Transcendence is the experimental side of what we have been describing
all along: it is the finding of unity in diversity, the synthesis
of discord in harmony and in especial the finding of something of
supreme value (and therefore dominant) which can be linked up with the
whole extent of our mental being. Transcendence in religion differs
from transcendence in art or love only in its objects. In love the
discrepancy between the object and the ideal values hung round it is
often so glaring as to provoke laughter from cynics, compassion from
the rest. In art, the operations by which an artist turns a collection
of mean and commonplace objects into a beautiful and single whole,
a poet invests failure and death with authentic tragedy, or drags
every-day to a seat in eternity, are just as transcendent as that by
which the mystic converts the relation between the warring passions
of his soul and the infinite catalogue of differences which he finds
around him into what he can only speak of as a divine communion,
all-satisfying in itself, all-important for the conduct of his life.
Science can here help religion by analysing and interpreting phenomena
such as transcendence, paring the false from the true, cutting down
false claims, substituting the hopefulness of natural causation for
the illogical vagaries of supernaturalism and incommunicability.
* * * * * * *
I may perhaps be allowed to close with a few more practical aspects of
the problem.
Many religious ideas and practices, as man’s thought clarified
itself, have proved to be unserviceable, and have been thrown on the
lumber-heap, or left only with the losers in the race. It is impossible
for any educated man nowadays to believe in the efficacy of magic,
or of animal sacrifice; to accept the first chapter of Genesis as
literally true; or to believe that God has human parts and passions.
But there was a time when all these could be, and were, believed.
The time is obviously coming when a great many other ideas must be cast
aside in favour of new ones. If you have followed me, you will agree
that it is impossible for me and those who think like me to believe in
God as a person, a ruler, to continue to speak of God as a spiritual
_Being_ in the ordinary way. Consequently, although the value of prayer
persists in so far as it is meditative and a self-purification of
the mind, yet its commonly accepted petitive value must fall to the
ground;[52] so must all idea of miracle and of direct inspiration;
so must all that is involved in the ordinary materialist ideas of
ritual, self-denial, and worship as merely propitiation or “acceptable
incense”; so must all the externally-projected parts of the ideas
concerning the ordaining of special priests; so must all notion of
our having a complete, peculiar, or absolute knowledge of God, or of
there being a divinely-appointed rule of conduct or a divinely-revealed
belief.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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