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Part Two: Religion

Chapter 1: The Necessity of Religion

Religion's origins reach far back, as far as the history of humankind. Through humanity's sorrows and joys, ideals and ambitions, hopes and disappointments, passions and anguish, it has walked the winding road of human life alongside it. Over that time some religions flourished and grew and others declined and decayed, but religion, as the mother of human culture, held a position of leading authority in every part of life. In the present age, however, the situation of religion has changed markedly. Broadly speaking, there are two reasons. One is that religion's cultural offspring, art, science, education, politics and the rest, have left religion and gained an independent standing. The other is that, with the development of modern scientific and philosophical knowledge, religion is less a compass that solves the problems of human life for us than itself a hard problem waiting for us to solve it.

As Professor Wieman of Chicago has said, present-day attitudes toward religion fall roughly into three kinds (Wieman, H. N., The Wrestle of Religion with Truth, pp. 35–53).¹ The first is religious apologetics, the second anti-religious apologetics, and the third religious inquiry.²

p. 32 People of the first kind accept religion from the outside and defend it. They received religion as a ready-made article. They do not try to question³ or examine the essence of religion, the validity of its creeds, or the source and value of its experience. Faith has settled all these problems. "Faith" here means accepting historical tradition without any objection. Their religion is therefore a finished truth and a closed rule. There is no room here for further argument, doubt, or study. The only question is whether one possesses it or not. Having it, we can apply it. We can also look for ways to possess it more surely. But this is not a question about the value or validity of religion; it is a question of acquiring religious experience and keeping it. For them religion is not a question but a power; not a search but a passion.

People of the second kind reject religion from the outside and seek to stamp it out. For whatever reason, they have received the firm impression that religion is a superstition and a vice that human society cannot tolerate. Like people watching a wrestling match,⁴ they do not try to experience it for themselves but stand by as spectators and denounce it. Some of them were once connected with a church and have a common-sense knowledge of religion. But their knowledge of religion is superficial in the extreme, and the religion they see is a fixed and finished ready-made article. For them the concept of the essence of religion is not defined after a serious scientific inquiry into religion. A set view of religion comes first, and then they seek to curse religion on the strength of that p. 33 ready-made notion.

Last, people of the third kind sympathize with religion from the inside, and in a fair spirit they criticize religion's certainty, forms, conditions, results and relations, and strive for a proper understanding of the essence of religion. For people of the first or second kind, religion is already a closed matter. Only people of the third kind call religion in question. They alone, therefore, truly seek to inquire into religion and understand it. Of course, criticizing religion from the inside, as a religious person oneself, will differ from criticizing it from the outside as a non-religious person. Religion easily leans toward the personal and the sentimental, and so it readily falls into partiality and dogmatism. To look squarely and coolly⁵ at the facts of religion from a third party's standpoint is therefore, for the critic, a privilege of being human; and from religion's side too it can be important material for reference and reflection. But whether the criticism of religion evaluates the essence of religion and the content of faith or examines the methods and practice of religion, one who has not lived it for oneself and has no vital interest in it will find it hard truly to understand its mood, its inclinations and its ideals (my article, "The Peculiarity of the Criticism of Religion," Saesaram, no. 3).⁶ Further, a historical religion with a tradition always carries the essential demand to preserve its own character and to refuse arbitrary alteration or reconstruction, and this cannot be ignored. In criticizing a historical religion, therefore, one must distinguish its unchangeable elements from its changeable ones.⁷ The unchangeable elements mean the p. 34 presupposed spiritual⁸ connection that is the unifying and necessary ground amid the manifold of the individual facts of religious experience. The changeable elements rest on the manifold of lived experience supplied in fixing the proper limits of universal concepts. Between the two an interaction goes round and round. Religious inquiry examines the facts that are religious, or that can be called religious, and obtains from them a properly valid concept of the essence of religion. With it, it evaluates the validity of the presupposition; and by the concept of religion obtained in this way, the proper aim, purpose and method of religion are defined.

The general tendency toward religion in the present age has been religious inquiry. It called religion in question and applied unreserved free criticism to its essence and even its methods. Over the past half-century religion has kept up a desperate effort for its own defense and survival. Indeed, in the many-sidedness of its problems and the depth of its concern, present-day religious inquiry has few parallels in past human history. During this time, in its external relations, roughly three important problems were raised, almost in stages, and pressed religion for a solution: first, the problem of religion versus science; second, of religion versus the materialist view of society; and last, of religion versus the state.⁹

The conflict between religion and science began from the time that science was freed from the realm of magic and it became clear that its results brought benefits to people's practical life. In method, science aims at quantitative calculation based on observation and experiment. Taken broadly, any knowledge in any field that has order and organization may be called science or p. 35 scientific. The results of science and the spirit of science have given us a new view of the universe. We now observe nature by the norms of order, purpose and development. By this, mysteries hidden in nature have been opened up, ignorance, pain and fear driven out, and our life made richer and more convenient. But science's conquest of nature reached as far as the conquest of humanity, and there was no lack of a tendency to claim that matter alone is the real and that knowledge by mechanical methods is the only valid knowledge, and to ignore the world of the soul.¹⁰

If you asked Professor Barnes, who wrote the book The Dawn of Christianity in 1929 (Barnes, H E., Twilight of Christianity),¹¹ whether religion is necessary, he would say that religion fell gravely ill after the Industrial Revolution and died at the close of the European War,¹² and that it is a miracle it has kept even its outward form down to today. Francis Bacon, who taught that knowledge is power, said long ago that in the modern age the "mysticism" believed in primitive times was not only useless but would die out of itself, even without any human effort applied to it. He promoted the separation of science and religion, and, seeing the practical results that scientists such as Galileo had achieved, he strove to put them into theory and make people grasp the revolutionary meaning they contained (Canon Streeter, tr. Murao Shōichi, Science, Philosophy, Religion, p. 6).¹³

Many have also reached the same anti-religious conclusion through the scientific study of religious experience. Mr. Freud's The Future of Illusion (Sigmund Freud, The Future of Illusion)¹⁴ regarded religious experience as a kind of pathological phenomenon, p. 36 and Mr. Martin's The Mystery of Religion (Everett Dean Martin, The Mystery of Religion),¹⁵ laying its weight on the "Oedipus" theory, said that religion arises abnormally, even after one has grown up, from the infant's childish impressions of its parents. Mr. Schroeder long ago published a long article, "Adolescence and Religion," claiming that "religion is a distortion of the sexual function," and pointed out that sexual consciousness always accompanies religious consciousness (Schraeder, T., "Adolescent Girl Among the Primitive People, in The Journal of Rligious[sic] Psych., vol. XI, (1913) pp. 27–40).¹⁶ Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy, too, sets out from the results of positive science. It holds that only the phenomenal world can be solved by human intelligence, and that the real at the root of the phenomenal world neither is known nor can be known by human intelligence. His First Principles (Spencer, H., The First Principle) set out from the intention of settling "the conflict of religion and science" peaceably.¹⁷ He said: "For a lasting reconciliation to be established between religion and science, it lies in science's fully acknowledging that its explanations are relative and proximate, and religion's fully understanding that the mystery it contemplates is ultimate¹⁸ and absolute" (First Principle, Chap II, p. 46; Ibid, Chap. V, p. 107). He divides what we must believe into two kinds: one is what can be known, and the other what cannot be known. What can be known belongs to science; what cannot be known belongs to religion. Spencer's theory, which asserts the relativity of knowledge and the unknowability of the real, is no different from Kant's philosophy setting phenomena against the thing-in-itself. But Spencer differs from Kant in that he treated this unknowable, in practice, as the same as nothing real.

p. 37 Just as the conflict between religion and science was barely coming to an end, religion began a new fight, with the materialist view of society. It would be no exaggeration to say that over the past several decades, perhaps for about twenty years since 1919,¹⁹ anti-religious thought and anti-religious movements have almost all rested on dialectical materialism, raised high from the standpoint of social science.

According to them, the task of philosophy is "to investigate the final basis of consciousness and being, and to grasp everything real in its connection with that basis."²⁰ Accordingly they hold that, in the fundamental problem of philosophy, the dualistic opposition of subject and object, spirit and nature, the real and the idea, soul and body, matter is the original given and thought is secondary. They acknowledged the defects of the naive materialism of the eighteenth century and corrected them. The old materialism, first, was mainly mechanical, because it took no account of the recent development of chemistry and biology; second, being unhistorical, it did not grasp the standpoint of development thoroughly and comprehensively; and third, because it viewed human beings abstractly and did not understand them as the whole of social relations, it did not fully know the meaning of revolutionary practice (Lenin, tr. Nagata Hiroshi, The Basic Theory of Marxism, pp. 81–2).²¹ The dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels corrected this fundamental defect. It does not see the world as a complex of ready-made things but as a complex of processes, and it upholds a dynamic and comprehensive view of the universe, in which ceaseless change, coming into being and passing away, is always present. But their philosophical foundation never goes beyond the limits of "naive realism."²²

"We acknowledge the existence of the objectively real, which does not depend on the subject and exists independently of human consciousness." p. 38 "Although the reflection of one and the same objectively real in consciousness can take various forms, what in the end determines the content of our consciousness is the objectively real, existing outside our brains; and so here a grasp of the objectively real is possible" (Kawakami Hajime, The Basic Theory of Marxist Economics, pp. 86–7).²³ But our senses cannot copy objective truth entirely as it is. The things of the outer world have infinite sides, and our thought is always relative. As they said, "The absolute can be approached through the mediation of the relative; it is itself relative, and is 'constructed' through finite moments" (Lenin, Lenin's Dialectics, tr. Kawakami Hajime, p. 77).²⁴

They seek the valid standard relating the independent existence of objective truth to the limits within which relative knowledge approaches it in "the whole of human practice."

"Whether human thought can take hold of objective truth is not a question of theory at all but a practical question. In practice human beings can only prove the truth, that is, the reality and power of their thought, in its this-sidedness (Diesseitigkeit)" (Marx Engels Orchiv[sic], Bd. I, S. 27; Kawakami Hajime, The Basic Theory of Marxist Economics, p. 94, where it is cited).²⁵ What they call "the practical" means "experiment and industry."²⁶ Human beings act before they argue, and the grasp of truth by human perception is proved by its likeness in kind or agreement with the object, or by the object's fitness for the representation, or its usefulness. Only, they say, "within the limits set by rightly training and rightly using our senses, putting the method of our action in order, and by perceptions properly used, the results of perception p. 39 can prove their agreement with the objective character of the thing perceived" (tr. Uno Kōzō, Collected Works of Marx and Engels, vol. 12, 587; Lenin, On Dialectical Materialism, tr. Kawakami Hajime, p. 22).²⁷

The basic theory of the materialist conception of history described above, realist and pragmatic, did not set out from a metaphysical intention. It seeks to give meaning and grounds to the struggle of ideas within the labor movement. Earlier materialism sought to grasp the object, actuality and sensuousness in the form of the object; they, on the contrary, seek to grasp them subjectively, as sensuous human activity, as practice.²⁸ This is to "extend materialism to the social realm," and to grasp the history of human society in its "self-movement" and "self-change."²⁹

Their materialist view of society places what is basic in human social life in the productive forces and the relations of production, and asserts that the ideal of human society lies in development through struggle. "In the social production of their life, human beings enter into definite and necessary relations independent of their will, that is, into relations of production corresponding to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces." "The sum of these relations of production forms the actual basis of the economic structure, to which definite social forms of consciousness correspond." "The mode of material production conditions the social, political and intellectual³⁰ process of life." "At a definite stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production within which they have hitherto been at work, or with the property relations that are merely their legal expression; then the revolution of society occurs."³¹ And so they concluded, "The history of all society hitherto is the history of class struggle."³²

p. 40 The collision between religion and the materialist view of society may be said, then, to have begun less from a theoretical opposition of matter against idea than from a partisan prejudice against religion, as an opposing force that clings to the traditions of the "bourgeoisie" and frustrates³³ class struggle.³⁴ They cursed religion for having done the most direct and deep harm to the interests of the revolutionary movement by "non-resistance to evil," "moral self-perfection," and "the teaching of conscience and universal love," so that people would submit to oppression and poverty.³⁵ They say: "Religion teaches those who labor all their lives and are still in want to be lowly and to endure in their life on earth. To those who exploit them it offers the cheapest justification, and it seeks to soothe them with the hope of a heavenly reward."³⁶ For them, therefore, a book like Feuerbach's The Essence of Religion,³⁷ which lists and reviles the actual faults and misdeeds of the church and the clergy in metaphor³⁸ and strange words, would have been welcomed as though it were sound scientific study of religion.

It is a fact that the reaction of the materialist view of society against religion, discussed above, gave religion a strong shock,³⁹ toward being freed from stale institutions and traditional superstition and toward proper self-examination. Their labor movement stressed social idealism, a fervent⁴⁰ international gospel, and a renewed recognition of human worth that aims at the rise of the lowly classes.⁴¹ But their basic theory has very great difficulties philosophically, so that one may say, "The time when one could claim that materialism alone is the philosophy that fits scientific knowledge has already passed" (Canon Streeter, Science, Philosophy, Religion, pp. 60–61).⁴² First,⁴³ the most eminent scientists and philosophers of our day, p. 41 as to whether the "scientific method" championed by the materialist conception of history can interpret many-sided and profound human experience fully and comprehensively, have come by degrees to doubt it (Julian Huxley, J. A Thomson, and Others, Science and Religion; A S Addington[sic], The Nature of Physical World, Science and the Unuseen[sic] World; A N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Religion in the Making).⁴⁴ Many have come to stress that, as modern material civilization develops and every person pursues nothing but pleasure and material comfort, people live lives without a center, and that we need a true religious culture (Murobuse Kōshin, The Decline of Civilization; Tsuchida Kyōson, The Reconstruction of Religion).⁴⁵ And attention has turned to this: even the economic problems of production and consumption cannot be satisfactorily solved without taking ethical relations into account, since the human element cannot be excluded from them (Hobson, Eonomics[sic] and Ethics: Wealth and Work).⁴⁶

Between the materialist view of society and religion there is a gap that no compromise can close, both in practical aims and in basic theory. Just as the friction between religion and materialism was growing steadily deeper, the recent state of society changed completely, so that religion could not but stop its fight with materialism and turn instead to concentrate all its strength on the problem of religion and the state.⁴⁷

Freedom of religion means this: so long as religion keeps within its own particular sphere of activity, does not disturb peace and order, and does not go against the duties of subjects, the state does not restrict it, even by law. That is the ideal alike of the civilized state today and of sound religion.⁴⁸ The freedom of religion recognized by the Imperial Constitution includes "that anyone may freely hold the religion in which they believe; that one may freely convert to another religion according to one's belief; p. 42 that one has the freedom not to believe in any religion whatever; that one may perform the worship of one's own religion in public places; and that one is not compelled to perform the religious acts of another religion or to worship the gods and buddhas of another sect."⁴⁹

Yet even now, in England, Italy, Germany and many other advanced countries, there are national religions recognized by the state, or state-chosen religions. In France and Spain the law treats Catholicism differently from other religions.⁵⁰ In China, until recently, there was an attempt to exercise some degree of repressive control over the propagation of Christianity. And the religious policy of the Soviet Union has been harsher still.

Of course, at the primitive stage of religion, almost all of people's social customs were religion or were colored by religion. "Totem" and "taboo" were the strongest factors binding them into one body. Even after several tribes had united to form a state, religious consciousness was not fully differentiated from consciousness of the state; religion, bound up with politics, became a major force in the state's activity and control.

To take Christianity alone: it is a fact that historical Christianity was loyal to its state, and that the Christian church held a leading place in nurturing and unifying the spirit of the nation.⁵¹ In France and Italy it is the custom that a good citizen should take part in the church's worship and in Holy Communion. In England and Scotland, too, the development of the nation and the advancement of religion were treated as one. And in America the Puritan spirit remains, even now, a strong national sentiment.

p. 43 But can a modern state establish some one religion for its nation, and have everyone who is one of its nationals believe in it uniformly? And if that were possible, would it really be an effective way to gather and unify the spirit of the nation? There will be those who answer both questions in the affirmative, almost categorically.⁵² Religion certainly has an inseparable relation to the life of the state, and it is certain that a religious person cannot evade responsibility toward the state. But to say that the state may select a particular religion and require it of the general population, or that religion can be used as an effective means for cultivating and unifying the national spirit, is to look at religion from the standpoint of the state, not at the state from the standpoint of religion. The essential feature of religion lies in individual experience, and the more developed a religion is, the more it goes beyond being a national product or a national peculiarity and takes on a human and cosmic mission. A cosmic religion,⁵³ therefore, though in its concrete functioning it cannot stand apart from historical structures and social conditions, may be said, by its own proper ideal, to transcend the limits of time and place.

And even if it were possible, or effective, to require some particular religion of the general population, the problem is how a civilized modern state could discriminate among the several religions it embraces and choose one. To take the nearest example: the religions that nationals believe within the Empire today are very many and varied in kind. p. 44 To name only the chief of them, there are Shinto, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity and others.⁵⁴ Each of these religions has a particular character, whether one looks at its ideal, its institutions or its religious sentiment, such that they cannot be synthesized with one another or brought to a compromise. It is extremely difficult for the state to choose any one of these religions alone, and to support, promote or require it.

Our age today demands of every country a careful self-examination of its own distinctive tradition. To forget oneself and what is one's own, and try to imitate only what comes from outside, goes against the spirit of the age. We should first become conscious of the distinctive value and historical place of our own people's culture, and so strive to contribute to the development of human culture. But this does not mean that we should maintain, without criticism, every tradition our country has. We are not people who extol a reactionary restorationism or an exclusive pride. What we mean is that we must work to preserve the purity of our own culture, and so be able to contribute to human culture. Therefore, even where we have taken in a religion that is not native but foreign, we should give up even the social customs, the institutional ties and the national feelings of the foreign people that the foreign religion brought with it. We should discern the essential core of religion within those external and historical accretions, free it from them, and strive to digest and understand it as our own, belonging to ourselves.⁵⁵

Above, we have examined step by step several of the questions of our time that collide with religion or call it in question, and have p. 45 offered some criticism of them. Below, we shall consider some of the reasons why religion is necessary in the present age.

On the common-sense view, religion is a means of satisfying human desires. Life needs effective adaptation to its environment in order to expand fully. From one side, then, religion might be called a method of bringing oneself into harmony with the universe.

When religion is regarded not as a principle but as a method, it falls to a secondary position, and human desires are easily taken, uncritically and before religion is considered at all, as having a cosmic basis. That is an error.⁵⁶ And yet, if one ignores the effect religion has on our actual life, it is hard to understand religion in its working role.⁵⁷ Within religion we feel our life and ideals to be not relative but absolute and solemn, or at least to have a foundation and basis in the absolute; and religion teaches, besides, that here our desires are purified and life is enriched.

The strongest impulses in human beings are hunger and sex. To lay in food before the cold winter comes, and to find a mate to one's liking before the time is past, is what ordinary common sense takes to be the most precious and weighty thing in a person's life. Accordingly, the religion of ordinary people consisted in worshipping the nature gods who send rain upon the earth and ripen the grain, and in performing marriage, and the bearing and raising of children, as mysterious rites. When, a little further on, p. 46 human desire goes beyond material and bodily limits into the spiritual and moral realm, religion too is purified, taking the world of the soul as its goal. At times, when the day's toil is over, a person looks for a "rest" in which to wet the wings of a weary heart in the ripples of a lake dyed by the setting sun. At other times people have climbed a mountain to ease a gloomy mind,⁵⁸ built an altar, and looked up to heaven in lament. People seek sympathy and love, and they also struggle for justice, even at the cost of their own pleasure and ease. The more their desires are purified and intensified in this way, the more religion arises when they climb the mountain to contemplate human life, and religion arises too when they go busily about the streets of the human world.

Do we need religion today? What demand of modern people cannot be satisfied except by religion? To this question we can find a clear answer by examining the reality of the society we face.

The present age is intoxicated with matter. The religion of modern people lies in the worship of matter. This is the most primitive belief humankind has known. As to how enormous a sacrifice this belief demands of human beings, it is completely blind. Modern mechanical production is enlarging our life outwardly. But our life seems to be swept ever deeper, from unrest into unrest. We concentrate all our strength on the falsehood of shallow outward show and on momentary pleasures of the senses. Meanwhile a gloomy undercurrent flows at the bottom of the spirit, and everyone wanders in doubt, delusion, fear and degradation. Modern people have "lost their goal even through science; even through p. 47 humanism they have lost their hero; even through logic they have come to a dead end."⁵⁹ Institutions develop and life is divided, bringing about a scattering of the personality, and amid confusion and disorder we cannot look human life in the face. What we now need is a contemplative view of human life, a view that finds rest in it. A large view of human life, a comprehensive view, is required. There must be a weighty life lived from the center, not by outward show and advertisement.⁶⁰ While machines and institutions develop, a spiritual power able to direct them rightly must come back to life. Here, I think, lies religion's mission for our time.

But, as I have already said, when religion is regarded purely as a utilitarian means, religion cannot be understood as the claim of objective and universal truth. Religious experience suggests, first, that it contains feelings and actions possible only to a spiritual and rational being; second, that this experience has cosmic meaning or a cosmic basis; and last, that it did not arise by chance but comes from obedience to hidden categories of the spiritual process (Caird, J, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, pp. 70ff).⁶¹

To say that religion is necessary, therefore, does not mean that the whole populace must welcome it, or that there is no one in the world who does not feel the need of religion. We often speak of "the universality of religion," but this amounts only to saying that there is a correspondence between the characteristics of the spiritual life and the experience of religion, and that in history religion, or religious phenomena, have shown a probable generality. The former is a psychological agreement, the latter a cultural agreement. But when religion, as religion in its own right, claims a categorical necessity,⁶² it must be able to claim that religious truth is not p. 48 an arbitrary expedient but rests on a cosmic, objective law. People do not make truth; truth takes people captive.⁶³ As someone has said,⁶⁴ truth is like a stone wall: I cannot stand in front of it and order the wall to open a way for me, nor ask it to suit my convenience. So the truth of truth is not bound by whether the majority accepts it, or by whether it has shown a temporary effect in our actual life. Religion, as the claim of cosmic truth, may at times go against its age and judge it; and it happens, too, that a person of faith ends a life in loneliness and tears. When religion is the claim of eternal truth on a rational foundation, the rationality it contains will demand our adaptation and obedience, just as two added to two make four, or as moral value commands our absolute obedience.