An introduction to the psychology of religion

Front matter

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Preface

T he present book is the result of a request to put into book form the substance of lectures delivered to ordi¬ nation candidates during the Long Vacation at Cam¬ bridge. This fact explains its scope. While it is hoped that it may appeal to professed psychologists as well, it is intended primarily for those who wish to study the psychological problems of religion, without any prior knowledge of psychological terminology. It must be judged chiefly by its success or failure in meeting the needs of this class of readers. The author’s excuse for adding to the enormous volume of literature dealing with religious subjects is that there seemed to be a niche in such readers’ requirements which no existing book quite filled, and he has attempted to fill it.

It is difficult adequately to acknowledge my personal obligations to the many friends who have given help and encouragement in the preparation of this volume. Dr Rivers, whose recent death leaves such a sad gap in the ranks of Cambridge psychologists, read through all the typescript and gave valuable advice. I am equally indebted for the same help to Professor Sorley and Mr Spens. Father Cary, S.S.J.E., read and criticised the chapters on Prayer and Mysticism. Professor Pear and Mr Mackay very kindly read through my proofs.

The Editors of Theology and The Quest generously gave permission for the reprint (with modifications) of articles which originally appeared in their papers.

R. H. T.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I The Psychology of Religion. 1

II The Traditional Element in Religious

Chapter I

A serious difficulty is introduced into the task of writing an introduction to the psychological study of religion by the fluid state of the science of psychology and particularly of its terminology. Since the object of the present book is not primarily to teach its readers psychology, it would merely be a waste of time to discuss the merits of alternative psychological theories when we come to matters about which there is dispute. In order to avoid this waste, it will be necessary at such points to limit myself to a description of the theory which seems to me to be the one which has most chance of proving to be of permanent value, with an indication of the terminology which I intend to use. Where I am differing widely from the more conservative psychologists, I propose to mention the existence of alternatives without arguing about them. This proce¬ dure will make the psychological part of this book appear to be very dogmatic, but it is necessary if I am to avoid confusing and wearying those of my readers whose knowledge of pure psychology is slight. This appearance of dogmatism would, I hope, have been avoided if I had attempted to write a book on pure psychology; but, for my present purpose, it is only necessary that I should make my own position and use of language clear so that I may not be misunderstood.

The first subject that it is necessary to discuss is the meaning we intend to attach to the word religion . It

l is not, perhaps, necessary to reach an academically satisfactory definition of religion, but we must come to a sufficient agreement about the use of the word to set some limits, however vague, to the subjects we propose to discuss under the psychology of religion. We must avoid the temptation, common amongst writers on religion, of defining it too narrowly, and thus unduly limiting the scope of our discussion. Such writers remind us of Mr Thwackum who when he mentioned religion meant the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.

If, for example, with Hegel we define religion as “the knowledge possessed by the finite mind of its nature as absolute mind,” we are making the meaning of religion far narrower than it is in common speech, for it would appear from this definition that a man can only be religious if he is a metaphysician. Similarly, we must not define religion in such a way as to imply that a man cannot be religious unless he is good. Many persons, as for example, Cellini, have been extremely religious and extremely wicked. This fact rules out such a definition as that of F. W. H. Myers—that religion is “the sane and normal response of the human spirit to all that we know of cosmic law.” 1

In Professor Leuba’s A Psychological Study of Religion 2 there is a valuable and interesting appendix in which he has collected no less than forty-eight dif¬ ferent definitions of religion from various writers. Of these forty-eight definitions, I wish to draw attention to three only which will be sufficient to serve as illustra-

1 Human Personality (London, 1903), n. p. 284.

3 New York, 1912.

tions of the three different classes into which most of the others may be divided.

The first is given by Frazer in The Golden Bough: “By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or con¬ ciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of Nature and of human life.” 1 The second comes from A Study of Religion by James Martineau. To him, religion is “the belief in an everliving God, that is, in a Divine Mind and Will ruling the Universe and holding moral relations with mankind.” 2 The third is Dr McTaggart’s definition in Some Dogmas of Religion: “Religion is clearly a state of mind. ... It seems to me that it may best be described as an emotion resting on a conviction of har¬ mony between ourselves and the universe at large.” 3

A scrutiny of these three definitions shows that they are applying the word religion to three completely different things. The first describes a mode of be¬ haviour, the second an intellectual belief or opinion, the third a system of feelings. It is possible to regard reli¬ gion as any one of these three things or as any combi¬ nation of them. It seems, however, more consistent with the ordinary meaning of the word religion to treat all three as essential elements in it. We should, for example, refuse the name religion to an opinion that there was in fact a God, if that opinion had no influence at all on the holder’s behaviour.

Our definition of religion will, therefore, include in association a mode of behaviour, a system of intellec¬ tual beliefs and a system of feelings. In order to find a complete and satisfactory definition, we must further enquire what is the particular mark of the conduct, beliefs and feelings in question which characterises them as religious. To this question many different answers have been given. Hoffding calls a belief in ‘the conservation of value’ the distinctive character of religion; Royce thinks that it is loyalty. The man in the street would probably reply that it is the belief in God, and (remembering the existence of polytheistic religions) he might add ‘or in gods.’ I see no sufficient reason for not adopting this as the distinctive character of religion. In order to avoid the use of the undefined word god, it may conveniently be replaced by the term superhuman being (superhuman implying nothing more than that the being in question is felt to be greater than man, and may be looked up to by him). Our definition will then run in some such form as this: Religion is a felt practical relationship with what is believed in as a superhuman being or beings.

This definition will be found to be sufficient for the purpose for which we require it—to indicate the sense in which the word religion will be used in the course of this book. Possibly for a different purpose, a different definition would have been found more convenient. It will be noticed that no mention has been made of the marks which theologians often introduce into their definitions of God—self-existence, infinity, and eter¬ nity. These things have no meaning except on a level of intellectual development which most religious per¬ sons, even though they be monotheists, have not reached. In the scientific study of religion it would be absurd to include them as essential marks of religious beliefs unless we intended to confine our study to the religion of philosophers.

There are two terms in common use in the psychology of religion which must be explained. These are the religious consciousness, and religious experience. The religious consciousness is that part of religion which is present to the mind and is open to examination by introspection. It is the mental side of religious activ¬ ity. Religious experience is a vaguer term used to | describe the feeling element in the religious conscious- \ ness—the feelings which lead to religious belief or are f the effects of religious behaviour. Examples of what is meant by religious experience are: the sense of the presence of God described by the mystics, which also is not very uncommon amongst other people; the feeling of peace after prayer or sacrament; and the less intense, hardly perceptible, emotional undercurrent which accompanies ordinary religious life.

The main business of the psychology of religion is to study the religious consciousness. But it is impossible to study that alone; we must investigate religious behaviour as well. Modern psychology has become fruitful by giving up the attempt to confine itself to mind alone, and including human behaviour in its field. All experimental psychology is a study of behaviour, and the American school of behaviourists confine them¬ selves entirely to this study, and refuse to concern themselves with the mind at all. In order to make the study of the psychology of religion fruitful, we must include religious behaviour as part of the problem to be investigated.

t The method of the psychology of religion is the method of science—the study of the facts which come within its province in an objective and impartial man¬ ner. As far as possible, we must try to approach it with none of the prejudices for or against particular religious customs or beliefs which result from our opinions about their truth or value. We must examine the strange writings of the erotic mystics and the wilder American revivals with the same scientific respect as we show to the services of matins and evensong in the established church. We must not be ready to damn them at once with that invaluable word pathological. It is possible that a study of what are called pathological forms of the religious consciousness may be of great value in the elucidation of the workings of the normal religious mind. The questions of truth and value raised by them belong properly to the philosophy of religion.

At the same time, it is true that we cannot, in the end, be content to rest in mere description. For most of us the practical interest of the psychology of religion —its bearing on the question of the truth and value of religion—is far greater than our interest in its purely theoretical side. Unless we are to ignore this practical interest altogether, we cannot help encroaching to this extent on the field of the philosophy of religion. I intend to neglect these questions at present, and to . return to them later.

The psychology of religion is an attempt to express the workings of the mind w 7 hen it is religious in terms of the mental processes we have discovered in secular psychology. It makes the reasonable assumption (which would be discredited by our total failure to con¬ struct a scientific psychology of religion) that a man’s mind works in the same way in his religion as it does in his other activities. The psychologist is no more necessarily concerned with the question of whether religious experience is caused by anything outside the subject than is the physicist with the question of the reality of matter. It is true that most psychologists do in fact interest themselves in trying to show either that all the phenomena of religious experience can be ex¬ plained without any religious assumptions, or that they do point to an agent outside the individual experiencing them. This, however, is only an interesting and im¬ portant application of the psychologist’s results; the conclusion he comes to will not influence him funda¬ mentally in his descriptive work. Whatever the origin of the mental states of religion, we assume that once they are in a man’s mind they will obey ordinary mental laws; in other words, that they will prove amenable to treatment by the methods of ordinary psychology.

In this, I am dissociating myself entirely from that school whose conception of the task of the psychology of religion is that it is to create a new and mystifying psychology for religion alone. It explains every new fact by the creation of some fresh mental faculty, which it christens with some such name as transcendental consciousness. When its inventive genius for new faculties fails, it brings in the mystery of the sub¬ conscious or the more ethically pretentious supraconscious. The objection to it is, of course, the objection to all faculty psychology—that it explains nothing but creates entities which are no more than the facts themselves which they were required to explain. So long as it claims to be merely description, there is no objection to this, provided that its terminology is simple and useful. If it claims to be scientific explana¬ tion, it is mere charlatanism.

It may be objected that the method of approach we are adopting is a very undesirable one to apply to religion. Scientific method itself tends to destroy that atmosphere of reverence which should surround reli¬ gion, and thus brings it down to the level of other activities. This is an objection with which we must sympathise; but it is not, I think, sufficiently well grounded. Unless religion is in reality a fancy woven by man out of his own mind, no scientific analysis will prove it so. On the other hand, if (as is freely assumed by modern writers on religion) psychology can produce real support for religion, it is clear that the value of our study of the psychology of religion will be proportion¬ ate to the completeness with which we detach our minds from our own beliefs and judgments. An inves¬ tigation which was only concerned with the facts which seemed to support religion, which hesitated to go any further when it appeared to be discovering natural explanations for what had previously been supposed to be supernatural processes, would obviously be of no value at all as evidence. The strength of any evidence that a scientific study of the religious consciousness can bring for the reality of the objects of religion will de¬ pend entirely on how far we have made that study in a scientific spirit, without either over-emphasising the facts which support religion or neglecting those which appear to discredit it.

To those who think that such a study is better not undertaken at all lest religious faith should be dis¬ turbed, it is necessary to point out that all these ques¬ tions are already being raised. We cannot get back into a condition in which they have not been raised at all. If any individual feels that he does not wish to disturb his own religious faith by questioning its foun¬ dations, he has a perfect right not to do so. But he should not be reading a book on the psychology of reli¬ gion ; if, by a mistake, he is, the right course for him to adopt is to close it at this point and to read no further.

At the same time, it is probable that the extent to which the psychological study of religion has power to dissolve religious faith is exaggerated. When the psychologist describes what he believes to be the mental laws by which such an event as a conversion takes place, he in no way excludes the explanation of it which would be given by the Salvation Army—that it takes place by the Grace of God. The physiologist’s expla¬ nation that a movement in my finger took place by muscular contractions brought about by a neural current started by a change (possibly chemical) in the cerebral cortex, in no way excludes the equally true explanation that I moved my finger because I wanted to. The psychologist and the Salvationist are explain¬ ing the same event on different levels. Both may be equally right. The psychologist may, of course, have a private opinion that the explanation of the Salvationist is wrong, but on this question he has no more right to dogmatise than anyone else. He may be wrong, and the Salvationist may know that he is wrong. To one who is sure that he has the vision of God, the scientific psychologist of religion can be no more than a blind man talking about colours.

The method of a psychological study of religion which claims to be scientific must be, in the widest sense of the word, empirical. In other words, such a study must proceed by the method of drawing conclu¬ sions from observed facts and not by arm-chair reflec¬ tion divorced from experience. It is true that it will not be able to make much use of experiment, that is, of the observation of the changes which are produced in phenomena by intentionally produced changes in the conditions under which they develop. Experiment, however, is not the sole source of empirical knowledge. There is also observation, which is the method we-use when we are not free ourselves to modify the conditions under which phenomena are observed but must be content with studying them-in such varying situations as are provided for us. Although we cannot experiment in-the psychology of YeTIgion as we can when we are studying the psychology of sensation, we are not ex¬ empted from the duty of being able to justify our conclusions by an appeal to experience.

There seem to be three main sources from which data may be drawn for a psychological study of religion. These are: first, what can be discovered by questioning living persons; secondly, what can be discovered by examining ourselves; and thirdly, the information which can be drawn from the autobiographies and other writings of religious persons. Of these, the third is the evidence on which the present work mostly relies, while the first and second are used only subordinately.

The most highly systematised method of obtaining evidence from living persons is by means of the ques¬ tionnaire. This is a series of questions issued to a large number of persons. It is peculiarly well adapted to obtain statistical information about what people be¬ lieve. It has obvious limitations which are illustrated by the use made of it by T Starbuck to obtain informa¬ tion about conversion . 1 It is difficult not to feel that Starbuck’s conclusions about the part played by emo¬ tion, intellect, etc., in conversions, from the number of people who have mentioned these in their reply, are of extremely doubtful value. Leub a used^ thej questionnaire to determine the percentage of scientific" workers of different kinds who believed in God andJn immortal¬ ity. This is the kind of problem for the elucidation of which the questionnaire seems to be well adapted. It is a pity that Professor Leuba was not content with this, but tried to'clraw from his results conclusions

*New York, 1903.

about the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, problems upon which a questionnaire, even if issued to leading scientific workers, is altogether in¬ capable of throwing any light.

While I am not in the present book making explicit use of self-analysis as data for my enquiry, it can never be altogether absent. The scheme of one’s classifica¬ tion must always be provided in part from one’s own religious development. Both in this and the previous kind of data, it is important to remember that one must not be content with mere introspection. The study of behaviour gives results which must supplement the data of introspection, and the psychoanalytic method of investigating the mind also makes a contribution to our knowledge. [An obvious criticism of the question¬ naire is that its replies are mere introspections whose value we could only judge if we could have also the testimony of the friends and relatives of the subjects, f One of the advantages of the analysis of written J material as an empirical basis, is that in this we are not confined to the introspections of our subjects. Contemporary biographies throw light on the beha¬ viour of the religious person when this is important for the understanding of his introspections. We can also observe the influence of his personal history and of his environment on his religious developme nt, JB uch infor¬ mation is generally not given at all in a questionnaire.^ At the same time, when he talks widely and freely on a variety of subjects, he often enables us to guess at the unconscious springs of his thought in a way which is not intended by himself. This also is an advantage foregone by the users of the questionnaire method.

I intend to use as material for this book the more developed religions rather than the primitive ones, because our own mental processes and those of the people with whom we live or whose books we read, are open to our observation in a way that is impossible for the mental processes of primitive man. For the same reason I propose to draw my illustrations principally from the religion with which we are most familiar— Christianity.

The first problem which it is necessary to discuss is perhaps most simply to be expressed as follows: what are the conscious roots of the belief in God as it is found in the mind of a believer in one of the higher religions? We find that this question has been answered in many different ways. St Anselm thought that he could prove the existence of God by an a priori process of reasoning quite apart from experience of any kind. Some persons say that they feel a certainty of His existence which they cannot doubt although they confess that they are not able to prove it. Others rest their belief on the authority of the Church or of the Bible. Others are convinced of the reality of the demands of morality, and can find no sufficient sanction for them except in the conception of a supreme lawgiver. Others are entranced by the beauty of Nature, and find in this the signature of a loving creator.

We need not dispute about which of these is the true method of approach, but recognise in each of them one element which goes to the building up of that complex mental product we call religion. \Tf we try to classify those elements which help to produce belief in God we find that they fall under three main headings.

These are:

(1) The influence of tradition, childhood teaching, etc.

(2) Various experiences of the individual which are harmonised by the beliefs which he has been taught.

(3) Processes of reasoning by which he subsequently justifies them.

If we wish to name these three roots of religious belief, we may call them the traditional, the experi¬ ential, and the rational element respectively. /

The experiences which have been included in the experiential root are so varied that we may conven¬ iently further classify them as follows:

(а) The experience of beauty, harmony and benefi¬ cence in the external world; in conflict with ugliness, disorder and malevolence.

(б) The moral conflict, i.e., the conflict in the indi¬ vidual’s own mind between the impulses he recognises as evil and those he believes to be good.

(c) The inner emotional experiences connected with the idea of God.

These I propose to call the natural, the moral and the affective element.

This gives five main roots of religious belief which will be discussed in more detail during the course of the next five chapters. They can be summarised in the following form:

(1) The influence of tradition, etc. (the traditional element).

(2) Experiences harmonised by religious belief.

(а) Beauty, harmony and beneficence in the out¬ side world (the natural element).

(б) The moral conflict (the moral element).

(c) Emotional experience (the affective element).

(3) Processes of reasoning (the rational element).

The above classification will help us to treat the

problem we are discussing in an orderly manner. We must, however, be on our guard against the pitfalls which are open to us if we attach too much importance to our own classifications. There is no shallower method in psychology than mat of those who arrange types in a neatly numbered series and then proceed to fit the infinite varieties of human life into their rigidly conceived framework. We should be making an evil use of the analysis just performed if we thought it justified us in allocating all the human beings of our acquaintance to the traditional, the rational, or to one of the three sub-varieties of the experiential type. I We shall indeed find that in some forms of religiom the contribution of one of these roots is exaggerated at the expense of others; and I shall speak of such forms of religion (and of such forms only) as types —as the traditional type when it is the traditional element which is exaggerated, and so on. These, however, are exceptional growths, often in response to the require¬ ments of a theory. If, for example, a man makes up his mind in his study that the sole valid function of religion is that of dealing with the moral conflict, we need not be surprised to find that he develops a religion of the moral type, in which the moral element attains unusual prominence. When dealing later with each of these elements in turn, we shall notice the type of re¬ ligion which results from their exaggeration. The more usual development of religion, however, will be from a variety of roots and an exclusive emphasis on one may be taken as a sign of an abnormal development.

rXt the same time, we must remember that we havja so far established no criterion of normality in religion! When we speak of a religious type having been formed by the exaggeration of one element in the mental groundwork of religion, we can only mean that it is exaggerated as compared with the religion we most commonly find. We have no right to mean that it is exaggerated as compared with religion as it ought to be. It is possible, for example, that the purest and most highly developed religion would be what we have called religion of the moral type. I do not believe that this is the case, for reasons which I shall discuss in a later chapter. So many people, however, do believe it that it would be dishonest for me to use language which prejudged the question in my own favour, by describ¬ ing religion of the ordinary kind as normal and speak¬ ing of this as an exaggeration with an implied condem¬ nation of it.

Just as such types of religion result from a strong emphasis in practice on one of these roots and com¬ parative neglect of the others, so dogmatic schools in the philosophy or psychology of religion result from a similar over-emphasis in theory. An example of this may be found in a work on the psychology of religion, in which the author makes it clear in his preface that he considered that the only element belonging properly to religion was the moral element. 1 Philosophers of religion have often occupied themselves exclusively with the arguments for the existence of God, and sup¬ posed that this was the whole foundation of religion. Their influence on the religious life of their times has been small, because what they were arguing about played only a small part in determining whether people believed or disbelieved in God. When a philosopher supposed that he had successfully refuted all the argu¬ ments for the existence of God which had so far been brought forward, there was no general abandonment of religious faith. At most, he had destroyed only one of the elements which determine religious belief; the others remained as firm as before.

1 The Psychology of Religion, by Coe (Chicago, 1916).

CHAPTER II THE TRADITIONAL ELEMENT IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF j

At the end of the last chapter, we had distinguished five main conscious roots of the belief in God. We are now going to discuss at greater length the first of these: the influence of such factors as childhood teaching, of tradition. This is an element which we always tend to regard as playing a much smaller part in the formation of our own beliefs than modern psychologists insist that in fact it does. Theorists’ discussions of religious experience too often make the tacit assumption that the problem of the psychology of religion is to discover what kind of religion a man would develop from his own inner experience if he had been entirely cut off from his fellow men from infancy by being abandoned on a desert island. The problem in real life is not so simple. [We are in fact surrounded by other people and are receiving from them influences far greater than we are generally willing to acknowledge to ourselves.

These do not come only from childhood teaching and from direct teaching in later life. £Even what we regard as our own inner experiences, products of our self-determined mental life, are moulded very much by our social environmentT^Members of a society all tend to thrill with the same’emotions under the same circum¬ stances.^ J’ew religious phenomena are more uniform than the adolescent conversions of members of a religious body in which adolescent conversion is the