p. 48

Part Two: Religion

Chapter 2: The Origin of Religion

The scholarly value and validity of research into the origin of religion are the same as those of historical science. Historical study, respecting the uniqueness and individuality of sensible actuality, which every empirical science takes as its starting point, first aims at as full a report as possible. It then combines these historical materials and unifies them into a single whole, and it seeks further to find what necessary tendency toward the future¹ they point to in the course of historical development. The selection and organization of facts that the method of historical study necessarily requires presuppose some standard of value; and p. 49 the manifold connections of meaning in actuality make a complete and purely descriptive account impossible. From these two points it follows that history does not stop at recording the past; it includes an evaluative attitude that relates the past to the present and seeks to point to guiding norms.²

But suppose one arbitrarily selects a concept abstracted from a single case, or from cases of the same kind, ignores the infinity of meaning and the historical limits that the case or concept carries, and tries to identify it with a universal principle. One has then crossed from the domain of descriptive science into that of normative philosophy, and careful consideration is needed. Still more, when one observes the forms in which religion originated from the genetic point of view, and takes these as the only or the chief source of the essential concept of religion, one easily falls into the error of oversimplification. The search for the forms in which religion originated therefore aims to make clear their historical place, as cultural values that arose at a particular time, and to establish how they point to "the values that have been progressively developed and realized in the course of history up to now."³

Research into the origin of religion will begin from a clear definition of the concept of "origin." The term⁴ "origin" sometimes means, in time, the last antecedent, reached when one traces back the line from which some event arose until one can go no further. Or it may denote, in space, the "adjacent," presumed to be the originating force of motion, change or growth, as the proximate cause of some given event. And it also refers, in essence, to the material of which the event is made. When we try to go back to the first beginnings of religion, not only must we imagine the remote period before historical records and draw abstract conclusions; even if we reach some valid conclusion, p. 50 we cannot identify the form in which religion "arose" with its "primitive" form, in the sense of a judgment of value.⁵ Moreover, religious experience, whose subject is the moment of vital grasp, can hardly be judged in value by the standard of the actual order of history. In practice, therefore, research into the origin of religion concentrates on criticizing the cultural values of the primitive stage that still exists, and on examining the mental tendencies of the individual, seen as a recapitulation.⁶ If we now observe the social customs of savage peoples, or the ways small children live, we can readily find religion at the stage of its arising, or phenomena that resemble religion.

But even in applying this method, one sets up the division between civilized and savage,⁷ or a sequence and connection among the origin and the stages of development of religion, and in doing so one ends by attaching universal principles of selection and unification to particular historical objects. Instead of showing a direction toward constructing the essential concept of religion from religion as it actually is, one easily falls into an inversion: a norm for the essence of religion has been fixed in advance, and the facts of religion, that is, the historical sources of the science of religion, are treated as cases that prove that method or principle. The task concerning the origin of religion therefore comes down to criticizing the materials of which the essential concept of religion is made. What we mean to take as the task of the study of religion's origin is to analyze and point out the cultural factors that recur, of the same kind, in every particular that could be called religion or a religious phenomenon, without regard to differences of period or to stages of culture.

We now propose to consider the factors from which religion arises under four aspects: the biological factor, the psychological factor, the social factor and the revelatory factor.⁸

p. 51 Religion, especially at its primitive stage, contains a biological factor. People have the desire to survive. While we act and think, we feel a strong impulse toward self-preservation and self-renewal.⁹ And wherever human beings exist and act, there is a faith that gives them the power to survive. Look at the religious thought of India in its age of nature religion: in trying to explain in myths the natural objects closely bound up with their lives, people often came to give divine character to the objects themselves and to worship them. Look at the sources of the Hebrew religion: at the root¹⁰ of their religious thought a lofty monotheism and moral ideals were sprouting, yet the religion of the common people aimed at obtaining the necessary conditions of practical life, such as the prosperity of the nation, defense against foreign enemies and good harvests. Here too, in the region where I am drafting this manuscript, the religious mood is ordinarily stagnant¹¹ and in decline; yet now that a long drought has dried up the crops and life is threatened,¹² there is a great commotion, with rain-prayer rites every day and the digging up of graves secretly dug on sacred mountains.¹³ One can see plainly how strong the human desire for life is. Until religion takes right and effective measures toward this powerful reality, it will hardly become a religion that truly feels human life.

Since Darwin, the development of modern biology has had a profound influence on philosophy and on religious thought. Bergson's theory of life is without doubt a metaphysical¹⁴ principle above experience, embracing all the phenomena of life. Yet the distinctive¹⁵ feature of his thought, it may be said, lies in its attempt to explain things by the method of biology. What he believes to be the root of all phenomena, p. 52 the "impulse of life" (élan vital), is no more than an analogy with an organism, which has both adaptability to its environment and an infinite impulsive force within itself.¹⁶ His philosophy is an important correction of the older mechanism, but it has the defect of trying to consider life only at the biological stage. The view of religion held by the North American pragmatists likewise takes a naturalistic position based on the same biological analogy.¹⁷ For them religion is one form of life. Life is the forced work of adapting to an environment that is cold, indifferent and already formed. Human beings act in the midst of threats¹⁸ to life. This threat is the most real and fateful of things, and what lies ahead cannot be foreseen. Religion, they teach, arose from this predicament of life.

Religion, as they claim, must indeed perceive the actual human being keenly and give proper consideration to our biological impulses. Religion, one might say, is the deepest and most solemn sense of life. But we must not forget that religion, even at the stage at which it arises, has contained some lofty spiritual¹⁹ ideal beyond biological desire.

The most popular view of the psychological origin of religion is the "religious instinct theory."²⁰ The psychologists of former days, observing the mental phenomenon of feeling, supposed that there was a mental entity²¹ called "feeling," and, observing the mental phenomenon of thinking, that there was a mental entity called "intellect." In the same way, from the presence of the distinctive phenomenon of experience called religion, they inferred that there was a special "innate idea" (Innate Idea.) or "religious instinct" that produced religious experience. But religion is too complex a phenomenon to be pronounced the outflow of an instinct. It is more fitting to call it the fruit of experience p. 53 than a hereditary disposition, and so the "religious instinct" has lost its true meaning. Irving King, in his book The Development of Religion, refuted the religious instinct theory in these words:²²

"According to the science of modern evolutionary theory, an instinct is not an innate endowment proper to human beings; it is a form of mental response formed in the course of the organism's development. Instinct is the form in which our organism adapts to the physical environment that the struggle for existence requires. Therefore instinct contains no conscious process, either in its origin or in its function. To say that religion is a kind of instinct, or that it developed out of instinct, is to regard religion as biological adaptive behavior toward the environment of living. But we can hardly say that religious consciousness or religious behavior bears a direct relation to the biological struggle for existence." (Irving King, Development of Religion, p. 25–28)

This does not mean, however, that instinct or instinctive behavior has in its nature no relation to religion at all. First, a human being does not come into the world like a blank sheet, without any content or tendency. It is a fact that we have certain inner forces, or inner tendencies, acquired in social life. If religion is closely related to such mental tendencies, then it would be right to say, not that there is some special instinct that could represent religious experience entire, but that various complex natural tendencies combine to influence religious experience or to give it a basis. (Cf. McDougall, Wm., Social Psychology, Chaps. II–III; James Wm., Principle[sic] of Psychology, vol. II, Chap. XXI; Hocking, W. E., Human Nature and its Remaking, Chap. VI.)²³

p. 54 Second, some people place the mental origin of religion in the subconscious.²⁴

The subconscious was at first no more than a philosophical hypothesis, put forward by philosophers such as Leibniz, Kant and Hartmann to explain the causal validity of experience. Later Myers, in Personality and Eternal Life (Mayer[sic], Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, London, 1903),²⁵ maintained that our conscious life of representations is only a part of the true self. An infinite latent force,²⁶ which our conscious powers can by no means measure, lies hidden within the personality; it is in constant touch with the great Self of the universe and shows itself at intervals²⁷ in the world of consciousness. Taking this up, eminent psychologists of religion such as Pratt and Coe pointed out that the subconscious has an indispensable relation to the psychological origin and development of religion,²⁸ and the psychoanalysts made it the sole basis for explaining abnormal phenomena of mystical experience.

If we sum up what various scholars have found in their study of the subconscious to this day, it comes to this.²⁹ First, the subconscious is not an innate, unified personality in touch with the reality of the universe. It is the most primitive and hereditary function, and it is the source of the biological factor, that is, of desires and impulses. Second, the arising of consciousness, or the forming of experience, means the unifying of the material of experience. So the conscious self first comes to stand where our attention is concentrated, and at the fringe of that consciousness we can only posit a non-conscious region without harmony or organization. Third, to intuit something supraconscious, beyond our conscious powers, is an essential condition of the working of thought. Before we conceive the particular, we grasp the universal to which the particular points; and before there is any connection among things, we can only p. 55 suppose the principle of that connection a priori. In the philosophical sense this may be called the subconscious.

Next, we often hear it maintained that fear is the psychological source of the origin of religion. The mark of "negative religion"³⁰ lies in devising means of defense by religious acts, in order to subdue the hostile forces of nature or to escape the wrath of God. Facing irresistible natural phenomena such as thunder and storm, plague and disease, human beings felt how weak their own strength was, and it is a fact that at this they came to fear.

Such fear is one expression of the biological feeling that seeks to preserve life. When ideals and circumstances run counter to each other, and "supernatural" forces such as upheavals of heaven and earth threaten life, the spirit sinks and people take biological means of defense against them. Fear, then, is the preservative value of the feeling that seeks to keep life safe. But when, as today, knowledge of nature has advanced on the one hand, so that many former superstitions have been broken down, and moral cultivation on the other can restrain extreme stimuli of feeling, something like biological fear is no longer so important a motive in religious life.

Yet fear too can rise above the state of biological feeling and become a factor in a genuinely religious disposition. When fear changes from a negative, selfish, biological state into awe³¹ before the Absolute or God, or into reverence for the dignity of a spiritual world, spiritual and moral in character, it will become a positive and necessary condition, indispensable to religious experience. Rudolf Otto's The Holy has made this clearest of all. (Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige, über das Irrationale p. 56 in der Idee des Gottlichen und sein Verhahaltino[sic] Zum Rationalen, 1926.)³² He says that although "natural fear" and "religious awe" are both expressions of analogous emotional responses, the latter "does not belong to the ordinary, natural sphere," "is possible only to one in whom a mental endowment wholly different from the natural endowment has awakened," and "this endowment itself shows³³ a wholly distinctive, new faculty of lived experience and of judgment of value in the human spirit." (Yamaya Seigo's translation, Sei naru mono, p. 25.)³⁴

He grants that in primitive religion it takes the crude³⁵ form of "daemonic dread." But "this dread and its fantastic products afterwards take a crude form in the midst of all this, and the 'numinous' feeling, the mystical impulse that was first stirring, is overcome and driven out by higher stages and forms of development," he says.³⁶ (Ibid., p. 26.)

Above, we have criticized the theories of the psychological origin of religion: instinct, the subconscious and fear. Now, to list in general terms the main points that modern psychology indicates about the predisposing causes of religion, they are roughly as follows.

First, the mark of modern psychology is that it is empirical and experimental. It rejects every hypothesis of "innate ideas" and sets psychology the task of examining the sources and functions of experience. Therefore, according to modern psychology, the essence of religious experience is interpreted as a result achieved through the accumulation of experience and the development of ideals. It is a fact that human beings have the endowment, or the common possibility, to live the spiritual and moral life possible only to human beings. But religion does not come into being from this endowment alone. Until the content of the endowment is defined and its direction settled, it has no practical value for us. So the general tendency of modern psychology in interpreting religion is to see religion as a result p. 57 achieved as long experience accumulates, both individually and socially.

Second, modern psychology opposes theories of partial entities, such as feeling, will or reason, and attends to the functions of the organism as a whole. So we have come to recognize that faith, too, does not belong exclusively to some mental entity called feeling, will or thought. It is the outpouring of the life of the personality, unified, whole and not to be analyzed. In faith a person moves as a whole. Unless one first knows the whole, one cannot know the parts, and the parts do not become meaningful except through the whole. Therefore in religion either our whole life goes bankrupt, or else our whole life can be saved.

Third, according to modern psychology, religious experience is not grounded in a mystery that we can neither understand nor explain, nor does it itself belong to mystery. It is of such a nature that we can actually be conscious of it and experience it, and so can communicate its source, its factors, its essence and its value. Religion, even at its primitive stage, begins when the self knows itself. No one else can do it for me in my place, nor send it to me as a gift.³⁷ One must experience it oneself, vitally. Yet such experience is not wholly incomprehensible. One must be conscious of one's own experience, and one can explain it to others and so make them understand one's heart.

In inquiring into the origin of religion we cannot leave its social origin unmentioned.³⁸ Religious thought before the eighteenth century p. 58 was, broadly speaking, centered on the individual. Even a modern scholar such as Max Müller said that "religion is the relation between the infinite real and the individual self." (Max Müller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 1901, Tiele, C. P, Elements of the Science of Religion, Edinburgh, 1807[sic].)³⁹ But it is a fact that the general tendency of modern religious thought is to stress the relation between religion and society. Professor Ames says that "religion is the experience of the social group: the collective and cooperative effort to create the social ideals that the whole group has judged most valuable, and to preserve those social ideals." (Ames, E.S., Psychology of Religious Experience, p 206.)⁴⁰ Professor Irving King, too, in The Development of Religion, reached a conclusion like Professor Ames's.⁴¹

"The fundamental problem of religion lies in upholding the structural forms of society. The religious activity of savage peoples aimed at achieving economic ends. Their chief customs were for the most part connected with sharing food, tending livestock and harvesting grain," he says. (King, I., The Development of Religion, p. 80.) Professor Haydon of Chicago, too, points out that economic institutions and activities are closely related to the origin of religion, and says:⁴²

"The tribes that settled in one place and made farming their livelihood believed in the god of the earth, which supplied the things needed to preserve life. The religious feelings of primitive people, the heart leaping at the joy of a spring day, the sense of mystic power on a quiet moonlit night, the mind enraptured by the fresh beauty of dawn, we too experience today. When the cold and fearful night had passed, and the warm rays of the sun parted the curtain of darkness and shed the warm light of a new day on the earth, so that the fierce p. 59 beasts hid in the mountain valleys, and the people who had slept rose from their beds and went out to their work singing glad songs, dawn was always a goddess whom they worshiped." (Haydon, A. E., The Quest of the Ages, p.20.)

The one who maintained most thoroughly that religion originated socially was the Frenchman Durkheim.⁴³ According to his theory, a human being, first coming into the world, is no more than a candidate for humanity, with no content beyond biological plasticity.⁴⁴ From there, as one gradually grows and develops, one comes to delight in contact with others and becomes conscious of cooperation. To know time and space by fixed forms and to infer the relation of cause and effect are all gained through social consciousness. It follows that religious consciousness is also a social product. The idea of the "sacred" is the necessary result of the selecting and imitating that go with the human process of learning by education. Whatever one would learn, one comes to show respect to its object. The ideas of sacred and profane are a kind of primitive notion of value, taught by society. Because society thinks a thing valuable, it sets it apart and protects it. What society needed, people thought holy; what society forbade, they thought unclean. The objects of religious faith, and the attitudes toward them, originated here and developed here. In other words, he maintains that the god worshiped in religion is social value idealized and personified.

Human beings are social animals, and we cannot imagine human life wholly separated from social structures and the social spirit. The development of language and art, the fixing of customs and institutions, the accumulating of knowledge and ideals: none of this p. 60 could come about apart from the social mind. So it is with religion. For primitive people, religious feeling was a kind of social emotion, aroused by the stimulus of society; religious acts were outward, structural rules for maintaining social custom; and the object of religion was the objectification of the values that society sought to hold fast.⁴⁵

Especially in the life of primitive people, their whole life was subject to a powerful social structure of kinship, and the idea of social solidarity had become the factor of their inner cohesion. In primitive society the individual self was not an individual, nor even one unit of society. It belonged to the social organism, and could stand for the whole on its behalf. Such a society, therefore, admits neither a supra-individualism⁴⁶ that denies society nor an individualistic view of society that believes in a social body organized by contract for the benefit of individuals. For they think, not that society comes after there are individuals, but that individuals exist after a certain kinship body exists. So their religion, too, originated in the social customs of kinship, and held fast to the idea of social solidarity in religious thought, religious action and religious ideals.

But there are one or two points to consider about the social origin of religion.

First, we must not forget that social consciousness is not a reality existing on its own apart from the individual self; it denotes the group consciousness and cooperative spirit of individual lives. To say that religion is a social product, therefore, can only mean either, first, to identify religion with social institutions and attend to the outward forms it has, or, second, to regard religion as the preservation of social values or as a means of preserving them. But though the outward forms and formal functions of religion may be called necessary conditions p. 61 for understanding religion, they are heteronomous, and inadequate for grasping the inner essence of religious faith.⁴⁷ It is like trying to explain a personality, or personal values, by the structure of the body, by clothing or by possessions, or to judge a fine painting by its canvas and its oils.

Second, religion aims not only at the preservation of values but at the creation of values. Society imposes on us fixed institutions, customs and ideas. But religion, while it respects the social values gained from the experience of humankind, stirs up the creative imagination and encourages a free individuality, and so has enabled people to see into a world of the soul that is ever new and ever wondrous, and to live as the seers of their age. Therefore the apostle of truth knows neither compromise nor surrender. The person of faith must live with the spirit that will not be moved, though the whole world rise up in clamor, unless I myself understand deeply, and will not take a stand on any way but the way of righteousness,⁴⁸ however hard the things one must meet.

Above, we have considered the origin of religion from the biological side, the psychological side and the sociological side. This is an attempt to explain the origin of religion by human phenomena. Science, philosophy, art, morality, all cultural values are closely related to religion and are outward conditions that make up religion. And even at the stage at which religion arises, one can discern these elements at work in complex ways. But a deep understanding of the essential concept of religion can by no means be reached by human phenomena alone. Religion p. 62 lies in the revelation of grace granted for the sake of human beings, and in the human response to that grace.⁴⁹ Therefore, to understand religion truly, we must begin from the recognition of the fact of revelation. In other words, rather than trying to explain religion by other phenomena that are not religion, we must explain what is religious as religious.

Some people believe in mechanical revelation.⁵⁰ According to them, religion is "supernatural knowledge," asserted by the arbitrary will of a despotic, absolute God at a certain particular place and on a fixed⁵¹ date. Religion is not a convenient means devised for attaining human desires; it is mysterious knowledge that God has made known for the sake of human beings. The study of religion, therefore, is not a final reckoning that human ability has created or experience has achieved; it aims at the recognition of the will and action of God, which are there from the beginning.

If religion is regarded as the keeping of God's pure revelation, containing no human element at all, then a concrete way of keeping that revelation will be needed, and this, they say, is scripture and doctrine. Because these are the perfect expression of God's mysterious will just as it is, without the least admixture of human intention, they believe that human intention can neither interpret them at will nor alter them.

But when a person consciously experiences anything, it cannot be explained by the mechanical action of simple stimulus and reaction. Even if religious experience is not a subjective supposition but an objective gift, the work of receiving and answering that gift⁵² is impossible except through the language, knowledge and heart of the one who receives it. Moreover, even if one grants that a certain historical p. 63 revelation is a unique, pure revelation, it is still human beings who interpret and weigh that revelation, so it will not be the same for all but will vary with differences of understanding and character. And from the side of the nature of the object known, too, the forms of thought about a given actuality are marked by infinity.⁵³

Religious revelation, therefore, cannot in any sense be interpreted mechanistically. At the stage at which religion arises, the final power of decision in all matters of faith and practice lay with tribal tradition. But this tradition concerned only broad⁵⁴ religious principles. To solve the complex and many-sided problems met in daily life, a special insight into the divine will was needed. Above all, foreknowledge of the future, that rain would come on a certain day, that a son would be born in a certain year, that one's fortune would open at a certain time, was to them the most precious scientific knowledge. The method by which they obtained such knowledge is called "divination." According to Jastrow,⁵⁵ there are two kinds of divination: one is technical divination, and the other is natural divination. Technical divination discloses the signs of the divine will by drawing lots, listening to the cries of birds,⁵⁶ or interpreting written characters. Natural divination is the direct manifestation of the divine will in the mind of some intermediary. Natural divination requires a special temperament in the intermediary, and in receiving the divine will the intermediary must be in a wholly passive state, of dream or of trance. This was commonly called "inspiration."

In religious experience there are two sides, reception and response:⁵⁷ the former is the static side of faith, the latter its dynamic side. Even p. 64 at its primitive stage, religion did not forget that God bestows unceasing grace for human welfare, and that before God's majesty human beings must have a spirit of humility, awe and obedience. The Greeks thought that all things, each according to its nature, are expressions of the "Logos," and the Christian tradition has believed that the historical Jesus is the "only begotten Son"⁵⁸ whom God gave to save sinful humanity. Religion aims to bring human consciousness to awaken and perceive the presence of God, to be moved with gratitude, in human conviction, for God's grace, and to go forward toward a sacred ideal. Revelation is the showing of the grace with which God turns toward human beings. Revelation, therefore, is less the claim of a divine ground for religious authority, that is, for a system of doctrine, than a question of the essence of religion, that is, of the grateful acceptance of God's grace. Truly, it may be said that God's personal act of self-giving⁵⁹ is the primal element of religion.