If John was critical of psychiatry, he was no less so of the churches. It was not only with the purpose of studying Homo sapiens that he had begun to take an interest in religious practices and doctrines. His motive was partly (so he told me) the hope that some light might be thrown upon certain new and perplexing experiences of his own which might perhaps be of the kind that the normal species called religious. He actually attended a few services at churches and chapels. He always returned from these expeditions in a state of excitement, which found outlet sometimes in ribald jests about the proceedings, sometimes in almost hysterical exasperation and perplexity. Coming out from an emotional chapel service of the Bethel type he remarked, “Ninety-nine per cent, slush and one per cent.—something else, but what?” A tensity about his voice made me turn to look at him. To my amazement I saw tears in his eyes. Now John’s lachrymatory reflexes were normally under absolute voluntary control. Since his infancy I had never known him weep except by deliberate policy. Yet these were apparently spontaneous tears, and he seemed unconscious of them. Suddenly he laughed and said, “This soul-saving! If one were God, wouldn’t one laugh at it, or squirm! What does it matter whether we’re saved or not? Sheer blasphemy to want to be, I should say. But what is it that does matter, and comes through all the slush like light through a filthy window?”
On Armistice Day he persuaded me to go with him to a service in a Roman Catholic cathedral. The great building was crowded. Artificiality and insincerity were blotted out by the solemnity of the occasion. The ritual was somehow disturbing even to an agnostic like me. One felt a rather terrifying sense of the power which worship in the grand tradition could have upon massed and susceptible believers.
John had entered the cathedral in his normal mood of aloof interest in the passions of Homo sapiens. But as the service proceeded, he became less aloof and more absorbed. He ceased to look about him with his inscrutable hawklike stare. His attention, I felt, was no longer concentrated on individuals of the congregation, or on the choir, or on the priest, but on the totality of the situation. An expression strangely foreign to all that I knew of him now began to flicker on his face, an expression with which I was to become very familiar in later years, but cannot to this day satisfactorily interpret. It suggested surprise, perplexity, a kind of incredulous rapture, and withal a slightly bitter amusement. I naturally assumed that John was relishing the folly and self-importance of our kind; but when we were leaving the cathedral he startled me by saying, “How splendid it might be, if only they could keep from wanting their God to be human!” He must have seen that I was taken aback for he laughed and said, “Oh, of course I see it’s nearly all tripe. That priest! The way he bows to the altar is enough to show the sort he is. The whole thing is askew, intellectually and emotionally; but—well, don’t you get that echo of something not wrong, of some experience that happened ages ago, and was right and glorious? I suppose it happened to Jesus and his friends. And something remotely like it was happening to about a fiftieth of that congregation. Couldn’t you feel it happening? But, of course, as soon as they got it they spoilt it by trying to fit it all into the damned silly theories their Church gives them.”
I suggested to John that this excitement which he and others experienced was just the sense of a great crowd and a solemn occasion, and that we should not “project” that excitement, and persuade ourselves we were in touch with something superhuman.
John looked quickly at me, then burst into hearty laughter. “My dear man,” he said, and this I believe was almost the first time he used this devastating expression, “even if you can’t tell the difference between being excited by a crowd and the other thing, I can. And a good many of your own kind can, too, till they let the psychologists muddle them.”
I tried to persuade him to be more explicit, but he only said, “I’m just a kid, and it’s all new to me. Even Jesus couldn’t really say what it was he saw. As a matter of fact, he didn’t try to say much about it. He talked mostly about the way it could change people. When he did talk about it, itself, he nearly always said the wrong thing, or else they reported him all wrong. But how do I know? I’m only a kid.”
It was in a very different mood that John returned from an interview with a dignitary of the Anglican Church, one who was at the time well known for his efforts to revitalize the Church by making its central doctrines live once more in men’s hearts. John had been away for some days. When he returned he seemed much less interested in the Churchman than in an earlier encounter with a Communist. After listening to a disquisition on Marxism I said, “But what about the Reverend Gentleman?”
“Oh, yes, of course, there was the Reverend Gentleman, too. A dear man, so sensible and understanding. I wish the Communist bloke could be a bit sensible, and a hit dear. But Homo sapiens evidently can’t be that when he has any sort of fire in him. Funny how members of your species, when they do get any sort of real insight and grasp some essential truth, like Communism, nearly always go crazy with it. Funny, too, what a religious fellow that Communist really is. Of course, he doesn’t know it, and he hates the word. Says men ought to care for Man and nothing else. A moral sort of cove, lie is, tull of ‘oughts.’ Denies morality, and then damns people for not being communist saints. Says men are all fools or knaves or waiters unless you can get ’em to care for the Class War. Of course, he tells you the Class War is needed to emancipate the Workers. But what really gets him about it isn’t that. The fire inside him, though he doesn’t know it, is a passion for what he calls dialectical materialism, for the dialectic of history. The one selfishness in him is the longing to be an instrument of the Dialectic, and oddly enough what he really means by that, in his heart of hearts, is what Christians so quaintly describe as the law of God, or God’s will. Strange! He says the sound element in Christianity was love of one’s fellow men. But he doesn’t really love them, not as actual persons. He’d slaughter the lot of them if he thought that was part of the Dialectic of History. What he really shares with Christians, real Christians, is a most obscure but teasing, firing awareness of something super-individual. Of course, he thinks it’s just the mass of individuals, the group. But he’s wrong. What’s the group, anyhow, but just everybody lumped together, and nearly all fools or limps or knaves? It’s not simply the group that fires him. It’s justice, righteousness, and the whole spiritual music that ought to be made by the group. Damned funny that! Of course, I know all Communists are not religious, some are merely—well, like that bloody little man the other day. But this fellow is religious. And so was Lenin, I guess. It’s not enough to say his root motive was desire to avenge his brother. In a sense that’s true. But one can feel behind nearly everything he said a sense of being the chosen instrument of Fate, of the Dialectic, of what might almost as well be called God.”
“And the Reverend Gentleman?” I queried. “The Reverend Gentleman? Oh, him! Well, he’s religious in about the same sense as firelight is sunshine. The coal-trees once lapped up the sun’s full blaze, and now in the grate they give off a glow and a flicker that snugs up his room nicely, so long as the curtains are drawn and the night kept at arm’s length. Outside, every one is floundering about in the dark and the wet, and all he can do is to tell them to make a nice little fire and squat down in front of it. One or two he actually fetches into his own beautiful room, and they drip all over the carpet, and leave muddy marks, and spit into the fire. He gets very unhappy about it, but he puts up with it nobly because, though he hasn’t a notion what worship is, he does up to a point try to love his neighbours. Funny, that, when you think of the Communist who doesn’t. Of course, if people got really nasty, the Reverend would phone the police.”