Man and Religion, Aldous Huxley
Man and Religion
I would like to start by reading two or three lines from the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Revelation. This chapter contains a description of the New Jerusalem, and it ends like this: ‘and the street of the city was pure gold as it were transparent glass. And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it’ (Revelation 21:21-2).
In the same way there was no temple—no religion, in the ordinary sense of the word—in Eden. Adam and Eve didn’t require the ordinary apparatus of religion because they were in a position to hear the voice of the Lord as he walked ‘in the garden in the cool of the day’ (Genesis 3:8).
When we read the Book of Genesis, we find that religion, in the conventional sense of the word, began only after the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden, and that the first record of it is the building of the two altars by Cain and Abel. This was also the beginning of the first religious war. Cain was a husbandman—a vegetarian, like Hitler—and Abel was a herdsman and a meat eater. They were divided passionately on their different occupations, and this gave them a kind of religious absoluteness, with the sad result which we all know.
In the third chapter of Genesis, after the birth of Seth, who was Adam’s third son, there is mention of a new phase in religion. The verse reads: ‘And to Seth, to him also was born a son; and he called his name Enos: then began men to call upon the name of the Lord’ (Genesis 4:26). This evidently represents the beginning of what may be called the conceptual, verbalized side of religion.
These two sets of references illustrate very clearly that there are two main kinds of religion. There is the religion of immediate experience—the religion, in the words of Genesis, of hearing the voice of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, the religion of direct acquaintance with the divine in the world. And then there is the religion of symbols, the religion of the imposition of order and meaning upon the world through verbal or non-verbal symbols and their manipulation, the religion of knowledge about the divine rather than direct acquaintance with it. These two types of religions have always existed, and we shall discuss them both.
Let us begin with religion as the manipulation of symbols to impose order and meaning upon the flux of experience. In practice we find that there are two types of symbol-manipulating religions: the religion of myth and the religion of creed and theology. Myth is obviously a kind of non-logical philosophy; it expresses in the form of a story or, very often, in the form of some visual image, or even in the form of a dance or a complicated ritual, some generalized feeling about the nature of the world and of man’s experience in regard to it. Myth is unpretentious, in the sense that it doesn’t claim to be strictly true. It is merely expressive of our feelings about experience. But although it is non-logical philosophy, it is often very profound philosophy, precisely because it is non-logical and non-discursive.
It permits the bringing together in the story, the image, the picture, the statue, or the dance of a number of the disparate and even apparently incommensurable or incompatible parts of our experience. It brings them together and shows them to be an indissoluble whole, exactly as we experience them. In this sense it is the most profound kind of symbolism. For example, the myth of the great Mother, which runs through all of the earlier religions, shows the mother as the principle of life, of fecundity, of fertility, of kindness and nourishing compassion; but at the same time she is the principle of death and destruction. In Hinduism, Kali is at once the infinitely kind and loving mother and the terrifying Goddess of destruction, who has a necklace of skulls and drinks the blood of human beings from a skull. This picture is profoundly realistic; if you give life, you must necessarily give death, because life always ends in death and must be renewed through death. Whether such myths are true or not is quite an irrelevant question; they are simply expressive of our reactions to the mystery of the world in which we live.
We find earlier non-logical mythical religions very frequently associated with what have been called spiritual exercises, but which are in fact psychophysical exercises. By use of chant and dance and gesture, they get a genuine kind of revelation. The physical tensions which are built up by our anxious and egocentred life are released. This release through physical gestures constitutes what the Quakers called an ‘opening’ through which the profounder forces of life without and within us can flow more freely. It is very interesting to see even within our own tradition how this occasional letting go for religious purposes has had profound and very salutary influences. The Quakers were called ‘Quakers’ for the simple reason that they quaked. The meetings of the early Quakers very frequently ended with the greater part of the assembly indulging in the strangest kind of violent bodily movements, which were profoundly releasing and which permitted, so to speak, the influx of the spirit.
As a matter of history the Quakers, as long as they quaked, had the greatest degree of inspiration and were at the height of their spiritual power. We have the same phenomenon in the Shakers, and we see it in the contemporary religious movement called Subud—the coming upon the assembled people of curiously violent and involuntary physical movements, which produce a release and permit for many people the influx and the flowing through of deeply powerful spiritual forces. Here I would like to cite the eminent French Islamic scholar Emil Dermenghem, who says that modern Europe—of course modern Europe includes modern America—is almost alone in having renounced out of bourgeois respectability and Gallic Puritanism the participation of the body in the pursuit of the spirit. In India as in Islam, chants, rhythms, and dance are spiritual exercises. But only small corners of our tradition have illustrated, through this permission to use the body, that the spirit may be left more free, a fact which is so manifestly clear when we study the history of the Oriental religions.
Religion as a system of beliefs is a profoundly different kind of religion, and it is the one which has been the most important in the West. The two types of religion—the religion of direct acquaintance with the divine and the religion of a system of beliefs—have co-existed in the West, but the mystics have always formed a minority in the midst of the official symbol-manipulating religions, and the relationship has been a rather uneasy symbiosis. The members of the official religion have tended to look upon the mystics as difficult, trouble-making people. They have even made puns about the name, calling mysticism ‘mysti-schism’—a foggy, antinomian doctrine, which doesn’t conform easily to authority. On their side the mystics have spoken not exactly with contempt—they don’t feel contempt—but with sadness and compassion about those who are devoted to the symbolic religion, because they feel that the pursuit and the manipulation of symbols is simply incapable in the nature of things of achieving what they regard as the highest end, the union with God. William Blake, who was essentially a mystic, was apt to express himself in rather violent terms about those he disagreed with. He has a little couplet where he says, ‘Come hither, my boy, tell me what thou seest there’—and the boy answers, ‘A fool tangled in a religious snare.’
Within the tradition of Western Christianity, the Mystics have been assured of a tolerated position by the perpetuation at an early stage in Christian development of what is called a pious fraud. About the sixth century there appeared a series of Christian Neoplatonic volumes under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, who was the first disciple of St Paul in Athens. These volumes were taken to be almost of apostolic value, inasmuch as Dionysius was the first disciple of St Paul. In point of fact the books were written either at the end of the fifth or at the beginning of the sixth century in Syria. The unknown author merely signed the name of Dionysius the Areopagite to them in order to give them a better hearing among his fellows.
He was a Neoplatonist who had adopted Christianity and who combined the doctrine of Neoplatonic philosophy and the practices of ecstasy with Christian doctrines. The pious fraud was extremely successful. The book was translated into Latin in the ninth century by the philosopher Scotus Erigena, and thereafter it entered into the tradition of the Western Church and acted as a kind of bulwark and guarantee for the mystical minority within the Church. It was not until recent times that the fraud was recognized for what it was. Meanwhile, in one of the odd, ironical quirks of history, this curious bit of forgery played a very important and very beneficent part in the Western Christian tradition.
We have to consider now the relationship between the religion of immediate experience and the religion primarily concerned with symbols. In this context there is a very illuminating remark by Abbot John Chapman, a Benedictine who was one of the great spiritual directors of the twentieth century. His spiritual letters are works of great interest; he was obviously a man who had had a
