Religion in the Making/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
TRUTH AND CRITICISM
I. THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMA
In human nature there is no such separate function as a special religious sense. In making this assertion, I am agreeing with the following quotation:
Those who tend to identify religious experience with the activity of some peculiar organ or element of the mental life have recently made much of the subconscious. Here there seems to be a safe retreat for the hard-pressed advocates of the uniqueness of religious experience.[1]
Religious truth must be developed from knowledge acquired when our ordinary senses and intellectual operations are at their highest pitch of discipline. To move one step from this position towards the dark recesses of abnormal psychology is to surrender finally any hope of a solid foundation for religious doctrine.
Religion starts from the generalization of final truths first perceived as exemplified in particular instances. These truths are amplified into a coherent system and applied to the interpretation of life. They stand or fall — like other truths — by their success in this interpretation. The peculiar character of religious truth is that it explicitly deals with values. It brings into our consciousness that permanent side of the universe which we can care for. It thereby provides a meaning, in terms of value, for our own existence, a meaning which flows from the nature of things.
It is not true, however, that we observe best when we are entirely devoid of emotion. Unless there is a direction of interest, we do not observe at all. Further, our capacity for observation is limited. Accordingly, when we are observing some things, we are in a bad position for observing other things.
Thus there are certain emotional states which are most favourable for a peculiar concentration on topics of religious interest, just as other states facilitate the apprehension of arithmetical truths. Also, emotional states are related to states of the body. Most people are more likely to make arithmetical slips when they are tired in the evening. But we still believe that arithmetic holds good from sundown to cockcrow.
Again, it is not true that all people are on a level in respect to their perceptive powers. Some people appear to realize continuously, and at a higher level, types of emotional and perceptive experience, which we recognize as corresponding to those periods of our own lives most worthy of confidence for that sort of experience. In so far as what they say interprets our own best moments, it is reasonable to trust to the evidential force of their experience.
These considerations are all commonplaces, but it is necessary to keep them clearly in mind when we endeavour to form our philosophy of religious knowledge.
A dogma is the precise enunciation of a general truth, divested so far as possible from particular exemplification. Such precise expression is in the long run a condition for vivid realization, for effectiveness, for apprehension of width of scope, and for survival.
For example, when the Greeks, such as Pythagoras or Euclid, formulated accurately mathematical dogmas, the general truths which the Egyptians had acted upon for more than thirty generations became thereby of greater importance.
It is not the case, however, that our apprehension of a general truth is dependent upon its accurate verbal expression. For it would follow that we could never be dissatisfied with the verbal expression of something that we had never apprehended. But this consciousness of failure to express our accurate meaning must have haunted most of us.
For example, the notion of irrational number had been used in mathematics for over two thousand years before it received accurate definition in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Also, Newton and Leibnitz introduced the differential calculus, which was the foundation of modern mathematical physics. But the mathematical notions involved did not receive adequate verbal expression for two hundred and fifty years.
Such recondite examples are quite unnecessary. We know more of the characters of those who are dear to us than we can express accurately in words. We may recognize the truth of some statement about them. It will be a new statement about something which we had already apprehended but had never formulated.
This example brings out another fact: that a one-sided formulation may be true, but may have the effect of a lie by its distortion of emphasis. Such distortion does not stand in its character of a truth, but depends upon those who are affected by it. So far as the make-up of an individual mind is concerned, there is a proportion in truth as well as in art.
Thus an ill-balanced zeal for the propagation of dogma bears witness to a certain coarseness of aesthetic sensitiveness. It shows a strain of indifference — due perhaps to arrogance, perhaps to rashness, perhaps to mere ignorance — a strain of indifference to the fact that others may require a proportion of formulation different from that suitable for ourselves. Perhaps our pet dogmas require correction: they may even be wrong.
The fate of a word has to the historian the value of a document. The modern unfavourable implications of the kindred words, dogma, dogmatic, dogmatist, tell the story of some failure in habits of thought. The word “dogma” originally means an “opinion,” and thence more especially a “philosophic opinion.” Thus, for example, the Greek physician, Galen, uses the phrase “dogmatic physicians” to mean “physicians who guide themselves by general principles” — surely a praiseworthy practice. The nearest Greek dictionary will give this elementary information. But the dictionary — and this is why I have quoted it — gives an ominous addition to the information about Galen. It says that Galen contrasts “dogmatic physicians” with “empiric physicians.” If you then refer to the word “empiric,” you will find that “empiric physicians” contended that “experience was the one thing needful.” In this lecture we have to investigate the application to religion of this contrast between “dogmatic” and “empiric.”
The philosophy of expression is only now receiving its proper attention.[2] In the framing of dogmas it is only possible to use ideas which have received a distinct, well-recognized signification. Also, no idea is determinate in a vacuum: It has its being as one of a system of ideas. A dogma is the expression of a fact as it appears within a certain sphere of thought. You cannot convey a dogma by merely translating the words; you must also understand the system of thought to which it is relevant. To take a very obvious example, “The Fatherhood of God” is a phrase which would have a significance for a Roman citizen of the early Republic different from that which it has for a modern American — stern for the one, tender for the other.
In estimating the validity of a dogma, it must be projected against the alternatives to it within that sphere of thought. You cannot claim absolute finality for a dogma without claiming a commensurate finality for the sphere of thought within which it arose. If the dogmas of the Christian Church from the second to the sixth centuries express finally and sufficiently the truths concerning the topics about which they deal, then the Greek philosophy of that period had developed a system of ideas of equal finality. You cannot limit the inspiration to a narrow circle of creeds.
A dogma — in the sense of a precise statement — can never be final; it can only be adequate in its adjustment of certain abstract concepts. But the estimate of the status of these concepts remains for determination.
You cannot rise above the adequacy of the terms you employ. A dogma may be true in the sense that it expresses such interrelations of the subject matter as are expressible within the set of ideas employed. But if the same dogma be used intolerantly so as to check the employment of other modes of analyzing the subject matter, then, for all its truth, it will be doing the work of a falsehood.
Progress in truth — truth of science and truth of religion — is mainly a progress in the framing of concepts, in discarding artificial abstractions or partial metaphors, and in evolving notions which strike more deeply into the root of reality.
II. EXPERIENCE AND EXPRESSION
Expression is the one fundamental sacrament. It is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. It follows that, Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/136 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/137 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/138 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/139 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/140 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/141 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/142 plicity of its origin. The dogmas are statements of how the complex world is to be expressed in the light of the intuitions fundamental to the religion. They are not necessarily simple in character or limited in number.
III. THE THREE TRADITIONS
The divergence in the expression of dogmas is most clearly shown in the two traditions of Buddhism and Christianity. This divergence is important because it reaches down to the most fundamental religious concepts, namely, the nature of God, and the aim of life.
There are close analogies between the two religions. In both there is, in some sense, a saviour — Christ in the one, and the Buddha in the other. But their functions differ, according to the theologies of the two religions. In both, the souls of the blessed return to God. Again, this analogy cloaks a wide divergence; for the respective concepts of God, and the respective concepts of the meaning of the Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/144 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/145 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/146 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/147 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/148 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/149 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/150 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/151 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/152 while rival pedants cut out neat little dogmatic systems to serve as the unalterable measure of the Universe.
IV. THE NATURE OF GOD
The general history of religious thought, of which the Reformation period is a particular instance, is that of the endeavour of mankind to interpret the great standard experiences as leading to a more definite knowledge than can be derived from a metaphysic which founds itself upon general experience.
There can be nothing inherently illegitimate in such an attempt. But if we attend to the general principles which regulate all endeavours after clear statement of truth, we must be prepared to amplify, recast, generalize, and adapt, so as to absorb into one system all sources of experience.
The earlier statements will be not so much wrong, as obscured by trivial limitations, and as thereby implying an exclusion of complementary truths. The growth will be in the proportion of truth.
Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/154 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/155 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/156 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/157 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/158 Page:Religion in the Making.djvu/159 into the world. Through it his ideal vision is given a base in actual fact to which He provides the ideal consequent, as a factor saving the world from the self-destruction of evil. The power by which God sustains the world is the power of himself as the ideal. He adds himself to the actual ground from which every creative act takes its rise. The world lives by its incarnation of God in itself.
He transcends the temporal world, because He is an actual fact in the nature of things. He is not there as derivative from the world; He is the actual fact from which the other formative elements cannot be torn apart.
But equally it stands in his nature that He is the realization of the ideal conceptual harmony by reason of which there is an actual process in the total universe — an evolving world which is actual because there is order.
The abstract forms are thus the link between God and the actual world. These forms are abstract and not real, because in themselves they represent no achievement of actual value. Actual fact always means fusion into one perceptivity. God is one such conceptual fusion, embracing the concept of all such possibilities graded in harmonious, relative subordination. Each actual occasion in the temporal world is another such fusion. The forms belong no more to God than to any one occasion. Apart from these forms, no rational description can be given either of God or of the actual world. Apart from God, there would be no actual world; and apart from the actual world with its creativity, there would be no rational explanation of the ideal vision which constitutes God.
Each actual occasion gives to the creativity which flows from it a definite character in two ways. In one way, as a fact, enjoying its complex of relationships with the rest of the world, it contributes a ground — partly good and partly bad — for the creativity to fuse with a novel consequent, which will be the outcome of its free urge. In another way, as transmuted in the nature of God, the ideal consequent as it stands in his vision is also added. Thus God in the world is the perpetual vision of the road which leads to the deeper realities.
V. CONCLUSION
God is that function in the world by reason of which our purposes are directed to ends which in our own consciousness are impartial as to our own interests. He is that element in life in virtue of which judgment stretches beyond facts of existence to values of existence. He is that element in virtue of which our purposes extend beyond values for ourselves to values for others. He is that element in virtue of which the attainment of such a value for others transforms itself into value for ourselves.
He is the binding element in the world. The consciousness which is individual in us, is universal in him: the love which is partial in us is all-embracing in him. Apart from him there could be no world, because there could be no adjustment of individuality. His purpose in the world is quality of attainment. His purpose is always embodied in the particular ideals relevant to the actual state of the world. Thus all attainment is immortal in that it fashions the actual ideals which are God in the world as it is now. Every act leaves the world with a deeper or a fainter impress of God. He then passes into his next relation to the world with enlarged, or diminished, presentation of ideal values.
He is not the world, but the valuation of the world. In abstraction from the course of events, this valuation is a necessary metaphysical function. Apart from it, there could be no definite determination of limitation required for attainment. But in the actual world, He confronts what is actual in it with what is possible for it. Thus He solves all indeterminations.
The passage of time is the journey of the world towards the gathering of new ideas into actual fact. This adventure is upwards and downwards. Whatever ceases to ascend, fails to preserve itself and enters upon its inevitable path of decay. It decays by transmitting its nature to slighter occasions of actuality, by reason of the failure of the new forms to fertilize the perceptive achievements which constitute its past history. The universe shows us two aspects: on one side it is physically wasting, on the other side it is spiritually ascending.
It is thus passing with a slowness, inconceivable in our measures of time, to new creative conditions, amid which the physical world, as we at present know it, will be represented by a ripple barely to be distinguished from non-entity.
The present type of order in the world has arisen from an unimaginable past, and it will find its grave in an unimaginable future. There remain the inexhaustible realm of abstract forms, and creativity, with its shifting character ever determined afresh by its own creatures, and God, upon whose wisdom all forms of order depend.