Yet if this force and need of the soul, and this religious element are allowed to emasculate the other two primary soul-forces and needs and the religious elements corresponding to them, it will inevitably degenerate into more or less of a Superstition,—an oppressive materialization and dangerous would-be absolute fixation of even quite secondary and temporary expressions and analyses of religion; a ruinous belief in the direct transferableness of religious conviction; and a predominance of political, legal, physically coercive concepts and practices with regard to those most interior, strong yet delicate, readily thwarted or weakened, springs of all moral and religious character,—spiritual sincerity and spontaneity and the liberty of the children of God. We thus get too great a preponderance of the “Objective,” of Law and Thing, as against Conviction and Person; of Priest as against Prophet; of the movement from without inwards, as against the movements from within outwards.
The Spanish Inquisition we found to be probably the most striking example and warning here. Yet the Eastern Christian Churches have doubtless exhibited these symptoms, if less acutely, yet more extensively and persistently. And the Protestant Reformation-Movement, (even in the later lives of its protagonists, Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin), much of orthodox Lutheranism and Calvinism, and some forms and phases of Anglican Highchurchism and of Scotch Presbyterianism, show various degrees and forms of a similar one-sidedness. In Judaism the excesses in the Priestly type of Old Testament religion, especially as traceable after the Exile, and their partial continuation in Rabbinism, furnish other, instructive instances of such more or less partial growth,—the Pharisees and the Jerusalem Sanhedrin being here the fullest representatives of the spirit in question. The classical Heathen Roman religion was, throughout, too Naturalistic for its, all but exclusive, externalism and legalism to be felt as seriously oppressive of any other, considerable element of that religion. And much the same could doubtless be said of Indian Brahmanism to this day. But in orthodox Mohammedanism we get the truly classical instance of such a predominance, in all its imposing strength and terrible, because all but irremediable, weakness—with its utterly unanalytic, unspeculative, unmystical, thing-like, rock-solid faith; its detailed rigidity and exhaustive fixity; its stringent unity of organization and military spirit of entirely blind obedience; its direct, quite unambiguous intolerance, and ever ready appeal to the sword, as the normal and chief instrument for the propagation of the spirit; and its entirely inadequate apprehension of man’s need of purification and regeneration in all his untutored loves, fears, hopes and hates.
(2) Then there is the soul-force by which we analyze and synthesize, and the law of our being which requires us to weigh, compare, combine, transfer, or ignore the details and the evidential worth of what has been brought home to us through the stimulation of our senses, by our picturing faculty and memory, and by means of our Social, Historical, and Institutional environment, and which orders us to harmonize all these findings into as much as may be of an intelligible whole of religion, and to integrate this religious whole within some kind of, at least rough, general conception as to our entire life’s experience. And this force and law are answered by the Critical-Historical and Synthetic-Philosophical element of religion. We thus get Positive and Dogmatic Theology. And this element is as humanly inevitable and religiously necessary as is that soul-force and law.
Yet here again, if this force, law, and element are allowed superciliously to ignore, or violently to explain away, the other kinds of approaches and contributions to religious truth and experience, special to the other two soul-forces and religious elements, we shall get another destructive one-sidedness, a Rationalistic Fanaticism, only too often followed by a lengthy Agnosticism and Indifference. Whilst the Rationalist Fanaticism lasts, everything will doubtless appear clear and simple to the soul, but then this “everything” will but represent the merest skimmings upon the face of the mighty deep of living, complete religion,—a petty, artificial arrangement by the human mind of the little which, there and then, it can easily harmonize into a whole, or even simply a direct hypostatizing of the mind’s own bare categories.
The worship of the Goddess of Reason at Notre-Dame of Paris we found to be here, perhaps, the most striking instance. Yet Rationalist excesses, varying from a cold Deism down to an ever short-lived formal Atheism, and the lassitude of a worldly-wise Indifferentism, are traceable within all the great religions. Thus a large proportion of the educated members of the ancient Graeco-Roman world were, from the Sophists and the Second Punic War onward, stricken with such a blight. The Sadducees are typical of this tendency among the Jews for some two centuries. The tough persistence of a mostly obscure current of destructive free-thought throughout Western Europe in the Middle Ages shows well the difficulty and importance of a mental and spiritual victory over these forces of radical negation, and of not simply driving them beneath the surface of society. And the ready lapse of the most daring and intense of the Medieval, Jewish and Christian, Scholastics into a thoroughly Pantheistic Panlogism, points to the prevalence, among these circles, of a certain tyranny of the abstractive and logical faculty over the other powers and intimations of the soul.—Unitarianism again is, in its origins and older form, notwithstanding its even excessive anti-Pantheism, strongly Scholastic in its whole temper and method, and this without the important correctives and supplementations brought to that method by the largely Mystical and Immanental Angel of the Schools. The greater part of the “Aufklärung”-Movement was vitiated by an often even severer, impoverishment of the whole conception of religion. And, in our day, the Liberal movements within the various Christian bodies, and again among Brahmanic religionists in India, rarely escape altogether from ignoring or explaining away the dark and toilsome aspects of life, and the inevitable excess of all deep reality, and indeed of our very experience of it, above our clear, methodical, intellectual analysis and synthesis of it. Too often and for too long all such groups have inclined to assimilate all Experience to clear Knowledge, all clear Knowledge to Physico-Mathematical Science, all Religion to Ethics, and all Ethics to a simple belief in the ultimacy of Determinist, Atomistic Science. The situation is decidedly improving now; History and Culture are being found to have other, more ultimate categories, than are those of Mathematics and Physics, and to bring us a larger amount of reality, and Ethics and Religion are discovered to be as truly distinct as they are closely allied and necessary, each to the deepest development of the other.
(3) The faculty and action of the soul, finally, by which we have an however dim yet direct and (in its general effects) immensely potent, sense and feeling, an immediate experience of Objective Reality, of the Infinite and Abiding, of a Spirit not all unlike yet distinct from our own, Which penetrates and works within these our finite spirits and in the world at large, especially in human history; and by which we will, and give a definite result and expression to, our various memories, thinkings, feelings, and intuitions, as waked up by their various special stimulants and by the influence of each upon all the others: is met by the Mystical and the directly Operative element of Religion. And here again we have a force and law of the human spirit, and a corresponding element of religion, which can indeed be starved or driven into a most dangerous isolation and revolt, but which are simply indestructible.
The Apocalyptic Orgies of the Münster Anabaptists we found to be perhaps the most striking illustration of the dire mischief that can spring from this third group of elemental soul-forces, when they ignore or dominate the other two. Yet some such Emotional Fanaticism can be traced, in various degrees and forms, throughout all such religious groups, schools, and individuals as seriously attempt to practise Pure Mysticism,—that is, religious Intuition and Emotion unchecked by the other two soul-forces and religious elements, or by the alternation of external action and careful contact with human Society and its needs and helps, Art and Science, and the rest.
Thus we find that, after the immense, luxuriant prevalence of an intensely intuitive, emotional, tumultuously various apprehension and manifestation of religion during the first two generations of Christians, and even after the deep, wise supplementation and spiritualization of this element by St. Paul, who in his own person so strikingly combined the Institutional, Rational and Intuitive-Emotional forces and elements, this whole force and element rapidly all but disappeared for long from Western Christian orthodoxy. And Montanism in still early times, and, during the very height of the Middle Ages, the Waldensian and Albigensian movements—all predominantly intuitive, enthusiastic, individualist—appear as so many revolutionary explosions, threatening the whole fabric of Christendom with dissolution. The “Eternal Gospel” movement of Abbot Joachim, on the other hand, gives us the intuitional-emotive element in a more purified, institutionally and rationally supplemented form.
Again we find that, for a while, in reaction from an all but hopelessly corrupt civilization, the Fathers of the Desert attained in many cases, by means of an all but Exclusive Mysticism, to a type of sanctity and to the inculcation of a lesson which the Church has gratefully recognized. We have to admit that many of the Italian, French and Spanish Quietists of the Seventeenth Century were no doubt excessively, or even quite unjustly, suspected or pursued, as far at least as their own personal motives and the effect of their doctrines upon their own characters were concerned; and that the general reaction against even the proved, grave excesses of some of these men and women, went often dangerously far in the contrary direction. Indeed even the fierce fanaticism of the Dutch-Westphalian Apocalyptic Intuitionists can but excuse, not justify, the policy of quite indiscriminately ruthless extermination pursued by Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, and by their official churches after their deaths, towards any and all Illuminism, however ethically pure and socially operative. The “Society of Friends” which, measured by the smallness of its numbers, has given to the world an astonishingly large band of devoted lovers of humankind, is a living witness to the possibility of such an Illuminism.
And we can note how the sane and solid, deep and delicate constituents, which had existed, mixed up with all kinds of fantastic, often hysterical and anti-moral exaltations, within most of those all but purely Intuitionist circles, gradually found their escape away into all sorts of unlikely quarters, helping to give much of their interiority and religious warmth, not only to various, now fairly sober-minded, Nonconformist Protestant bodies on the Continent, in England and America, but also to the more religious-tempered and more spiritually perceptive among modern philosophers—such as Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Schelling and Fechner.