Chapter XI: Man’s Conceptions of Religion (3)

The Church has often been accused of tolerating like superstitions; yet she endeavours to stop their propagation; but the task of trying to restore each stone to its place is one of great delicacy, lest the foundations should be shaken upon which the spiritual life of long centuries has been built. Miracles are a prominent feature in all religions; nevertheless, when the disciples of Buddha asked their master to enable them to perform them, he replied: “I will teach you to perform the greatest moral miracle. Hide your good deeds, and confess before the world the sins you have committed” (_Phy. Religion_, p. 339).

Mohammed, in the Koran, expresses the strongest contempt for miracles, in the usual sense of that word, and he appeals to the true miracles, the great works of Allah in nature: “I cannot show you,” he said to his disciples, “signs more wonderful than what you see every day and every night.” But the orthodox Mohammedans delight in relating the miracles wrought by Mohammed, and which have made him the marvel of Arabia.

Miracles seem to serve the purpose of impressing upon us that the religion is true in which name they are performed; it has also been observed that the same miracle is not generally performed twice, as the second time it appears natural; it is extraordinary the faculty man possesses of feeling no astonishment at those things which should awaken his most profound astonishment.

As critics we are now in a position to take note of the mental aberrations of the mythological period; we can understand that when the ancient peoples attributed a divine descent to their kings and heroes, it was the highest praise that one man could give to another; we know that the mythology as taught in the schools, was no more the religion of the Greeks and Romans than rust is iron. Yet it is this homage which has perhaps obscured our minds as we imagine absolutely human intercourse taking place between mortals and immortals. The action of metaphor overstepped the boundary of the fabulous ages; it invaded, unknown to us, the domain of the modern thinker, and even our religion was not sheltered from its attacks; we now use in our religious phraseology the words of _father_ and _son_, without having first despoiled them of their material meaning; and we hardly realise that in this different sphere these words are a daring metaphor, upon which, of our own initiative, we could not have ventured. A vague idea that God is separated from us by space dominates us, so that the belief that there can be no barrier between the divine and human is often confounded with pantheism; yet without pantheism of this kind, which differs _in toto_ from the dogmatic pantheism, Christianity would not have made its appearance in the world. We invoke neither Jupiter nor Jehovah; God is for us the God whose name is found in all modern languages; but it is God around us, beyond us; in speaking of Him our thoughts follow Him to Heaven. When a man takes God to witness of his innocence, he involuntarily lifts his hand to Heaven; in a time of disastrous drought, when the earth refuses its nourishment to man and beast, pious souls are invited to pray to God for the blessing of rain. Whilst the work of science has been specially directed to causes, religion is content, as in the past, to attribute each act to an agent; the influence of ancient ideas on our present thought is still in force, and our mind has to live as the oyster, under a cover which it has made for itself. But we must submit to evidence, and acknowledge that if we do not yet escape from the power of mythology, it is that we meet its language everywhere, even in our sacred writings.

Language has moulded our thoughts; when they tend towards God, we make a representation of Him as a person, we are not able to avoid such representations; we know that the sun does not rise each morning, but we cannot do otherwise than see it rise; we know that the sky is not blue, but to us it wears no other appearance.

We hear it repeated that an impersonal God is no God; but it is forgotten that personification implies limitations, since it cannot be conceived but from a human point of view, and thus with limits. When Spinoza denied a Divine personality, his opposers believed him to be denying God; the philosophers of the seventeenth century, including Catholic theologians, did not define the personality of God.[131] Descartes and Fenelon’s definition is “The Infinitely perfect Being, without restrictions, the Being, to which nothing can be added.” In regarding God’s personality as we do that of a human being, we might logically say with Massillon: “God, in His anger, hears unwise prayers, in order to punish those who use them”; you would also be logical if you thought with that mother that God had taken away her child because she had loved it too well.

In tracing the progress of ideas concerning God throughout the course of ages, it would be a sorry task to gather together the characteristics chosen by Christian writers as those which mark the supreme Being; these traits would furnish a whole Pantheon of mythological divinities.

All philosophers and all truly philosophical theologians have held that God is impersonal Reason; Bossuet called Him “La Raison-Dieu.” This Light that lighteth every one that cometh into the world is the source of a principle of certitude; Aristotle, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas thus understood it when they said that mind cannot be mistaken.

If we would make an approximate conception of God we must scrupulously follow the advice of St Thomas Aquinas, “Eliminate, eliminate,” then only shall we understand the meaning of the sages who said that negation is fuller than affirmation.

Thousands of years before St Thomas Aquinas, the Hindoos practised his method; for it was the inadequacy of the names used to express the indefinable attributes of divinity that led them always to search for new ones, until at last, all the phenomena of nature having been examined and rejected, the Hindoos in despair cried, “It is impossible to seize that which we seek; it is not this, nor that, nor anything for which we have a name.” At last they came to the conclusion that there was no name worthy of God in the language of humanity, and that all that could be said was, “No, no.”

It is necessary, however, to use names as soon as we possess the ideas. All those which have contributed to the education of humanity have been the production of an impersonal work, the result of a long meditation by the human mind. It has been said that the idea and name of “the Being” for God, originated in the mind of Moses; perhaps this prophet put the last touch. “I Am that I Am” was the name used by him for the Eternal. The Hebrews employed another method when speaking of God, they used the word Il or El. In Hebrew it occurs both in its general sense of strong or hero, and as a name of God. Something equivalent is found in the Zend-Avesta; “Looking around him, Il (Ahuramazda, the Zend name for Ormazd) sees nothing but himself; and Il said, ‘I Am,’ and his name became ‘I Am.’”

But man at times yearns for a closer union with God than is expressed by the name “Being.” When troubled and in pain he says, “My Father!” and he remembers the names which he lisped as a child, and all come crowding to his lips; and He who is above all hears and understands.

We must not separate religion from philosophy; the subjects touching on religion have always been those which have given birth to philosophy; even if religion existed only on sentiment, as some people maintain, it would be for philosophy to determine if this sentiment were an illusion, or if it had a rational base; to separate them is to lessen both.

FOOTNOTES:

[109] _Origin and Growth of Religion_, p. 312.

[110] Rothe in his “Stille Stunden,” _Anthropological Religion_, p. 16.

[111] Psalm xxxiii. 6; Isaiah xi. 4.

[112] _Natural Religion_, p. 164.

[113] _Rig-Veda_, I. 164. 6.

[114] _Ibid_., VI. 9. 6.

[115] _Rig-Veda_, X. 82. 7.

[116] _Ibid._, 121. 8.

[117] _Theosophy or Psychological Religion_, p. 97.

[118] Higher Critics.

[119] We find from a letter of St Jerome’s to Paula that he was in the habit of advising his disciples to read the Scriptures, which he so reverenced, in the following order. He began by the Psalms, then took the books of Solomon, then he would come to Job. After going through this course of Old Testament history he would come to the Gospels and then to the Acts and the Epistles. After this preparation he would turn to the Prophets, who had foretold all that the Gospels related, and ended by allowing his disciples to read the historical Books of the Old Testament, which might, he thought, without such previous training, trouble and perplex them.--TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.

[120] From M. Renan’s work on Semitic languages.

[121] _Introduction to the Science of Religion_, pp. 31, 32.

[122] 2 Kings iii. 15.

[123] Ezekiel xxxi. 8.

[124] “A God understood would be no God at all.”--Dean Mansel, seventeenth century.

[125] _Metaphysics_, xii.

[126] _Physical Religion_, p. 4.

[127] Cf. _Summum jus est summa injuria_.

[128] This study of religions hardly gives sufficient prominence to Christianity; Max Müller says: “I make no secret that true Christianity, I mean the religion of Christ, seems to me to become more and more exalted the more we know and the more we appreciate the treasures of truth hidden in the despised religions of the world.”--_Introduction to the Science of Religion_, p. 28.

“It may be said that my chief object has been to magnify Christianity, by showing that it is the fulfilment of all that the world has been hoping and striving for. In one sense that is true. But if I hold that Christianity has given the best and truest expression to what the old world had tried to express in various and less perfect ways, I have at least given the facts on which I rely.”--_Anthropological Religion_, p. 388.

[129] On this subject Max Müller says: “The ancient Fathers of the Church spoke on these subjects with greater freedom than we venture to use in these days.”--_Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. i., Pref. xxix.

[130] _Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. i., Pref. xxix.

[131] In the seventh century the Personality was clearly set forth in the Athanasian Creed.