Doctrine and Religion

This post is meant as a companion to the last—in which I attempted to define the personal experience of religion. I defined personal religion as an attitude and orientation in which an intuition of a transcending “beyond” has a genuine reality. While I view this experience as arising in an innate intuition of reality, an “intimation of immortality”—something that trumps, as it were, various conceptual formulations of it—I’m still fully aware that people have the use of intellect and reason and that a fully mature person will have a comprehensive view in which a conceptual framework will be present as well. Today more on the later aspect.

A doctrine literally means a teaching. In the western religious traditions, all of which are revealed religions, the teaching is the elaboration of a revelation directly or indirectly received from God. In the eastern tradition, and here I have the Buddha in mind, the teaching concerns the elaboration of the meaning of an experience persons had—and also about what they themselves said about it. In both cases a certain acceptance, usually labeled faith, is necessary before the doctrine, the teaching, can be considered on its own merits. The fundamental character of such teachings is precisely this faith or this acceptance. There is no way that the ordinary human, even with a great deal of diligence and effort, can replicate the experience on which the doctrine rests. Religious doctrines have a very different character from what we call hypotheses or theories.

To reduce the western religious conception to its absolute grounding premise, it says that the ultimate creator of reality intervenes in its creation at certain times in order to communicate its will to many people through one person. Acceptance of this premise is, I submit, required to go further into the specifics of a doctrine.

The Buddha’s teaching contains another basic assertion, namely that a realm of suffering exits where the illusion of the self is present. The self is created by attachments. When all these are withdrawn, we enter a kind of blissful annihilation.

People who have serious, sincere difficulties with either of these essentials will be left to form their own explanations of the nature of reality. What they must accept as given is that from time to time religious faiths arise from the experiences of individuals, that these experiences are very evidently of a greatly persuasive and very energetic nature—sufficiently so that they produce huge social phenomena that spread over time and, by and large, produce more benefits than harm.

Clashes between groups, the use of coercion to make unbelievers comply with the teaching, persecutions, wars, inquisitions, and crusades do not, alas, at all require a religious orientation. The religious aspect in these phenomena is incidental, not central. What is central in them is the drive to power. The twentieth century brought us ample, indeed rich samples of each of these negatives under entirely secular conditions.

It does not take a great deal of faith to believe in truth, justice, and the good. That comes with personal religion, as I’ve outlined in the last post. The doctrines, however, belong—because of their basic premises—to the realm of judgment.

Religion and Doctrine

I would here contrast religion as a personal experience and religion as a structure of doctrines. The first I would define as an attitude or orientation to reality—but with a twist. It holds within it an awareness of something beyond the tangible experiences of our day to day life—also something beyond projections derived from observing the world, thus such concepts as “humanity,” “nation,” “cosmos,” “history,” and so on. Under my definition Marxism would not qualify as a religion despite its detection of a “dialectical process” in history—however appropriately airy-fairy that sounds. Nor would atheism or materialism qualify. The last two would deny anything “beyond” the experienced. Atheists with odd intimations of positive meanings hidden somewhere invisibly have already committed heresy, as it were, in their hearts.

Intimation here is a good word although, for me, the German Ahnung, is best. Its derivation is from Die Ahnen, or the ancestors—and they’re definitely no longer here. Wordsworth’s title, Intimations of Immortality, fits my purpose nicely. My personal experiences of the religious take this form, the form of intimations, and they arise from poetry, myth, literary, and other artistic forms, including music. A sneering realist would label all this mere emotionalism—but I view such criticism as arising from the absence of inner powers rather than their presence.

Religion as experienced is an intuition. The moment concepts arise, and we hear of God quite early in life, we enter another realm. We learn to associate certain intuitions with certain structures of concepts. Intimations are intimate, personal. When I was young the concept of God produced in me images of a person in the sky. It did not connect with my own experience of awe—indeed has never linked that way in the intimate sense except in moments of extreme anxiety or gratitude. Odd, that, isn’t it. In certain moments when feelings rise beyond the normal range, when they transcend the average, we reach for the nearest concept of transcendence. There are no atheists in the trenches.

Experience teaches transcendence—and not just in extreme moments. But one does not experience it in a concrete, tangible way as one experience a tree, for instance, when climbing it as a child. The transcendental is ineffable yet felt as real. And the more open the top of one’s head, the more real it is and becomes. But between this experience and the doctrines of religions there is an enormous gulf—one so deep that the Grand Canyon would seem, by contrast, to be a mere line in the sand drawn by a wooden match-stick.

For these reasons I treat all scriptures as poetry—and view poetry as humanity’s highest achievement. I resist doctrinal claims to be communicating tangible realities, to describe in detail, however vague, what God intends or once might have done. Regarding that concept I hew resolutely to a negative theology and assert, no matter what I hear, “Not that, not that.” In the poetic mode I hear of “God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” in Genesis 3:8—and that’s fine with me, not least what came before and comes after. Eventually, by a long process, this inspiration turns into something that has nothing to do with intimations of the high; poetry is turned into doctrine; and by that time it has sunk out of my sight.