The Religious Sentiment / Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and / Philosophy of Religion

by Daniel G. Brinton

Such deities were fearful to behold. They are represented as mighty of stature and terrible of mien, calculated to appal, not attract, to inspire fear, not to kindle love. In tropical America, in Egypt, in Thibet, almost where you will, there is little to please the eye in the pictures and statues of deities.

In Greece alone, a national temperament, marvellously sensitive to symmetry, developed the combination of maximum strength with perfect form in the sun-god, Apollo, and of grace with beauty in Aphrodite. The Greeks were the apostles of the religion of beauty. Their philosophic thought saw the permanent in the Form, which outlives strength, and is that alone in which the race has being. In its transmission love is the agent, and Aphrodite, unmatched in beauty and mother of love, was a creation worthy of their devotion. Thus with them the religious sentiment still sought its satisfaction in the individual, not indeed in the muscle, but in the feature and expression.

When the old gods fell, the Christian fathers taught their flocks to abhor the beautiful as one with the sensual. St. Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian describe Christ as ugly of visage and undersized, a sort of Socrates in appearance.[241-1] Christian art was long in getting recognition. The heathens were the first to represent in picture and statues Christ and the apostles, and for long the fathers of the church opposed the multiplication of such images, saying that the inward beauty was alone desirable. Christian art reached its highest inspiration under the influence of Greek culture after the fall of Constantinople. In the very year, however, that Rafaello Sanzio met his premature death, Luther burned the decretals of the pope in the market-place of Wittenberg, and preached a doctrine as hostile to art as was that of Eusebius and Chrysostom. There was no longer any hope for the religion of beauty.

Nevertheless, under the influence of the revival of ancient art which arose with Winckelmann towards the close of the last century, a gospel of esthetics was preached. Its apostles were chiefly Germans, and among them Schiller and Goethe are not inconspicuous names. The latter, before his long life was closed, began to see the emptiness of such teachings, and the violence perpetrated on the mind by forcing on the religious sentiment the food fit only for the esthetic emotions.

The highest conception of individual perfection is reached in a character whose physical and mental powers are symmetrically trained, and always directed by conscious reason to their appropriate ends. Self-government, founded on self-knowledge, wards off the pangs of disappointment by limiting ambition to the attainable. The affections and emotions, and the pleasures of sensation as well, are indulged in or abstained from, but never to the darkening of the intellect. All the talents are placed at usury; every power exercised systematically and fruitfully with a consecration to a noble purpose.

This is the religion of culture. None other ranks among its adherents so many great minds; men, as Carlyle expresses it, of much religiosity, if of little religion. The ideal is a taking one. Such utter self-reliance, not from ignorance, but from the perfection of knowledge, was that which Buddha held up to his followers: “Self is the God of self; who else should be the God?” In this century Goethe, Wordsworth, beyond all others Wilhelm von Humboldt, have set forth this ideal. Less strongly intellectual natures, as Maine de Biran, De Senancourt, and Matthew Arnold, listen with admiration, but feel how unknown to the mass of human kind must remain the tongue these masters speak.

Thus did the religious sentiment seek its satisfaction in the idealization, first of physical force, then of form, and last of mental force, but in each case turned away unsatisfied. Wherein did these ideals fail? The first mentioned in exalting power over principle, might over right. As was well said by the philosophical Novalis: “The ideal of morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of physical strength, of the most vigorous life. Through it man is transformed into a reasoning beast, whose brutal cleverness has a fascination for weak minds.”[243-1] The religion of beauty failed in that it addressed the esthetic emotions, not the reasoning power. Art does not promote the good; it owes no fealty to either utility or ethics: in itself, it must be, in the negative sense of the words, at once useless and immoral. “Nature is not its standard, nor is truth its chief end.”[244-1] Its spirit is repose, “the perfect form in perfect rest;” whereas the spirit of religion is action because of imperfection. Even the gods must know of suffering, and partake, in incarnations, of the miseries of men.

In the religion of culture what can we blame? That it is lacking in the impulses of action through the isolation it fosters; that it is and must be limited to a few, for it provides no defense for the weaknesses the many inherit; that its tendency is antagonistic to religion, as it cuts away the feeling of dependence, and the trust in the unknown; that it allows too little to enthusiasm ever to become a power.

On the other hand, what momenta of true religious thought have these ideals embraced? Each presents some. Physical vigor, regarded as a sign of complete nutrition, is an indispensable preliminary to the highest religion. Correct thought cannot be, without sufficient and appropriate food. If the nourishment is inadequate, defective energy of the brain will be transmitted, and the offspring will revert ancestrally to a lower plane of thought. “It thus happens that the minds of persons of high religious culture by ancestral descent, and the intermarriage of religious families, so strangely end in the production of children totally devoid of moral sense and religious sentiment—moral imbeciles in short.”[245-1] From such considerations of the necessity of physical vigor to elevated thought, Descartes predicted that if the human race ever attain perfection it will be chiefly through the art of medicine. Not alone from emotions of sympathy did the eminent religious teachers of past ages maintain that the alleviation and prevention of suffering is the first practical duty of man; but it was from a perhaps unconscious perception of the antagonism of bodily degeneration to mental progress.

So, too, the religion of beauty and art contains an indefeasible germ of true religious thought. Art sees the universal in the isolated fact; it redeemed the coarse symbol of earlier days by associating it with the emotions of joy, instead of fear; commencing with an exaltation of the love to sex, it etherealized and ennobled passion; it taught man to look elsewhere than to material things for his highest pleasure, for the work of art always has its fortune in the imagination and not in the senses of the observer; conceptions of order and harmony are familiar to it; its best efforts seek to bring all the affairs of life under unity and system;[246-1] and thus it strengthens the sentiment of moral government, which is the first postulate of religion.