Those who persist in having emotional relationships with a God whom they believe to be personal are people who have never troubled to undertake the arduous training which alone makes possible the mystical union of the soul with the integrating principle of all being. To viscerotonics, with a craving for emotional experience, as also to somatotonics, with a craving for muscular experience, such training must seem particularly arduous. Indeed, the genuine mystical intuition may be an experience which it is all but impossible for many people belonging to these psycho-physiological types ever to have. Be that as it may, the fact remains that such people generally choose the types of religious experience they find most agreeable and easiest to have.
The theology of bhakti-marga may be untrue; but it often produces very considerable results with great rapidity. In other words, the emotional method of religious self-education is demonstrably effective. It should be remarked, however, that the emotional method of secular self-education is no less effective. In his volume, God or Man, Professor Leuba has pointed out that startling conversions can take place without the question of religion ever arising; that the imitation of admired human models can produce desirable changes of character no less effectively than the imitation of divine models. The trouble with bhakti-marga is that it is really too effective by half. Devotion to any object of worship, however intrinsically grotesque or even evil, is capable of producing great changes in the character of the devotees—changes that, up to a point, are genuine ameliorations. Those who have followed the contemporary American cult of the negro man-god, Father Divine, must have been struck by the fact that many, probably most, of Father’s worshippers have undergone a striking ‘change of heart’ and are in many respects better men and women than they were before their conversion to Divinism.[19]
But this improvement of character has very definite limitations. Divinists are committed by their theology to a belief in the perfection of Father. The commands of a perfect being should be obeyed. And, in fact, they are obeyed, even when—and this would seem to be the case in certain of the new church’s financial transactions—they are not in accord with the highest principles of morality. The abnormal is worthy of study because of the light it throws upon the normal. Divinism is a kind of fantastic parody of a religion of personal devotion; but just because it is a parody, it exhibits very clearly the dangers and defects, as well as the virtues, of bhakti-marga. Bhakti towards Father produced excellent results for just so long as Father himself behaved with perfect virtue, or as his followers attributed perfect virtue to him. The moment he ceased to be virtuous, or the moment non-virtuous actions were attributed to him under the mistaken belief that they were virtuous, the devotion of his followers ceased to be an influence for good in their lives and became an influence for evil. It is obvious that the obedient devotees or imitators of a person who either is, or is believed to be in some way evil, cannot themselves be wholly good.
What applies to the worship of Father Divine, applies, mutatis mutandis, to all other forms of bhakti-marga. Devotion to, and imitation of, a personal divinity provide worshippers with more energy to change themselves and the world around them than any other form of religious self-education. This is an empirical fact. Now, energy is a good thing provided it be well directed. Devotion to a personal deity produces a great deal of energy; does it also give a satisfactory direction to the energy produced? A study of history shows that the results of worshipping a personality are by no means necessarily good. Indeed, the energy developed by devotion to a person has been directed to undesirable ends almost as often as to desirable ones. That this should be so is, in the very nature of the case, only to be expected. Devotion to a human person, who is still alive, but who has been deified by general acclaim, can hardly fail to be disastrous in the long run. Bhakti-marga in regard to an Alexander the Great, a Napoleon, a Hitler may begin by producing certain desirable changes in the worshippers; but it cannot fail to produce degenerative changes; in the person worshipped. ‘Power always corrupts,’ wrote Lord Acton. ‘Absolute power absolutely corrupts. All great men are bad.’ A deified man is morally ruined by the process of being worshipped. Those who adoringly obey and imitate him are making it inevitable, by their very adoration, that they shall obey and imitate a thoroughly bad, corrupted person.
In cases where the adored man is no longer alive, adoration cannot corrupt its object. But even the best human persons have their defects and limitations; and to these, if they happen to be dead, must be added the defects and limitations of their biographers. Thus, according to his very inadequate biographers, Jesus of Nazareth was never preoccupied with philosophy, art, music, or science, and ignored almost completely the problems of politics, economics and sexual relations. It is also recorded of him that he blasted a fig-tree for not bearing fruit out of season, that he scourged the shopkeepers in the temple precincts and caused a herd of swine to drown. Scrupulous devotion to and imitation of the person of Jesus have resulted only too frequently in a fatal tendency, on the part of earnest Christians, to despise artistic creation and philosophic thought; to disparage the enquiring intelligence, to evade all long-range, large-scale problems of politics and economics, and to believe themselves justified in displaying anger, or, as they would doubtless prefer to call it, ‘righteous indignation.’
In many cases devotion is directed, not to a living human person, nor to a human person who lived in the past, but to an eternal, omniscient, all-powerful God, who is regarded as being in some way a person. Even in this case bhakti-marga is apt to lead to unsatisfactory results. The theologians are at great pains to insist that the personal God is an absolutely perfect person; but, in spite of all their precautions, the deity tends to be thought of by his adorers as being like the only kind of person of whom they have direct knowledge—that is to say, the human individual. This natural tendency to conceive of a personal God as a being similar to a human person is especially prevalent among Christians brought up on the Old Testament.
In this remarkable compendium of Bronze-Age literature, God is personal to the point of being almost sub-human. Too often the believer has felt justified in giving way to his worst passions by the reflection that, in doing so, he is basing his conduct on that of a God who feels jealousy and hatred, cannot control his rage and behaves in general like a particularly ferocious oriental tyrant. The frequency with which men have identified the prompting of their own passions with the voice of an all-too-personal God is really appalling. The history of those sects which have believed that individuals could base their conduct upon the moment-to-moment guidance of a personal deity makes most depressing reading. From Thomas Schucker, the Swiss Anabaptist, who was divinely guided to cut off his brother’s head, and who actually did so in the sight of a large audience, including his own father and mother, down to Smyth-Pigott, who believed that he was God and who fathered upon the parlour-maid two illegitimate children called respectively Power and Glory—the long succession of divinely justified cranks and lunatics and criminals comes marching down through history into the present time.
Belief in a personal God has released an enormous amount of energy directed towards good ends; but it has probably released an equal amount of energy directed towards ends that were silly, or mad, or downright evil. It has also led to that enormous over-valuation of the individual ego, which is so characteristic of Western popular philosophy. All the great religions have taught the necessity of transcending personality; but the Christians have made it particularly difficult for themselves to act upon this teaching. They have accompanied the injunction that men should lose their lives in order to save them by the assertion that God himself is a person and that personal values are the highest that we can know.
A personal deity tends to be regarded as completely transcendent, as somebody out there, apart from the percipient and different from him. At various times in
