From Authority to Experience

SEPTEMBER, 1926

BY HERBERT PARRISH

I

AT a church dinner. A very fashionable church dinner. Distinguished laymen in evening dress. Aristocratic ladies in jewelry and colors. Bishops and ecclesiastical dignitaries in swallowtails and silk waistcoats. An orchestra and choir in the gallery for the music. Costly food and a profusion of exotic flowers. But, being a church dinner, no wine. No visible cocktails. Speeches, of course. That is the chief purpose of church dinners. Something ulterior.

‘It is quite time,’ began the bishop, ‘that these disturbing speculations were laid aside and we returned to the recognition of properly constituted authority.’

‘It is not surprising,’ replied the dean, ‘that the whole religious world is in a state of turmoil. It will continue. We are in a period of transition from authority to experience.’

The lady across the table puffed learnedly at her cigarette. The laymen tried to appear interested and understanding. Two clergymen of austere aspect frowned like Torquemada at the examination of a heretic before the Holy Office. A third cleric grinned as a secretary grins when he hears that the Cause has been mentioned in a will. A distinct thrill went through the great ballroom. The keynote of a situation had been struck.

It has long been the feeling that there is the sound of a going in the tree tops of the religious world, but the exact nature of the period as an historical movement has perhaps never been phrased so accurately as the dean on this occasion put it.

‘From authority to experience.’ It is happening in every other aspect of human life, in the political, social, scientific fields. The history of the modern world is made up of just such transitions all along the line. The individual equally goes through such transition. The boy graduating from school, leaving home, passes out of the control of such authoritative influences as he has been forced unwillingly to recognize into the light of experiences where he must stand as an individual on his own. Why should religion be excepted from the general order?

Evidently the dean had sounded a tocsin. The bell had rung. The little beam of the candle was shimmering from the church steeple. Rebellion had raised its head. Revolution was in the air. The word was ‘Give me liberty, or give me death.’ Signals were flashing.

Matches were ready for the cannon. The movement of muffled feet could be heard.

II

It is said that Junipero Serra, the Spanish friar who built so many of those charming old missions you visit when you go to California, did not understand a word of the language of the Indians to whom he had been sent as a missionary. He had, nevertheless, three sermons. His first sermon consisted of striking himself on the chest with his fists. If that failed to make converts, Junipero produced a scourge, such as monks use, from the folds of his habit, raised his robes, and beat himself on his bare buttocks after the manner of the flagellants. If the savage heart was still untouched, the forceful friar seized a jagged stone of great size and, baring his bosom, pounded his flesh until the blood ran down in streams. Invariably this last appeal convinced the gainsayers.

‘Ugh!’ said the braves. ‘Great medicine!’ And straightway the tribe submitted to the authority of Holy Church. It is a source of wonder to the traveler in Central and South America to find how thoroughly the Spaniard gave his language and his religion to the aborigines of his far-flung colonial empire after the Conquistadores. Authority was there established under the flaming torch of the Inquisition. The auto-da-fé lasted down well into the nineteenth century — almost to the time of the auto-da-Ford. Early settlers have told me of attending Mass with Indian congregations, and of the ceaseless beating of the tomtom and the wild monotonous droning of the worshipers during the sacred mysteries. I know places in the Andes — but of that another time.

An analysis of the basis upon which religious authority is accepted will convince you that it is a basis of emotion. The psychologists have been telling us that all ideas derive from emotion and that emotion derives from sensation. In the case of Junipero’s Indian converts the course is apparent. They saw, they were moved, they believed. What they believed was for the immediate purpose comparatively unimportant. No doubt the good friars taught them many things later on.

Where religion is established the acceptance of religious authority is generally a part of one’s group psychology, but in order to maintain itself authority must continually be reëstablished over the individual by appeals to his emotional nature. It has always been so.

Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, wrote a slight but very important little book called Manresa. The principles of this book are recognized by students of the subject as fundamental to the whole authoritative devotional fabric of the Catholic Church. Ignatius was a man of analytical mind of the highest order. In his book he anticipated some of the discoveries of modern physiological psychology by three hundred years. In dealing with religious meditation or contemplation Ignatius directs ‘the application of the senses.’ Sight, touch, hearing, — if possible, even taste and smell, — must be employed to arouse the emotions of the neophyte, who, deeply moved, becomes submissive. To the same effect, and with the best motives in the world, Saint Francis invented the Christmas crib and Saint Dominic devised the fifteen chaplets of the rosary. The Stations of the Cross are another instance. In fact, all the devices of art, architecture, painting, sculpture, music, ritual, lights, and vestments produce and are intended to produce just those emotions that will make the believer accept religious authority, support the institution, and perform works of virtue in the cause of religion. This is not an arraignment; it is an explanation.

Protestantism, breaking from the established authority of the Mediæval Church, naturally swept out the instruments by which that authority was sustained. It declared them to be ‘superstitious.’ But it now finds itself without the means of maintaining its own authority. It relied merely upon the reading of the Bible and the preaching of the minister. The Bible in the vernacular was then new and passed without criticism as final. Preaching was fervid, controversial, negative. But Biblical criticism and the paucity of eloquent preachers have forced Protestantism to turn back at least to stained glass and such music as it can produce, as aids in a failing cause. Protestant authority, so far as the laity is concerned, is to-day practically nil. It is only where some perfervid evangelist can establish, through his emotional appeals, a temporary submission that there is even the semblance of it. Where Protestantism is stable, that is due, with few exceptions, to group consciousness and endowments or the support of rich individuals.

The eye is the organ most immediately connected with the imagination centres of the brain. Protestantism swept out of the churches everything interesting to look at and depended upon the ear. Moving pictures and psychology were unknown when Protestantism was born. If they had been known, our ancestors might not have made so prodigious a mistake. As for Protestant music, it is devotionally good as a general rule only when it is taken over from some Catholic composer. And as for Protestant stained glass, with few exceptions it will produce emotions all right, but they are scarcely of a strictly religious character. ‘Brighten the Corner’ and ‘The Brewer’s Big Horses Can’t Run Over Me’ were excellent for arousing the emotions of the Billy Sunday crowds. But they have failed to hold their vogue. It is significant that for over forty years there has not been produced a single religious musical composition, Catholic or Protestant, that has a notable popular appeal. Why?

III

The reasons, then, for the breakdown of authority both in the Anglican Church and in Protestant churches generally are not far to seek. Certain of them are affecting Roman Catholicism as well. For in the present age there has come upon the world a conception that affects the imagination of multitudes, raising doubts as to the validity of formerly accepted emotions and stirring human feeling to a high degree. Intellectually we have only recently emerged from the Middle Ages. For years the very seats of learning, our colleges and universities themselves, lived in the past, looking backward to classical antiquity as a seated mistress of all learning, accepting the dicta of the age of Aristotle or of Cicero as authoritative and final. Our fathers were trained to look backward to the golden past. Youth to-day looks forward. Even our colleges are beginning to do the same.

There is no need to discuss the change in the cosmic outlook. The magazines have been full of the effect upon religious conceptions of the new view of the universe, of man’s insignificance, of the long ages of the creative process, of the absurdity of an anthropomorphic conception of God. It is old stuff. But while these things have been known and recognized by the educated for generations, we have probably not counted upon the power of the race inheritance, the delayed acceptance into the popular imagination of a geocentric cosmography. After all, the religious masses have just begun to realize that the planet, floats a speck in the great, voids. As this idea is visualized and takes possession of the mind, it creates impressions that obtrude upon the old religious imagery.

may still do for children. It revolts the college boy or girl. And so do most of the hymns in the hymn book. They were written in a past age when men saw their place in the universe as the men of fifty thousand years ago saw it.

The theology that was behind the devotional machinery of the Church comes into question in exact ratio as general knowledge increases. The pictures that thrilled the souls of believers in the Incarnation, the Redemption, the Ascension, and Session at the right hand of God have to be reconstructed to fit the facts. They were crude and mediæval in outline and coloring and must needs be done over in modern dress. Until they are so done over most thinking people put them on the shelf — though I have met men, educated men, who tell me that they still manage to keep their religion and their science in two separate compartments, living in one compartment for a single hour on Sundays and in the other compartment all the rest of the week. On Sunday they maintain that God made the world in six literal days; on Monday they are evolutionists. This accomplishment is really quite common. I have been wondering whether it. may not extend also to morals. In a period of revolutionary transition one must expect strange compromises.

But if the period of transition from authority to experience has grotesque aspects, it is not without its tragic side. ‘Easter,’said a woman to me recently, — she had just lost a child, — ‘Easter must be lovely in Heaven.’ We cannot so easily slip the moorings of ancient prepossessions without the sense of a vast loss — unless our experience has itself been developed.

At the present moment an enormous number of people stand at the crossroads. They have scrapped the authority of churches, they have no regard for ecclesiastical organization. But neither have they any actual spiritual experience to supply the empty soul. They want something to take the place of that which they have lost. Interest in religion was never greater. The sociological value of it is recognized by all public men. Presidents and statesmen, editors and professors, college presidents and millionaires, dramatists and novelists, all talk and write about religion. At the luncheons of the Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs nothing brings greater applause than a boost of religion. If a minister makes a speech at one of their meetings, they cheer him to the echo, pat him on the back, and sing,

But a careful survey shows that very few of the men who stress the social value of religion at public meetings are regular attendants at church. When Sunday comes they play golf.

IV

What, then, is the experience toward which the world is moving?

I think that the transition is very largely a matter of emphasis and interpretation. Authoritative religion has been the mother of so much splendid virtue and magnificent heroism in the past that no one would lightly thrust it all aside as worthless. Its values must be retained and expanded rather. The one thing that is perfectly clear is that in any conflict between arbitrary dogma, whether Biblical or ecclesiastical, and the established facts of science men will invariably and justly give the preference to the latter. It is only peasants and the undeveloped mind of childhood that can any longer be imposed upon. It has long been recognized by the theologues themselves that such doctrines as rest upon the Biblical account of creation and the fall of man, though still preached at Dayton and to the hill billies of the remote mountain districts, are regarded by the educated as mere poetical folklore. The transition on this line may be said to be already accomplished. All of the Old Testament, in fact, apart from the moral and spiritual values enshrined there, has no bearing upon the religion of the modern man. Its legends and history may have a mystical interpretation, but they no longer inhibit the advance of knowledge. Politicians, candidates for Congress, on the lookout for the votes of clodhoppers, men of the BryanUpshaw type, may profess to accept the Bible from ‘kiver to kiver’ as a final book of science, but nobody else does, surely.

Matters of this sort were settled by scholars a generation ago. The learned of the present day are shifting their polemic to problems like the origin and character of the eschatology of Jesus, the authenticity of the New Testament, the question of interpolations, especially in regard to the sacraments and the Church, the amount early Christianity borrowed from the pagan mysteries, the philosophical background for the dogmatic definitions of the ecumenical councils. There can be no doubt that the outcome of study on these and kindred lines will parallel the work done on Old Testament criticism. But in spite of our greatly increased means of communication, the extent of education, and the enormous interest, it takes a good many years for ideas to filter down to and affect the imagination of the masses. Add to this the opposition of obscurantists, the brayings of ignorance, the crotchets of cranks, the ingrained prejudices of official old women, the thought grooves of narrowminded bigots, the stupidity of settled pastors, the solemn asseverations of popular preachers, the deliberate policy of press-agented prelates who design to keep the masses in ignorance, and you might think that the transition would be slow. It is slow, but it moves.

I hold no brief for Christian Science, New Thought, Mental Science, Pastor Russell, or the rest. The Vedantic and Buddhist missions in New York do not interest me greatly. Mr. Sinnett, Madame Blavatsky, and Mrs. Besant, with their new avatars, have not swayed me very much. But all these have done something to further the movement of a transition from authority to experience and they have affected the trend of Christian devotion quite definitely. Multitudes have gone out of the churches recently to seek a new experience in devotional emotion which does not lead to the acceptance of ecclesiastical authority. And multitudes who still remain in the churches have shifted their conceptions of spiritual values.

Consider, for instance, the transition as it affects the idea of the Christian virtue known (to some) as humility. In the Manresa of Saint Ignatius, to which I have already referred, there is an exercise on humility. The saintly author gives three degrees of humility. He says: —

The first degree of humility consists in perfect submission to the law of God, so that we should be ready to refuse the empire of the whole world, or even sacrifice our lives, rather than willingly transgress any precept which obliges under pain of mortal sin.

The second degree is more perfect; it consists in the indifference of the soul toward riches or poverty, honor or shame, health or sickness, provided the glory of God and salvation are equally secured on both sides.

The third degree is the highest degree of Christian perfection. It consists of preferring, for the sole love of Jesus Christ and for the wish to resemble Him more, poverty to riches, shame to honor, sickness to health, and so forth, even if on both sides your salvation and the glory of God were equally to be found.

This may be heroic, but it is not common sense. The whole drift and tendency of the race is and always has been toward life, toward livingness, toward health, wealth, and happiness. No modern interpretation of the sayings of Jesus would find even the first degree of Saint Ignatius in the Gospel. Jesus said, ‘I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.’

A new conception of the virtue of humility, then, is arising. It does not consist in accepting arbitrary ecclesiastical authority as the assured law of God. Neither does it lie in depreciating your own knowledge, ability, or powders. Nor least of all does it seek miseries that can be avoided, and a whining pose like that of Uriah Heep. Humility in essence is merely the recognition of the truth. Your actual limitations, your real ignorance, your dependence for all that you are and all that you have upon the supreme power that gives life—that is humility. To remember these limitations and this power constantly is the art of the virtue. Humility may coexist with the loftiest claims and the most outspoken and courageous egoism, if that egoism is justified. Jesus did not come merely to die. He came with convictions and bold utterance, an egoism such as the world had never heard before. ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.’ When regarding his humanity by itself, Jesus said, ‘I can of mine own self do nothing.’ But realizing the divine omnipotence within, he said, ‘All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.’

Another shift in interpretation and emphasis in this period of transition from authority to experience is found in relation to the idea of the kingdom of Heaven. It was formerly taught quite generally by Catholic and Protestants alike that the kingdom of God on earth was the Church and that the kingdom of God in Heaven could be experienced only after death. Twenty years ago the pink socialists and guild brethren who clung to religion began to teach that the kingdom would be realized when their theories had been accepted, when Prohibition was voted for, when capitalism fell — a kingdom in which paid secretaries would sit on golden thrones, sniffing incense and giving directions. Alas! the war and Russia put a crimp in it. But there may be something more in the present emphasis of the sayings of Jesus, that the kingdom is right here now, at hand; that it is not visible, cometh not with observation; that it is within us. It is in this direction that experience is taking the place of authority among those who are interested in religion if not in ecclesiastical organization.

There are many other aspects of the matter. It would be of interest, if space permitted, to pursue the problem into the conception of God — God as creative energy, God in relation to locality, God in relation to human consciousness. What is God? Where is God? These are questions that religious experience above all things seeks to answer. For upon the answers depends the tendency of modern religion.

Everybody understands the difference between moonlight and sunshine. One is reflected and secondary; the other is inherent. And if you will consider the difference between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings about Jesus, the ancient theology and the mystery of an actual consciousness of the divine in human life, you will perceive the real essence of the transformation of authority into experience.

The impregnated cell out of which the human body is developed has no brain, no evidence of the power of reason. It grows, fissiparous in structure, selecting the chemical elements that form the body through the mysterious power of an instinctive emotional wisdom. Ultimately it develops a brain. The brain, kindling consciousness out of feeling, forms thought. At a time the mind of man looks back upon the origin of its own formation and perceives the presence of a wisdom and power within from which all has come. ‘The kingdom of God is within you.’

‘ How to the singer cometh the song?' sings Walt Whitman. And when one considers the origin of ideas, of inventions, of discoveries, the growth of civilization, the knowledge of laws and of arts, the poems written, the pictures painted, the cities created, the business and order of the world of nations, whether you call the origin creative energy or call it God, you have a religious experience that Augustine, Francis, Eckhart, Teresa, John of the Cross, Plotinus, or the mystics of the East could not deny. It may not produce the stigmata, but it will give you the joy of life. You are no longer in the moonlight of the experiences of others in relation to the divine. You have entered the sunshine of reality.

V

Religious authority, like the mediæval mind, looks always backward, toward the past. Its wisdom, its mysteries, its experience with God, its miracles, its revelations, all took place centuries ago. It has held the world of thought in thrall for two thousand years. But, if God is the creative and controlling power of the universe, why confine His operations to the first few years of the Christian era? If there is a continuous unfolding of the secrets of the universe to the mind of man, is there not equally a continuous revelation of the nature of God? If miracles ever happened, why should they not be happening now? Is truth confined to the studies of Augustine, Jerome, Basil, Hilary, Gregory, Chrysostom, the fathers of Nice, Ephesus, Constantinople, Calcedon, the traditions of the first six centuries? Excellent men and excellent traditions, no doubt. But has not this vast array of ecclesiastical authority been used as a blanket to stifle thought? A little freedom, good masters, from the fulminations of the theologues of the orthodox schools. Let us think out the interpretations for ourselves, untrammeled and de novo. Let us breathe the fresh air of this new morning without forever smelling the dust of obsolete libraries. God is not confined to old books. Neither is He shut up in churches.

The most enormous religious ceremony, or series of ceremonies, in all history has just been staged by the Roman Catholic hierarchy in that most wicked city in the world, Chicago. The newspaper accounts of processions and masses, of vast crowds of pilgrims, numbering hundreds of thousands, of a scarlet Pullman train for the cardinals, of public streets decorated with columns of white and gold draped in laurel and surmounted by bronze eagles, of choirs numbering sixty thousand voices, of the ceremony on the lake front and at the new town of Mundelein, of the papal legate, the fifteen princes of the church, archbishops and bishops, mitred abbots and abbots, monsignori, papal chamberlains and knights,

bewilder the imagination and — make for authority. It has been a demonstration in force.

There is nothing in the way of similar exhibitions that can compare in dramatic effect, in poetry, in color and variety, with a well-arranged religious procession. The Elks and the Tall Cedars pale into insignificance before it; even the Knights Templars look like the wooden soldiers of the ChauveSouris in comparison. Moreover, it stands for a very high ideal, something beyond the mere parade in unwonted costumes that seems somehow to meet a need of human nature. No one can doubt the sincerity and piety of the vast numbers of laity participating. Their thought undoubtedly was ad majorem Dei gloriam.

But unprejudiced and intelligent people will nevertheless ask to what spiritual values, to what experience, this great and well-oiled enterprise leads? Does it mean au fond much more than a demand for submission of the intellect to an established and settled hierarchy? Is its purpose any different from that of Junipero Serra with the Indians? If so, what increase of knowledge, insight, and character will be assured by joining the procession? It may be an ecclesiastical accomplishment to understand the meaning of terms like mozetta, biretta, zucchetto, and to know the proper occasion for wearing a cappa magna, but will this throw any light upon the grim questions of eternity, upon the unsolved problems of survival after death? Is there any assurance that God will be found at the end of the rainbow? Liberty for the intellect has only lately been wrung, at much cost of blood and treasure, from just such authoritative and imposing ceremonial dominance. Spectacular pomp is not an answer.

Or, is it a conceivable thing that the Roman Church now desires by this splendid show in the New World to make a gesture of tolerance to modern thought and ascertained knowledge, extending the poetic beauty and religious mystery of its ancient faith to such as may feel that experience is not only a costly but an incomplete teacher? Has its own experience something still to contribute to a world which yet lies in darkness and in the shadow of death?