

For, first of all, the Previous, the Past, has a right and duty either to assert clamorously its still unexhausted existence and action, or even, within limits, to weigh and press upon us; and thus so to force its abiding claims, its complements and criticisms upon our attention, as to pre;- vent too sudden a change, a rude jerk on to another level or way, which might upset healthy progress for the many altogether* And this Majority, the Average, both of men in general, and of each man*s ordinary thoughts and aspirations — they, too, have certain rights, if only as rests and fallow-times between one period of spiritual stress and another; and as, so to speak, neutral gaps or buffers between the otherwise too straining and conflicting personalities of intenser pitch and those of the average pitch. And to represent and defend these rights is to help to prevent the minority of ideas in each man, and the minority of men in the community, from themselves becoming a mere trick and fashion, a puerile preciousness, an inverted, doubly base Philistinism* And safety, even of the simply material and easily weakening, protective kind, has a certain right and claim, as, at its best, a primary (but then simply transitional), or as an abiding (but then ever secondary) means of helping souls, doubtless as long as souls shall exist on earth. For, though we are bound to instruct and interiorly to strengthen all souls as much as may be, some considerable weaknesses will necessarily remain more or less amongst us all, and will demand the partial or transitional application of such protection.

And the matter of our convictions and actions, as contrasted with their form and intention, is deeply important; and, indeed, neither can exist without the other, and each will absolutely require the stimulation of other leading, equal and dependent minds. For after all, in the spiritual as in the material sphere, we have to begin by trusting, imitating, being moulded by, those who know, or who declare they do; and, again, up to the very end, the actual more or less great correspondence of our notions and strivings with objective reality and its laws, is as truly important as is our faithful striving to attain it. And even where illegitimate or excessive, an official Authority, where sincerely accepted, can and does stand forth to us as the symbol, test and partial instrument of this objective Truth and of the corresponding objective, outward-moving spirit, with its noble sense of the littleness of all excessive subjectivity. And the, as it were phenomenal, juxtaposition or contrast of Truth and Error, Goodness and Evil, they too have also in so far a claim to recognition; as, though truth and goodness, together with error and evil, are no doubt present throughout all human lives and institutions, yet they are not simply evenly distributed, either in degree or in kind, throughout or behind space or time, any more than are physical health or mental endowments. Hence it is, at bottom, as really unjust and dangerous to hold all lives, doctrines, or institutions to be equally true, helpful and holy, as to deny any and every kind or degree of truth or of goodness to any man or any institution or teaching that could ever keep alive at all. And against the former of these injustices, such, as it were phenomenalist, spirituality is a useful reminder and counter-symbol. And, finally, even an Optimism inclusive of the status quo has got its share of truth: for if all that already exists and appears, even in the actual average around us, be bad and false, then all hope of a better future is cut off; since only through a growth, liberation and concentration of the germinal^ imprisoned, scattered good already at work in the present can the better of the future be achieved*

But above all, and throughout all these seven points, it is clear that Officialism, of some kind or degree, is inevitable if we would make a reasonable, continuous provision for applying the motive force and light of the leading, stimulating, renovating few to the dull, average, more or less automatic many — the few highest thoughts, volitions and experiences of any one man to the multitude of his average experiences; and the predominant dispositions and actions of the few whose religious life is almost entirely first-hand to the multitude of men whose religion is average in its attainments* And such relation is not by any means only necessary for those many thoughts and many men; it is at least as, though differently, necessary for those few who gain from such communication that uniquely noble, creaturely sense of each requiring and supplementing the other. For only then shall we avoid a gnostic, esoteric, '* Palace of Art*' infatuation, and the loss of that greatest glory of Christianity, the corporate spirit, the love of the universal brotherhood, the sense of the indestructible, though most easily deniable, interdependence of all times and races, gifts and activities of life, the supremacy of Love over knowledge, and of Action over speculation.

Ill

And History seems clearly to bear out this contention. For we there find three things,

I, We see how practically indestructible is, in the long run, if not this or that form of religious organisation, yet at least the presence of some such form. If the Jewish official Church could deliberately try, excommunicate and virtually itself crucify Him who was its very flower, its crown, its measure and its end; if it could, soon after, have its one great Sanctuary levelled with the ground for ever, and could yet continue and revive, in a very appreciable measure, in the Rabbinical schools and the Synagogal organisation, and last to this day: then no scandal can kill this instinct and this need. If, at the very moment of breaking with the old organisation, St. Paul, the most daringly free and individual of mystical-minded souls, became the virtual founder of the more elaborate Christian organisation, of the Church in our stricter sense of the word : then no overflowing fullness of interior life and personal assurance will prevent a soul, large and open enough to hear the heart-beats of the many, from realising the essential necessity of institutionalism for all normal religious education and for the development of even the most interior gifts. And if well-nigh one half, and certainly the mentally more active part, of Western Christendom could, at the Protestant Reformation, be carried away not only from the specifically Roman organisation, but, just at first and in considerable part, from all deliberate and uniform organisation whatsoever; and if, after now well-nigh four centuries, Rome lives on still, dead or a mere Antique only to those who do not know her; whilst the various protesting or separate groups of persons had very soon, after many a terrible experience, to return to some kind of deliberate organisation: then no such experiments, tried simultaneously by different races and types of men, have any reasonable chance of succeeding.

2. And, secondly, we see how spiritually beneficent is some kind and degree of organisation and officiality, or rather how the fuller and fullest interior life not only can thrive in, but seems actually to require, and itself to occasion, a vigorous, definite Church organisation. Certainly Our Lord, even though in conflict with, and the final victim of, the abuses of the Church of His age and country, nowhere denied or ignored its legitimate authority. Certainly St. Paul was not less, but rather more interior, from being at the same time the great organiser of the i6 OFFICIAL AUTHORITY

Christian Church, Certainly the deeply interior Clement of Alexandria and Origen grew up in^ and worked with and for, a very definite organisation. Certainly the beautiful simplicity and freedom of the Poverello of Assisi and of his first heroic little band will be at once misconceived and impoverished by us, if we take them as anything but the loyal children and proudly grateful products of that very Roman Church, which they loved too much not to give their all to live down the abuses that had come to disfigure its pristine and now largely latent beauty. And certainly those great Spanish mystics, St, John of the Cross and St, Teresa, flourished in the midst of what we now, practically on all sides, recognise as an excessive politicoecclesiastical officialism,

3, Yet there remains a third thing clearly taught by History, The frequent recurrence, and in fact the abidingness of attempts, on the part of truly religious men, to work and propagate or awaken religion as something purely interior, individual, subjective, as something which cannot conceive the presence or influence of a fellow-man as other than a barrier between a man and God, proclaim to all not beyond the reach of learning, that there are certain profound dangers and difficulties attendant upon all officialism; certain readily, all but inevitably, forgotten laws and limits of its efficacious exercise, I take these laws to be fundamentally two; and to be completed and reinforced by two great critico-historical conclusions.

First, then, official organisation and authority are part, a normally necessary part, of the fuller and more fruitful religious life; but they are ever only a part, and a part in what is a dynamic whole — one movement and moment in what is a life, in the deepest sense of the word. The lonely, new and daring (if but faithful, reverent and loving) outgoing of the discoverer and investigator are as truly acts of, are as necessary parts of, the Church and her life as his coming back to the Christian hive and community, which latter will then gradually test his contribution by tentative applications to its own life, and will in part assimilate, in part simply tolerate, in part finally reject it. And such a lonely, venturesome outgoing appears, in all kinds of degree and form, in every sort of life. The inventive, often most daring, ever at first opposed, philanthropy of the Saints belongs entirely to this exploratory, pioneer class of action in the rhythmic ** inspiration-expiration *' life, in the breathing of the living Church, The Church is thus, ever and everywhere, both progressive and conservative; both reverently free-lance and official; both as it were male and female, creative and reproductive; both daring to the verge of presumption, and prudent to the verge of despair. And Church officials are no more the whole Church, or a complete specimen of the average of the Church, than Scotland Yard or the War Office or the House of Lords, though admittedly necessary parts of the national life, are the whole, or average samples, of the life and fruitfulness of the English nation. The true cure here would then be for officials to cultivate in themselves also the non-official, the out-going, lonely and daring, the ** expiration ** movement of the complete soul and community; and for the pioneers and investigators to keep alive in themselves the recognition and practice of the homing, the ** inspiration'' movement, the patient referring back and living with the slow- moving, mentally ruminating, socially regulative multitude, and its and their official heads.

And, next, official organisation and Authority are ever means, necessary means, of life; means, not ends; of life, not of death. If all life is necessarily — in the exact measure of its fullness, persistence and reproductive power — a unified diversity, an organism of some kind, and there is no temporal priority on the side either of life or of organisation, since life and organisation grow pari passu: there is nevertheless, always and everywhere, a plain priority of logic and of worth on the side of life. We do not live our day worthily with a view to its division into neat sections of time, or to pleasing the police: we divide c i8 OFFICIAL AUTHORITY

it thus and we follow the police regulations, since, by so doing, we find that we can more fully and easily live our day in a worthy manner. And although the individual man will ever give the benefit of the doubt, where doubt exists, to the rulings of the official Authority, and will have to be interiorly pressed by increasingly grave and spontaneous promptings of conscience, in proportion as he neglects or opposes it: yet it is clear that, if the mere Individual, the raw human article, the spiritually untrained or unenlightened man, is, as such, ever under Authority in general, and, normally, under some particular authority conceived by himself as more or less an end: yet the Person, the spiritualised and purified man, who, as such, is part and organ and product of the Invisible Church in which God's Spirit dwells, as in His very Bride, is bound to such external authority only as to an instrument, realised by himself as such, for his own further progress, and for his social-religious union with his fellowmen* And thus some degree and kind of official Authority will be, in this double way, necessary for us all, and right up to the end of life, since we ourselves will never be quite completely '* personal persons,'' and since, even if we could be, we shall have to live with and to love, help and be helped by, a large majority who have hardly ceased to be mere individuals. And yet one of the tests of our advance will be the degree to which, in a very full and devoted life, we shall not actually require the pressure of that official Authority, whilst nevertheless never ceasing to believe in, and on occasion practising, the necessity, for our own selves as for all men, of deferring to and executing its legitimate commands and counsels.

And, thirdly, historical criticism has ended by clearly establishing how that Church organisation and Officialism, in all but the very rudimentary. Synoptic- Gospel form of their original operation — a form so akin to the Franciscan Brotherhood during the Poverello's lifetime — is not the direct and deliberate creation of Our Blessed Lord Himself.

But for the two exceptions confirmatory of the rule, His denunciation of the official abuses, and His modest organisation of the little preaching and curing fraternity of His Apostles, all competent scholars are coming to see how entirely He kept and lived and died, as far as in Him lay, within the pale, a member of the Jewish Church — and this if only because, whatever be the reason. He spoke and acted according to the current belief that this Church, indeed all earthly arrangements, would soon end at His Proximate Second Coming* Now this conclusion necessarily involves the recognition that all and every officialism beyond that humble brotherhood, so simply trained, organised and sent out by Him, can but go back germinally and not formally and materially to Him, somewhat as the visible universe itself was germinally created by God in the beginning, and not in the state or form in which we now see it. And, since all more or less largely organised Christian bodies go almost as far beyond that first modest confraternity, as do our secular knowledge and our religious problems and picturings as affected by that knowledge go beyond the knowledge of that primitive community, it follows that this matter is a point which concerns all Historical Christians, And such a view will, for a man of faith, imply his profound conviction of the identity of the God slowly working out His purposes in history with the God incarnate in Jesus Christ. There can be no more ''pure'' Christianity, in the actual practice, or (if he is historically unprejudiced) in the reasoned conception of the modern man now, than Christ's own Christianity was *'pure"; and this for the simple reason that Christ, though God, is not God in the sense of leaving God no work to do in the world.

God's work, before and during and ever since the Incarnation, has been met, taken up, and carried higher and deeper by the Christ. But all this cannot fail to introduce width, elasticity, and a noble humanity into our conception of the Church. We require the Church as much as ever, it is as venerable and sacred as ever; but, as to the form in which we now have it, it is mostly of divine institution in the sense in which the family and human society are — God's work, under the immense impulsion given to humanity by Christ Our Lord's teachings, life, death, and glorified existence — a work built up in and through and for the abiding necessities, aspirations and helps of men* Thus the Church which, in proportion to our spiritual receptiveness and vigour, we all, as the instruments of God, have made, in return helps to make each one of us* And thus, whilst remaining sacred. Christian and Divine, the Church will be conceived so warmly and humanely as to put all haughty, oppressive, Old Testament institutionalism, all angry, hard, cold, purely or predominantly exterior rule, out of court and practice* And thus, from out the valuable but much-mixed ore of our present Institutionalism, the pure dear gold of Christ's own spirit, that has been met and reinforced by all the goodness and greatness of a God-moved outer world, will be smelted out and more ready for our spiritual use*

And, lastly, this same historical criticism is demonstrating, with apparent ruthlessness, the limited and noninfallible character of Our Lord's recorded manifestation of human knowledge; His adoption of all the scientific, literary, critical assumptions, picturings and beliefs of His own age and country — even inclusive of such an apparently spiritual belief as that in the proximity of His Second Coming* More and more we are being driven to the conclusion that, since the effects upon and in the Humanity, of the Divinity of Our Lord, are necessarily matters entirely beyond our own experience or intuition, they cannot be determined by us, either by means of such experience, or, a priori, by deductive reasoning as to the consequences of such a union; we can but get at the effects a posteriori and from history, by a quite docile adherence to the information given us by the eye-witnesses of that Humanity*

Now this information, taken thus, ruins the old deductions and positions, in two respects* For it turns out not to be true that human nature, in its fullest purity and perfection, is exempt from mental growth, struggle, obscurity; from dim and partially mistaken gropings and guesses. Everywhere, on the contrary, it is of the very essence of human nature as such, and one of the central means and pathetic forms of its very greatness and nobility, to possess such a fringe of shadow to its light — a light ever limited, ever pushing its way and spreading, mostly slowly and fitfully, through the gloom. And, again, it is not true that even that unique union with, and penetration by, the Divinity, which we Historical Christians hold and proclaim to exist in Our Lord's Humanity, abolishes these or any characteristics which are essential to human nature as finite. We are evidently forced to say that God Himself could not, even by such an unique union, abolish these characteristics; at least, if He would have a true Incarnation, if Our Lord was to be as truly man as He is truly God. But note that we do not, by any such admissions, cease from holding a glorious central, spiritual and moral inerrancy of insight and instinct in Our Blessed Lord's teaching and life. In Him as in the Son dwelt the plenitude of that Spirit which spake by the prophets in sundry times and divers manners. Never more fully, never as entirely as to-day, could we say : ** Thou hast the words of Eternal life'': indeed He has.

Now, immense and deeply satisfactory conclusions follow at once from such a recognition of Our Lord's Humanity, for that extension of the Incarnation, the Church, and for the official Authority within it. For the major premiss of an implied piece of theological reasoning does, indeed, remain as true as ever, viz. that it is truly impossible that theologians, or indeed Church Authority generally, should have an inerrancy higher, or more extensive in degree or kind, than Our Lord's; or, rather, that He should be less infallible than they. But the minor premiss assumes a view of religious ** truth/' i.e. of the subject-matter of infallibility, which will want considerable remoulding. For the intellectualist view of religion, and of the ultimate nature and worth of man, has prevailed to such an extent as, in good part, to obliterate the essential characteristics of human nature, and hence of human nature's worth, in Our Lord's life and character themselves. And now, contrariwise, a more adequate philosophy of human nature and of its special greatness will reinforce and apply, in their various degrees, to all human inteUigences under Christ, that which we have learnt historico-critically about Himself, our Head and Pattern, And hence church-officialism will necessarily become deintellectualised — not in the pernicious sense of discouraging speculation and learning, or of ceasing to be awake to their important bearing upon religion, or of neglecting to watch for the many who do not know much of earthly knowledge, either with or against those who do: but in the more general, all-pervasive sense, that the inerrancy of the Church, a derivative of the fuller unfailingness of Christ, will be taken as primarily one of spiritual instinct and affinity for and with the religious and moral direction given to life itself; and all this as exemplified and tested by the deepest spiritual intuitions, experiences and actions of the most saintly of her children across the ages, and with a slow and halting, but, in the long run, sure growth in adaptation to the successive requirements of all that is good and great in God's wide world outside. The intellectual will remain a most necessary part of human life and of the Church's interest and discipline; but it will now appear as the more or less inadequate mental scaffolding partly shaping, partly shaped by those immanent experiences of transcendent realities, God, our own soul, and the community of its fellow-souls — together with the experienced relations between those living realities: sin, contrition; grace, pardon; strength not our own; pure love; the action of the spiritual (if from person to person.

yet through the determinism of phenomenal science) in life in general, and (through the determinism of things and forms, the Sacraments) in religion in particular*

In a word, official Authority will thus get recognised and treated both by its bearers and its subjects as a part, a normally necessary part, but ever only a part, of the total religious life ; as a means, one of the normally necessary means, but not as the end or even as one end of that life; as directly Christian and Divine, only in its germinal and most elementary features and functions; and as directly busy with bearing its share in helping on that ever-growing, ever-renewed experience and embodiment of those sacred realities from which Authority itself derives all its rights and duties, and of which it is but the consecrated, ceaseless servants

II

THE PLACE AND FUNCTION OF THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION

II

THE PLACE AND FUNCTION OF THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN RELIGION ^

It was in 1774 that Kant wrote to Hamann: ** If a religion comes to be so placed that the critical knowledge of ancient languages — philological and antiquarian learning — constitutes the basis upon which it must remain built up, throughout all ages and all races: then the man who is most at home in Greek and Hebrew and the like will drag all the orthodox believers, in spite of all their wry faces — as though they were so many children — whithersoever he may choose. For in the matter which, according to their own admission, carries with it the probative force for the whole, these believers cannot measure themselves with that scholar/' It would, then, appear to be dangerous in practice to link Religion and History very closely together.

It was in 1777 that Lessing wrote to Schumann: ** Contingent truths of History can never become the proof for necessary truths of Reason/' It would, then, seem to be impossible in philosophy to tie Religion to History.

And it was as lately as 1873 that Paul de Lagarde wrote: *'The entire Christian Church has accepted the Jewish principle of considering as the object of religious emotion a something that has occurred once for all, instead of something which is evermore happening anew — the Past instead of the Present. . . ♦ Yet the spirit of man, essentially eternal, cannot be satisfied with what happens just once for all. It is not religion, it is sheer sentimentality, to absorb one's self in what has come and

1 A Paper read before the London Society for the Study of Religion on Tuesday, 2 May, 1905.

a?

28 THE PLACE AND FUNCTION

gone. We require, not the mere Past of God and of the Divine, but their very Presence, here and now/* It would then appear to be contrary to the very genius of rehgion itself to interconnect History and Religion.

Yet, since Kant and Lessing wrote, two great developments have occurred with regard to this matter. The one has now perhaps achieved maturity; the other has, as yet, reached only certain discriminations of a still tentative but already profoundly fruitful kind. The older achievement. Critical and Historical method, has, indeed, attained and perfected a whole series of results of the most striking and far-reaching kind; and the names of the great critical workers are known to all the world. But the newer investigation — as to the nature and meaning of the historical process, the possibility and conditions of a science of History, and the place of that process and of this science in Religion and Theology respectively — this is slowly but surely progressing under our very eyes. Professor Wilhelm Windelband, of Heidelberg, and Professor Heinrich Rickert, of Freiburg, Baden, are, no doubt, the chief path-finders. Yet Professor Percy Gardner here in England has merited well, in the same direction, by his continuous, and as yet far from superfluous, insistence upon the claims and place, in life and thought, of History as a process in actual life, and as a Science within the human mind.

As concerns the supposed or real antagonism between History and Religion, Plato and Plotinus, Augustine, and the great Christian Mystics, remain, for one important side of this deep question, a treasure-house of experience, analysis and stimulation, which is even now far from being exhausted. But among recent workers, I owe most, in this matter, to Professor H. J. Holtzmann, in his book on Rothe's System, 1899; to Professor Ernst Troeltsch, in numerous articles; to M. Henri Bergson, in his Essai, 1898; and to the second series of Professor Josiah Royce^s The World and the Individual, 1901.

OF THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT 29

Now I propose, in this paper, first briefly to consider the specific character of History, as process and as science, in its difference from natural happenings and natural science; next, to describe the double movement of the human mind and will from History down into Religion, and up from Religion back to History; thirdly, to explain two special points connected with the relations between such phenomenal happenings and this their doctrinal interpretation; and, lastly, to elucidate the connection between History, which apparently is ever and entirely successive, and Religion, which, in its essence, is surely suffused with some apprehension — is it not even some indirect experience? — of Simultaneity and Eternity*