The Mysticism of a Modernist

Extract

The current conception divides religious from scientific belief, so that it seems almost as if religious belief supplied our emotional needs and scientific belief did not. Put into crude terms, this is the sense in which all maintainers of old creeds, who are not merely obscurantist, oppose the dismemberment of tradition. They even say that it is not the mere sentiment which attaches to an inheritance from the past that makes an old creed seem necessary to an intelligent man. For this intelligent man must have in his life a glamor such as science can never give, and the glamor comes from the religious creed. On this ground the mysticism which has always accompanied and exalted intellectual views of the universe must be sought from our traditional creeds, for it can never arise from science and history.

It is our purpose here to maintain the opposite. We shall endeavor to show how a mysticism may arise from the acceptance of science and history as the only possible intellectual views of the universe. So that what has been the chief argument for the maintenance of inherited creeds will be seen to be false. It does not in fact follow that the highest religious life can only arise from the acceptance of traditional creeds, simply because in the past there has been this connection. We are willing to admit that in the thirteenth century mysticism and deep religious feeling depended upon a belief in the eucharist as the physical body of Christ; but it by no means follows that the intellectual disagreement with such a belief implies a desertion of mysticism. This may seem very obvious; but we mean more. We mean that the highest mysticism does not depend even on the belief in a personal God, for the emotional needs of man are just as completely supplied by science and history as they ever were by any theology.