Progress and History

by Unknown

V

PROGRESS IN RELIGION

Baron Friedrich von Hügel

The difficulties are deep and delicate which confront any man at all well acquainted with the fuller significance of Religion and of Progress, who attempts clearly and shortly to describe or define the ultimate relations between these two sets of fact and conviction. It is plain that Religion is the deeper and richer of the two terms; and that we have here, above all, to attempt to fathom the chief elements and forces of Religion as such, and then to see whether Progress is really traceable in Religion at all. And again it is clear that strongly religious souls will, as such, hold that Religion answers to, and is occasioned by, the action, within our human life and needs, of great, abiding, living non-human Realities; and yet, if such souls are at all experienced and sincere, they will also admit—as possibly the most baffling of facts—that the human individuals, families, races, are relatively rare in whom this sense and need of Religion is strongly, sensitively active. Thus the religion of most men will either all but completely wither or vanish before the invasion of other great facts and interests of human life—Economics or Politics or Ethics, or again, Science, Art, Philosophy; or it will, more frequently, become largely assimilated, in its conception, valuation, and practice, to the quite distinct, and often subtly different, conceptions, valuations, and practices pertaining to such of these other ranges and levels of human life as happen here to be vigorously active. And such assimilations are, of course, effected with a particular Philosophy or Ethic, mostly some passing fashion of the day, which does not reach the deepest laws and standards even of its own domain, and which, if taken as Religion, will gravely numb and mar the power and character of such religious perception as may still remain in this particular soul.

I will, then, first attempt some discriminations in certain fundamental questions concerning the functioning of our minds, feelings, wills. I will next attempt short, vivid descriptions of the chief stages in the Jewish and Christian Religions, with a view to tracing here what may concern their progress; and will very shortly illustrate the main results attained by the corresponding main peculiarities of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism. And I will finally strive to elucidate and to estimate, as clearly as possible, the main facts in past and present Religion which concern the question of religious 'Progressiveness'.

I

I begin with insisting upon some seven discriminations which, even only forty years ago, would have appeared largely preposterous to the then fashionable philosophy.

First, then, our Knowledge is always wider and deeper than is our Science. I know my mother, I know my dog, I know my favourite rose-tree; and this, although I am quite ignorant of the anatomical differences between woman and man; of the psychological limits between dog and human being; or of the natural or artificial botanical order to which my rose-plant belongs. Any kind or degree of consciousness on my part as to these three realities is a knowledge of their content. 'Knowledge is not simply the reduction of phenomena to law and their resolution into abstract elements; since thus the unknowable would be found well within the facts of experience itself, in so far as these possess a concrete character which refuses translation into abstract relations.' So Professor Aliotta urges with unanswerable truth.[32]

And next, this spontaneous awareness of other realities by myself, the reality Man, contains always, from the first, both matter and form, and sense, reason, feeling, volition, all more or less in action. Sir Henry Jones insists finely: 'The difference between the primary and elementary data of thought on the one hand, and the highest forms of systematized knowledge on the other, is no difference in kind, analogous to a mere particular and a mere universal; but it is a difference of articulation.'[33]

Thirdly, direct, unchallengeable Experience is always only experience of a particular moment; only by means of Thought, and trust in Thought, can such Experience be extended, communicated, utilized. The sceptic, to be at all effective, practises this trust as really as does his opponent. Thought, taken apart from Experience, is indeed artificial and arid; but Experience without Thought, is largely an orderless flux. Philosophers as different as the Neo-Positivist Mach and the Intuitionist Bergson, do indeed attempt to construct systems composed solely of direct Experience and pure Intuition; and, at the same time, almost ceaselessly insist upon the sheer novelty, the utter unexpectedness of all direct Experience, and the entire artificiality of the constructions of Thought—constructions which alone adulterate our perceptions of reality with the non-realities repetition, uniformity, foreseeableness. Yet the amazing success of the application of such constructions to actual Nature stares us all in the face. 'It is, indeed, strange,' if that contention be right, 'that facts behave as if they too had a turn for mathematics.' Assuredly 'if thought, with its durable and coherent structure, were not the reflection of some order of stable relations in the nature of things, it would be worthless as an organ of life'.[34]