CHAPTER VIII
THE RELIGIOUS TEMPER
“As a little child . . .”
Here is a sentence worth considering: “It is customary … to contrast the humility required by the Gospel with the supposed arrogance and self-sufficiency of the philosophical spirit. Yet if we take men so different and so representative in their differences as Plato, Bacon, and Spinoza, we find them all agreeing, not in a glorification of the human mind, but in the imperative demand that it should shake off its ‘chains’ and turn to receive the light, that it should surrender its ‘idols’ and ‘become as a little child,’
that it should look at things ‘under the
form of eternity,’ not through the vague
confusion of its own imagination.”[1]
This substantive agreement between the language of religion and that of wisdom is a remarkable thing. I suppose it points to what we have dwelt upon throughout, the total simplicity of supreme experiences, and the impossibility of entering into them except by a total sincerity and candour. Humility no doubt is demanded; but humility taken by itself may be an obsession and distraction, just like vanity, amour propre, curiosity, the charm of contrivance and ingenuity. What is aimed at is rather not to be preoccupied with yourself at all; not to be preoccupied with your own weakness or littleness, any more than with your own goodness or cleverness. The feeling and admission of defect is, I imagine, presupposed; but it should not, surely, be reflectively predominant so as to divert attention to itself and impair the simple spirit of trust and surrender. Now this is at the same time the spirit of complete appreciation, which alone can seize the whole fact in its due shape and proportion. This is what in any matter of common life we get, as we say, only from those “who really care.” “Love speaks with better knowledge and knowledge with dearer love.”
The artist, too, we are told, covets “the innocence of the eye”; the gaze for which the whole impression is single, unbroken, and unrationalised.
To illustrate a little further. It is one of the less noted advantages in the succession of fresh lives which death and birth maintain, that the worn and patched and piece-meal experience of the aged scholar or statesman, perhaps even of the saint, is not perpetuated for ever with the full traces of the mode in which it was painfully acquired. In being swept away along with its possessor, it makes room for the fresh and total contemplative activity of new minds, no longer seamed and wrinkled by the hardships and accidents which attended acquisition.
So he smote before, in such a peril.
When they stood and mocked, “Shall smiting help us?”
******
O’erimportuned brows becloud the mandate.
Carelessness or consciousness the gesture.
For he bears an ancient wrong about him. . . .
In the gaze of the rising generation all this is wiped away. It comes, or should come, delighted and unwearied, to seize directly and vigorously on its actual merits and in its total contours the treasure that is offered to it, and so to accept the experience in its full and real proportions.
Something of this kind is what the religious temper demands. Here even the veteran expert in life must stand to his own mature experience somewhat as the younger generation stands to its predecessor’s. He finds himself necessarily negligent of its entanglements, its history, its controversy, and trying to take it at its centre simply as it is and for its own sake. To be one with the supreme good in the faith which is also will — that is religion; and to be thus wholly and unquestioningly is the religious temper. Then all the riches of the spirit may add themselves to the mood, on condition that nothing in them stands out to impair or to violate it. For they all, as we saw, belong to it of right; only their intricacies and distractions make it so easy for us to lose our way among them. To be as a little child means to keep hold, so to speak, of the direct handclasp; to remain in touch with the centre; not to go wandering after this clever notion and that.
If one could maintain this simplicity, supreme bona fides, sincerity of mood and temper, and care about one’s religion mainly and especially with reference to those features in it which are truly and strictly religious, I believe the gain would be great. And gradually and naturally, I suppose, there would come about a certain discrimination between what is necessary in religion, and what is more or less superfluous, and, if emphatically insisted on, tends even to become harmful. But I most firmly believe that to a sound and sincere religious temper much that may in itself be superfluous can fall into its place and be in no way dangerous. I do not think controversy is useful, but mischievous. Yet a sense of sanity and proportion, if it could be promoted by concentrating attention on the simple essence of religion, would, I believe, be of very great religious value.
THE END
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Notes edit
- ↑ Nettleship in Hellenica, ed. 1, 152.