duct is supremely important and prayer may help it, but that prayer is supremely important and conduct tests it.
Archbishop Temple
The aim and purpose of human life is the unitive knowledge of God. Among the indispensable means to that end is right conduct, and by the degree and kind of virtue achieved, the degree of liberating knowledge may be assessed and its quality evaluated. In a word, the tree is known by its fruits; God is not mocked.
Religious beliefs and practices are certainly not the only factors determining the behaviour of a given society. But, no less certainly, they are among the determining factors. At least to some extent, the collective conduct of a nation is a test of the religion prevailing within it, a criterion by which we may legitimately judge the doctrinal validity of that religion and its practical efficiency in helping individuals to advance towards the goal of human existence.
In die past the nations of Christendom persecuted in the name of their faith, fought religious wars and undertook crusades against infidels and heretics ; today they have ceased to be Christian in anything but name, and the only religion they profess is some brand of local idolatry, such as nationalism, state-worship, boss-worship and revolutionism. From these fruits of (among other things) historic Christianity, what inferences can we draw as to the nature of the tree? The answer lias already been given in the section on ‘Time and Eternity. 5 If Christians used to be persecutors and are now no longer Christians, the reason is that the Perennial Philosophy incorporated in their religion was overlaid by wrong beliefs that led inevitably, since God is never mocked, to wrong actions. These wrong beliefs had one element in common—namely, an over-valuation of happenings in time and an under-valuation of the everlasting, timeless fact of eternity.
Thus, belief in the supreme importance for salvation of remote historical events resulted in bloody disputes over the interpretation of the not very adequate and often conflicting records. And belief in the sacredness, nay, the actual divinity, of the ecclesiastico-politico-financial organizations, which developed after the fall of the Roman Empire, not only added bitterness to the all too human struggles for their control, but served to rationalize and’justify the worst excesses of those who fought for place, wealth and power within and through the Church. But this is not the whole story. The same over-valuation of events in time, which once caused Christians to persecute and fight religious wars, led at last to a widespread indifference to a religion that, in spite of everything, was still in part preoccupied with eternity. But nature abhors a vacuum, and into the yawning void of this indifference there flowed the tide of political idolatry. The practical consequences of such idolatry, as we now see, are total war, revolution and tyranny.
Meanwhile, on the credit side of the balance sheet, we find such items as the following: an immense increase in technical and governmental efficiency and an immense increase in scientific knowledge—each of them a result of the general shift of Western man’s attention from the eternal to the temporal order, first within the sphere of Christianity and then, inevitably, outside it.
Chapter XX Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum
‘To such heights of evil has religion been able to drive men’
Would you know whence it is that so many false spirits have appeared in the world, who have deceived themselves and others with false fire and false light, laying claim to information, illumination and openings of the divine Life, particularly to do wonders under extraordinary calls from God? It is this : they have turned to God without turning from themselves; would be alive to God before they are dead to their own nature. Now religion in the hands of self, or corrupt nature, serves only to discover vices of a worse kind than in nature left to itself. Hence are all the disorderly passions of religious men, which burn in a worse flame than passions only employed about worldly matters ; pride, self-exaltation, hatred and persecution, under a cloak of religious zeal, will sanctify actions which nature, left to itself, would be ashamed to own.
William Law
to God without turning from self— the JL formula is absurdly simple; and yet, simple as it is, it explains all the follies and iniquities committed in the name of religion. Those who turn to God without turning from themselves are tempted to evil in several characteristic and easily recognizable ways. They are tempted, first of all, to practise magical rites, by means of which they hope to compel God to answer their petitions and, in general, to serve their private or collective ends. All the ugly business of sacrifice, incantation and what Jesus called ‘vain repetition’ is a product of this wish to treat God as a means to indefinite self-aggrandizement, rather than as an end to be reached through total self-denial. Next, they are tempted to use the name of God to justify what they do in pursuit of place, power and wealth.
And because they believe themselves to have divine justification for their actions, they proceed, with a good conscience, to perpetrate abominations, ‘which nature, left to itself, would be ashamed to own.* Throughout recorded history an incredible sum of mischief has been done by ambitious idealists, self-deluded by their own verbiage and a lust for power into a conviction that they were acting for the highest good of their fellow-men. In the past, the justification for such wickedness was ‘God’ or ‘the Church,’ or ‘the True Faith’; today idealists kill and torture and exploit in the name of ‘the Revolution,’ ‘the New Order,’ ‘the World of the Common Man,’ or simply ‘the Future.’ Finally there are the temptations which arise when the falsely religious begin to acquire the powers which are the fruit of their pious and magical practices.
For, let there be no mistake, sacrifice, incantation and ‘vain repetition’ actually do produce fruits, especially when practised in conjunction with physical austerities. Men who turn towards God without turning away from themselves do not, of course, reach God; but if they devote themselves energetically enough to their pseudo-religion, they will get results. Some of these results are doubtless the product of auto-suggestion. (It was through ‘vain repetition’ that Coue got his patients to cure themselves of their diseases.) Others are due, apparently, to that ‘something not ourselves’ in the psychic medium—that something which makes, not necessarily for righteousness, but always for power.
Whether this something is a piece of second-hand objectivity, projected into the medium by the individual worshipper and his fellows and predecessors; whether it is a piece of first-hand objectivity, corresponding, on the psychic level, to the data of the material universe; or whether it is a combination of both these things, it is impossible to determine. All that need be said in this place is that people who turn towards God without turning from themselves often seem to acquire a knack of getting their petitions answered and sometimes develop considerable supernormal powers, such as those of psychic healing and extra-sensory perception. But, it may be asked: Is it necessarily a good thing to be able to get one’s petitions answered in the way one wants them to be? And how far is it spiritually profitable to be possessed of these ‘miraculous’ powers? These are questions which were considered in the chapter on ‘Prayer’ and will be further discussed in the chapter on ‘The Miraculous.’
The Grand Augur, in his ceremonial robes, approached the shambles and thus addressed the pigs. ‘How can you object to die? I shall fatten you for three months. I shall discipline myself for ten days and fast for three. I shall strew fine grass and place you bodily upon a carved sacrificial dish. Does not this satisfy you?’
Then, speaking from the pigs’ point of view, he continued: ‘It is better perhaps, after all, to live on bran and escape from the shambles.’
‘But then,’ he added, speaking from his own point of view, ‘to enjoy honour when alive, one would readily die on a war-shield or in the headsman’s basket.’
So he rejected the pigs’ point of view and adopted his own point of view. In what sense, then, was he different from the
pigs?
Chuang Tqu
Anyone who sacrifices anything but his own person or his own interests is on exactly the same level as Chuang Tzu’s pigs. The pigs seek their own advantage inasmuch as they prefer life and bran to honour and the shambles; the sacrificers seek their own advantage inasmuch as they prefer the magical, God-constraining death of pigs to the death of their own passions and self-will. And what applies to sacrifice, applies equally to incantations, rituals and vain repetitions, when these are used (as they all too frequently are, even in the higher religions) as a form of compulsive magic. Rites and vain repetitions have a legitimate place in religion as aids to recollectedness, reminders of truth momentarily forgotten in the turmoil of worldly distractions. When spoken or performed as a kind of magic, their use is either completely pointless; or else (and this is worse) it may have ego-enhancing results, which do not in any way contribute to the attainment of man’s final, end.
The vestments of Isis are variegated to represent the cosmos; that of Osiris is white, symbolizing the Intelligible Light beyond the cosmos.
Plutarch
So long as the symbol remains, in the worshipper’s mind, firmly attached and instrumental to that which is symbolized, the use of such things as white and variegated vestments can do no harm. But if the symbol breaks loose, as it were, and becomes
