Wheaton, Illinois
RELIGIOUS activity assumes many forms; in the service of God all the functions of consciousness are involved. The questions here raised are, whether any order may be found among such activities, and what is the principle that determines such order. In particular this discussion aims to emphasize the role of the intellect in the life of Christian devotion.
To this end some grouping of conscious acts is necessary. In the past the various mental functions or conscious states have been classified according to different schemes. For example, while St. Augustine made several divisions, he often spoke of memory, intellect, and will. A later Augustinian, St. Bonaventura, listed the faculties of the soul as vegetative, sensitive, and rational — the latter uniting both intellect and will. At the present time a more common division is emotion, will, and intellect. St. Bonaventura’s identification of intellect and will may eventually prove to be a better classification than either St. Augustine’s or the common division of the present day. But inasmuch as nearly all religious psychology since the time of Kant has assumed that volition and intellection are distinct, this discussion will be conducted within the limits of the modern classification.
Without in the least denying the necessity of some scheme of dividing conscious activity, it is also necessary, in order to avoid misunderstanding, explicitly to reject the so-called faculty psychology. A man is not a compound of three things, an intellect, a will, and an emotion. Each man is a single personality. Long ago Plato showed the sophistic, skeptical results of making man a wooden horse of Troy and destroying his unitary personality. Emotion, will, and intellect are not three things, each independent of the other, mysteriously and accidentally inhabiting one body. These three are simply three activities of a single consciousness that sometimes thinks, sometimes feels, and sometimes wills. For this reason one must recognize that religion in general and Christianity in particular makes its appeal to the whole man. Strictly there is no such thing as a discrete part of man; other than conceptually it is often difficult if not impossible to separate these three functions. When a normal human being experiences an emotion, he may easily will an action; when he exercises his volition, he ought to have some knowledge of the situation; though to be sure he may employ his intellect and even his will without much emotion. Since these three, then, are actions of a person, the unity of personality must be regarded as basic throughout the whole discussion — it is the individual person who acts in several ways. Therefore, although expression is facilitated by using will, emotion, and intellect as abstract terms, and while the term “faculty” is still a good English word, the exact question proposed may more clearly be stated as follows: Granting that religion does not appeal to a thing called emotion or intellect but to a real human being, by which of these three actions does a man best respond, most fully grasp God, most perfectly worship and most closely commune with Him?
In the history of the past and at the present time also, each of these three activities has been declared by its proponents to be the religious activity par excellence. In a field already so well cultivated, the newcomer need not wait long for fruitful developments.
Note well that no question is asked about the temporal priority among these actions. Obviously in time emotion comes first; an infant surely experiences emotions before it thinks; plausibly willing also precedes any knowing. The question at issue, then, treats not of the temporal order but of the logical order, or to repeat more exactly, of an order determined by the degree to which these actions unite us to God.
While it is hazardous, in view of other schemes of classification, to assert the completeness and finality of the threefold division of consciousness into emotion, will, and intellect, the practical ease which this division affords makes emotion the first activity to be examined.
The meaning of the term “emotion”, it must be recognized at the outset, is exceptionally vague. Philosophic or scientific accuracy is not to be expected in a dictionary, for a dictionary must record colloquial usage; but with respect to the word “emotion” colloquial usage is not only the starting point for scientific definition — as is true always — it also fixes the only generally accepted meaning. Contemporary psychologists usually avoid giving a scientific definition of emotion or any accurate account of it;[1] instead they merely enumerate states of consciousness which they are willing to call emotional. And this a dictionary can do perhaps as well as a psychologist. More systematically minded thinkers, both ancient and modern, not confined to any one school but varying as do Plato, the Stoics, and Leibniz, attempt to define emotion as confused thinking, or as a physiological hindrance to rational activity. Writers on emotion who have not thought out the whole problem as deeply as Plato and Leibniz should not object to such a definition; but admittedly it is not a widely accepted view. Therefore one is almost forced to the dictionary.
Webster’s New International, Unabridged, 1935, reads as follows: “1. Obs. a Migration; transference, b An agitation, disturbance, or tumultuous movement, whether physical or social. 2. Any such departure from the usual calm state of the organism as includes strong feeling, an impulse to overt action, and internal bodily changes in respiration, circulation, glandular action, etc.; any one of the states designated as fear, anger, disgust, grief, joy, surprise, yearning, etc. 3. Agitation of the feelings or sensibilities.”
Accordingly, unless a student of this subject is prepared to follow some well integrated system like that of Leibniz in which the place of emotion is accurately located with respect to all other knowledge, the dictionary has to be accepted. Now the most noticeable quality common both to the original and obsolete meaning and to its modern derivative is that of agitation, a departure from a state of calm, accompanied by physical disturbances. Disturbance and agitation, therefore, are the chief criteria of an emotion.
In theology when one claims that emotion is the basic religious activity, it is not usually meant to imply that man comes into contact with God by means of each or all in the list of emotions, but by one of them. In some less profound and more popular religious circles the one chosen is the emotion of love, though it is significant that the dictionary did not include love among its examples of emotion and it is particularly to the point that for centuries the theologians have classified love not as an emotion, but as a volition. Apart from popular religion the more philosophical advocates of emotionalism do not stress love but choose a peculiar religious emotion, the feeling of piety or dependence. The reason for such a choice, at least the reasons for the adoption of emotionalism, are most clearly seen in the philosophical development starting from Kant.
Briefly, Kant had taught that behind the sense perceptions present to the mind there were things-in-themselves which caused the sensations. But just as we see railroad tracks apparently converging in the distance, so all our perceptions are received under a certain perspective. Common sense says that the tracks are really straight but they appear to converge. Kant says that the things of perception appear to be spatial and temporal, but strictly things-in-themselves are not really in space and time at all. Furthermore, the scientist by his laws describes nature as it appears to him. There are causes and effects, substances and accidents, action and reaction. But nature has these only in perspective; nature-in-itself must not be conceived as subject to such categories, which after all are only human forms of perspective. To proceed rapidly, the cosmological argument for the existence of God is therefore invalid, not because of any minor fallacy but because it has used the concept of causality beyond the range of sensible experience. God cannot be conceived as a cause or a substance for these categories apply only within sensible experience. Hence thinking, which receives its real content only through sensation, can never grasp God.
With Kant’s position thus briefly summarized, the post-Kantian development is not hard to anticipate. Jacobi epitomized the situation in his famous phrase to the effect that without the thing-in-itself one cannot get into Kant’s system, but with it one cannot stay in. Things-in-themselves had originally been posited as causes of sensation, and then causality had been denied application beyond the sensations. Since, then, the categories and the forms of space and time constitute Kant’s main contribution to philosophy, there is no reason for retaining the notion of things-in-themselves. God, too, must keep company with the things-in-themselves in their banishment from thought.
But, continues Jacobi, God is banished only from thought; and, after all, thought is neither the whole nor the most important part of man. Kant’s theory which limits causation to phenomena and identifies every cause with a preceding temporal event shows that thought is imprisoned in the infinite series of conditioned events and is forever incapable of grasping true, unconditioned actuality. Since the knowable is the phenomenal, a God who could be known would not be God at all. He would be merely an event in time. Thus the attempt to make religion rational is deadly to religion. He who would bring into his intellect the light of his heart extinguishes the light. Jacobi’s salvation, therefore, must lie in the fact that man has a “heart”, that man has feeling and emotion as opposed to thought; and while man cannot know God, he may by faith feel him. This type of view, which is by no means psychologically incompatible with what passes as great devotion and piety, had previously in history demonstrated its fundamental antagonism to orthodox Christianity. For while Pascal was undoubtedly a Christian in the strictest meaning of the term, and believed and taught that only in Jesus Christ could the riddle of the universe be solved, none the less his statement, “the heart has its reasons which reason does not recognize”, leads immediately to French skepticism. Similarly Jacobi, in championing a faith which has no evidence, gives free rein to a romanticism which Hegel justly characterizes as rhapsodic.
Unfortunately the interesting philosophic development must give way for the specific application of these views to theology. In this field Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was easily the outstanding exponent of the theology of feeling that grew out of post-Kantian philosophy, and his influence extends even beyond the nineteenth century. Although it may seem ungenerous to those who revere his name, yet from the restricted scope of this discussion, Schleiermacher can hardly be called an original philosopher. As a theologian he is important for shaping actual religious movements after the pattern already indicated. Hence, he repeats, God cannot be an object of intellect, nor of the will. Rather it is in the feeling of piety, not to be identified either with a form of knowledge or with a form of right action, that man attains communion with God. Romanticism in philosophy, therefore, corresponds to mysticism or pietism in religious life. The forms in which this anti-intellectualistic philosophy has manifested itself have been various since the time of Schleiermacher, but perhaps the most conspicuous example in the United States is the aestheticism of which Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick is an exponent.
The history of pietism and emotionalism reveals the chief considerations militating against this type of theology. In the first place it is a matter of experience that man has many emotions — a list was given above. Since, now, they are all equally parts of man’s nature, why should one emotion, the feeling of piety, be singled out as able to bring us into communion with God rather than some other emotion or all of them together? Certainly if Schleiermacher feels that the feeling of piety is the most valuable for him why cannot some one else feel that the feeling of pleasure feels best to him — or the feeling of anger? If an individual’s emotions are the most important activities in life, as they must be if by them alone one reaches God, then no person has any basis to complain against any emotion which another person cares to make supreme. Emotion is supreme and is therefore its own and only judge. The intellect is enjoined from interfering. The emotionalist must therefore assert that there is no reason for selecting one emotion above another. The emotion which emotes most emotionally is on its own authority best and most valuable.
If at present we do not feel like tracing out these Dionysian consequences and feel like discussing Schleiermacher only, there is another implication of emotionalism that needs to be made explicit. Since it is the feeling of piety that brings man into contact with God, it follows by a simple logical conversion that God is to be denned as the object which gives rise to the feeling of piety. On this basis some contemporary thinkers have concluded that polytheism is the only possible religion. Many objects by their aesthetic appeal produce feelings of awe, reverence, or piety, and hence these objects are, by definition, gods. Emotionalism, therefore, involves polytheism.
But the chief objection to the theology of feeling is its assertion that God is unknowable. It should be perfectly clear that no man knows enough to assert the existence of an object of which he knows nothing. And not only so, but the assertion that an object exists of which nothing can be known reduces to skepticism, as the history of religion in France and the logic of the matter in Hegel demonstrate. The right of each man to assert the kind of unknowable he chooses throws all objectivity into confusion; and the implicit contradiction contained in asserting that something cannot be known cuts the foundation out from under any and all knowledge.
Because skepticism is the logical outcome of the theology of feeling, its advocates take refuge in deep obscurity. James Orr, in the first chapter of The Christian View of God and the World,[2] neatly characterizes the verbiage of those who object to the clarity of intellectualism and defend the theology of feeling. “Here I cannot forbear the remark”, he writes, “that it is a strange idea of many who urge this objection (and defend emotionalism) in the interests of what they conceive to be a more spiritual form of Christianity, that ‘spirituality’ in a religion is somehow synonymous with vagueness and indefiniteness; that the more perfectly they can vaporise or volatilise Christianity into a nebulous haze, in which nothing can be perceived distinctly, the nearer they bring it to the ideal of a spiritual religion.”
If the argument so far developed is sufficient to dispose of emotion as the chief religious activity, one also finds in the history of philosophy and theology proponents of the will as the religious faculty par excellence. It is not through emotion, they hold, nor is it through knowledge, but rather it is in the act of volition or love that man grasps God. While these thinkers have rejected emotionalism, they are at one with it in its anti-intellectualism. For this reason their attack on the intellect is at least as prominent as their defense of the will. No criticism, no just analysis of the complete thought of any one man can here be attempted; some borrowings of typical phraseology must suffice to represent the basic position.
The intellect, they write, deforms and mutilates reality. Real things exist in their rich individuality, but the intellect abstracts from and divides this individuality, with the result that unreal abstractions take the place of the original object. Thus artificial unities become substitutes for immediately given experience. Petrified categories obscure the ever-changing life of history; and even worse, God is brought into subjection to the limitations of human reason, and the religious person is fettered by dogmas and creeds. Pulsating faith in a person, says one author as he waxes eloquent, is laid to rest in a tomb over which is set the stony monument of Gnosticism, and a Gnosticism devoid even of the picturesque fancies that served to make early Gnosticism at least interesting.
Religion, another writer protests, seeks union with God, but it is a union of will. Thought and the object of thought are never the same, and hence thought can never truly grasp any object. Reality, he repeats, is something other and deeper than thought. Personalism, the philosophy he acknowledges as his own, is more voluntaristic than rationalistic. It lays more stress on the will than on the intellect and inclines to the view that life is deeper than logic. Mere reason, he asserts, cannot bridge the gulf between thought and reality.
One of the gentleman’s basic arguments makes voluntarism the bulwark against skepticism. Rationality or intellect of itself apparently cannot justify itself. We must, he therefore continues, as rational beings assume the validity of reason, but this assumption is itself a matter of faith. To accept reason, quite as much as to reject it, is at bottom an act of volition. Contrary to the standard arguments showing the contradiction inherent in skepticism, this thinker holds that skepticism is not theoretically impossible, and hence the only escape is not theoretical or speculative, but volitional.
This capitulation to skepticism becomes clearer as we trace the developments. For if reality is deeper than thought, it follows that thought is not real. And if thought is not real, we are confronted with the unknowable. The same author continues to say that reality is deed as well as idea, but how it is constituted we do not know. There is about reality, he admits, a mystery that the human mind can never penetrate. The embarrassment increases when he says that to think is to create, but how creation is possible we do not know. The immaterial soul combines unity and plurality; this is a fact we assert, he writes, but which we do not understand.[3]
Here again it is clear that anti-intellectualism has affirmed the existence of an unknowable, and in spite of all verbal denials the result is skepticism. In the light of the devastating admissions that produce this conclusion, it is hardly necessary to proceed further. The original proposition comes under the suspicion of being not only false, but meaningless. Religion seeks union with God, it was said, a union of will. What can such a union be? Wills may be united in the sense that two persons aim at a single object, but in the case of God and man the specific object would prove difficult to identify. Both God and man may be said to aim at God’s glory, but the methods of aiming and the specific, proximate objects of volition are different. Man aims at being honest, benevolent, or pleasing to God. The latter makes little sense when applied to God, and if benevolence or honesty seems to be a possible aim for both God and man, it is because one forgets that “aiming” with God is not the same as aiming with man. Man aims to become benevolent, but God is already benevolent eternally. Strictly, then, there is no single object at which both man and God aim, and a union of wills in this sense is impossible if not pure nonsense.
Or again a union of wills may be understood in the sense that the human being obeys the divine commands. Obedience is far from nonsense, and the respective rôles of God and man are clearly indicated; but how can obedience be described as a union between God and man? Is obedience, however necessary it may be, the exact equivalent of grasping or coming into contact with God? Is obedience to a divine command the nearest approach to God that man can enjoy? Certainly, if an analogy be of any value, obedience is not the most intimate form of human friendship.
Since so much of the voluntaristic argument was an attack against intellectualism, the criticism of the former from this point on can only with difficulty be distinguished from the advocacy of the latter. There can therefore be no abrupt division between these two parts of the subject as there was between emotionalism and voluntarism. For the basic consideration in the views of voluntarist and intellectualist alike is the nature of the intellect as seen by each of the two. The voluntaristic position is that intellectual activity consists in abstraction, and that abstraction mutilates reality by substituting artificial unities for immediately given experience. Now, presumably the advocates of voluntarism would include sense perception under the heading of immediately given experience. And yet the sense of sight abstracts color and shape alone from the rich individuality of a plum pudding and fails to grasp the smell and the taste. Smell and taste similarly fail to grasp the color. It follows, then, that every sensation mutilates reality. But who at Christmas dinner cares to will rather than to taste a plum pudding?
As has been said some centuries ago, a mistake is made if the deliverances of a single sense are considered exhaustive of the object, but if they are recognized as a partial grasping of the object, there is neither mutilation nor illegitimate substitution. The process of abstraction, therefore, is not guilty of the charges made against it.
And in the second place the voluntarists seem to assume without sufficient basis that abstraction is the sole example of intellection. In the history of philosophy this point has received considerable attention, and here it can be noted only that a respectable school has held for centuries that intellection is the grasping of an object as a whole. Concepts, they teach, are built up out of discrete parts; but ideas, far from being progressive reconstitutions of an object by the putting together of fragments drawn from experience, are global or integral representations arising within us. Unless the voluntarist can effectively dispose of this view, his objections to intellectualism fall to the ground. And a reading of personalistic authors does not give evidence that this view has been adequately studied.
The intellect, therefore, on the part of its defenders, instead of mutilating reality, is that faculty, or better, that mode of action, by which man comes into possession of, or contact with, reality; while volition is considered as the act of striving to gain possession. The energy used in going to an art museum forms a rough analogy to the will, whereas the enjoyment of contemplating the picture may represent intellection. Before the enjoyment or possession of the object, whether it be picture or God, there is desire, love, or volition; afterward there is enjoyment, possession, contemplation. The will is directed toward an end or aim that is future; possession is present. Clearly the desire of. an end is not the attainment of that end. Now if in Christianity the end of all human endeavor is to see or contemplate God, evidently the desire for God or the love of God is subordinate, since one can love God without seeing him, or at least without seeing him with that clarity which characterizes the final object of desire. In other words, desire and love, because they are means to the end, cannot be the end itself. Voluntarism or dynamism, in refusing to accept such a consideration, is involved in the absurdity of making desire itself the end of desiring. Nothing is permanent except change. Life must therefore be deeper than logic because life and reality are too chaotic and unstable for logic to represent. In intellectualism, on the other hand, life is not deeper than logic, but this implies not that life is shallow but rather that logic is deep. Or to rephrase the distinction: voluntarism conceived reality as fundamentally irrational, as ultimately an unknowable mystery before which man must remain a skeptic; whereas intellectualism with a love of truth resolutely affirms that reality is essentially rational, logical, and knowable.
Some voluntarists have seen more clearly than others that their irrationalism provides no room for truth. This is at least indirectly admitted by their stress on value judgments. It was Ritschl who in recent days popularized this conception, and his vogue has become wide-spread. But in antiquity the Sophists also, when by reason of their inability to cope with the philosophic situation they despaired of attaining truth, taught that each man for himself could by an act of will set up an object of value. The effective means of attaining these subjectively erected values was the nearest equivalent of truth they admitted in their system. And these means in the course of a century degenerated noticeably from the standpoint of common morality. Today also, the duplicity of modernists in using for their religious work as large a proportion as possible of the traditional phrases of historic Christianity, simply because these phrases with their sacred connotations are valuable in gaining the none-too-intelligent adherence of unsuspecting common folk to their ecclesiastical and political programs, is nothing but a surface reflection of the technical viciousness of the basic philosophy. There are such things as values, of course; but to be truly valuable, a value must first be true. Truth is primary, value secondary. And the supreme value in the life of man is to be sought in the activity of the intellect as it grasps truth. It is no mere accident of history that the term sophist became one of disrepute. And it will not be surprising if the term modernist also becomes identified with intellectual dishonesty, for however pious and humble skepticism may at first appear, the unknowable will always prove unspeakable.
Hence much of the defense of intellectualism is provided by the old arguments against an unknowable object and ultimate mysteries. Instead of transforming the Kantian thing-in-itself into an object of feeling or will, it will be necessary to reject the position that gave rise to such a development and to formulate an epistemology in which reality can be known. Hegel attempted just this; and while much of his logic is worthless, his arguments against the unknowable are so final as to cause astonishment at any resurrection of this unmanageable idea.
In the past the systems that emphasized rationality have always assumed a world of static perfection. At least the enemies of the intellect call it static; its friends think of it as stability. Plato, in The Sophist, protested against the criticism that his ideal world was one of petrified categories or unreal abstractions, and urged that it be viewed as a living mind. But at any rate, even Plato would have denied change in the truth the divine mind knows. Change in perfection could only be change toward the worse. The connection, therefore, between intellectualism and stability is too stable now to be overthrown. An intellectualist today must accept the onus that history has placed upon him, but he accepts it gladly. In voluntarism immutable truth is replaced by a radical dynamism. One seeks for God and ultimately finds only a Heraclitean flux. Nor does the lesson of antiquity need to be pointed out again that flux results in skepticism. The exponents of voluntarism embrace dynamism because they are enamoured of progress; to them stability is sterility — and in one sense it may so be in human life, — but they fail to see the aimlessness of an evolution that has no goal. “What is the ape to man? A jest or a bitter shame. And just that shall man be to the Superman, a jest or a bitter shame.” But after the Superman, what? And if we must all travel this way again, where is progress? Or, if we need not travel this road again, if we must travel always new roads that lead nowhere, where is progress? The skepticism to which voluntarism as a system is reduced is nicely balanced by the despair to which it reduces us. Its restlessness is matched by its futility. Progress is possible only when there is a fixed goal, and goals belong not to voluntarism but to intellectualism.
Before the final paragraph it may be well to repeat that the argument has proceeded on the assumption that will and intellect have different definitions. Should someone follow St. Bonaventura and in reclassifying mental acts identify intellect and volition, he might be progressing toward a new synthesis that avoids the difficulties of more awkward classifications. Such an identification would not void the objections to voluntarism considered above; it would perhaps alter in a small way the picture of intellectualism.
But, whatever the classification, no progress is possible unless some primacy and subordination is found among mental acts. To say that they are all completely on a par is to deny that calm reflection has authority over irrational passion.
Now at last to clarify the implications of the whole argument for positive religion, for Christianity specifically, the suspicion arises that anti-intellectualism in general is an attitude engendered not merely by the complexity of the epistemological problem but also, and perhaps in greater measure, by the fact that truth in philosophy implies truth in religion, and truth in religion is unwanted. Petrified categories fetter a person by dogmas and creeds; pulsating faith in a person (about whom no true statement can be made) is entombed in an unartistic Gnosticism. This hatred of creed, openly admitted to be one motive among others, can easily be suspected of being a most important motive because of ecclesiastics’ pseudo-pious appeal to something inexpressible to disguise their inability or unwillingness unambiguously to answer straightforward questions.
Similarly a chemist is fettered by equations? His devotion to the rich variety of the chemical world dies when entombed in a formula?
But rather on the contrary: if truth can be expressed — and only a skeptic dare deny it — then a love of truth must lead to a love of its expression. Creeds and equations are not fetters to hinder man, but are essential aids to his progress. As Orr said, spirituality is not vagueness; rather the spiritual man is the honest man, the most truthful, the most accurate in his expression. Certainly it is clear that historic Christianity with its acceptance of a written revelation is more in accord with intellectualism than with either of the rival theories. Now the creed is the most accurate expression possible of so much truth as has been discovered in the Scriptures. It is therefore the object of explicit faith. God himself is revealed in the words of Scripture; their truth is his truth; in understanding them we understand him, and in contemning truth we contemn God.
Notes
- Tiffin, Knight, and Josey, The Psychology of Normal People (D. C. Heath and Co., 1940), are to be complimented on trying to frame a definition. They write, page 187, “emotion (is) an experience involving a disturbed condition of the organism brought about by the prospect of some ‘values’ being gained or lost, and involving also an impulse to act”.
- pp. 21f. (Edinburgh, 1897).
- See Albert C. Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, pp. 33, 65, 67, 143, 147, 209, 225. and 244.
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