Creative Intelligence · John Dewey
V
If art may be said to create values, religion has been said to conserve them. But the values conserved are not those created: they are the values postulated by philosophy as metaphysical reality. Whereas, however, philosophy substitutes these values for the world of experience, religion makes them continuous with the world of experience. For religion value and existence are on the same level, but value is more potent and environs existence, directing it for its own ends. The unique content of religion, hence, is a specific imaginative extension of the environment with value-forms: the visible world is extended at either end by heaven and hell; the world of minds, by God, Satan, angels, demons, saints, and so on. But where philosophy imaginatively abolishes existence in behalf of value, where art realizes value in existence, religion tends to control and to escape the environment which exists by means of the environment which is postulated. The aim of religion is salvation from sin. Salvation is the escape from experience to heaven and the bosom of God; while hell is the compensatory readjustment of inner quality to outer condition for the alien and the enemy, without the knowledge of whose existence life in heaven could not be complete.
In religion, hence, the conversion of the repressed array of interests into ideal value-forms is less radical and abstract than in philosophy, and less checked by fusion with existence than in art. Religion is, therefore, at one and the same time more carnal and less reasonable than philosophy and art. Its history and protagonists exhibit a closer kinship to what is called insanity[93]--that being, in essence, the substitution in actual life of the creatures of the imagination which satisfy repressed needs for those of reality which repress them. It is a somnambulism which intensifies rather than abolishes the contrast between what is desired and what must be accepted. It offers itself ultimately rather as a refuge from reality than a control of it, and its development as an institution has turned on the creation and use of devices to make this escape feasible. For religion, therefore, the perception that the actual world, whatever its history, is now _not_ adapted to human nature, is the true point of departure. Thus religion takes more account of experience than compensatory philosophy; it does not de-realize existent evil.
The outer conflict between human nature and nature, primitively articulated in consciousness and conduct by the distress engendered through the fact that the food supply depends upon the march of the seasons,[94] becomes later assimilated to the inner conflict between opposing interests, wishes, and desires. Finally, the whole so constituted gets expressed in the idea of sin. That idea makes outward prosperity dependent upon inward purity, although it often transfers the locus of the prosperity to another world. Through its operation fortune becomes a function of conscience and the one desire of religious thinking and religious practice becomes to bring the two to a happy outcome, to abolish the conflicts. This desiderated abolition is salvation. It is expressed in the ideas of a fall, or a separation from heaven and reunion therewith. The machinery of this reunion of the divided, the reconversion of the differentiated into the same, consists of the furniture of religious symbols and ceremonials--myths, baptisms, sacraments, prayers, and sacrifices: and all these are at the same time instruments and expressions of desires. God is literally "the conservation of values."[95] "God's life in eternity," writes Aristotle, who here dominates the earlier tradition, "is that which we enjoy in our best moments, but are unable to possess permanently: its very being is delight. And as actual being is delight, so the various functions of waking, perceiving, thinking, are to us the pleasantest parts of our life. Perfect and absolute thought is just this absolute vision of perfection."[96]
Even the least somnambulistic of the transcendental philosophies has repeated, not improved upon Aristotle. "The highest conceptions that I get from experience of what goodness and beauty are," Royce declares, "the noblest life that I can imagine, the completest blessedness that I can think, all these are but faint suggestions of a truth that is infinitely realized in the Divine, that knows all truth. Whatever perfection there is suggested in these things, that he must fully know and experience." But this aesthetic excellence, this maximum of ideality is in and by itself inadequate. God, to be God, must _work_. He is first of all the invisible socius, the ever-living witness, in whose eyes the disharmonies and injustices of this life are enregistered, and who in the life everlasting redresses the balances and adjusts the account. Even his grace is not unconditional; it requires a return, in deed or faith; a payment by which the fact of his salvation is made visible. But this payment is made identical by the great religions of disillusion with nothing other than the concrete condition from which the faithful are to be saved. If the self is not impoverished, unkempt, and hungry, in fact, it is made so. Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but self-defilement is godliness; sainthood, if we are to trust the lives of saints, whether in Asia or in Europe, is coincident with insanitation; saintly virtues are depressed virtues,--humility, hope, meekness, pity; and such conditions of life which define the holy ones are unwholesome--poverty, asceticism, squalor, filth. Hence, by an ironic inversion, religions of disillusion, being other-worldly, identify escape from an actual unpropitious environment with submergence in it; that being the visible and indispensable sign of an operative grace.
So the beatitudes: the blessed are the poor, the mourners, the meek. Beginning as a correction of the evils of existence, religion ends by offering an infallible avenue of escape from them through postulating a desiderated type of existence which operates to gather the spirit to itself. For this reason the value-forms of the spirituality or spiritual control of the universe and of the immortality of the soul have been very largely the practical concern of religion alone, since these are the instruments indispensable to the attainment of salvation. In so far forth religion has been an art and its institutional association with the arts has been made one of its conspicuous justifications. So far, however, as it has declared values to be operative without making them actually existent it has been only a black art, a magic. It has ignored the actual causes in the nature and history of things, and has substituted for them non-existent desirable causes, ultimately reducible to a single, eternal, beneficent spirit, omnipotent and free. To convert these into existence, an operation which is the obvious intent of much contemporary thinking in religion,[97] it must, however, give up the assumption that they already exist _qua_ spirit. But when religion gives up this assumption, religion gives up the ghost.
What it demands of the ghost, and of all hypostatized or anthropomorphized ultimate value-forms, is that they shall work, and its life as an institution depends upon making them work. Christian Science becomes a refuge from the failure of science, magic from mechanism, and by means of them and their kind, blissful immortality, complete self-fulfilment is to be attained--after death. There is a "beautiful land of somewhere," a happy life beyond, but it is beyond life. In fact, although religion confuses value and existence, it localizes the great value-forms outside of existence. Its history has been an epic of the retreat and decimation of the gods from the world, a movement from animism and pluralism to transcendentalism and monism; and concomitantly, of an elaboration and extension of institutional devices by which the saving value-forms are to be made and kept operative in the world.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.