Religious Life is the eleventh volume in the “Man and His World” series of Northwestern University essays in contemporary thought, edited by Baker Brownell and published in the late 1920s. Five contributors—Edward Sapir, Shailer Mathews, Ernest F. Tittle, Rufus M. Jones, and Francis J. McConnell—each take up religion from a different angle: the ethnologist’s, the historian’s, the preacher’s, the mystic’s, and the logician’s. Brownell frames the collection with an introduction arguing that man makes his own eternities out of deep need, and that theologies and churches are “arts of religion”—brave, shifting human constructions rather than the thing itself.
The Wager Behind the Volume
Brownell’s preface sets the terms the essays then work out. Modern man, he writes, lives in an ever thinner stratum of time and space; his senses sharpen, his observations improve, and he extracts “facts” under what Brownell calls the dogma of the senses. The result is a partial objective world—external, fixed, merely receptive—that cannot house the spirit. Space and time fail to contain man, so he demands wholeness anyway and creates his gods, finding in creation an avenue to being that observation and rational analysis cannot open. The critic of religion matters as the critic of art matters: he correlates religious life with other things and adjusts his world to religious value. Brownell then sorts his contributors by temperament—Sapir distinguishing evangelistic from ritualistic religion and art from religion, Tittle pragmatic and moral, Jones mystical, Mathews historical and social, McConnell showing that faith is irreducible even inside fact—and closes by insisting that religion belongs to all these lights yet remains wordless and unsaid.
The Editor’s Frame and the Dedication to the Buddha
The volume opens with a dedication to Gautama, called the Buddha, of Benares, and a contents page that sets Edward Sapir’s essay “Religions and Religious Phenomena” first among five contributions, followed by Shailer Mathews on the religious life, Ernest F. Tittle on religion and personality, Rufus M. Jones on the Spirit, and Francis J. McConnell on fact and faith. The editor, Baker Brownell, signs his introduction “B. B.” and uses it to stake out a position: man manufactures his own eternities out of deep need, and the long labor of proving and explaining them is a brave failure that shifts with every age. Theologies, churches, apologies for God, and the modern gods will break and rise in new mutations, yet man will keep building worlds of spirit and questing for eras beyond time. Brownell argues that modern man lives in an ever thinner stratum of time and space; his senses sharpen, his observation improves, and he extracts “facts” and gives scientific form to pluralities—an obedience to the dogma of the senses that yields only a partial objective world, external, fixed, merely receptive. Space and time cannot house the spirit, so man will try to defeat the dualism of his maturing world and demand pristine wholeness, creating his gods and finding in creation an avenue to being that observation and rational analysis cannot reveal. The critic of religion, like the critic of the arts, remains important: he may correlate religious life with other things and adjust his world to religious value, though theologies, churches, moral codes, and institutions are “arts of religion” and less religious than artistic.
Brownell then summarizes his contributors. Sapir distinguishes evangelistic religion—individual, an impulsive conquest of reality—from ritualistic religion, social and fixed in routine, and separates art, the manifest, from religion, the inexpressible. Tittle’s view is personal and moral, justifying religion by man’s need for moral distinction and authority, illustrated by Meister Eckhart’s saying that feeding a hungry man is better than seeing St. Paul’s visions—a pragmatic test. Jones is mystical, a realist reaching beyond personality to independent spiritual being: “Man is more than himself”; “The beyond is within us.” Mathews’ approach is historical and social, defining religion as an attempt to establish a help-gaining relationship with environmental elements that evolved man’s personal powers, treating mysterious forces as social superiors. McConnell shows logically that faith is irreducible even in facts, which are discovered through social expectations and judged by social pronouncement—approximations emerging like crystals from a molten magma and dissolving again. Religion belongs to all these lights but remains wordless and unsaid.
Sapir’s Definition: Religion as the Road to Serenity
Sapir opens by distinguishing “a religious”—tradition-organized, with church, officers, guarded rituals, canonical texts—from “religion,” which is universal, as universal as speech and tools, and present even among primitive peoples lacking formalized institutions. Ethnologists unanimously ascribe religious behavior to the simplest societies, barring none, not even atheistic ones. He defines religion as “man’s never-ceasing attempt to discover a road to spiritual serenity across the perplexities and dangers of daily life”; where the need for serenity is passionately felt there is religious yearning, and where it is absent, religious behavior is mere socially sanctioned form. Spiritual serenity must be answered afresh for every culture and individual: the Ojibwa’s ultimate problems differ in content from the modern scientist’s, but religion means for each the realization of ultimate powerlessness in an inscrutable world and the irrational conviction of gaining mystic security by identifying with the unknowable—omnipresent fear and vast humility paradoxically turned into bedrock security. Pure religion is hard to find; it is the pursuit of ultimate serenity following total and necessary defeat that constitutes religion’s core.
Religion has allied with art and science, but in crucial situations it is indifferent to both, seeking neither objective enlightenment nor aesthetic equilibrium but the impulsive conquest of reality; the thorough intellectualist is baffled by religion. Art creates wholeness by precipitating the flux of things into tangible, self-sufficient forms; religion gathers life’s threads into a wholeness not manifest, experienced only as passionate desire. The two may be antithetical: art forgives because it values the here and now as ultimate good; religion forgives because the here and now are irrelevant to desire for ultimate solutions.
Belief, Emotion, and the Test of Intensity
Religion does not presuppose belief in God or gods, though such beliefs generally rationalize religious behavior; belief is a scientific, not a religious, concept—one’s beliefs constitute one’s science, sustained either by direct personal experience or by social authority. Belief in molecules or atoms is of exactly the same nature as belief in God or immortality; the true division is between personally verifiable and unverifiable belief. A philosophy of life is not religion if merely a cluster of rationalized beliefs; only when vitalized by emotion does it become religion. No specifically religious emotion is needed: “religious emotion” is a cluster of typical experiences—fear, awe, hope, love, the pleading attitude—occurring in a context of ultimate values. Fear alone is not religion; calm belief in a rewarding and punishing God is not religion if not applied to personal problems; only when emotion and belief are integrated into a value are they religious. Sapir’s standpoint allows no specific religious emotions or beliefs, asking only that intensity of feeling join a philosophy of ultimate things into an unanalyzed conviction.
Totems, Fetishes, and the Persistence of Sacred Symbols
The essay turns to totemism, noting a shadowy borderland between individual and group totemism and advising against assuming one derives from the other. The pursuit of power connects to magical objects: the North American Indian medicine bundle owes its potency to the supernatural experience behind it, whereas classical fetishism, as in West Africa, is not necessarily based on individual vision—a fetish possesses power in its own right and may house a resident supernatural being. The religious significance of such tokens is the reassuring power of a concrete symbol linked to the mysterious unknown, and this same suggestibility of visual symbols persists in higher religions: temples, shrines, crucifixes. Rituals are typically symbolic actions belonging to the whole community, though among primitives often the special function of a limited group—a clan, gens, or religious fraternity of priests. Communal ritual whips the tribe into emotional tension interpreted as supernatural visitation; the dance, with singing, is the most powerful means. Some ethnologists see ritual as mere drama, but the exaltation of the Sioux sun dancer or the Northwest Coast Indian impersonating the cannibal spirit differs from artistic excitement—it is closer to mystic or ascetic reverie. On primitive levels religion is not sharply distinguished from ethics, science, art, or social organization; for many primitives religion is the one structural reality of culture.
Certain religious sentiments persist: a feeling of community with a necessary universe of values, a blend of humility and security marking the mystic; a feeling for sacredness and holiness; taboo as unconscious striving for strength through sacrifice or deferment; and the sentiment of sin as the necessary shadow cast by sincerely religious feeling. Religion, Sapir concludes, is “the enemy of self-satisfaction.”
Mathews: Religion as a Technique for Help
Shailer Mathews rejects treating “religion” as an entity subject to scholastic discussion, urging observation of human behavior instead. Men seek ends through two sorts of effort—treating natural forces socially, as men treat men, or impersonally—with no sharp distinction in earliest culture; agriculture, for instance, combined manual labor with fasts, feasts, and religious dancing to placate supernatural forces. Religion is defined as actions, more or less rationalized, seeking help through personal relations with forces of the universe judged capable of such relationship; every religion is a technique for this end. The definition is historical, not metaphysical, presupposing no belief in a supreme God or gods, since behavior and mores precede evolved concepts. The religious life is not identical with its justification; most persons follow group customs, and religious life is an actual search for satisfaction of actual needs—men seek superhuman assistance because of impotence amid sickness, death, and misfortune, turning to possible help “as the flower turns to the sun.” The religious life is distinguished from love of beauty and from contemplation, unless contemplation is a means of gaining a higher power’s friendship; it involves morality, though sometimes lacking social control and tending toward asceticism, as when men make themselves miserable to arouse divine pity—yet such sacrifice drifts into co-operative movements, penitents urged to charity, and institutions of helpfulness.
From personal relations with superhuman powers developed the idea of God: first personification of dependent forces, or polytheism, then belief in one supreme God, Reason, or Will—arising among the Hebrews by expansion of a tribal god, among the Greeks by reflective thought; Hindu philosophers reach philosophical pantheism, but practical needs turn to pictured gods and goddesses. In Western civilization the conception of God followed evolving civilization: in a prescientific age the pattern was politics, so God was thought an absolute sovereign, and theology became “transcendentalized politics”; but the actual religious life of the West is not identical with its theological formulas. As life grew complicated, religious life sought variety of expression—the scientifically minded use scientific patterns, democrats use symbols of democracy. Difficulties arise because we identify the form of thought with its content, treating patterns as literal facts, such as liturgical pleading for mercy or substitutionary suffering; resolving them into analogies confuses earnest minds, and methodical resolution may lead to denial of the religious life itself. The critic of an idea of God treats that conception as interchangeable with God himself, but it is a mistake to identify a pattern with total reality—if we no longer speak of God as an old man with an Oriental king’s magnified power, we can still seek fellowship with elements of total Activity that evolved human personality. Even if belief in an individual God disappears, the sense of dependence on outside forces and the tendency to set up personal relations therewith do not cease; the religious life may persist without traditional monotheism, reversing the process traced in religious history, as the radical thinker passes from a Semitic, Hellenistic, or Christian Deity to dependence on forces he cannot deny. If religion were philosophy or metaphysics, such change might concern those seeing religion as a conservative social element; the disintegration of authority at one point may induce similar change elsewhere, especially moral.
The Faith Beneath All Knowing
Sapir begins by turning the scientific mind back on itself. Every act of knowing, he argues, rests on at least three assumptions, and each of them is finally an act of faith: that we live in a community of persons; that there is something objective and common to all, on which we deal with one another; and that the laws of reason can be trusted. That we make these assumptions without deliberation does not make them less than faith—it only makes the faith spontaneous. We take things at face value until some reason for doubt appears.
His counsel is to keep those assumptions in full light rather than let them work in the dark. He refuses to treat the mind as a passive receiving instrument. Even an image impressed on nervous tissue would need an agent to see it, and what that agent sees depends on the agent. William James, he recalls, called the investigator who merely stares about a “duffer.” Beyond the general assumptions there is always a selective interest at work in the scrutiny of facts; finite intelligences must select, and interests count. Each student should pursue what most interests him while guarding against letting interest overrule him. Two moods present themselves—the will to believe and the will not to believe—and Sapir insists that severe scientific skepticism is no less subjective than credulity; both answer to exact examination.
Hypothesis as the Engine of Discovery
Discovery, he continues, requires hypothesis: the significant discoverers looked for something definite. Columbus sailed with a vast body of studied theory and a definite expectation, though he was mistaken in almost every detail, and nearly two centuries passed before the full geographical significance of his work stood clear. Hegelianism, with its thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, drove scholars of Biblical documents to assign dates by Jewish, Gentile, or mixed tendency—a scheme mostly passed away, yet it set them on the path to understanding the tendencies of early Christian society and proved productive in all historical study. Karl Marx took his start from Hegel, seeing capitalism passing into socialism; Marx seemed truer to the formula than Hegel, who allowed a full stop at the Prussian state. Sapir, no socialist, mentions Marx the historian: faith in a theory led him to discover masses of economic fact. Evolutionary theory was fertile in sharpening eyes for facts. One of the best ways to see a fact, he writes, is to accept a theory and push it to its utmost.
Incubation and the Organic Work of the Mind
From Graham Wallas’s Art of Thought Sapir takes the period of incubation: collect the relevant facts, reflect purposefully and strenuously, then trust the mind’s organic processes—as soil acts upon a seed—to ripen into new illumination. Poincaré waited for his mind to work on a proposition; Newton had the falling apple; Darwin’s natural selection took shape through reading Malthus on population; William James spoke of pulling the trigger only when consciousness is loaded. Under free reflection facts arrange themselves, revealing coherency and gaps—the “missing links” in evolution. Robertson, a student of Spanish-American history, reflected on the lives of Charles and Cortez and deduced where Cortez’s correspondence to the Emperor must have been sent; a search of the archives at the suggested place, Vienna he thinks, revealed the documents.
The Skeptic’s Leap and the Social Temper
Psychology, Sapir notes, tends toward skepticism, and its implications touch all objective knowledge; psychologists who put guns in position to demolish the objectivity of religious conceptions would cast doubt on psychology itself. The step from a seeing act to the vision revealed is a leap the psychologist must also take; psychologists are human beings making projections like the rest of us. What is needed is a compelling faith, not predominant skepticism—Wallas’s incubation is more soundly the method of faith.
Truth seekers are in some degree voices of their times. Even mathematical announcements require a general mathematical interest to have risen; Euclid’s propositions took shape when Greeks discussed geometry in the streets and market place. Organized groups of truth seekers create a social temper that makes discernment keener; science is co-operative through a spirit of knowledge informing its members, with expectancy and a feeling that discovery is imminent. Dangers attend this: general expectations have prevented search, and there are intellectual fashions in the pursuit of truth, with an irrational element about them, as in hats or coats—yet fashion adds zest.
The Expert, the Instrument, and the Ship
The expert’s authority, too, is accepted by faith. The age of scientific procedure is characterized by instruments of precision, with an almost worship of instrumentalism in America; a table of logarithms involves as material only paper. Tools are extensions of human powers, and all depends on the mind back of the lens. The expert’s qualities are ethical as well as intellectual: Professor Hocking observed that at sea the sharpest eye can see for the whole ship, and must look with a sense of responsibility. Democracy rests on faith in the character of experts. Sapir likens expertness to the shipwreck of St. Paul in Acts, when the sailors sensed they drew nigh to land and the sounding lines confirmed it.
Tests of Objectivity and the Judgment of Peers
Physical tests solve the problem quickly where they are available. The pragmatist’s “working” is insufficient: an idea may be usable without being objectively valid. The older “lump” atom was an arbitrary stopping point, a fiction not meant to deceive, which helped lead to truth; taken as objectively real it would produce inconsistencies. The Ptolemaic theory “worked” for a thousand years yet is held valid nowhere today, because another explanation accounts for all the facts with more logical consistency and simplicity—consistency and simplicity being inner spiritual demands. Objectivity is sought through the judgment of the expert’s peers, the society of scientific groups, though experts sometimes fight long to convince their co-workers—witness Pasteur’s struggles with the scientific mind of his time, not the popular mind. Truth may reside in the special insight of one, but in the long run it must win the assent of the community of knowers.
What the Five Essays Argue
Sapir opens with the distinction that organizes his whole essay: “a religious” is tradition-organized, with church, officers, guarded rituals, canonical texts; “religion” is as universal as speech and tools, present even in the simplest societies, barring none. He defines it as man’s never-ceasing attempt to discover a road to spiritual serenity across the perplexities and dangers of daily life—the realization of ultimate powerlessness in an inscrutable world, and the irrational conviction of gaining mystic security by identifying with the unknowable. Belief, on this account, is a scientific rather than a religious concept; belief in atoms and belief in God are of exactly the same nature, and the true division is between personally verifiable and unverifiable belief. A philosophy of life becomes religion only when emotion vitalizes it. From there Sapir moves through totemism, the medicine bundle and the fetish, ritual as the community’s symbolic action—the Sioux sun dance is closer to mystic reverie than to drama—and the persisting sentiments of community with a necessary universe of values, of sacredness, of taboo, and of sin as the shadow cast by sincere religious feeling. Religion, he concludes, is the enemy of self-satisfaction.
Mathews urges that religion be observed as behavior rather than debated as an entity. Men seek ends by treating natural forces socially, as they treat men, or impersonally, and the two are not sharply divided in early culture; religion is a technique for gaining help through personal relations with forces of the universe judged capable of such relationship. The idea of God develops out of these relations—personification of dependent forces, then one supreme God, Reason, or Will—and in the West the prescientific pattern was politics, so theology became “transcendentalized politics.” The religious life outlives its formulas: even if belief in an individual God disappears, the sense of dependence on outside forces does not cease, though the disintegration of authority at one point may spread quietly into moral life and disarrange the perspective of values.
Tittle answers materialism with the story of Captain Gates, frost-bitten and delaying his comrades, who limped into an Antarctic blizzard one evening and never returned. What chemicals, he asks, combine to send a gallant gentleman into that night—”Produce that in your test-tubes if you can!” A creed sincerely held eventually determines deeds, and thoroughgoing materialism would rule out moral distinction altogether. Religion insists that the spiritual element in man has something corresponding to it in the universe; Bertrand Russell’s vision of labors destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system is met by the claim that personality is not a chemical formula.
Jones begins below, with experience, rather than above, with God’s nature. Copernicus overturned the crystalline dome that had supported religious imagery of heaven above, and old sky imagery has collapsed for serious persons; Jones seeks new images—Tennyson’s “world within the world we see,” Boutroux’s “beyond within us,” William James’s “More” continuous with the self, Augustine’s inward ascent at Ostia. Self-transcendence, he argues, occurs in every perception and in love of persons, so spiritual self-transcendence is no stranger. Pentecost’s real marvel is Paul’s demonstration of the Spirit in heightened life—a new creation, the fruits of the Spirit, the love of 1 Corinthians 13. Against Freud’s libido he asserts a divine urge and a higher ancestry, and finds God’s monumental evidence in spiritual personality, Christianity being “eternity revealed in time.”
McConnell closes the volume by dismantling the fact-faith opposition. All knowing rests on three assumptions, each an act of faith: that we live in a community of persons, that there is a common-to-all of an objective kind, and that the laws of reason can be trusted. The mind is no passive receiver; William James called the investigator who merely stares about a “duffer.” Discovery needs hypothesis—Columbus sailed with studied theory and was mistaken in almost every detail, Hegelianism put scholars on the path to understanding early Christian tendencies, Marx’s faith in a theory led to masses of economic fact. Wallas’s incubation, the expert’s ethical responsibility—the sharpest eye at sea must see for the whole ship—and the judgment of expert peers all belong to the method of faith. Objectivity is sought through consistency and simplicity, which are themselves inner spiritual demands.
Why the Volume Still Reads
The collection captures a particular moment: the late 1920s, when the sciences of man were ascendant and the old sky imagery had genuinely collapsed, and when thoughtful believers were learning to argue from experience and social function rather than from cosmology. Its wager is that religion survives the loss of its inherited pictures—that creeds and rites may disappear and be replaced by new formulas, and that so long as humanity is human, religion cannot be destroyed. Read together, the five essays form a debate rather than a chorus, and the debate is still recognizably ours.
