its most essential function, and ultimately, like Deism, ceases to be a religion at all. It may perhaps be objected that this view involves the identification of religion with mysticism, and that it would place a philosophy of intuition like that of the Vedanta higher than a religion of faith and supernatural revelation, like Christianity. In reality, however, the Christian insistence on the necessity of faith and revelation implies an even higher conception of transcendence than that of the oriental religions. Faith transcends the sphere of rational knowledge even more than metaphysical intuition, and brings the mind into close contact with super-intelligible reality. Yet faith also, at least when it is joined with spiritual intelligence, is itself a kind of obscure intuition—a foretaste of the unseen—* and it also has its culmination in the mystical experience by which these obscure spiritual realities are realised experimentally and intuitively.
Thus Christianity is in agreement with the great oriental religions and with Platonism in its goal of spiritual intuition, though it places the full realisation of that goal at a further and higher stage of spiritual development than the rest. For all of them religion is not an affair of the emotions, but of the intelligence. Religious * Cf. Rousselot, Les Yeux de la Foi.
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HUMANISM AND RELIGIOUS E X P E R I E N C E
knowledge is the highest kind of knowledge, the end and coronation of the whole process of man’s intellectual development. Herein they all differ profoundly from the conceptions of religion and religious experience that have been developed by modern European thinkers.
For the modern mind no longer admits the possibility or the objective value of spiritual knowledge. The whole tendency of Western thought since the Renaissance, and still more since the eighteenth century, has been to deny the existence of any real knowledge except that of rational demonstration founded upon sensible experience. Intuition, whether metaphysical or mystical, is regarded as an irrational emotional conviction, and religion is reduced to subjective feeling and moral activity. Such a religion, however, can have no intellectual authority, and in consequence it also loses its social authority and even its moral influence. Civilisation becomes completely rationalised and secularised, as may be seen from the last two centuries of European history.
Nevertheless, man cannot live by reason alone.
His spiritual life, and even his physical instincts, are starved in the narrow and arid territory of purely rational consciousness. He is driven to take refuge in the non-rational, whether it be the irrational blend of spirituality and emotionalism C.N.A. 49 D
CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE
that is termed romanticism, or, as is increasingly the case to-day, in the frankly sub-rational sphere of pure sensationalism and sexual impulse.
To-day we are faced with the bankruptcy of rationalism and with the necessity of finding some principle of the religious order which can rescue us from the resultant confusion. One alternative is that of the late D. H. Lawrence, who accepts the failure of reason, and who seeks to find a basis for the religious consciousness not in spiritual intuition, but in that lower intuition of the senses and the physical life, the reality of which cannot be denied even by the rationalist. He writes :
” Come down from your pre-eminence, O mind, O
lofty spirit !
Your hour has struck,
Your unique day is over,
Absolutism is finished in the human consciousness too.
” A man is many things : he is not only a mind.
But in his consciousness he is twofold at least : He is cerebral, intellectual, mental, spiritual, But also he is instinctive, intuitive, and in touch.
” The blood knows in darkness, and forever dark, In touch, by intuition, instinctively.
The blood also knows religiously, And of this the mind is incapable.
The mind is non-religious.
” To my dark heart gods ore.
In my dark heart love is and is not.
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