The Religious Sentiment: Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and; Philosophy of ReligionBrinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
Religion
The Religious Sentiment: Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and; Philosophy of Religion
Brinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
Religion -- Philosophy
Now, the general meaning of this symbol I take to be the same as that
which led to the choice of hills and “high places,” as sites for altars
and temples, and to the assigning of mountain tops as the abodes of the
chief gods. It is seen in adjectives applied, I believe, in all
languages, certainly all developed ones, to such deities themselves.
These adjectives are related to adverbs of place, signifying _above_,
_up_ or _over_. We speak of the supernatural, or supernal powers, the
Supreme Being, the Most High, He in Heaven, and such like. So do all
Aryan and Semitic tongues. Beyond them, the Chinese name for the Supreme
Deity, Tien, means _up_. I have elsewhere illustrated the same fact in
native American tongues. The association of light and the sky above, the
sun and the heaven, is why we raise our hands and eyes in confident
prayer to divinity. That at times, however, a religion of sex-love did
identify these erect symbols with the phallus as the life-giver, is very
true, but this was a temporary and adventitious meaning assigned a
symbol far more ancient than this form of religion.
In this review of the principles of religious symbolism, I have
attempted mainly to exhibit the part it has sustained in the development
of the religious sentiment. It has been generally unfavorable to the
growth of higher thought. The symbol, in what it is above the emblem,
assumes more than a similarity, a closer relation than analogy; to some
degree it pretends to a hypostatic union or identity of the material
with the divine, the known to sense with the unknown. Fully seen, this
becomes object worship; partially so, personification.
There is no exception to this. The refined symbolisms which pass current
to day as religious philosophies exemplify it. The one, esthetic
symbolism, has its field in musical and architectural art, in the study
and portraiture of the beautiful; the other, scientific symbolism,
claims to discover in the morphology of organisms, in the harmonic laws
of physics, and in the processes of the dialectic, the proof that
symbolism, if not a revelation, is at least an unconscious inspiration
of universal truth. This is the “Doctrine of Correspondences,” much in
favor with Swedenborgians, but by no means introduced by the founder of
that sect. The recognition of the identity in form of the fundamental
laws of motion and thought, and the clearer understanding of the
character of harmony which the experiments of Helmholtz and others give
us, disperse most of the mystery about these similarities. The religion
of art, as such, will come up for consideration in the next chapter.
The second form of the Cult is the Rite. This includes the acts or
ceremonies of worship. Considered in the gross, they can be classed as
of two kinds, the first and earliest propitiatory, the second and later
memorial or institutionary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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