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Page 50
Thus an almost universal trait of the religious temperament is in
its delight in beauty. Sometimes it is repressed by an irreligious
asceticism or narrowed and stunted by a literal and external faith.
But when the religious man is left free, it is appropriate to his
genius that he finds the world full of a high pleasure crowded with
sound, color, fragrance, form, in which he takes exquisite delight.
There is, in short, a serene and poetic naturalism, loosely called
"nature-worship," which is keenly felt by both saints and sinners.
All it needs for its consecration and perfection is to help men to
see that this naturalism is vital and precious because, as a matter
of fact, it is something more than naturalism, and more than pleasure
objectified.
Recall, for instance, the splendors of the external world and that
best season of our climate, the long, slow-breathing autumn. What
high pleasure we take in those hushed days of mid-November in the
soft brown turf of the uplands, the fragrant smell of mellow earth and
burning leaves, the purple haze that dims and magnifies the quiescent
hills. Who is not strangely moved by that profound and brooding peace
into which Nature then gathers up the multitudinous strivings, the
myriad activities of her life? Who does not love to lie, in those
slow-waning days upon the sands which hold within their golden cup the
murmuring and dreaming sea? The very amplitude of the natural world,
its far-flung grace and loveliness, spread out in rolling moor and
winding stream and stately forest marching up the mountain-side,
subdues and elevates the spirit of a man.
Now, so it has always been and so men have always longed to be the
worshipers of beauty. Therefore they have believed in a conscious and
eternal Spirit behind it. Because again we know that personality is
the only thing we have of absolute worth. A man cannot, therefore,
worship beauty, wholly relinquish himself to its high delights, if he
conceives of this majestic grace as impersonal and inanimate. For that
which we worship must be greater than we. Behind it, therefore, just
because it seems to us so beautiful, must be something that calls to
the hidden deeps of the soul, something intimately akin to our own
spirits. So man worships not nature, but the God of nature; senses an
Eternal Presence behind all gracious form. For that interprets beauty
and consecrates the spell of beauty over us. This gives a final
meaning to what the soul perceives is an utter loveliness. This gives
to beauty an eternal and cosmic significance commensurate to its charm
and power. As long as men's hearts surge, too, when the tide yearns
up the beach; as long as their souls become articulate when the birds
sing in the dawn, and the flowers lift themselves to the sun; so long
will men believe that only from a supreme and conscious Loveliness,
a joyous and a gracious Spirit could have come the beauty which is so
intimately related to the spirit of a man.
But not all saints and sinners are endowed with this joy and insight,
this quick sensitiveness to beauty. Some of them cannot find the
eternal and transcendent God in a loveliness which, by temperament,
they either underrate or do not really see. There are a great many
good people who cannot take beauty seriously. They become wooden and
suspicious and uncomfortable whenever they are asked to perceive or
enjoy a lovely object. Incredible though it seems, it appears to them
to be unworthy of any final allegiance, any complete surrender, any
unquestioning joy. But there are other ways in which they, too, may
come to this sense of transcendence, other aspects of experience which
also demand it. Most often it is just such folk who cannot perceive
beauty, because they are practical or scientific or condemned to mean
surroundings, who do feel to the full the grim force and terror of
the external world. Prudence, caution, hard sense are to the fore with
them! Very well; there, too, in these perceptions is an open door for
the human spirit to transcend its environment, get out of its physical
shell. The postulate of the absolute worth of beauty may be an
argument for God drawn from subjective necessity. But the postulate of
sovereign moral Being behind the tyranny and brutality of nature is
an argument of objective necessity as well; here we all need God to
explain the world.
For we deal with what certainly appear to be objective aspects of the
truth, when we regard ourselves in our relation to the might of the
physical universe. For even as men feed upon its beauty, so they have
found it necessary to discover something which should enable them to
live above and unafraid of its material and gigantic power. We have
already seen how there appears to be a cosmic hostility to human life
which sobers indeed those who are intelligent enough to perceive
it. It is only the fool or the brute or the sentimentalist who is
unterrified by nature. The man of reflection and imagination sees his
race crawling ant-like over its tiny speck of slowly cooling earth and
surrounded by titanic and ruthless forces which threaten at any moment
to engulf it. The religious man knows that he is infinitely greater
than the beasts of the field or the clods of the highway. Yet Vesuvius
belches forth its liquid fire and in one day of stark terror the great
city which was full of men is become mute and desolate. The proud
liner scrapes along the surface of the frozen berg and crumples like
a ship of cards. There is a splash, a cry, a white face, a lifted
arm, and then all the pride and splendor, all the hopes and fears, the
gorgeous dreams, the daring thoughts are gone. But the ice floats on
unscarred and undeterred and the ocean tosses and heaves just as it
did before.
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