Who does not see that to represent things otherwise is to remain in the
crudest and least religious of anthropomorphisms? At bottom, these men
are afraid of losing revelation, which they rightly judge to be
inseparable from the very idea of religion. They object that piety and
the awakening of the religious sentiment must have an objective cause,
and that that cause can only be a revelation of God Himself. Nothing
is more true; but this revelation which is effected without, in the
events of Nature or of History, is only known within, in and by the
human consciousness. This inward inspiration alone enables religious
men to interpret Nature and History religiously. Now, this
interpretation is made by their intellect and according to the laws and
conditions which regulate it. The religious phenomenon therefore has
not two moments only, the objective revelation as a cause and the
subjective piety as an effect; it has three, which always follow each
other in the same order: the inner revelation of God, which produces
the subjective piety of man, which, in its turn, engenders the
historical religious forms, rites, formularies of faith, sacred books,
social creations, which we can know and describe as external facts. It
will be seen what an error they commit, what a mistake they make, who
identify the third term with the first, suppressing the second, which
is the necessary link and forms the transition between the other two.
Whoever will fathom this little problem in psychology, and reflect upon
it with a little attention, will see that all religious revelation of
God must necessarily pass through human subjectivity before arriving at
historical objectivity.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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