The time comes, however, when the image detaches itself from the feeling that produced it, and when it fixes itself as such in the memory. In considering it in itself, reflection transforms the image into an idea more or less abstract, and takes this idea for a representation of the object of religion. But then arises the original discrepancy that we noted at the outset between the object of religion, which is transcendent, and the nature of the phenomenal image by which we attempt to represent it. Hence there is a latent contradiction in every symbolic idea. To get rid of this contradiction the understanding is obliged to eliminate from these ideas the sensible element which remains in them and renders them inadequate to their object.
By progressive generalisation and abstraction, reasoning attenuates the primitive metaphor; it wears it down as on a grindstone. But, when the metaphorical element has disappeared, the notion itself vanishes in so far as it is a positive notion. There are mysterious lamps which only burn under an alabaster globe. You may thin away the solid envelope to make it more transparent. But mind you do not break it; for the flame inside will then go out and leave you in the dark.
So with all our general ideas of the object of religion. When every metaphorical element is eliminated from them, they become simply negative, contradictory, and lose all real content. Such are our pure ideas of the infinite and the absolute. If you would give them a positive character, you must put into them some element of positive experience. This is what is done when it is said that God is the ultimate energy of things, that He is the creative cause of everything, that He is Justice, that He is Spirit, a Judge, a Father.
Born of the primitive symbols of religion, all our religious ideas will therefore necessarily keep their symbolical character to the end. As is the seed, so is the plant. Dogmatics itself will never be for the religious soul anything but a higher symbolism—that is to say, a form which, without the inward presence of active and living faith, would be worthless. If dogmas may sustain and produce faith, it is still more true that, at the outset, it is faith which produces dogmas and afterwards revives them.
Many good men withstand these conclusions from a rigorous analysis of religious knowledge and of its psychological genesis. Supposing you are right, they say, and that the mental constitution of our spiritual nature confines religious thought to symbolic forms, cannot a supernatural revelation enable us to pass beyond these limits and bring to us religious ideas adequate to their object, and consequently of a pure and absolute truth? This seems to us a very strange desire—that a revelation of God should be effected apart from the conditions of knowledge—that is to say, apart from the forms under which alone it can be accessible to us. Do they not see that the very idea of revelation soon becomes contradictory? If God wished to make us a gift that we could receive, must He not have suited the form of it to that of our mind? Must He not have availed Himself of our ideas and of our language in order to explain to us the nature of His benefits? Now, it is certain that our ideas, as soon as they are transported outside space and time, contradict and destroy themselves, and that we are reduced to the necessity of conceiving and expressing things invisible and eternal by images actual and terrestrial. If God, in speaking to us of His mysteries, used other than these human means, we should not understand Him at all, so that the revelation would no longer be a revelation. And is it not for this reason that when God has desired to reveal Himself to men He has never employed any but men as His organs, and that He whom we name His Son never spoke except in images and parables of the things of the kingdom of God?
No one in fact was fonder and more intelligently fond of this symbolical form than the Christ; He never wished to employ any other. This preference did not arise, as is supposed, merely from the fact that He found it a happy means of popularity to adapt Himself to all minds. He also knew that no language was more natural or more conformed to the moral exigencies of piety. He saw in it an institution ordained by God Himself. And it is the truth. The Parable addresses itself, not to the pure understanding, but to the active faculty of the ego, to "the heart." It appeals to our subjective life; it awakens the religious need before satisfying it. The soul which hears it meditates, and experiences the living content that it contains. On the contrary, the soul that is inert and dead finds nothing in the symbol and receives nothing from it even theoretically, so that it is literally true that the symbolic form, a shining revelation unto some, remains a dull and empty letter for others. It is from this point of view alone that it is possible to understand that other saying of Jesus, so paradoxical to common sense, so rich and just to the eyes of experience and of faith: "To him that hath shall be given; from him that hath not shall be taken away that which he hath." The gift of God comes only to the felt need and the active desire of man.
7. Conclusion
The conclusion from all that has now been said is that religious knowledge is subject to the law of transformation which regulates all the manifestations of human life and thought.
As there is disproportion and disparity between the object of religion and its means of expression, it will always be possible and necessary to distinguish, in all its creations, between the form and the substance, the body and the soul. Religious symbolism will therefore always be very variable de facto, but subject, de jure, to new interpretations.
This variability, however, is not unlimited. It is necessarily confined within limits which, while not easy to define theoretically, are none the less precise and fixed; for the great religious creations are organisms, and every organism carries in itself, determined by its own nature, the exact capacity of its metamorphoses.