It is doubtless Kant who, among the philosophers, has been the most consistent and influential in inculcating such non-Mystical Religion. “Religion,” he says in 1793, “is, on its subjective side, the cognition of all our duties as so many Divine Commandments.” “The delusion that we can effect something, in view of our justification before God, by means of acts of religious worship, is religious superstition; and the delusion that we can effect something by attempts at a supposed intercourse with God, is religious fanaticism.… Such a feeling of the immediate presence of the Supreme Being, and such a discrimination between this feeling and every other, even moral, feeling, would imply a capacity for an intuition, which is without any corresponding organ in human nature.… If then a Church doctrine is to abolish or to prevent all religious delusion, it must,—over and above its statutory teachings, with which it cannot, for the present, entirely dispense,—contain within itself a principle which shall enable it to bring about the religion of a pure life, as the true end of the whole movement, and then to dispense with those temporary doctrines.”[306]
It is deeply instructive to note how thoroughly this, at first sight, solid and triumphant view, has not only continued to be refuted by the actual practice and experience of specifically religious souls, but how explicitly it is being discredited by precisely the more delicately perceptive, the more truly detached and comprehensive, students and philosophers of religion of the present day,—heirs, let us not forget in justice to Kant, of the intervening profound development of the historical sense, and of the history and psychology of religion.—Thus that most vigorous, independent thinker, Prof. Simmel of Berlin, writes in 1904: “Kant has, I think, simply passed by the essentials of religion,—that is to say, of that reality which historically bears the name of religion. Only the reflection, that the harmony of complete happiness with complete morality is producible by a Divine Being alone, is here supposed to lead us to believe in such a Being. There is here a complete absence of that direct laying hold of the Divine by our souls, because of our intrinsic needs, which characterizes all genuine piety. And the religious sense is not recognized as an organism with a unity of its own, as a growth springing from its own root. The entirely specific character of religion, which is resolvable neither into morality nor into a thirst after happiness: the direct self-surrender of the soul to a higher reality, the giving and taking, the unification and differentiation,—that quite organic unity of the religious experience, which we can but most imperfectly indicate by a multiplicity of some such, simultaneously valid, antitheses: this, there is no evidence to show, was ever really known to Kant. What was religion for Augustine and Francis of Assisi, he was unable to reproduce in himself; indeed religion, of this type, he readily rejects as fanaticism. Here lay the limit both of his own nature and of his own times.”[307]
The rich mind of Prof. Troeltsch is, perhaps, more entirely just: “As Kant’s theory of knowledge is throughout dependent upon the state of contemporary psychology, so also is his theory of religious knowledge dependent upon the psychology of religion predominant in his day. Locke, Leibniz, Pascal had already recognized the essentially practical character of all religion; and since their psychology was unable to conceive the ‘practical’ otherwise than as the moral, it had looked upon Religion as Morality furnished forth with its metaphysical concomitants. And as soon as this psychology had become the very backbone of his conception of Religion, Morality gained an entirely one-sided predominance over Kant’s mind,—considerably, indeed, beyond his own personal feelings and perceptions.” For he remains deeply penetrated by “the conceptions of Regeneration and Redemption; the idea of divine Grace and Wisdom, which accepts the totality of a soul’s good disposition in lieu of that soul’s ever defective single good works; the belief in a Providence which strengthens the Good throughout the world against Evil; adoring awe in face of the majesty of the Supersensible”: and “all these” conceptions “are no more simply moral, they are specifically religious thoughts.”[308]
Such a fuller conception of religion is admirably insisted on by that penetrating philosopher and historian of philosophy, Prof. Windelband: “Actual Religion, in its complete reality, belongs to all the spheres of life, and yet transcends them all, as something new and sui generis. It is first an interior life—an apprehending, cognizing, feeling, willing, accomplishing. But this accomplishing leads it on to being also an exterior life: an acting out, according to their various standards, of such feeling and willing; and an outward expression of that inner life in general, in ritual acts and divine worship. Yet this worship takes it beyond the little circle of the individual, and constitutes the corporate acts of a community, a social, external organization with visible institutions. And yet Religion ever claims to be more than the whole series of such empirical facts and doings, it ever transcends mere earthly experience, and is an intercourse with the inmost nature and foundation of all reality; it is a life in and with God, a metaphysical life. All these elements belong to the complete concept of actual religion.”[309] I would add, that they each stimulate the other, the external, e.g. being not only the expression of the awakened internal, but also the occasion of that awakening.
And the great Dutch scholar, Prof. C. P. Tiele, unexcelled in the knowledge of the actual course taken by the great religions of the world, declares: “All progress, not only in Morality, but also in Science, Philosophy, Art, necessarily exerts an influence upon that of Religion. But … Religion is not, on that account, identical with Ethics any more than with Philosophy or Art. All these manifestations of the human spirit respond to certain needs of man; but none of them, not even Morality, is capable of supplying the want which Religion alone can satisfy.… Religion differs from the other manifestations of the human mind” in this, that whereas “in the domain of Art, the feelings and the imagination predominate; in that of Philosophy, abstract thought is paramount”; and “the main object of Science is to know accurately, whilst Ethics are chiefly concerned with the emotions and with the fruit they yield: in Religion all these factors operate alike, and if their equilibrium be disturbed, a morbid religious condition is the result.”[310]
2. Ritschlian modification of Kant’s view.
It is deeply interesting to note the particular manner in which Kant’s impoverishment of the concept of religion has been in part retained, in part modified, by the Ritschlian school,—I am thinking especially of that vigorous writer, Prof. Wilhelm Hermann.
(1) If in Kant we get the belief in God derived from reflection upon Goodness and Happiness, and as the only possible means of their ultimate coalescence: in Hermann we still get the Categorical Imperative, but the thirst for Happiness has been replaced by the historic figure of Jesus Christ. “Two forces of different kinds,” he says, “ever produce the certainty of Faith: the impression of an Historic Figure which approaches us in Time; and the Moral Law which, when we have heard it, we can understand in its Eternal Truth. Faith arises, when a man recognizes, in the appearance of Jesus, that symbol of his own existence which gives him the courage to recognize in the Eternal, which claims him in the Moral Imperative, the source of true life for his own self.”[311]—And these two sole co-efficients of all entirely living religion are made to exclude, as we have already seen, especially all Mysticism from the life of Faith. “True, outside of Christianity, Mysticism will everywhere arise, as the very flower of the religious development. But a Christian is bound to declare the mystical experience of God to be a delusion. Once he has experienced his elevation, by Christ alone, above his own previous nature, he cannot believe that another man can attain the same result, simply by means of recollection within his own self.… We are Christians precisely because we have struck, in the person of Jesus, upon a fact which is incomparably richer in content than the feelings that arise within ourselves.” “Only because Christ is present for us can we possess God with complete clearness and certainty.” And, with Luther,—who remained, however, thoroughly faithful to the Primitive and Mediaeval high esteem for the Mystical element of religion;—“right prayer is a work of faith, and only a Christian can perform it.” And, more moderately: “We have no desire to penetrate through Christ on to God: for we consider that in God Himself we still find nothing but Christ.”[312]
(2) Now it is surely plain that we have here a most understandable, indeed respectable, reaction against all empty, sentimental Subjectivism, and a virile affirmation of the essential importance of the Concrete and Historical. And, in particular, the insistence upon the supreme value and irreplaceable character and function of Christ is profoundly true.—Yet three counter-considerations have ever to be borne in mind.
(i) It remains certain that we do not know, or experience anything, to which we can attribute any fuller reality, which is either purely objective or purely subjective; and that there exists no process of knowing or experiencing such a reality which would exclude either the objective or the subjective factor. “Whatever claims to be fully real,” either as apprehending subject or as apprehended object, “must be an individual … an organic whole, which has its principle of unity in itself.” The truly real, then, is a thing that has an inside; and the sharp antithesis drawn, although in contrary directions, by Aristotle and by Kant, between the Phenomenal and the Intelligible worlds, does not exist in the reality either of our apprehending selves, or of our apprehended fellow-men, or God.[313]—But Hermann is so haunted by the bogey-fear of the subjective resonance within us being necessarily useless towards, indeed obstructive of, the right apprehension of the object thus responded to, that he is driven to follow the will-o’-the-wisp ideal of a pure, entirely exclusive objectivity.