The Road to Religion

The following editorial appears in the current issue of LIFE:

This Easter all mankind seems to be trying harder than ever to find within itself some sign or hope of moral rebirth. As Paul Hutchinson reported after his world tour (LIFE, March 10), people in every nation have the same "new longing to explore the possibilities of a spiritual interpretation of reality," all other interpretations having yielded such barren fruit. In the U.S., church membership (72 million) is at an alltime high. Not for decades has religion enjoyed so much friendly curiosity.

Materialism and science worship are in full retreat, eminent scientists leading the chase. Millikan proclaims that "the mechanistic philosophy is bankrupt." The trend is toward God, all right. Or rather, it is away from His enemies. It has become as fashionable and as easy to laugh at the blindness of ethical relativism with C. S. Lewis, the English wit, as it used to be to laugh with H. L. Mencken at the blindness of the Bible belt. But has the tone of the laughter improved? Is there any joy in it?

Religion is not something one wins by voting against irreligion. Religion is the most difficult and radical thing in the world. If America were to undergo a genuine religious revival, the course of history would be changed. And if any American wants to undergo a genuine religious conversion, he must prepare for a revolutionary change in his personal history.

What Religion Is Not. "It would be naive," says Mr. Hutchinson, "to expect in this day the God-intoxication of a 17th-Century Spinoza." If that is so, it must be doubted that religion in this day is due for a serious rebirth. For "God-intoxication," whether it is appropriate for modern man or not, is one of the things religion is all about.

This proposition, though beyond proof, can be illustrated in two ways. We can show what religion is not, and we can invite testimony from those most experienced in true religion.

Religion is not the "brotherhood of man." The Golden Rule is a necessary but not a sufficient description of man's religious duty. Although almost all the great religions prescribe some variant of the Golden Rule, none of them relies on it exclusively. In the four Gospels Jesus speaks several times about the brotherhood of man, but he speaks of the Fatherhood of God just three times as often. Without that Fatherhood, man's efforts to live by the light of altruism have always landed him in its dark opposite.

Also, no code of ethics is an adequate substitute for religion. For if it be manmade, it can be remade by other men, and its true name is mores, which are transient. And even if, like the Ten Commandments, an ethical code has a religious origin, but is not newly illuminated for each generation by fresh drafts of religion, then its followers are trapped in what Santayana calls "the snare of moralism, that destroys the sweetness of human affections by stretching them on the rack of infinity."

There are many people today who, though not personally religious, are content with the ethical heritage which they received gratis from prior generations of believers, notably from the medieval monks who first proclaimed the human battle against pessimism, cruelty and ignorance. Indeed it is a comforting heritage; we are surrounded like the Chinese by our forefathers, wise, good and great. The very richness of [the Christian] heritage argues against personal religiosity the way a million dollars argues against personal toil. "Just use your brains," our forefathers seem to say to us; "You'll find a thought for every crisis in the trophy room upstairs." Christianity itself is so rich a trophy, so sure a talisman that our age has less motive than most to discover it as a religion. Especially since, as a religion, it asks us to sell all we have, to renounce this world, to lose life itself.

Now this otherworldly precept is not unique with Christianity. It is rather the greatest common denominator of all great religions, and the great saints and mystics of these religions obeyed it. From Lao-Tse, who "shut the sense channels," and Gautama Buddha, who forsook a throne to subsist on a grain of rice a day, through St. Anthony, St. Francis, St. Teresa and the other great imitators of Christ, down even to His modern missionaries like John Wesley, renunciation of the world and control of the flesh have been the common measure of their insight into the Absolute, their knowledge of God.

The great mystics have come in for much restudy of late. Many interesting distinctions are revealed, such as the fact that Christian mystics, by & large, have been more active in the world than the Oriental variety. Far more striking is the thing common to all saints: their utter preoccupation, at great cost to their comfort, with a world the average man knows nothing of, a world whose existence they proved and whose bliss they affirmed by simply spending a large part of their lives in it.

It was Christ himself who, by dying and not dying, revealed to believers the unity of the two worlds which we celebrate at Easter. And this unity is confirmed by all subsequent mystical experience.

St. Anthony. In the year 338, when Christianity was sick with the worst disease of its childhood, there came to Alexandria a tall, gaunt old man in white sackcloth who had lived as a hermit in the rock-pocked desert for more than 60 years. Fasting, isolation and constant prayer had brought him many visions, and in one of these, the one that brought him to the city, he had seen some donkeys trying to upset an altar in the full light of day. Alexandria, like all of Christendom, was then rent by the soft doctrine of the presbyter Arius, who argued that Jesus Christ was a good man, not God; that truth is reason, not mystery. In vain had the Council of Nicaea just condemned this heresy; the emperor himself had embraced it. "It seemed," as Fueloep-Miller tells it, "as if there were a devilish conspiracy of the entire world against the divinity of Christ."

All Alexandria knew old St. Anthony by reputation, for he had worked miracles of solace among the martyrs there 30 years before. In the basilica he was given the place of honor, the archbishop's throne. When the service reached the new Nicene Creed (. . . "very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made. . .), an Arian heckler interrupted to protest. Old Anthony was puzzled. He did not understand the controversy very well, but he knew what he knew. Before a crowd tense with suppressed rationalism and electrified by his majestic presence, the saint arose.

"I have seen Him!" he said.

Such testimony kept Christ on his throne. It preserved the infinite mystery of a religion which, had the Arians won, said Carlyle, "would have dwindled away into a legend." Without its saints and mystics, no religion is long for this world. For the ultimate purpose of religion is not right behavior, or right opinion, or any earthly glory or virtue. Its purpose is that of a window through which the selfless eye may see its way to that final necessity of the human spirit, Godhead and immortality.

Mysticism Today. In this, its real purpose, lies the real difficulty of religion for modern man. It is not to be taken up with reservations, lightly. The fact that most men do so take it is the reason it may fail them. For although religion is practical and can still do much good in the world, its strength at any period is measured by the number and quality of its mystics, of its "God-intoxicated" men.

They seem rather few these days. Yet the mystical tradition is sustained by many poets and intellectuals, for example, T. S. Eliot. And the direct experience of God is still available to any man capable of enough suffering, renunciation and self-conquest. Across time and space the great mystics share their discovery. Dostoevsky and St. Teresa bear witness to identical ecstasies. The visions of many a saint are echoed in these words by the late flyer Saint-Exupery, who alone above the clouds found himself "enclosed as in the precincts of a temple," where, "by the grace of an ordeal ... which stripped you of all that was not intrinsic, you discovered a mysterious creature born of yourself. . . . Man does not die. . . . What man fears is himself, not death. When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed."

There are indeed as many dangers as there are comforts in true religion. As the churches cannot survive without it, so we need the churches to protect us from its untutored excesses. Happy is he who can find his religion within the ancient wisdom of a church; happy the nation! But our age, if it is to be a religious age, must be also an age of rediscovery. That will take us through much travail before we find our spiritual home.

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