Part 25

RATIONALISM AND THE IDEA OF GOD

GODS

Surprised by doubt, and longing but to know, I asked of men and books what God might be:-- “An immanent spirit, clothed with the world we see”-- “A King of kings, ruler of all below”-- “Pure Love”--“A golden calf set up for show”-- “A jealous chief and tribal sectary”-- “Figment of fear and Man’s servility”-- “The final Judge that dooms to joy or woe” ...

I turned away; and found my God alone. God is the world--yet captive in our thought: Our thought--when it the head of the world is grown: Love--with what love we to ourselves have taught. The Soul must incarnate Divinity, And God in each anew must builded be.

RATIONALISM AND THE IDEA OF GOD

“Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst.” --GOETHE.

“Nowadays, matters of national defence, of politics, of religion, are still too important for Knowledge, and remain subjects for certitude; that is to say, in them we still prefer the comfort of instinctive belief because we have not learnt adequately to value the capacity to foretell.”--W. TROTTER.

No one who has read Flaubert’s Tentation de St. Antoine will be likely to forget that amazing procession of Gods, hundreds upon hundreds, in every diversity of form, defiling past the visionary Saint to topple over into the abyss of nothingness and be for ever destroyed--the doomed and outworn divinities of man’s childhood and adolescence, put away as he came to maturity. “Man created God in his own image,” wrote the irrepressible pen of Voltaire; and if it is not always true that Gods have been in his own image, but also in the image of animals and monsters, of embodied fears and hopes, it is indubitable that man has created God after God, only to throw them on the scrapheap as he outgrows them, like a child rejecting his old toys for new.

Indubitable--in a sense; indubitable that he has given each of them their peculiar and characteristic form, endowed this and that God with different qualities. But there is another part which he has not created, which he can only perceive, mould, clothe. The raw material of Divinity and its elemental attributes are given--man can but take it or leave it; and, what is more, it is difficult for him to leave it. It is given as the raw material and elemental attributes of life are given, and the evolutionary process can but take them. Man moulds and forms; but evolution has no more created living matter than he Divinity.

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I propose, then, to lay down as my main point that the idea of God is an inevitable product of biological evolution, arising when the human type of mind first came into being, and taking shape and form as a definite God or Gods. That the Gods who thus arise, although of course they play a rôle in the affairs of the human species only, have a definite biological function. That the term God can still be properly and profitably employed to denote a certain complex of phenomena, with a certain function in human evolution.

What, then, do we mean by saying that the idea of God arises inevitably with the appearance of man upon the evolutionary scene? How can the appearance of man account for such a curious phenomenon?

With man, for the first time in the history of life upon the earth, an organism appeared capable of generalizing, of framing concepts, and of communicating them to his fellows. Through sense-organs and brain, an organism reflects in its mind some of the events of the world outside, creates some sort of a microcosm over against the macroscosm. But the animal with no more than associative memory can at best create a haphazard microcosm, a mere cinema record, and incomplete at that, of the most elementary organization; while all one can say of its power of profiting by experience is that a certain primitive plot is thus provided for the series of adventures which make up the scenario.

With an organism like man, however, in which to the faculty of associative memory there has been superadded the power of framing concepts and of accumulating experience by tradition, the picture is altogether changed. The microcosm becomes more highly organized; from rough-and-tumble cinema it develops into an elaborate drama, whose plot is knotted up in the same general way as that of the great macrocosmic drama unrolling itself outside. Microcosm images macrocosm more nearly, both in its form and in its scope. As result of this, life is for the first time enabled in man’s person to frame some general ideas of the outer world. Not only is it enabled, it cannot help but do so. The outer world is there; it impinges through man’s sense-organs on his mind, and his mind is so constructed that, if it thinks at all, it must think in general terms.

For the first time, life becomes aware of something more than a set of events; it becomes aware of a system of powers operating in events. These powers (to use a general, and what is intended to be a non-committal, term) are in constant action upon man’s life. There is a power in the sun, a power in the storm, in the growth of crops, in wild beasts, in strange tribes, in the unrealized recesses of man’s own heart; and in the course of his life man is brought into contact with these powers, which may act with him or against him. Man frames his own idea of these powers; and once that idea is framed, it exerts an effect upon the rest of his ideas, upon his emotions, upon his conduct. The more strongly the idea is held, the greater the effect.

But the idea may obviously be held and organized in many different ways. It is when the idea is organized in one particular way that we call it religious. We call it religious when on the one hand it involves some recognition of powers operating so as to underlie the general operations of the world; and, on the other hand, when it involves the emotions. It must involve the idea of the general powers operating in the outer world; so that an emotional reaction entirely limited to a single human being, or to beauty, or to a single event, is not religious. And it must involve the emotional nature of man, so that a purely intellectual investigation of the powers in operation, or a purely practical response, a purely moral reaction to them, is again not religious.

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In primitive societies, as the studies of a Frazer or a Rivers have shown us, the whole of life is enmeshed with religion, and there is scarcely an activity of man which is not spun round with religious emotion and ritual. Very often the idea of God has not in this stage been clearly formulated; there is simply a notion of power, of mysterious influence, sometimes partly crystallized round a primitive deity. Later, however, the power became frankly anthropomorphic, and Gods came into being--many or one. Man had projected the idea of that active agency he knew best--human personality--into his idea of cosmic powers.

Into the God thus fashioned there are always projected, to greater or less degree, the ideals of the community; and thus, at a certain stage of development, we find definitely tribal Gods. Here the biological function of Gods becomes extremely obvious. The God, by his inspired prophets and priests, orders the destruction of his rivals--the false Gods of neighbouring tribes--or of his enemies, the members of those tribes.

The people of the tribe, however the result may have been brought about, do as a matter of fact find themselves, all unconsciously, caught up in the system which they and their forefathers have made. They have fashioned their God so that their inmost life is joined to him. When they sin, they fear him; when they look into their own hearts to take stock of their ultimate ideals, they find that these are attached, through the impalpable but infinitely resistant fibres of tradition, of childish memory and of education, to him; he is on their side against their enemies, so that their advantage is on the whole his.

Whatever, therefore, arouses the idea of God in their minds will send messages into every corner of their being. And if they can be firmly persuaded that God wishes something done, the call will pull at their heart-strings and bring them to convinced and united action.

The most familiar example of this type of effect is to be found in the history of the Jews in the Old Testament. But even to-day such tribal ideas are not extinct: an educated and charming lady said to me during the war--“I am convinced that if Jesus Christ were alive to-day He would be fighting on the side of the Allies.” ...

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In our further analysis we must carefully distinguish between the outer and inner components of the idea of God. The outer components are the powers acting upon man. Some of these are inorganic--storms, winds, floods, the sun and moon; others are organic--wild beasts, pestilence, crops, and fruits, domesticated animals; others again are human--personal or national enemies, the community in which the individual lives. And they may act upon man’s body or upon his mind. The sun warms his body, but makes an impression on his mind as well. The practice of astrology shows what power can be exerted on the mind by quite imaginary properties of external reality. But, whatever we may think of these outer components, there they are, and they do affect us for better or for worse. Before such a heterogeneous assemblage as is constituted by the outer components can operate as a single idea, can deserve a single name such as God, they must be elaborately organized.

The contribution to the idea of God from within, from the mind of man himself, is its form; and this form is the outcome of a process of mental organization every bit as real as the physical organization occurring in the unborn embryo.

The essential thing about both is, as we have indicated, that unity should arise in spite of diversity, and the resulting entity--organism in the one case, organized idea in the other--should thus be able to act as a single whole.

The system of ideas which man holds concerning external powers may be thus organized by thinking of it in terms of magic, of “influence,” manifesting itself in different ways in different operations of Nature; or in terms of personality, the manifestations of power being supposed to result from the activities of a being or beings more or less similar to ourselves; or it may be organized, as we shall see, on more scientific lines, by carefully pruning away all parts of it which are either definitely the mere product of our own imaginations, or else are not proven.

Thus what we have called the raw material of Divinity is given in the outer forces of nature, which not only act upon man as they act upon all organisms, but are by him perceived so to act in a way special and peculiar to man alone.