IV.
The question whether there exist any tribes completely devoid of all religious belief has been extensively discussed. That there are any such seems doubtful, when we take into account, on the one hand, the reticence of the savage towards strangers with regard to his own feelings and beliefs; and on the other, the scanty psychological equipment of travellers, who frequently understand by religion only a developed and organised cult. The fact, even were it proved, would be but of slight value, since it could only be the case among the very lowest specimens of humanity.[[199]] A question scarcely ever asked is this: Are there individuals (not social groups) utterly without religious feeling? We must eliminate idiots, imbeciles, and the uneducated deaf and dumb; we are speaking of normal men living in some society or other, all of which have a religion. I am distinctly inclined to answer in the affirmative, though I find no decisive observation on this point. The case would be analogous to those of moral blindness already studied, to the absence, if it exists, of all æsthetic feeling; it would denote a lacuna in the emotional life. It should be noted that it is only in this department that such a lacuna can occur. No normal man, living in a society, can have his mind closed to religious ideas, can ignore their existence, their object, their significance; but they may have no hold on him, may remain within his consciousness as a foreign substance, originating no tendency and exciting no emotion; they may be conceived without being felt.
I have already reminded the reader that the religious feeling may become a violent passion; it may even pass this limit, take a chronic form, and enter the region of pathology. For the alienist, religious madness is not a morbid entity, but a symptom; it sometimes exists by itself, but is more often associated with epilepsy, hysteria, and the forms of melancholia. From a psychological point of view, it has to be studied by itself, as a complement to the normal state. Considered thus, from the purely psychological standpoint, its manifestations, though very diverse, may be reduced to a simple classification: the depressive, or asthenic; and the exalted, or sthenic forms.
I. The depressive forms spring up and grow on the soil of melancholia. Their physiological criteria are the symptoms so often described—lowering of the vital functions, and so on. Their emotional criterion is fear in all its varieties, ranging from the simple scruple to panic terror; and the intellectual criterion, the possession by a fixed idea. Religious madness follows a course depending on character, education, environment, epoch, and form of belief. So those who believe in predestination are tortured by the idea of having committed the unpardonable sin. This obsession, frequent among Protestants, is rare among Catholics, who admit the possibility of absolution.[[200]]
One form, which we might call subjective, consists in religious melancholy pure and simple, in which the patient believes himself continually guilty, rejected, damned. In its anxious form it is characterised by scruples about everything, lamentations over imaginary crimes or faults. This state is connected with two primary emotions, both of which have a depressive character: on one side fear, on the other the self-feeling under its negative form of humility and dejection. An unconscious or conscious course of reasoning leads the subject to a feeling of abjectness and self-contempt; he tries to weaken himself, to make himself worthy of pity. Asceticism, though, rightly or wrongly, invoking moral reasons in its own favour, rests on the fundamental desire of depreciating the individual, at least in this life. This appears, even in its simple and mitigated forms, but still more in its extravagances (the monasticism of the fifth century, Simeon Stylites, etc.), in the cases of castration, mutilation, partial destruction, and finally, in the religious suicide of the Hindoos who threw themselves before the car of Jaganath.
A second form, which for want of a better term may be called objective, is demoniac melancholia—the delusion of obsession or possession,—which, formerly superabundant in all religions, has now become rarer.[[201]] In obsession, or external demonomania, the patient is not in the true sense possessed; he hears, sees, feels, smells the spirits who are obstinately determined on his ruin, but he does not feel them within him. In possession, or internal demonomania, they are inside him. There is doubling of the personality, with sensory, visceral, and psychomotor hallucinations, these last consisting of internal voices which the possessed person hears speaking inside him and in spite of himself.
II. The morbid exaltation of the religious feeling is derived from attraction and love, as depression springs from fear. Related to joy, and sometimes to megalomania, it is accompanied by partial or total augmentation of both the physical and psychical life.
Ecstasy is a transitory and comparatively passive form. Seen from without, it resembles catalepsy in the insensibility to external impressions, and suspension of sensory activity. It differs from it on the motor side. The ecstatic has not the “flexibility of wax” and the complete immobility; he can move, walk, speak, and his face can assume any given expression. Seen from within, ecstasy is an intense state of consciousness, of which the recollection remains after awaking, while catalepsy is attended by unconsciousness, or, at least, complete oblivion. Its psychology is simple enough, if, neglecting details, we confine ourselves to the essential conditions. The confessions of ecstatics, which are tolerably numerous, agree in their principal features: (1) restriction of the area of consciousness, with one intense and overmastering representation serving as the pivot and only centre of association; (2) an emotional state—rapture—a form of love in its highest degree, with desire and the pleasure of possession, which, like profane love, only finds its end in complete fusion and unification (ἐνῶσις of the Alexandrians). The declarations of the great mystics, however involved they may be in metaphor, leave us in no doubt on this point;[[202]] and their critics, even theologians, have reproached them with frequently being mistaken in the nature of their love.
A more stable and active form of religious exaltation is theomania—i.e., “a mental state in which the subject believes himself to be God, or at least inspired by Him to reveal His will to men.” To draw a hard and fast line between the founders of religions, the reformers, the promoters of religious orders, and pure theomaniacs, is as difficult as to indicate the precise point at which a violent love becomes madness. We might make use of a practical test, and say that the one has succeeded where the others have failed, but this would be too simple, success and failure depending on a variety of causes. This discussion, moreover, is out of place here. It is sufficient to remark that theomania is, in its psychical characteristics, the complete antithesis to demonomaniac melancholia. Instead of the sorrow of the possessed person with the enemy lodged in his own body, we find an unalterable joy, which can be affected neither by persecution, nor misfortunes, nor tortures. To the feeling of abjectness is opposed the delusion of grandeur. However modest a man may be by nature, or as a result of reflection, he cannot with impunity believe himself chosen by the Deity as His prophet, to speak and act in His name.
The preceding sketch, whence I have purposely eliminated details and observations (of which, as is well known, there is no lack), has but one object—viz., to show that the primary constituents of the religious sentiment may serve as a guide to its pathology, which rests entirely on fear and love. I may add that none among morbid emotions has—and still more, has had—a more marked tendency to rapid propagation in epidemic form: a further proof that, in its nature, it is not so much individual as social.