Chapter Two of "A Religion for Greatness" by Clarence Skinner,
1945. Entered by Joel Miller.
WHAT, then, is this radical religion which goes down
below surface appearance, and finds its root in the
profoundest reality? How do we realize it in our lives? What
have been some of its manifestations in history, and do we find
that it has really been a common experience?
To sum the answer in a word, radical religion creates in
man a sense of vital, meaningful relationship between the self
and the universe. In primitive man this feeling may center in
worship of sun, moon, stars, or other natural phenomena. It
may manifest itself by the belief in and practice of inana-an
all-pervasive potency which endows men with unique gifts. No
matter how crude and superstitious man's early religion may have
been, it lifted him out of his isolation into union with powers
and influences greater than himself. His religious experience
gave him an orientation toward the unities and the universals.
Groping through fogs of ignorance he laid hold on the
central fact of human existence; namely, that there is a
relationship of dependence between man and the powers which
exists outside and beyond himself.
Radical religion does not insist upon naming or
describing these powers. Animism, polytheism, deism, theism, are
phases of the essential experience, but none of these is
necessary to it. The elemental fact is the outreach of man to
something beyond himself.
What primitive man may have dimly apprehended has grown
through the centuries into an increasingly clear conviction.
The outreaches attained larger proportions, and our consciousness
has broadened with the process of evolution. We have become less
trustful of naive emotions, and hence more sophisticated. We
want to name and define what we feel, but despite all obstacles
radical religion persists.
A most interesting example of this elemental experience
in modern life has recently been recorded by Dr. Hocking:
A short time ago I was talking with a
colleague, a psychiatrist. He said, "Something has
been occurring to me recently which seems important,
and yet it seems so simple that I can hardly believe it
very significant. It is a way of taking the miscellany
of events that make up the day's impressions of the
world. One sees no trend in them. But suppose there
were a trend that we cannot define but can nevertheless
have an inkling of. There is certainly some direction
in evolution, why not in history? If there were such a
trend, then we men could be either with it or against
it. To be with it would give a certain peace and
settlement; to be against it would involve a subtle
inner restlessness. To have confidence in it would be
sort of a commitment, for better or for worse. I
wonder if that is what you mean by religion."
"Yes," I said, "I think that is the substance of it.
The great religious ones seem to have had a certainty
that they were going along with the trend of the world.
They have had a passion for right living which they
conceived of as a *cosmic demand."* (Italics mine, not
Dr. Hocking's.)
"There is nothing contrary to science in that."
"No, but it makes a difference, doesn't it?"
"Strange that such a simple thing should
make so very much difference." (What Man Can Make
of Man. By William Ernest Hocking. Harper's, New
York, 1942.)
Such is the insight which comes to man, whether primitive or
modern, whether naive or sophisticated.
Beneath all curious customs and beliefs, deeper than
ecclesiastical creeds, more vital and basic than priestly rites,
stands out one impressive fact - namely, man touches
infinity; his home is in immensity; he lives, moves, and
has his being in an eternity. This magnificent assertion is
man's greatest affirmation. Nothing else surpasses it, in
sweep of imagination or depth of understanding. It is a
truth proclaimed by all that we know of modern science, and
it stands the test of experience as the enduring reality.
It is man's effective protest against all that lessens and
divides. It is his emphatic denial of any attempt to separate
him from his home and heritage. It expresses his
uncompromising unwillingness to be reduced to insignificance:
and utter isolation. This radical interpretation would
rescue religion from its fringes and accretions. It would
scrape the barnacles off the elemental truth and reveal the
basic reality in its purity and power. So many superficial
impediments have been heaped upon religion by its devotees
that it is frequently impossible to recognize the genuine from
the spurious. But by rethinking religion and by performing a
major surgical operation upon it, we can discover the vital
organs. The radical interpretation refuses to be led aside by
the extraneous. It insists upon returning to what is the
essential core of religious experience; namely, the seeking
after and finding man's relation to the unities and
universals.
Three words will occur often in this essay; so often, in
fact, that the may seem repetitious. To understand their
meaning s vital to the understanding of the central theme
of this essay. It will therefore be necessary to define
these terms with as much precision as possible, and the
reader is urged to fasten the definitions in his mind now,
or to turn back to this page from time to tine to refresh his
memory.
The terms are of such a nature that they cannot be
reduced to mathematical exactitude, but they are not so vague and
discrete as to mean anything or nothing. They will be used
with a certain connotation which is always in the mind of the
author when he writes them.
Insight. The dictionary gives us the following: "A
perception of the inner nature of a thing." In our view this
ability may be purely intellectual, or it may be due to some
causal factor which works in conjunction with intelligence.
It may be close to intuition. Perhaps even some mystical
quality may inhere in this ability to grasp the inner nature of
some form of reality. Whatever the cause or character of
the insight, we shall assume its validity when, like any other
form of knowledge, we test it by empirical methods.
Unity. Again, the dictionary says, "The state of
being indivisibly one; harmony, concord." This unity may be
purely physical, as the unity of the human body; it may be
intellectual, as the unity of a scheme or plan; it may be used as
a metaphysical term, implying a fundamental unity underlying
all aspects of reality. It may be used with all these
meanings in this volume, but always it will mean the coherence
of what may seem to be separate, into a oneness. Unity means an
operative harmony, a functional relationship which belongs to all
the parts of a whole.
Universal. Funk and Wagnalls says: "Relating to the
entire universe; unlimited; general. Regarded as existing as
a whole; entire. Including all of a logical class. A universal
concept; that which may be predicated of many particular things
or persons." We shall give all these connotations to the word.
The universal will mean the all-inclusive as far as we can
imagine it - the entire cosmos with all it contains. Again it
will mean all of a class, as, a universal religion or a universal
language. Finally, we shall mean by the term that which is
the antithesis of the limited, or fragmentary. It is the
opposite of the partial. When we speak of Universalism we
shall mean a philosophy of life or system of values
which stresses the largest possible Weltanschauung, or world
outlook, in contrast to the narrow view which is herein
denominated partialism.
To return now to the consideration of the main
theme of this chapter; namely, the fact that religion
provides insight into these unities and universals.
A glance at the quotations at the beginning of this
chapter gives some intimation of this type of religion as
expressed in many different cultures and by persons of differing
periods of time.
Taoism, in its sacred scripture, the Tao-teh-King,
gives a remarkable example of this insight: "Man takes his norm
from earth; earth from heaven; heaven from Tao; the Tao from
itself." Without going into an extended and unnecessary
discussion of the meaning of the terms used by Lao-tse, the
founder of the movement, we see at once the kind of
philosophy, or mysticism, which religion gives to a noble mind.
Man is surrounded by earth and all its forces. To put it
scientifically, we are geocentric. We are related to
soil, climate, flora, fauna, and all the chemical and
physical laws which operate on the earth. This planet, however,
is by no means an isolated fact. It swings in a vast cosmos,
and so, as man takes his norm from earth, so the earth takes its
norm from heaven. Needless to say, heaven did not mean to the
Chinese twenty-five hundred years ago what it means today.
The significant thing about the statement is not its astronomy,
but its early insight into the fact of orderliness and
interrelatedness. If heaven meant to Lao-tse something in the
nature of a moral as well as physical order, so much the better
for our argument. It simply extends the sweep ,and scope of the
author's insight into the unity of all phases of the universe,
whether moral or physical. Heaven, however, is not an ultimate
and final fact, but it, too, is dependent on something more
elemental and self-sustaining. The Tao is the uncaused cause,
the prime mover, the Ding an sich which all philosophers
must assume as the ultimate reality. It gives measure, shape
and meaning to all else, including the wide expanse of the
cosmos, this planet, and even man, small as he may seem in the
universal order of things.
It would be difficult indeed to find a more complete and
satisfying statement of radical religion than this logical
and penetrating summary by the sage Lao-tse.
This religio-philosophical type of thought is perhaps
found at its best in Hinduism, and it evolves as early as the
Upanishads. The Indian sages evolved the Brahman-atman
doctrine, and considering the fact that the period in
which it was conceived was prescientific, and taking into
account the highly poetic form in which it is written,
there never has been a more satisfying statement of man's
cosmic nature The Brahman here means, as accurately as we
can translate it, the soul of the universe - the fundamental
principle which goes into the making of all things. It is the
inner nature of the all-embracing, all-animating reality.
Wisely, the Hindu refrains from describing this nature or
Universal Self. He declares that names merely limit what is
essentially limitless and put bounds to what is not to be
bounded and defined by man's Feeble vocabulary. Like the Tao
in Chinese systems, it is not personalized, yet it is not denied
that it can be manifested in terms of personality. But
whatever it is, it must be too great to be compassed about with
things temporal and local.
On the other hand is the atman - the self of each
individual - the inner reality which motivates human action,
gives ground or foundation to our being, and sustains in us our
life force. We in the West are accustomed to calling this the
individuating principle the ego, or soul, which marks off one
single person from all other persons. The Hindu sage, on the
contrary, declares that this atman is not an isolated, unrelated
entity standing apart from others. This separateness is an
illusion and is at the root of most of our ills. The true atman
is identical with the Brahman. The two are merged into one,
and therein lies illumination and salvation for man. The ego
is not an individual possession; it is simply part of the all.
The "I" which man so proudly proclaims is allied to the
plants and to the animals. What St. Francis was to
express so beautifully centuries later in his Canticle to
the Sun was a commonplace of Hindu thought a thousand
years before our era. All life is sacred, because the soul
of all is the soul of each.
By the same token, man is part of humanity. You are I
and I am you. We are merged in the one environing and
interpenetrating all. This fragmentary self, upon which we
sometimes insist, is revengeful, cruel and inhuman only
when it is ignorant of its unity with all other men. My life
is not so much mine as a particle of the Infinite life encased
for a passing moment in a frame which houses it in fragile
solitariness. It is the drop of water lifted for a brief day by
the lotus leaf from the pool. Soon the drop will fall back
into the source whence it came - merged in water which is
common not only to the one pool, but with all water everywhere.
It becomes a crystal of snow on Mt. Everest, a drop in the Holy
Ganges, or it reflects the Taj Mahal on a silvered moonlit
night.
So it is with the ego's relation to infinity and
eternity: whether incarnated in the form of a sacred cow or a
perfect Buddha, whether toiling on a farm or sitting in quiet
contemplation, under the beneficent stars, the soul feels
itself to be one with the tides of life as they sweep
through time and space.
"The everlasting universe of things
Rolls through the mind."
Are these reflections of the oriental mere empty
verbiage-sound and fury, signifying nothing? Are they to be
cast out of consciousness as ancient and uncouth good, man's
feeble attempts to lay hold on truth but long since
outmoded?
Skip two thousand years and see where a devout soul has
laid bare its inward promptings. All day he has been reading
in science, immersed in the world of gritty fact. In the Journal
Intime of Henri Frederic Amiel occurs the following passage
which he wrote under the date of April 21, 1855:
I have traversed the universe from the deepest
depths of the empyrean to the peristaltic movements of
the atom in the elementary cell. I have felt myself
expanding in the infinite, and enfranchised in spirit
from the bounds of time and space, able to trace
back the whole boundless creation to a point without
dimensions, and seeing the vast multitude of suns,
of milky ways, or stars, and nebulae, all existing in
the point. And on all sides stretched mysteries,
marvels and prodigies without limit, without number,
and without end. I felt the unfathomable thought of
which the universe is the symbol live and turn within
me; I touched, proved, tasted, embraced my nothingness
and my immensity. I kissed the hem of the garments of
God, and gave him thanks for being spirit and for
being life. Such moments are glimpses of the
divine. They make one conscious of one's
immortality; they bring home to one that an eternity
is not too much for the study of the thoughts and works
of the eternal; they awaken in us an adoring ecstasy
and the ardent humility of love. (Journal Intime. By
Henri Frederic Amiel, Introduction.)
A cynical modern may lay aside such flowery and high-
flown poetry as mere outpourings of an easily excited
spirit. His imagination was fired by the slightest spark
because he was quick to respond to any stimulus. Surely
our cynic would say, this means nothing. Such a rush of words
pouring pell-mell from a a ready pen were simply the easing of a
psychological tension. Words - empty of any profound insight
into the nature of things deep and elemental.
Are they? Do we not find here, as in Taoism and in
Hinduism, a flash of revealing which goes to the very core
of truth and illumines the universe? Echoing the cry of
Augustine for man's discovery of the ultimate, he continues:
There is no repose for the mind except in the
Absolute; for feeling except in the Infinite; for
the soul except in the Divine. Nothing finite is
true, is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention.
All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is
exclusive repels me. There is nothing non-exclusive
but the All; my end is communion with Being
through the whole Of being. (Journal Intime. By
Henri Frederic Amiel, Introduction.)
How can any man read these truths wrung from the depths
of a great man's life without feeling an immediate
affirmation and confirmation? Not, of course, an exact
agreement with every word and implied theological
definition; but taking the intent, the large meaning of it
all, how can we fail to feel the authenticity of such an insight?
To read it reverently opens windows and unfolds vistas of high
religion and solemn festival for the soul.
Dr. Meland expresses some clear convictions on this
matter:
Only those whose rootings reach deeply into the
environing realities that sustain them, whose
perspective is continually cleansed of self-
centeredness, and whose mind and organism are kept
plastic and expansive by experiences of awe, wonder and
reverence, find the assurance and incentive to be
inclusive. For inclusive attitudes, which issue in
friendly and magnanimous conduct, have their
psychological basis in an expansive organism. Back of
every show of selfishness, greed, ruthlessness, or
deceit is a contrastive organism that clutches and
holds things to itself. The source of its unsocial
attitudes and conduct is the tension centering around
the I. Ease the tension and you lessen the unsocial
complex, for you then relax the egocentric focus. The
importance of contemplative worship for conduct is
therefore apparent. It turns man away from
himself. It opens before him an expanse of reality so
vast, so austere, and so insignificant, that it
confounds his ego and punctures any inflation that
might be forming or existing in incipient form. It
confronts him with a wealth of mystery that breaks
through more sophistic allegiance to science, and
crowds out dogmatisms. Contemplation thrusts us from
our tiny thrones and renders us subjects of a greater
Kingdom. It dispels self-worship and turns us to a
greater devotion, and in so doing it transforms our
self-centeredness into a shared way of living.
(Modern Man's Worship. By Bernard Eugene Melund. P.
296. Harper and Brothers, 1934.)
This passage seems to indicate something profoundly
true and radical about religion, especially that type of religion
which we have been describing. It is expansive in the very
nature of its being. It is other-regarding. It adds a
fourth dimension to our lives. The disciplines connected
with religious living are therefore exactly what the world
needs at this moment of crisis.
Compare such an enlarging and inclusive experience as
worship or contemplation with the contracting influence of
our acquisitive enterprises. Economic activities are closely
related to the grasping nature of man. In the very nature of
the case, getting a living is a problem of subtraction and of
egocentricism. Pleasure, amusement, and hosts of daily
activities, which make up routine for millions of lives, are
self-centered. Their discipline tends to make man look
within, or to focus the outside upon himself. This great
religious experience of the unities and the universals, however,
tends to direct man outward toward what is greater than the
atomistic human.
Love, service, unselfish devotion to the common
good, are all in line with the expansive experiences, but
they are definitely limited in scope. Even at best their
horizons are narrowly confined. But the religion of the
universals and the unities has no felt limitations. It leads out
to the infinite and thus tends to make the largest possible type
of human personality. It would be hard to imagine a person with
an habitual cosmic "mind-set" descending into the bitter and
exclusive partialisms which divide men. The point of view and
the psychological disciplines of the Universe-Man are inclusive
and integrating.
This insight, experienced by men thousands of years
ago, is authenticated by the findings of the laboratory.
Let us take an example. If we turn a spectroscope on the
farthest star, we get a series of light bands informing us of
the chemical composition of that distant heavenly body. It is
in the nature of a telegram informing the chemist as to the
exact elements which are resident in sidereal matter. Very well.
Turn this same instrument on man and we find the same light
bands, indicating the identical chemical composition! What does
that prove? Precisely this: man and the universe are one. We
reject the dichotomy that thrusts human kind into one separate
category, completely isolate, and puts the stars into another
fact world or frame of reference. A thread of unity runs
through all.
Take the laws of physics for another example, and we
find that here, again, we are confronted with a common
world. When a man lifts his finger he obeys the same universal
laws of force and matter as obtain on Jupiter or Betelgeuse. Let
man raise a one pound rock three feet and he has raised the
center of gravity of the earth; and when the gravity of the earth
shifts, it affects the planets, and the orbits of the
planets affect the stars, and the stars affect the solar systems,
and the systems reach out into the universe.
It is small wonder that we grow bitter at man's
sinful partialisms. We have every reason to be rebellious
against the stupidity and cruelty which turn the Elysian fields
into a charnel house. But one fact persists through all
our disillusioning and through all our attempts to make man
naught but a miserable worm - a damned spot, to be erased
and forgotten. That fact is the cosmic affinity of this same
man, who in the most brilliant moments of flashing genius
rises above the pettiness and indignity of his lesser self to
the stature of the all.
Einstein, in his very brief essay entitled Cosmic
Religion, says that there are three stages through which men
pass in their rebellious development. First is the stage marked
by fear of all the evils that beset mankind. A second and higher
type evolves from the social feelings such as love and
fellowship. Einstein believes that the anthropomorphic idea
of God is common to these types, but there is a higher
stage which he calls "cosmic religion." The individual feels
"the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature
and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny
as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of
existence as a unity full of significance." (Cosmic Religion.
By Albert Einstein. P. 48. Covici Friede, 1931.)
Here is a modern scientist, who certainly cannot be
accused of sentimentality, recognizing just what we have
been striving to express: man's existence and destiny as an
individual (that is, as a separate unit) are a form of
restriction and limitation. Separateness is an imprisonment.
We find the meaning of human personality and the meaning of the
whole universe in the unity of the parts with the whole. Just as
a spark plug can be understood only when it is seen as part of
an automobile, so man can be understood only when he is
recognized as part of the universe. Einstein tells us
that "the religious geniuses of all times have been
distinguished by this cosmic religious sense." Again, as we
have been trying to say, the religious insight in its highest
form perceives and conceives this quality of wholeness and
inclusiveness, and believes it to be of the highest value.
Those who have experienced it in their personal
lives have developed certain qualities which the world
desperately needs. They have become "universe men" with an
outlook so all-including that they can integrate into
themselves all aspects of human, geographical, and even
astronomical life. Examples of such personalities will be
given in the next chapter.
It is the further thesis of this essay that such
personalities logically develop a social outlook which again
is the basic and imperative need of our day. Because such
men and women have experienced something cosmic and emancipatory,
they inevitably reach out beyond the partialisms and fragments of
human relations to those forms and practices of social
life which are the largest and most inclusive. Both
theoretically and practically the larger faith is creative of a
social universalism.
To borrow a magnificent phrase from Herbert Agar: "It
is a time for greatness." The crisis of our age which is
one of the most acute in the whole history of man might well be
described as a sudden demand for greatness for which the world is
not prepared. Our trade, our civilization, have become unified
and universal. As Wendell Willkie puts it, there is "one
world" one physical neighborhood in which all the nations,
races and classes have been thrown. But- and herein lies the
crisis - we bring to this one world not a greatness and
unity of spirit but a narrow provincialism. Our minds
are filled with partialisms, while the physical forces of our
culture are demanding and creating universalism. We cannot
run a great society without greatness of spirit. We must
have great conceptions, great imaginations, great emotions,
great programs. We can't run a super-power dynamo with the steam
from a teakettle.
There are two alternatives, and only two, before us.
First, which is unlikely, is that we unscramble our modern
interdependent culture, returning to separate and isolationist
lives. If we went back to the village stage of existence, then
we might be partialists to our hearts' content. Such a world
would not demand greatness.
The other alternative is to so expand our spiritual
powers that we vastly increase the range of our understanding and
sympathy. There is no middle way. It is greatness -
universalism - or perish.
There is no experience which gives to man so
compelling a universalism as this radical religious insight
into the unities and universals.