If it could be proved objectively and scientifically that there was a life after death and that supernatural beings do exist this would have about as much religious significance as the discovery of a new continent, of the existence of life on Mars, or of the uses of electricity. It would be neither more nor less than an addition to human experience and knowledge. It would not necessarily be an addition to human wisdom, and this is the province of religion. For wisdom is not factual knowledge nor mere quantity and range of experience, nor even facility in the use of knowledge and experience. Wisdom is a quality of the psychological or spiritual relationship between man and his experience. When that relationship is wise and harmonious man’s experiences set him free, but when it is unwise and discordant his experiences bind him.
Religion alone can deal with that relationship, and this is its essential function. For what do we find left in religion when its quasi-scientific aspect is removed? There is the whole, vast problem of love or spiritual union which is contained in the question, “How can I learn to love life, whose source and essence we call God? How can I learn to be united with it in all its expressions, in living and dying, in love and fear, in the outer world of circumstances, and in the inner world of thought and feeling, so that in union with it I may find freedom?” Now science cannot teach any kind of love, not even the love between man and woman, for whoever learned to love his wife out of a psychological textbook on matrimony? Morality, which religion would teach as having supernatural sanctions, is just the expression of love; it follows it as a consequence and does not precede it as a cause. The will of God as expressed in morality is not a ukase which we should merely obey, for the purpose of His will is not that there should be morality, but that there should be love, and morality is just the “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”
Insofar as religion has diverged from its main purpose into psychism, morality for its own sake, speculative theology, concern for the life after death, and attempts to awaken spirituality by imitating its expressions, it has also put itself out of touch with people who have no desire to be religious specialists. Those who cannot feel that man’s principal concern should lie outside this world, who feel that salvation has nothing to do with removal to another realm of experience or with mere obedience to a moral law—such people can find little assistance from religion as usually taught, and today they constitute a very large proportion of intelligent men and women. For the nineteenth-century conflict between religion and science was, for those whose eyes were open, a stripping off of nonessentials from religion, but unfortunately official religion seldom saw it in this way. It clung to supernaturalism, which, rightly or wrongly, rationalist science had discredited, and continued to make it the keystone of spirituality.
But this kind of religion does not encourage the type of love upon which spirituality is founded. We have seen that its technique is imitative and thus unlikely to produce genuine, firsthand religious experience; we have also seen that its contempt of this world and its concentration on the life hereafter has little to do with the essentials of religion. This is not all, for not only has it little to do with such essentials; it is also a decided hindrance to spiritual growth because it encourages a “love” of God on a false basis. God is loved not because He has given us this world, but because He is said to have promised a much better world in the life after death. His gift to us of this world is therefore declined without thanks—an effrontery which is softened by describing this world as a place of trial for fitness to enter the world to come, on the principle that if you refuse God’s first gift, you will get His second.
The “Higher Sensuality”
But if God created this world only as a temporary place of trial, He seems to have taken a wholly unnecessary amount of trouble in its construction. He gave us senses which as yet we have hardly begun to develop to their full potentialities, and yet religion warns us against those senses as if they were given us simply as a sop to embellish life with such superficial trimmings as art, literature, music, and athletics so that in playing with them we may have a little relaxation from the more important task of fitting ourselves for the hereafter. But there is a way of looking at things whereby these “trimmings” become the main business of life, and religion the means to their fulfillment, on the principle that religion was made for life and not life for religion. For the contempt of the world of the senses is peculiarly like the fable of the sour grapes. Man burned his fingers at the game of pleasure, and instead of learning to play it aright was filled with fear and relegated pleasure to the realms of the Devil and his vanities, crying:
The earthly hope men set their hearts upon
Turns ashes, or it prospers, and anon,
Like snow upon the Desert’s dusky face,
Lighting a little hour or two, is gone.
But the whole point about the beauties of the earth is that they would be intolerable if they did not change and vanish. A woman is not less beautiful and desirable because she grows old and white; if she had eternal youth she would be a monster, as many women are who refuse to accept the different beauties of old age and death. For the beauty of life is not in any one of its stages but in the whole movement from birth to death, and if this movement is in any way resisted or interrupted there come unhappiness, maladjustment, and neurotic disease. Those who look pitiful and hideous in their old age are only so because years rankle them, because they have not accepted the rhythm of their life and go forward to old age with regretful glances behind at lost glories.
Certainly all pleasures are transient; otherwise we should cease to appreciate them, but if this be made the excuse for refusing to enjoy them, one must suspect that man’s ideas of happiness are horribly confused. The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop. Man does not learn this secret easily, but to shun pleasure altogether is cowardly avoidance of a difficult task. For we have to learn the art of enjoying things because they are impermanent. We do this every time we listen to music. We do not seize hold of a particular chord or phrase and shout at the orchestra to go on playing it for the rest of the evening; on the contrary, however much we may like that particular moment of music, we know that its perpetuation would interrupt and kill the movement of melody. We understand that the beauty of a symphony is less in these musical moments than in the whole movement from beginning to end. If the symphony tries to go on too long, if at a certain point the composer exhausts his creative ability and tries to carry on just for the sake of filling in the required space of time, then we begin to fidget in our chairs, feeling that he has denied the natural rhythm, has broken the smooth curve from birth to death and that though a pretense at life is being made it is in fact a living death.
The Problem of Pain
But by itself this philosophy of “higher sensuality” is inadequate, for life is not like a musical masterpiece in certain respects. We may find all of a musical masterpiece beautiful; from the sensual point of view life is only beautiful in parts; it has also ugliness, pain, and horror, and hence the love for a God who will remove these things in the world to come. But this, too, is an avoidance of the problem. For the attitude of ordinary religion to both the pleasures and the pains of this world is negative. Pleasure is suspected, and in the everlasting life pain is not.