What the convictions to which we thus surrender the practical guidance of life are, in any individual case, seems to be largely a question of individual constitution and social tradition. Not only are the convictions as to the nature of the higher power represented by the great typical historical religions very various, but what we may call the individual religion of different persons exhibits even greater variety. There is hardly any important object of human interest which may not acquire for some man the significance which belongs to the completed realisation of his highest ideals. It is no more than the truth to say that a mother, a mistress, a country, or a movement, social or political, may be, as we often phrase it, a man’s “religion.”
Amid all this variety two general principles may be detected which are of primary importance to the metaphysical critic of religious experience. (1) It is essential to the religious experience that its object should be accepted as the really existing embodiment of an ideal. This is the point in which the religious attitude of mind differs most strikingly from that of mere morality. In the ethical experience the ideal is apprehended as something which does not yet exist, but has to be brought into existence by human exertion. Hence for the purely ethical attitude of mind the world has to be thought of as essentially imperfect, essentially out of accord with what it ought to be in order to correspond to our demands on it. Thus there is not for morality, as we shall directly see there must be for religion, such a thing as the “Problem of Evil.” That the world, as it comes to us in the temporal order, contains imperfection and evil which must be done away with, is a practical presupposition without which morality itself would have no raison d’être.
But in religion the case is otherwise. It is only in so far as the object of our adoration, whatever it may be, is taken to be the really existing embodiment of our highest ideals, that it can produce, in our spiritual communion with it, that combined emotion of exaltation and abasement, that feeling of being at once ourselves already perfect so far as our will is one in its contact with our ideal, and absolutely condemned and “subject to wrath” so far as it is not, which distinguishes the religious from all other states of mind. But all real existence, as we saw in our Second Book, is essentially individual. Hence it is of the essence of religion that it looks upon the ideal as already existing in individual form. This is why devotion to an abstract principle, such as nationality, socialism, democracy, humanity, proves so much inferior as a permanent expression of religious life, to devotion to a person, however imperfect.[[216]]
(2) It follows that mere appearance in the time-order cannot be the ultimate object of religious devotion. For the time-order itself, as we have seen, is essentially unfinished and incomplete, and no part of it, therefore, can be perfectly individual. The completely individual, if it exists at all, must have an existence which is not temporal. Hence no part of the temporal order of events, as such, can be finally satisfactory as an object of religious adoration. So far as it is possible to succeed in worshipping anything which forms part of that order, such as a man or a cause, this can only be done by regarding the temporal facts as an imperfect appearance of a reality which, because completely and perfectly individual, is in its true nature timeless. And it further follows that, since all finite individuality is, as we have already seen, only imperfectly individual, and because imperfect is temporal, the only finally adequate object of religious devotion must be the infinite individual or timeless Absolute itself.
That the great philosophical religions of the world have felt the force of this, is shown in history by the way in which they have inevitably tended to credit their various “gods” with omnipotence. Thus the god of the Hebrew religion, as at first presented to us in its earlier records, is represented as limited in power by the existence of other divine beings, and temporally changeable and mutable. But in the later Old Testament writings, the New Testament, and the subsequent constructions of ecclesiastical theology, we see the gradual development from these Hebrew beginnings of an idea of a God who is “all in all,” and limited neither by the existence of other divine beings with opposing aims and interests, nor by the inherent resistance of “matter,” to His purposes. So the Zoroastrian religion, in which the limitation of the power of the good being Ahura Mazda by the existence of a co-ordinate bad being, Angro Mainyus, was originally a fundamental tenet, is said to have become among the modern Parsis a pure monotheism.
§ 6. Now, it should be noted that this inevitable tendency of Religion itself to identify its object with ultimate Reality, conceived in its timeless perfection as a complete and infinite individual whole, leads to the difficult metaphysical “problem of evil.” For if God is the same thing as the Absolute, it would appear that evil itself must be, like everything else, a manifestation of His nature. And if so, can we say that God is strictly speaking “good,” or is the complete realisation of our ideals? It is this difficulty about evil, more than anything else, which has led many philosophers in both ancient and modern times to distinguish between the Absolute and God, and to regard God as simply one, though the highest and most perfect, among the finite individuals contained in the Absolute.[[217]] In the following paragraphs I propose not so much to offer a solution of this time-honoured puzzle, as to make some suggestions which may help to put the issue at stake clearly before the reader’s mind.
The doctrine of the finitude of God does not appear in any way to remove the difficulty about evil; in fact, it renders it, if anything, more acute. For evil must now appear in the universe in a double form. On the one hand, it admittedly is taken to exist outside God, as a hostile factor limiting His power of shaping the world to His purpose. But again, as we have seen, every finite individual, because finite, falls short of complete internal harmony of structure, and thus contains an element of defect and evil within itself. Thus evil will be inherent in the nature of a finite God, as well as in that of the existence supposed to be outside Him. We have, in fact, one more illustration of the principle that all limitation involves self-limitation from within. It is only by forgetting this fundamental truth that we can conceive the possibility of a being who is “perfectly good” and yet is less than the Absolute.
And even when we overlook this, our difficulties are not removed. For a “finite” God with a further reality outside and in some way opposed to His own nature, even when illogically thought of as perfectly good, must be at best only such another being as ourselves, though on a larger scale. He, like us, must be simply a partly successful, partly unsuccessful, actor in a universe of which the constitution and ultimate upshot are either unknown or known not to satisfy our religious demand for the complete individual reality of our ideal.[[218]] This is the view which has in history been actually adopted by religions like those of the Hellenes and the Norsemen, in which the gods are regarded as ultimately subject to an inscrutable and unethical Fate. But a finite being struggling, however successfully, against such an alien Fate is, after all, a fit object only for moral respect and sympathy, not for religious adoration. Such a being, however exalted, is still not that complete and harmonious individual realisation of all human aspiration for which Religion yearns, and is therefore not, in the full and true sense, God.
If, then, a finite ethical individual, however exalted, cannot be an adequate object of religious devotion, how does the case stand with the infinite individual whole of Reality? Can we worship the Absolute?[[219]] This is a question which needs some careful examination before we can venture on a positive answer.
§ 7. The problem, let it be observed, is not strictly psychological. Experience shows that individual men can derive religious support from belief in the most varied and most defective conceptions of the nature of the Deity. Beliefs which bring one man “peace in believing” might, if seriously entertained, blight another man’s life; one man’s God may be another’s devil. This is, however, not the point. The real question is, whether the Absolute can be made into an object of religious worship, as we have seen that finite individuals cannot, without a breach of logic. Has it the character which, as we have seen, anything which is to correspond to our ideal of “God” must logically possess?