The Sources of Religious Insight

by Josiah Royce

V

I cannot close this extremely imperfect sketch of our crowning source of insight without applying to our present doctrine of the invisible church, the eternally true teaching of St. Paul regarding spiritual gifts.

As Paul's Corinthians, in their little community, faced the problem of the diversity of the gifts and powers whereby their various members undertook to serve the common cause--as this diversity of gifts tended from the outset to doctrinal differences of opinion, as the differences threatened to confuse loyalty by bringing brethren into conflict--even so, but with immeasurably vaster complications, the whole religious world, the invisible community of the loyal, has always faced, and still faces, a diversity of powers and of forms of insight, a diversity due to the endlessly various temperaments, capacities and sorts and conditions of men. The Corinthian church, as Paul sketched its situation, was a miniature of religious humanity. All the ways that the loyal follow lead upward to the realm of the spirit, where reason is at once the overarching heaven and the all-vitalising devotion which binds [{294}] every loyal individual to the master of life. But in our universe the one demands the many. The infinite becomes incarnate through the finite. The paths that lead the loyal to the knowledge of the eternal pass for our vision, with manifold crossings and with perplexing wanderings, through the wilderness of this present world. The divine life is won through suffering. And religious history is a tale of suffering--of mutual misunderstanding amongst brethren who have from moment to moment been able to remember God only by narrowly misreading the hearts of their brethren. The diversity of spiritual gifts has developed, in religious history, an endless war of factions. The invisible church has frequently come to consciousness in the form of sects that say: "Ours alone is the true spiritual gift. Through our triumph alone is the world to be saved. Man will reach salvation only when our own Jerusalem is the universally recognised holy city."

Now it is useless to reduce the many to the one merely by wiping out the many. It is useless to make some new sect whose creed shall be that there are to be no sects. The unity of the visible church, under any one creed, or with any one settled system of religious practices, is an unattainable and undesirable ideal. The varieties of religious experience in James's sense of that term are endless. The diversity of gifts is as great as is the diversity of strong and loyal personalities. What St. Paul saw, in the miniature case presented to him by the [{295}] Corinthian church, was that all the real gifts, and all the consequently inevitable differences of approach to the religious problems, and all the differences of individual religious insight were necessary to a wealthy religious life, and might serve the unity of the spirit, if only they were conceived and used subject to the spiritual gift which he defined as Charity.

Now the Pauline Charity is simply that form of loyalty which should characterise a company of brethren who already have recognised their brotherhood, who consciously know that their cause is one and that the spirit which they serve is one. For such brethren, loyalty naturally takes the form of a self-surrender that need not seek its own, or assert itself vehemently, because the visible unity of the community in question is already acknowledged by all the faithful present, so that each intends to edify, not himself alone, but his brethren, and also intends not to convert his brother to a new faith, but to establish him in a faith already recognised by the community. Yet since the Corinthians, warring over their diversity of gifts, had come to lose sight of the common spirit, Paul simply recalls them to their flag, by his poem of charity, which is also a technically true statement of how the principle of loyalty applies to a brotherhood fully conscious of its common aim.

But the very intimacy of the Pauline picture of charity makes it hard to apply this account of the [{296}] loyalty that should reign within a religious family to the problems of a world where faith does not understand faith, where the contrasts of opinion seem to the men in question to exclude community of the spirit, where the fighting blood even of saintly souls is stirred by persecutions or heated by a hatred of seemingly false creeds. And Paul himself could not speak in the language of charity, either when he referred to those whom he called "false brethren" or characterised the Hellenic-Roman spiritual world to whose thought and spirit he owed so much. As the Corinthians, warring over the spiritual gifts, were a miniature representation of the motives that have led to religious wars, so St. Paul's own failure to speak with charity as soon as certain matters of controversy arose in his mind, shows in miniature the difficulty that the visible church, in all its forms, has had to unite loyal strenuousness of devotion to the truth that one sees with tolerance for the faiths whose meaning one cannot understand.

And yet, what Paul said about charity must be universalised if it is true. When we universalise the Pauline Charity, it becomes once more the loyalty that, as a fact, is now justified in seeking her loyal own; but that still, like charity, rejoices in the truth. Such loyalty loves loyalty even when race or creed distinctions make it hard or impossible for us to feel fond of the persons and practices and opinions whereby our more distant brethren [{297}] embody their spiritual gifts. Such loyalty is tolerant. Tolerance is what charity becomes when we have to deal with those whose special cause we just now cannot understand. Loyalty is tolerant, not as if truth were indifferent, or as if there were no contrast between worldliness and spirituality, but is tolerant precisely in so far as the best service of loyalty and of religion and of the unity of the spirit consists in helping our brethren not to our own, but to their own. Such loyalty implies genuine faith in the abiding and supreme unity of the spirit.

Only by thus universalising the doctrine which Paul preached to the Corinthians can we be prepared to use to the full this crowning source of insight--the doctrine, the example, the life, the inspiration, which is embodied in the countless forms and expressions of the invisible church.

The work of the invisible church--it is just that work to which all these lectures have been directing your attention. The sources of insight are themselves the working of its spirit in our spirits.

If I have done anything (however unworthy) to open the minds of any of you to these workings, my fragmentary efforts will not have been in vain. I have no authority to determine your own insight. Seek insight where it is to be found.