4. Lang. The Making of Religion
By Andrew Lang, M.A., LL.D. London, New York and Bombay: Longmans, Greene & Co. 1898. 1 n his dedicatory letter to Principal Donaldson, Mr. Lang intimates that I these chapters on the early history of religion "may be taken as representing the Gifford Lectures" delivered by him; "though in fact," he adds, "they contain very little that was spoken from Lord Gifford's chair."
Unsystematic, diffuse, repetitious, desultory, "jotty," the whole discussion, nevertheless, not only is clothed with that piquant literary quality which Mr. Lang gives his writings, but is also of undeniable scientific importance.
The object of the book is to discuss afresh the origin of the two fundamental beliefs which lie at the base of what we call "Religion"—the belief in God and the belief in the immortality of the soul. If these beliefs arose, comments Mr. Lang, "in actual communion with Deity (as the first at least did, in the theory of the Hebrew Scriptures), or if they could be proved to arise in an unanalysable sensus numinis, or even in 'a perception
of the Infinite' (Max Müller), religion would have a divine, or at least a necessary source. To the Theist, what is inevitable cannot but be divinely ordained; therefore religion is divinely preordained; therefore, in essentials, though not in accidental details, religion is true.… But if religion, as now understood among men, be the latest evolutionary form of a series of mistakes, fallacies, and illusions, if its germ be a blunder, and its present form only the result of progressive but unessential refinements on that blunder, the inference that religion is untrue—that nothing actual corresponds to its hypothesis—is very easily drawn" (p. 51). The latter view has attained among anthropologists almost the position of a fixed truth.
The current teaching is briefly that man first derived the conception of "spirit" from the phenomena of sleep, dreams, shadow, trance, and hallucination; that his first worship was directed to the souls of his dead kindred and to spiritual existences fashioned on the same lines; and that, as the result of a variety of processes, these "spirits" prospered until they became gods, and at last one of them became supreme: thus "the ideas of God and of the soul are the result of early fallacious reasonings about misunderstood experiences" (p. 1). Even so, Mr. Lang is not prepared to acknowledge that "religion" may be lightly set aside as only a huge blunder.
"All our science itself is the result of progressive refinements upon hypotheses originally erroneous, fashioned to explain facts misconceived."
Why may not our religion likewise, "even granting that it arose out of primitive fallacies and false hypotheses," have yet "been refined, as science has been, through a multitude of causes, into an approximate truth" (p.
51)? But it seems more directly to the point to ask whether the current teaching is accordant with the facts. Mr. Lang thinks that it is not. And it is the object of this book to show that in two crucial points it is not; or, as he more coyly expresses it, that "there are two points of view from which the evidence as to religion in its early stages has not been steadily contemplated"
(p. 2). He proposes to reopen the matter at these two points and to raise anew the two questions: Whether man arrived at belief in the existence of a "soul" solely through a misinterpretation of such simple phenomena as those of sleep and dreams; and whether man attained the conception of God through an evolution from the idea of "spirit." To both questions he returns a negative reply. And it is the purpose of his book to validate these two negative replies.
Mr. Lang justly points out that the two positions thus taken up by him are independent of each other. The establishment of them both would be, of course, the ruin of the presently dominant theory of the origin of religion. But the establishment of both is not essential for that result. It might well be that man arrived at the notion of "spirit" through a misinterpretation of the phenomena of dreams and the like, and yet, if his idea of God is not a development of his doctrine of "spirit," this fact would have no bearing on the validity of his doctrine of God. Mr. Lang unites the discussion of the two questions in this volume thus, not because they are essential to one another, but because he conceives that the developed idea of religion, as prevalent among the higher races at present, is a complex of the two ideas of the immortality of the soul and of the existence of an infinite moral Ruler and Judge. He is, therefore, at pains to investigate the origins of both ideas. His book thus falls into two very different portions.
In the first he seeks to bring forward indications that "the savage theory of the soul may be based, at least in part, on experiences which cannot … be made to fit into any purely materialistic system of the universe" (p. 2). In the second he presents evidence which shows that the idea of God was not dependent on or derived from the idea of "spirit," but was of wholly independent origin, and was capable of a very high development apart from the aid of the idea of "spirit"—though, of course, this idea supplied a formula by which the Mighty Being already envisaged could be more
adequately conceived, as well as an elevating conception of man's own nature. The importance of thus separating the idea of God from that of "spirit" is obvious. But we do not see why the idea of immortality also may not equally validly and with equal advantage be separated from that of "spirit." Men believed in God, as Mr. Lang shows, without the aid of any metaphysical conception of "spirit." Why might they not equally readily have believed in their own future existence apart from a conscious elaboration of a doctrine of "spirit"? It is also a question worth asking at this point, What does Mr. Lang mean by "spirit"? In this query we may indeed place our finger on a weak point in the book. Mr. Lang does not seem to keep clearly before him any consistent definition of this term, fundamental though it is to his whole argument. He seems to use it prevailingly as equivalent to "ghost," and to conceive it merely negatively as over against solid matter. Indeed, as we read his pages we are reminded of the old scholastic pleasantry which replied to the query, "What is matter?"
"Never mind"; and to the query, "What is mind?" "No matter." But what "spirit" is as distinguished from what it is not, Mr. Lang does not seem to stop to consider. If, however, "spirit" means, positively, nothing but thinking, feeling, willing being—that is, if it is practically a synonym for "person"—then, of course, every person has the idea of "spirit"
(undeveloped of course) given in the most immediate and intimate action of his self-consciousness: and the idea of a personal Ruler is already the idea of a spiritual God and, as well, the idea of the continued life of a person is already the idea of spiritual immortality. The metaphysical development of this conception is, to be sure, a different matter. We are, meanwhile, confused, and we think Mr. Lang confuses himself, by his undefined usage of the term. We think, had he clearly discriminated the differing connotations of the word, he would have argued that the idea of "spirit" (= ghost) was no more necessary to the belief in immortality than it is to the
belief in God: and would have sought (and found) evidence of early belief in continued life and in future rewards and punishments either before or certainly apart from the emergence in thought of any developed metaphysics of "spirit." Certainly, at all events, such a state of mind is not uncommon to-day. The whole first section of Mr. Lang's book, thus, appears to us unnecessary to his avowed purpose. It is not required to show that men arrived at the conception of "spirit" by a valid pathway in order to obtain a valid starting-point for belief in immortality. In the order of developing thought, the idea of immortality would rather precede that of "spirit" in this sense: men would naturally believe in their own future existence before they fully wrought out a theory of the mode of that existence. Nevertheless we are grateful for the chapters which investigate the possible and the actual grounds on which savage men may have come to the conviction of the existence of a something in man different from his bodily organism which they could speak of as "that in men which makes them live," and which they pictured as subject of experiences beyond the confines of the merely bodily life.
The professed purpose of these chapters is to offer evidence that the inference drawn by primitive man that he possessed a "soul" did not necessarily rest on phenomena which readily admit of a materialistic explanation. Mr. Lang marshals an array of supernormal experiences asserted to occur among savage races, on the basis of which such an inference would not seem so absurd as it is commonly represented. He then parallels these asserted supernormal experiences with similar ones, occurring not among savages, but among the cultured races of the modern world, and subject to the investigation of trained scientific intellects, with the effect of raising the question whether they are to rank merely among asserted experiences, or must not rather be believed to have actually occurred. "If so," he observes, "the savage philosophy and its supposed
survivals in belief will appear in a new light," and it may at least be wise "to suspend our judgment, not only as to the origins of the savage theory of spirits, but as to the materialistic hypothesis of the absence of a psychical element in man" (p. 71). The discussion of these points leads Mr. Lang into a very obscure region—into the region of hypnotism, clairvoyance, crystalgazing, hallucinations, prophetic dreams, and the like. It is too much of a jungle for unwonted feet to tread. But we think he fairly makes out his point that there are supernormal experiences in this obscure region which are as yet insoluble on the ordinary assumptions of materialism. The evidence will, of course, appeal to different minds with different degrees of force—and indeed to the same mind at different times very differently.
Personal experience of or first-hand acquaintance with similar phenomena will count for much in the estimate put upon the narrative of such experiences in the case of others. But for ourselves we do not see how it can be successfully denied that such supernormal events as Mr. Lang relates occur. What interpretation is to be put on them is a different story. The savage man has been prone to explain supernormal knowledge of the remote, for example, by the assumption of the wandering of the separable soul temporarily from the body. Mr. Lang seems now and again to suggest that it may be explained as a telepathic communication from one mind to another. Others fall back on the assumption of common participation in the universal fühlende Seele, or on common contact with the Absolute. The savage man's theory does not seem the worst of these guesses—rather than accept any of which we prefer to remain (like Mr. Lang) without a theory, meanwhile abiding content with the conviction that there are experiences that come to the human animal which shake the foundations of the materialistic hypothesis. "No more than any other theory, nay, less than some other theories, can it account for the psychical facts which, at the lowest, we may not honestly leave out of the reckoning" (p. 172).
The great success of the volume is attained, however, in the discussion of the second of the questions to which it is devoted. Here, by an array not of strange experiences drawn from a dubious borderland, but of plain and open facts, Mr. Lang demonstrates that so far from belief in a moral
Supreme Being being the last result of a slow evolution, due to the action of advancing thought upon the original conception of ghosts, it occurs (often apart from the conception of ghosts) in the lowest known grades of savagery in a strikingly pure and complete form, and is so widely spread as to suggest its aboriginal universality. The novelty of this exhibition is perhaps not so great as Mr. Lang thinks, though it is doubtless very novel, indeed, in the scientific circles for which he specially writes; but the importance of his solid contribution to the establishment of the fact cannot easily be overestimated. After his marshaling of illustrative cases drawn from every part of the world and his luminous discussion of the relations of their theism to the other beliefs of savages, it would seem that the crudities of the Animistic theory of the origin of the idea of God are forever antiquated. "The savage Supreme Being," says Mr. Lang, "with added power, omniscience, and morality, is the idealisation of the savage, as conceived of by himself, minus fleshly body (as a rule), and minus Death.
He is not necessarily a 'spirit,' though that term may now be applied to him. He was not originally differentiated as 'spirit' or 'not spirit.' He is a Being, conceived of without the question of 'spirit' or 'no spirit' being raised; perhaps he was originally conceived of before that question could be raised by men.… In the original conception he is a powerful intelligence who was from the first: who was already active long before, by a breach of his laws, an error in the delivery of a message, a breach of ritual, or what not, death entered the world. He was not affected by the entry of death, he still exists" (pp. 203 f.). In a word, the Supreme God of the lowest races, who stands behind and above their Animism and Fetishism and even his
own mythology (p. 198), has not been conceived metaphysically but religiously: he was not primarily a "spirit"—he was and remains the Eternal,
Omniscient, Ethical Creator, Ruler and Judge of all things. No wonder that Mr. Lang is impelled to exclaim: "These high gods of low savages preserve from dimmest ages of the meanest culture the sketch of a God which our highest religious thought can but fill up to its ideal" (p. 208). To the origin of this conception he devotes little discussion, contenting himself with hints that he would reject the assignment of it to a special primeval revelation and would look with favor on the supposition that it represents an instinctive operation of the causal judgment seeking an adequate cause for the universe—to which he doubtless would not object to adding the action of that sense of dependence and responsibility which seems native to man as man. Its history he is inclined to trace in a progressive degeneration incident to the very advance of culture, the vera causa of which he discovers in the "attractions which animism, when once developed, possessed for the naughty natural man" (p. 281). He tentatively suggests that four stages in this history may be traced, represented by (1) the Australian unpropitiated
Moral Being; (2) the African neglected Being, still somewhat moral; (3) the relatively Supreme Being involved in human sacrifice, as in Polynesia; and (4) the Moral Being reinstated philosophically, or as in Israel (p. 329).
Whether, however, these stages can be made out or not, the mass of evidence offered for the main proposition is overwhelming; and we think
Mr. Lang has shown with a clearness and force which should convince the most recalcitrant that the conception of a Supreme Being, the cause of all existences and the moral ruler of the world, is native to the human race, is possessed by even its lowest representatives, and can only with difficulty be eradicated or even obscured.
It is natural, of course, that Mr. Lang should wish to see how far his conclusions "can be made to illustrate the faith of Israel." His closing
chapter is given to this subject. Perhaps it is not the most satisfactory portion of his book. Mr. Lang is as chary of the directly supernatural as most men of science of the day. But, apart from this, his remarks on the Israelitish religion and its course are most suggestive. He naturally looks upon the belief in Jehovah as "a shape of the widely diffused conception of a Moral Supreme Being, at first (or, at least, when our information begins) envisaged in anthropomorphic form, but gradually purged of all local traits by the unexampled and unique inspiration of the great Prophets" (p. 294).
"Had it not been for the Prophets," he remarks, "Israel, by the time that Greece and Rome knew Israel, would have been worshipping a horde of little gods, and even beasts and ghosts, while the Eternal would have become a mere name—perhaps, like Ndengei and Atahocan and Unkulunkulu, a jest. The Old Testament is the story of the prolonged effort to keep Jehovah in His supreme place. To make and to succeed in this effort was the differentia of Israel. Other peoples, even the lowest, had, as we prove, the germinal conception of a God.… 'But their foolish heart was darkened' " (p. 220). Upon the current "critical" theories of the origin of Jehovah-worship, Mr. Lang accordingly pours a well-deserved scorn. "Have critics and manual-makers," he exclaims, "no knowledge of the science of comparative religion? Are they unaware that peoples infinitely more backward than Israel was at the date supposed have already moral Supreme
Beings acknowledged over vast tracts of territory? Have they a tittle of positive evidence that early Israel was benighted beyond the darkness of Bushmen, Andamanese, Pawnees, Blackfeet, Hurons, Indians of British
Guiana, Dinkas, Negroes, and so forth? Unless Israel had this rare ill-luck (which Israel denies) of course Israel must have had a secular tradition, however dim, of a Supreme Being" (p. 312). The uniqueness of the religious history of Israel does not then consist in the mere fact of its
Theism, but in the preservation and on the whole steady elevation—not, of
course, without periods of decline and degeneration (which Mr. Lang paints far too black, p. 283)—of this universal high Theism. In the account to be given of "the historically unique genius of the Prophets" by whose instrumentality Israelitish Theism was thus preserved and developed, Mr.
Lang certainly falters: the divine purpose was exhibited in it, he is driven to admit; but beyond that single admission he will not go. But of the fact he is clear: here is a unique experience among the races of men—the progressive broadening and deepening of primitive Theism in one race, under the influence of a series of unparalleled religious teachers until a greater than all the prophets came to birth. And the uniqueness of the experience of Israel is all the more marked because of the relative indifference of Israel to the second stream of influence which, in Mr. Lang's theory, enters into the formation of religion in our modern conception of that term. "The great
Prophets of Israel, and Israel generally, were strangely indifferent to that priceless aspect of Animism, the care for future happiness, as conditioned by the conduct of the individual soul" (p. 329). "They carried Theism to its austere extreme—'though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him'—while unconcerned about the rewards of Animism" (p. 295). And so it seems that "early Israel having, as far as we know, a singular lack of interest in the future of the soul, was born to give himself up to the developing, undisturbed, the theistic conception, the belief in a righteous Eternal" (pp.
332 f.).
We may not find here quite all that we could wish: but surely we find what is fundamental in the Christian conception of the history and mission of the religion of Israel, and the germ of much else. One feels that Mr. Lang needs only to give a somewhat more detailed study to the development of that religion, to be forced to posit something more than what we may speak of as natural inspiration in the Prophets, for example, in order to account for their unique work. And one is strengthened in such a feeling by reading
such a treatise, for instance, as Giesebrecht's "Die Berufsbegabung der alttestamentlichen Propheten." Giesebrecht is quite as keen as Mr. Lang can be, to account as far as possible for the prophetic teaching on natural grounds, that is, without the assumption of direct supernatural revelation; and his postulation of a natural Ahnungsvermögen as the basis of the Prophetic phenomena would, one would think, be attractive to Mr. Lang.
But a reader of Mr. Lang's acuteness would soon discover that even Giesebrecht does not succeed in accounting for the Prophetic phenomena by eliminating all direct supernatural communication from them; and we fancy his candor would gradually lead him to the conviction that there is a deep discrimination between religions that he has not yet clearly made, which nevertheless the facts require—a discrimination by which, over against those religions which are the product of men's reaching up after God if haply they may grasp Him, is set the religion which is the product of God's reaching down to men if haply He may restore them to communion with Himself.
1. 1 The Presbyterian and Reformed Review, ix. 1898, pp. 744–749.