CHAPTER IV FAITH AS PURE FEELING IN my last lecture I tried to keep to the most universal and primary aspects of Faith. But I have gone further in differentiating its activities and aspirations than some would wish to follow me. There are some who wish to keep the Faith-feeling uncontaminated by thought and will; who desire that it should remain a vague, mysterious apprehension of the infinite, an immediate intuition of the ineffable. It would be a mistake to include all the mystics under this class. The greatest mystics have not made the mistake of identifying the primary ground of Faith with feeling, if by feeling is meant the faculty which psychologists recognise as constituting, together with thought and will, our psychical life. The differentia of mysticism is an intense inner life; the drama of the mystic's spiritual ascent, his struggle after purification, illumination, and unity with the Divine, is played out within his mind and not on the stage of history. But whatever may be his notion of the perfect state, when he shall have attained the Beatific Vision, his life is by no means one of pure emotion; it is characterised by intense striving, and often by profound thought. The mystics with whom we are concerned in this lecture are the Quietists-those whose favourite maxim is, 'Be still then, and know that I am God'; and we have also to deal with emotional theism, which is not quite the same as mysticism. We cannot be surprised that many have supposed that Faith is a pure feeling. For our feelings seem to us to be the deepest and most vivid of our experiences. Thought never shows us what a thing is in itself, but only how it is related to other objects. Feeling, especially those most characteristic feelings, love and hate, goes deeper, As Tennyson says in that wonderful poem, The Ancient Sage: For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake ... Religion, too, in its various moods is intimately connected with the emotions. Fear, humility, love, trust, remorse, the joy of reconciliation, the pain of estrangement, are all emotional states. Moreover, there is a vast and half-explored background of vague feeling which fades away into the subconscious, a reservoir of life behind consciousness, which seems as if it might be the very soil out of which Faith springs and grows. If we could tap this subliminal self, and force it to give up its secrets, should we not find our Faith definite, explicit, and selfsufficing? So the mystic wishes to interrogate this dark background, to bring it into the light. He does not wish to contaminate it with infusions from his surface consciousness, but to see what the twilight conceals. Now the genuineness of the pure mystical experience— the feeling which the devout mystic interprets as the immediate presence of God-is proved beyond cavil. I am not speaking now of that rare trance which Plotinus enjoyed four times and Porphyry once, but of something much more familiar-those consolations' which almost all religious people enjoy at times during their devotions. There is reason to believe that the majority of people who believe in God do so because they consider that they have had immediate experience of Him. An American psychologist found that out of seventy-seven persons whom he questioned on the subject no less than fifty-six rested their Faith on the experience of immediate communication with God.1 I am surprised, indeed, that the proportion was not even larger. For who that has prayed regularly has failed to have at times an intensely vivid experience that his prayers are being heard and answered? The following description is typical. Times without number, in moments of supreme doubt, disappointment, discouragement, unhappiness, a certain prayer-formula, which by degrees has built itself up in my mind, has been followed in its utterance by quick and astonishing relief. Sometimes doubt has been transformed into confident assurance, mental weakness utterly routed by strength, self-distrust changed into self-confidence, fear into courage, dismay into confident and brightest hope. These transitions have sometimes come by degrees-in the course, say, of an hour or two; at other times they have been instantaneous, flashing up in brain and heart as if a powerful electric stroke had cleared the air.' 2 I will not now dispute with those who would remind me that what the devout person calls God may be only a deeper or higher state of his own consciousness. Perhaps the very deepest and highest state of our own consciousness is nothing else but beholding the face of God and hearing His voice; but that is not my point just now. What is the rank and value, in the religious life, of this very common feeling of the presence of God? Is it a great enough thing to be the complete satisfaction of Faith, so that we need go no further, but may rest content with the statement that Faith is an immediate feeling or consciousness of God's presence? In order to do justice to this conception of Faith I will give you some extracts from Schleiermacher (1768-1834), 1 Pratt, Psychology of Religious Belief, p. 245. ⚫ld. p. 276. who may be taken as one of the best representatives of the religious type which we are considering in this Lecture. You will observe that in this writer the object of Faith is not analysed even so far as I analysed it in my last Lecture. It is not determined as the triune ideal of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. It is the vague Infinite. The religious instinct is fixed in its primary form; it is identified with feeling, instead of being the common ground of our intellectual, moral, and emotional activities. Schleiermacher is the theologian among the German romanticists. He conducted a campaign against the socalled Enlightenment' (Aufklärung), with its crude and self-satisfied rationalism. We shall meet with this poor type of intellectualism in a later chapter. It encouraged a cold, common-sense view of life, and despised enthusiasm. The romantic movement rushed to the opposite extreme. Its first principle was to value immediate impressions above reflection and reason. In the sphere of religion this means that emotional experience, devout feeling, is the sole foundation of religious belief. Why,' Schleiermacher asks, ' do you not fix your eyes on the religious life itself, and in particular on those pious elevations of the mind in which all other activities are checked or almost suspended, and the whole soul fused in an immediate feeling of the infinite and eternal, and of her own union with it? 'Religion resigns at once all claims on anything that belongs to science and morality.' (This energetic repudiation is directed, firstly, against the rationalism of the eighteenth-century Deists, who held that Faith is related to knowledge only as probability to certainty, being an intellectual judgment based on examination of evidence; and, secondly, against the austere moralism of Kant.) The contemplation of the pious is the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things in and through the Infinite, and of all temporal things in and through the Eternal. Religion is to have and know life only in immediate feeling, as existing in the infinite and eternal. Where this is found, religion is satisfied; where it hides itself, she is in anguish and disquietude. Religion is not knowledge or science, either of the world or of God. The pious man, as pious, knows nothing about ethical science. It is the same with action itself. While morality always appears as manipulating, as self-controlling, piety appears as a surrender, a submission to be moved by the Whole that stands over against man. The pious man may not know at all, but he cannot know falsely. His nature is reality which knows reality. True religion is a sense and taste of the Infinite. If a man is not one with the Eternal, in the unity of intuition and feeling which is immediate, he remains for ever apart.' Schleiermacher reserves his keenest scorn for those who make religion ancillary to morality. A high praise it would be for the heavenly one, if she could only look after the earthly affairs of men in this poor fashion! Great honour for her, to quicken men's consciences a little, and make them more careful! What is loved and valued only for an advantage that lies outside it is not essentially necessary, and a reasonable man will put no higher price upon it than the value of the end for which it is desired. And I cannot attach much importance to the wrong acts which it prevents in this way, nor to the right acts which it is said to procure. What I maintain is that piety springs up, necessarily and spontaneously, from the inward parts of every better soul, that she has in the heart a province of her own, where she bears unobstructed sway, and that she is worthy to be welcomed and acknowledged by the noblest and most excellent, for her own inner nature's sake.' 1 Faith, then, for Schleiermacher, is a spontaneous, im 1 The English reader will find a useful and characteristic selection from Schleiermacher's writings in Caldecott and Mackintosh, Selections from the Literature of Theism, pp. 256-304. |