RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY
13
of those martyrs, which had been shed above a thousand years before, and
lay cold in their streets. So the sense of this blood was upon me, and I
obeyed the word of the Lord.”
Bent as we are on studying religion’s existential conditions, we
cannot possibly ignore these pathological aspects of the subject.
We must describe and name them just as if they occurred in non-
religious men. It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing
an object to which our emotions and affections are committed
handled by the intellect as any other object is handled. The first
thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with
something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and
awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and
unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal
outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a
crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing,” it would
say; “I am
MYSELF
,
MYSELF
alone.”
The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in
which the thing originates. Spinoza says: “I will analyze the actions
and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes,
and of solids.” And elsewhere he remarks that he will consider
our passions and their properties with the same eye with which he
looks on all other natural things, since the consequences of our
affections flow from their nature with the same necessity as it re-
sults from the nature of a triangle that its three angles should be
equal to two right angles. Similarly M. Taine, in the introduction
to his history of English literature, has written: “Whether facts
be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have their
causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as
there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice
and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar.” When we read such
proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential
conditions of absolutely everything, we feel — quite apart from our
legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the
program, in view of what the authors are actually able to perform
— menaced and negated in the springs of our innermost life. Such
cold-blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to undo our soul’s
vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed in explaining
their origin would simultaneously explain away their significance,
14
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
and make them appear of no more preciousness, either, than the
useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks.
Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that
spiritual value is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those
comments which unsentimental people so often pass on their more
sentimental acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality so strongly
because his temperament is so emotional. Fanny’s extraordinary
conscientiousness is merely a matter of over-instigated nerves.
William’s melancholy about the universe is due to bad digestion —
probably his liver is torpid. Eliza’s delight in her church is a symptom
of her hysterical constitution. Peter would be less troubled about
his soul if he would take more exercise in the open air, etc. A more
fully developed example of the same kind of reasoning is the fashion,
quite common nowadays among certain writers, of criticising the
religious emotions by showing a connection between them and
the sexual life. Conversion is a crisis of puberty and adolescence. The
macerations of saints, and the devotion of missionaries, are only
instances of the parental instinct of self-sacrifice gone astray. For the
hysterical nun, starving for natural life, Christ is but an imaginary
substitute for a more earthly object of affection. And the like.
1
1
As with many ideas that float in the air of one’s time, this notion shrinks from dogmatic
general statement and expresses itself only partially and by innuendo. It seems to me that
few conceptions are less instructive than this re-interpretation of religion as perverted sexu-
ality. It reminds one, so crudely is it often employed, of the famous Catholic taunt, that the
Reformation may be best understood by remembering that its fons et origo was Luther’s wish
to marry a nun: — the effects are infinitely wider than the alleged causes, and for the most
part opposite in nature. It is true that in the vast collection of religious phenomena, some
are undisguisedly amatory — e.g., sex-deities and obscene rites in polytheism, and ecstatic
feelings of union with the Saviour in a few Christian mystics. But then why not equally call
religion an aberration of the digestive function, and prove one’s point by the worship of
Bacchus and Ceres, or by the ecstatic feelings of some other saints about the Eucharist?
Religions language clothes itself in such poor symbols as our life affords, and the whole
organism gives overtones of comment whenever the mind is strongly stirred to expression.
Language drawn from eating and drinking is probably as common in religious literature as is
language drawn from the sexual life. We “hunger and thirst” after righteousness; we “find the
Lord a sweet savor;” we “taste and see that he is good.” “Spiritual milk for American babes,
drawn from the breasts of both testaments,” is a sub-title of the once famous New England
Primer, and Christian devotional literature indeed quite floats in milk, thought of from the
point of view, not of the mother, but of the greedy babe.
Saint François de Sales, for instance, thus describes the “orison of quietude”: “In this state
the soul is like a little child still at the breast, whose mother, to caress him whilst he is still
in her arms, makes her milk distill into his mouth without his even moving his lips. So it is
here. . . . Our Lord desires that our will should be satisfied with sucking the milk which His