Gordon W. Allport, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, has been a teacher at Robert College, Istanbul, Turkey, and at Dartmouth College. He is a past president of the American Psychological Association and of the Eastern Psychological Association. Among the books of which he is author are: Personality: a Psychological Interpretation; The Individual and his Religion; The Nature of Prejudice; Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality.
A dialogue between Harry Holworthy,
Junior in College and his professor of
psychology, Andrew Allen. The scene is the
professor's office; the occasion, a psychological
autobiography, written for Allen's
course, The Development of the Normal
Personality.
ALLEN: Won't you sit down? Have a smoke? --
I've been reading your term paper, and find it
interesting. What you say about not getting on
well with your father, about feeling inferior at
athletics, and being so self-conscious, and not
regarding college as close enough to life, and not
finding any values that you can take seriously,
and being cynical and sometimes depressed -- all
very interesting. And then, the pages and pages
you devote to your sex life: such pre-occupation,
such worries, and such candor. It shows that you
feel all tangled up, and yet that you can express
yourself with very few inhibitions.
HARRY: Well, you know, I found it very interesting
to talk about myself once I got started. Don't
you think my life's an unusual mess, Professor?
Do I need psychotherapy or something? Do you
think I'm neurotic?
3
ALLEN: Oh, I don't know. You sound much like
the Great American Boy to me. I have to be
careful of these term papers. If I ever shuffled
them together I'd never be able to sort them out.
Each one reads so much like all the rest. Yet,
nearly all you fellows regard yourselves as more
introverted, more anxious, more inferior, than
all the others, and you all complain that life
doesn't make a great deal of sense. You don't
realize how much alike you are, having the same
worries about yourselves, and being perplexed
by the social disruptions in the world to-day.
TROUBLE: THE FOCUS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
HARRY: Maybe I do take myself too seriously. I
didn't know I was so much like the other fellows.
But don't we have to take ourselves seriously?
What else is there these days that makes any
sense?
ALLEN: Of course, we have to take our own troubles
seriously. If we don't, nobody else will. Trouble
is the focus of every autobiography. Everyone
has his pet pains and fears to contend with, and
I have come to feel that no personality is entirely
normal nor mature until one's sufferings are secured
in some long-range perspective. That is
what I find lacking in your biography and in the
autobiographies of nearly all students: the
perspective that gives the stamp of maturity to
personality.
HARRY: How do you mean?
4
ALLEN: I mean specifically that given his whole
life to write about, with no restrictions whatever,
only about one student in ten will mention anything
in his personal document about his religious
life. Can you perhaps tell me why that is so?
HARRY: Well, I never thought particularly about
the subject while I was writing. Religion did
come up once or twice but I left it out.
ALLEN: Why did you?
HARRY: I'll tell you frankly. I thought psychologists
were beyond taking religion seriously. Didn't I
read somewhere the statement that "the loss of
the soul is one of the chief points of pride in the
science of the soul"?
ALLEN: Probably you did; it's a telling paradox.
QUESTIONS A PSYCHOLOGIST CANNOT ANSWER
HARRY: And didn't a psychologist by the name of
Leuba show some years ago that less than half
of the physical scientists believed in the God of
the Christian Church, and a still smaller percentage
of psychologists? If I remember rightly, among
the most prominent psychologists then living, only
thirteen per cent said they believed in
the Christian God, and only eight per cent
believed in immortality.
ALLEN: I think your memory is accurate. And I
don't suppose the ratio has changed greatly in the
past thirty years, even though there is recently a
5
rise of interest among psychologists in religious
phenomena.
HARRY: Well, I wouldn't expect a psychologist who
knows all about the workings of the human mind
to accept anything anyone says about his religion.
He'd see through the fantasies and rationalizations.
For my part I've come to see what an illusion it
all is.
ALLEN: We'd better correct one statement you just
made. You say psychologists know all about the
workings of the human mind. Actually they
know very little and Leuba's disbelievers knew
very little. As a matter of fact, there's not one
single basic question concerning the human mind
that psychologists can answer. Where did it come
from? Psychologists do not know. How is it
related to our nerves and muscles, and to the
material world? Even this fundamental question
we cannot answer. Where is mind going when the
body dies? The psychologist doesn't know. Most
important of all, what ought we do with our minds
now that we have them? Again, psychologists
haven't a word to say.
HARRY: You mean that so far as these basic questions
are concerned we might as well believe theological
dogma and let it go at that?
ALLEN: I mean, where psychologists are ignorant,
and in all likelihood will remain ignorant, there
is no logic in following what seems to be their
collective prejudice against religion.
6
HARRY: Well, if they are so ignorant, why do they
tend not only to disbelieve, but to disparage
religion? You can't say they don't. Take Freud,
or take that young instructor --
DEBUNKING AN INEXPENSIVE DIVERSION
ALLEN: I know. Having a nickle's worth of knowledge,
some psychologists are willing to spend it
lavishly. Many invest it in shocks and surprises
that gain them attention. Debunking is an inexpensive
diversion.
HARRY: But isn't it natural? Even though they
may not know any fundameutal answers they do
know a thing or two about wishful thinking, and
about sex symbolism and about escape mechanisms.
They know about the psychological roots of
religion. ... Come to think about it, I recall a
neat syllogism which I made in my notes after
reading Leuba. It strikes me as good reasoning:
Major Premise: God in any knowable sense
can exist only in human experience, and through
human inference;
Minor Premise: All human experience and
human inference are subject matter for psychology;
Conclusion: Therefore, God in any intelligible
sense is exclusively a psychological phenomenon.
ALLEN: Good! You've got the argument down pat.
It says that the moment we have any consciousness
whatsoever of God, or any thoughts of Him, not
to speak of any joy, consolation, inner radiance,
or awe, we make of Him an empirical God,
7
and as such He becomes a datum for psychology
and for psychology only. A purely metaphysical
God, it is admitted, would be inaccessible to
psychological science, but such a God is not the
God people think about. As soon as any experience
of Him is claimed, the entire question becomes at
once psychological.
HARRY: Well, what's wrong with that? It seems to
me perfectly logical, and does away once and for
all with the possibility of taking religion seriously;
as anything objectively valid, I mean.
PSYCHOLOGISTS DO NOT GO FAR ENOUGH
ALLEN: We've stated pretty clearly certain premises
of what is called the naturalistic view of
religion. Although metaphysicians have attacked
it fiercely, it has much to be said for it. Let's
follow it for a while, because I happen to believe
that for intellectual people like yourself the
naturalistic road is the most congenial one to
travel. The trouble is that most psychologists who
have travelled it, don't go down it far enough.
They get tired half way, and then sit down and
write a book, as Leuba and Freud, and scores of
others have done. Some, like James and Thouless,
have gone far enough to glimpse a point of
convergence where the naturalistic road and the
supernatural seem to meet.
HARRY: Let's go. I've attended a lot of bull
sessions on religion, but not with a psych prof
before.
8
ALLEN: Then we'll start with a handful of simple
facts that I think no one can doubt. They are
all empirical facts of a natural order. Let's say
they constitute some of the psychological roots
of religion.
SOME OF THE ROOTS OF RELIGION
We know that people get their first ideas of God
in childhood, and that these ideas are always
twisted by the child to fit his own pint-sized mind.
Many children confuse God with Santa Claus,
some think their father is God. One boy thought
an onrushing locomotive was God.
HARRY: You know when I was a kid I lived on a
farm. My mother told me God was high and
bright. For quite a while I went around thinking
that the weather vane on the barn was God, because
it was the highest and brightest thing I knew.
ALLEN: That's a good illustration for my point.
Children, and adults too for that matter, think
in terms of their own experience. What other
terms can they think in? Remember, we're leaving
out for the time being the hypothesis of divine
revelation. Even the saints, and Christ Himself,
continually represented what to them were
religious realities in homely analogies. The
parables, beautifully chosen as they are, are
constructions out of everyday experience of the
same type as your first idea of God. The Kingdom
of God is like unto a mustard seed; God is like
unto a weather vane. ...
9
HARRY: Heaven is a place of palms and harps and
wings.
ALLEN: Precisely. Those traditional images preserve
for us the limitations of St John the Revelator's
human experience. In his day palms were
given to conquerors, harps were the loveliest
musical instruments he ever heard, and a bird's
wings were the fastest means of movement.
HARRY: Aren't a lot of sex symbols mixed up in
religious worship?
ALLEN: Wouldn't it be extraordinary if there
weren't? Creation and procreation are linked,
and sex is one of the most urgent of human
experiences. Wouldn't anyone, excepting Queen
Victoria, be likely to draw some religious images
from the sexual sphere, just as from the sphere of
nourishment: the land of milk and honey, the
Bread of Life? Our little store of human experience
is all we have to symbolize great thoughts we
are trying to express. Food and love and security
and sex must all be drawn on; for religious thinking,
like other kinds of thinking, proceeds in terms
of analogy.
HARRY: What bothers me is the way people run to
religion just as soon as they get scared. "There
are no atheists in foxholes," you know, and all
that. When I was a kid I was left alone one
afternoon in the house and for some reason I was
scared blue. I remember that I prayed and prayed
and promised all sorts of favors to the Almighty
if He would protect me.
10
ALLEN: Why not? Fear is undoubtedly one of the
chief psychological roots of belief in the
supernatural.
HARRY: But it seems to me that all these earthy
roots just show that religion is nothing but a
rationalization of human emotions, a fantasy to
explain why we feel as we do. Freud calls it the
Great Illusion. For example, don't you think that
St. Paul's conversion might have been an epileptic
fit with hallucinations?
ALLEN: It's quite possible, but did you ever stop
to think that an epileptic fit might be the best
avenue to the discovery of truth? And that we'd
all be better off if we had more fits? The ancients
suspected as much when they called epilepsy the
divine disease.
HARRY: Are you trying to say that we'd all be
better off if we were abnormal?
THE ROOTS DO NOT INVALIDATE THE FRUITS
ALLEN: I'm trying to say that the psychological
roots of religion have nothing to do with the
validity of religious experience. Take an example
from philosophy. Kant, you know, was a rationalist.
Now a psychologist might point out that
having a sunken chest and poor physical stamina,
he was a failure physically and had few fundamental
emotional satisfactions in life. Partly as
a consequence, therefore, he evolved his famous
doctrine of "pure reason," and said that emotions
were nothing but "diseases of the intellect."
11
Here, let us say, was the psychological root of
Kant's philosophy, but still he might have been
quite correct in conclusion. Perhaps rationalism
is the truest philosophy, even though it takes an
inferiority feeling like Kant's to produce the
insight.
Or, take the example of George Fox, the founder
of Quakerism, who was apparently psychopathic.
Certainly he was eccentric, had visions, heard
voices. But his powerful, if erratic personality,
has affected countless lives favorably. To be
specific, think of the Friends Service Committee
and all that it has done to relieve human
suffering. George Fox's psychopathy was one of
the psychological roots of this organization, but
the value of the Friends Service Committee to
mankind has nothing whatsoever to do with Fox's
queerness.
HARRY: Sounds like what they called pragmatism
in my philosophy course.
ALLEN: Perhaps it does. But pragmatism is only
the first step forward out of the muddle we were
in. Many naturalists keep their eyes glued on
the glands and nerves and passions and neuroses
that are the matrix of human nature, and they
never see what grows out of this matrix. No working
of the human mind is adequately characterized
by describing its roots. The flower, the
fruit, and the influence of a mental condition on
its possessor and on other people are parts of
the story of that mental condition.
12
HARRY: Your point is that naturalists being
preoccupied with the roots of the mind ignore the
fruits of the mind?
ALLEN: Yes, or put it this way. If they are so bent
on disclosing causes let them disclose causes all
along the line. Many psychologists have shown
the effect of fear upon the development of man's
religious nature, but few have commented on the
effect of the religious outlook upon man's fear.
If we define in terms of causation we'll have to
say that religion is, in part, what grows out of
human anxiety; it is also, in part, what abolishes
human anxiety.
HARRY: Would you say religion is like a good
bridge? If it holds up and does its job no one can
disparage it just because the engineer who designed
it had some fear or obsession or complex.
ALLEN: Yes, as a matter of fact, if the engineer
was neurotically sensitive and cautious the bridge
might endure all the better for it. I do not mean
to imply that all neuroses are so benign in their
effects. Many of them are vicious and crippling.
But the point is that the existence of a neurosis
in a given mind does not in itself invalidate that
mind's religious thinking.
HARRY: I'm still worried about religious symbols.
There seem to be more of them than are strictly
necessary, especially in a liturgical Church. What
are they good for?
ALLEN: Well, you'll agree that some symbols are
necessary both for communication and expression of
13
thoughts and feelings. To express or communicate
the religious striving we are forced to use
analogies all along the way. The imagery of
hymns is an interesting study in this connection.
So, too, is The Book of Common Prayer. Take
the Prayer of Humble Access which contains the
phrase, "We are not worthy so much as to gather
up the crumbs under thy Table." What a simple
domestic image this is, but what a large thought
and emotion it tries to express. William James put
the matter in this way, "Religious language clothes
itself with such poor symbols as our life affords."
THE CRUX OF RELIGION
HARRY: But what is it that is being symbolized?
You spoke a moment ago of "the religious striving."
Seems to me that is the center of our whole
problem. Just what is the religious striving?
ALLEN: Still approaching the subject naturalistically,
I should say that the root of the religious
striving lies in the fact that people always try to
do things far in excess of their capacities.
HARRY: I don't quite get your point.
ALLEN: Let's put it this way then: the human mind
has the marvelous property of soaring way off
miles beyond its own competence. For example,
at the present moment, we are not able to achieve
peace, or a world government, or a decent social
order; but that inability doesn't prevent us from
purposing a solution, working for it, and appointing
14
innumerable committees to focus, and if possible
achieve, our hopes and aspirations.
HARRY: Just what has that to do with religion?
ALLEN: It's the crux of the whole matter. Religious
people in their religious moments are trying to
get a satisfying solution to the persistent emotional
and intellectual riddles that confront them.
The human mind can hope for, and envision, a lot
more than it can accomplish or contain.
HARRY: Freud says somewhere that religious experience
is a sort of "oceanic feeling." Is that what you
mean?
ALLEN: It is often "oceanic" enough. One sometimes
feels a vague surging and longing without one's
ideas taking a definite form or shape. Here
is something H. G. Wells once wrote -- and he is
not ordinarily considered to be a religious person:
"At times, in the silence of the night and in rare
lonely moments, I come upon a sort of communion
of myself and something great that is not myself.
It is perhaps poverty of mind and language that
obliges me to say that this universal scheme takes
on the effect of a sympathetic person and my
communion a quality of fearless worship. These
moments happen, and they are the supreme fact of
my religious life to me; they are the crown of my
religious experiences." Note that Wells writes this
passage, as he writes everything, from the natural-
istic point of view.
15
HARRY: I remember once a few years ago I had
gone for a walk alone and came to the top of a
hill. It was a beautiful day, and I stretched out
my arms, and had a most indescribable feeling of
fullness and completeness. I remember I said out
loud something that sounds foolish now. I said,
"I know all, I see all, I am all."
ALLEN: That was a typical mystical experience. And
it is one of the forms that religious consciousness
takes. It signifies a longing to have a completely
unifying explanation of everything that lies inside
the scope of your own life, and everything that
lies beyond, which you can now only vaguely imagine.
RELIGION: THE QUEST FOR UNITY
HARRY: Could you say, in terms of certain of the
German philosophers and psychologists, that one
is religious when one's mind intends complete
unity?
ALLEN: Yes, I like the theory of intention. It plays
a big part in historical religions and it is sound
psychology. The mind is always intending something;
it is characteristically stretching to include
more than it can. When it stretches vigorously to
include all that lies within personal experience
and all that lies beyond, we have a true religious
attitude.
HARRY: Re-ligio means to bind, so I've heard. Are
people religious because they want to be whole,
and not so scattered? Would you say then that
religion is always a "quest for unity in a
disordered life"?
16
ALLEN: That, I think, is the kernel of the matter.
HARRY: But in actual religious activity we do not
always find this "intention of unity" uppermost,
do we?
ALLEN: No. It is usually present as an undercurrent,
however, and in the more mystical forms of
worship it predominates. But, you are right, the
conscious longing for unity is only one form that
religious experience takes. Sometimes it is more
related to specific needs of the moment. In prayer,
for example, intention usually arises from some
one aspect of a person's sense of incompleteness.
For instance, no human being can ever love or be
loved enough. He always wants more love, and
so prayer and worship often stress love. At other
times, fear has the upper hand, and one prays to
understand or be relieved from this fear. His mind
intends a solution of a particular problem, even if
it cannot readily produce one. Prayers, we may
say, give vent to aspiration or longing in terms of
the need that is uppermost at the time.
DIFFERENCES IN RELIGION
HARRY: That would explain why religious practice
takes so many forms, and why different people,
having different needs, go at the matter from
different points of view.
ALLEN: Yes, and here is where tolerance and
understanding are needed. Before condemning a
religious practice we must weigh the intention
behind it. The poor juggler of Notre Dame who
17
practiced his art before the shrine of the Virgin
was symbolizing in the best way he could his
purely religious intention. Even the oddest of
heathen practices often makes sense if one takes
pains to appreciate the intention behind them.
HARRY: From this point of view could we ever
criticize any religious practice at all?
ALLEN: Only I think if the intention is somehow
perverted or absent or hypocritical. When a symbol
loses its finalistic intent and for example, takes
on a merely social or prestigeful intent, it is no
longer religious and should be exposed. Some
years ago a reporter on a Boston paper wrote that
a certain clergyman gave "the most eloquent
prayer ever addressed to a Boston audience."
Here is a typical and frequent perversion of a
religious attitude. Or, if music is taken merely for
its aesthetic effect rather than as a device to
facilitate the outward reaching of the mind, it is not
a religious symbol. In principle, it seems to me that
Protestantism often suffers a displacement of the
religious attitude by the social, aesthetic, or
economic attitude.
HARRY: Don't people who belong to the same
Church have different conceptions of the nature
of God?
ALLEN: They do, and what is more each may change
his conception from moment to moment. On one
occasion or in one context, God is considered
omnipotent, in another, omniscient; or the
loving Father, or the Giver of good gifts, or
18
the Beautiful, the Harmonious, or the Actus Purus.
These varied conceptions are natural enough.
They come to light according to the direction of
our intention at the moment. Sometimes when we
stretch our minds religiously it is for the purpose
of supplementing our limited strength, sometimes
to supplement our limited love, sometimes to
obtain more understanding, or to escape our feelings
of guilt, or to find more beauty, or more peace of
mind. One might say that religious practice is the
flowering of all our various desires and their
intended fulfillment.
RELIGION: A NORMAL ACTIVITY
HARRY: You've given me two ideas I want to think
about. One is that religion somehow has more to do
with the fruit of mental life than with its roots,
and somehow has more to do with the intent of
the mind than with its content. These two points
seem to make religion a respectable and normal
activity of the human mind. You'd say, I suppose,
that every man, from your way of looking at it, is
to some degree inescapably religious.
ALLEN: Yes, I would. Every man at least at moments
intends a perfection of his own nature, a
completion of his own limited being. He imagines
a kind of future where a harmony is achieved and
riddles he encounters are explained. It sometimes
seems that the only really clean aspect of human
nature is this ability it has to intend its own
perfection.
HARRY: But if religion is a clean and normal part
19
of life, why is it that psychopaths have so many
mixed-up religious thoughts?
ALLEN: Paranoid religious states, or what we sometimes
call theopathic conditions, are really the
necessary corollary of what we have been saying.
A person who has had a bad breakdown is naturally
disoriented: he feels strange and mysterious.
What is more natural than that he should resort
to religious language to explain to himself his
mysterious feelings? We cannot argue from this
fact that pre-occupation with religion is the cause
of breakdowns; rather, just the reverse, that a
disintegrating life grasps wildly at some support,
and that this support becomes an odd mixture of
religious ideas and personal delusions.
HARRY: Don't Jung and Freud make opposite
interpretations of the relation of religion to
mental breakdowns?
ALLEN: Yes, Jung's approach is closely in line with
what I have been saying. He claims that side by
side with the decline of the religious life comes
an increase in the neuroses. His famous remark is
that of thousands of patients over thirty-five years
of age, "all have been people whose problem in
the last resort was that of finding a religious
outlook on life." To put the point in our terms,
Jung argues that an adequately comprehensive
"intention" is needed for normal maturity in the
personality.
HARRY: And Freud?
ALLEN: Freud is one of those writers who sits down
20
in a puddle before he has gone far enough down
the road of naturalism. He calls religion a "great
illusion" which is a remark on the same level as
statements to the effect that it is "the opiate of the
people," or a sublimation of sex, or an expression
of fear. The fallacy lies in fixing attention only on
certain selected roots and never considering the
fruits, and in confusing the content that sometimes
gets into religious consciousness with the intent
that is the essence of religion.
CHRISTIANITY'S FULLNESS AND ADEQUACY
HARRY: Up to now, I assume, we've been talking
about the essence of religion, without special
reference to Christianity.
ALLEN: Yes, first one has to prepare a psychological
groundwork for a sympathetic approach to all
religion. Unless one has respect for the religious
impulse wherever it is found, I don't think one
can appreciate the extraordinary fullness and
adequacy of historic Christianity.
HARRY: You seem to regard it as the best of all
possible religions. Why is that?
ALLEN: Briefly, because it has everything. For the
theoretical mind it can accommodate all that science
can discover and still challenge science to
dig deeper and deeper. For the social mind, it
contains the highroad to all successful and just
social relations, even the solution to the problems
of war. For the aesthetic mind, it gives the
absolutely satisfying conception of harmony and
21
beauty. For economic and political minds, it gives
a meaning to production and to power, and a
guide to conduct. Its goals and ideals are always
miles ahead of what any human being can fully
achieve. Christianity can never cloy, because even
for the most saintly Christian perfection lies
ahead. The saint pursues his goal all his life, but
never attains it. Christian objectives are too high
to make complete achievement possible.
HARRY: Why do you put so much stress on the
unattainability of Christian ideals?
ALLEN: For the very good reason that unending,
single-minded striving is in this life the one and
only condition of normality in personal development.
Striving is what creates unity and health in
the individual. Did you ever stop to think how
completely you would go to pieces if you ever
obtained everything you wanted?
HARRY: Isn't that idea the theme of Goethe's Faust?
ALLEN: Yes, you remember what the choir of angels
sings:
He who striving ceaselessly bestirs himself,
Him can we save.
According to his pact with the Devil, Faust would
have been damned if he had said, Hold, thou art
so fair, that is, if he had ever thought his goals
were attained. To be a complete man is what
Faust wanted, and to be a complete man he had
to aspire and plan and work and reach forever
toward something that lay always ahead.
22
HARRY: Your point is that Christianity contains all
the worth-while goals that men ever strive for?
ALLEN: That is my view. The Christian philosophy of
life is conducive to mental health because as a religion
of striving, it has adequate comprehensiveness of goals.
It catches up and focuses all the human intentions
that experience convinces us are worthy of preservation.
CHRISTIANITY: SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF GOOD
HARRY: And what about human intentions that are
evil? Why doesn't Christianity act as a magnet for
the hateful and greedy intentions that men have?
ALLEN: Because its standards are rigidly selective.
it tells what sin is and the remedy for it. If it does
not clearly solve the problem of evil, it at least
makes it possible for mankind to live with it. No
other religion seems to do so with anything like a
similar measure of success. I might add that perhaps
the reason Christianity helps us to get around
the problem of evil so well is that it completely
solves the problem of good.
HARRY: How do you mean?
ALLEN: Its central doctrine is that of the Incarnation.
Men can see in the person of Christ in concrete terms
what absolute Goodness is like. His way of life and
of thinking provides a tangible model for men to follow.
HARRY: But now, when you bring up the Incarnation
aren't you jumping out of the natural or psychological
23
frame of discourse into the realm of blind faith?
ALLEN: I'm not sure that I am. Of course there are
other types of arguments to support the doctrine,
but even ordinary operations of the human mind
carry us a long way toward its acceptance. The
elementary logic of sufficient cause leads us to
accept the Incarnation, for what else could Christ,
the perfect Model, be, excepting God, or as our
symbolism has it, the Son of God? We know that
ordinary men, even the best of them, only
approximate in slight degree such perfection.
HARRY: You make it seem that psychology and
logical thinking taken together carry us far along
the road to historic Christianity. But earlier you
said this road converges somewhere with the
supernatural approach. I suppose you mean that
psychology doesn't have anything to say about
the Realities that the religious attitude implies.
Does mere intention by itself guarantee that there
is anything beyond?
ALLEN: Of course psychological analysis stops
somewhere and faith begins. But the break is not
violent, nor does it imply any serious contradictions.
Let's take just one example, asking ourselves
this question: Does man aspire all by himself,
unaided and undirected by what theologians call
the Holy Spirit? Or, as man reaches out his hand,
does God reach out His, and thus intervene in the
psychological series of events?
HARRY: That certainly is the question. I doubt that
24
the average man will be satisfied to be told that
he is "directionally intended" toward God. He
wants to feel that God is there.
ALLEN: And there is no reason why he shouldn't.
Doesn't the very fact of his striving imply a
sufficient cause for the striving? Royce in his World
and the Individual makes the case for supposing
that self-consistent fragments of religious experience
of necessity imply a befitting context. Now
we see as through a glass darkly, and we prophesy
in part. Because this partialness seems fulfilled in
the course of religious striving, men are convinced
that clarity and completeness exist somewhere beyond
their immediate vision. ... You see this additional
step in faith is not very great. Many philosophers
regard it as a necessary step. An act of faith
merely completes our natural intention. Astronomers
seeking a new planet have a similar faith, so do
chemists seeking a new element; just so does the
religious man seeking what seems to him the
inevitable implication of his experiences to
date. Of all the available hypotheses he finds
the Christian view of life best subsumes all his
observations and experience.
THE COMPLETION OF PARTIAL EXPERIENCES
HARRY: Would you approach all the so-called mysteries
of the Christian faith by saying that they are a
necessary complement to our own partial experience?
ALLEN: Yes, they are the reciprocal of our own
limited natures. Without baptism and absolution
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our desire to improve our lives would not be adequately
focused. Without holy matrimony the desire to make
the most of our conjugal love would be unfulfilled.
Without the Holy Communion we would find it difficult
to acknowledge or remember adequately the Model and
Master we have chosen in our lives.
HARRY: I begin to see what you mean. Beyond our
own powers, we accept what more we need in
order to improve our vision and complete our
natures.
ALLEN: You put it well. ... But remember, our
conversation has taken the naturalistic road. We
must not forget that there are all kinds of men.
Some prefer to surrender their intellectual efforts
early and to take more on faith. Some would find
our line of reasoning cold and even presumptuous.
But millions of mortals taking many paths have come
to essentially the same conclusion. Even though no
two perhaps have exactly the same conception
of individual points in the Gospel or in the
sacraments, still the attention of all is riveted
to the picture of God taking human nature, and
on the Cross exemplifying manhood perfected
through the triumph of love over suffering. No
model in the history of the human race compares
with this. It is the central image toward which
Christians address themselves, finding it always
meaningful and always satisfying. Some, I admit,
see the Crucifixion as a one-time distant event,
and fail to realize its significance for men's
struggles today. But the more discerning find the
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event of present importance, seeing how day by day
men crucify the good within them, and day by day
the good within rebukes, forgives, and restores.
HARRY: Can you tell me why it is that some people
are more religious than others? From what you
say I should think that everyone would have
about the same needs, the same intentions, and
would reach the same satisfying conclusions.
ALLEN: I'm not going to attempt to answer that
question. The problem, I admit, puzzles me too.
Before I can make up my own mind I'd like to
investigate further. If we had adequate religious
autobiographies from people who are religious,
and from people who are irreligious, we'd know
better why human minds differ in this respect.
HARRY: Well, I'd be glad, now that we've had our
talk, to write you the full story of my own
religious life, such as it is. ... But you haven't
yet told me whether you think I need some kind of
psychotherapy. Don't forget I have my personal
problems.
ALLEN: I predict that your religious autobiography,
when it is completed, will be therapy enough. But
don't hurry with it. Live it before you write it.
THE PATTERN OF A RELIGIOUS AUTOBIOGRAPHY
HARRY: What do you suppose it will look like?
ALLEN: You've already told me enough about yourself
to permit me some guesses. I suppose it will
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start with an account of how, as a child, you
accepted unquestioningly the religious content
taught by your parents and by the Sunday school
you attended. Then will come the story of juvenile
doubts about the literal adequacy of this content.
When you began to study elementary psychology
you felt that what remained of the imagery,
symbols, and dogma was blown sky high. Then came,
as in every life, frustrations, inferiority, new
fears, and suffering. These emotions you found almost
too much to bear. At the same time you had a
longing to find some explanation for the maladies
and a remedy. Your mind hopped ahead, imagining
this solution or that, always bent on saving
itself from disintegration. Half-consciously your
childhood teachings lingered on, but you knew
they would have to be entirely overhauled,
changed, expanded so that they might be, not
second-hand, but first-hand fittings to your
personality. Only by degrees did it dawn on you that
historic Christianity held the complement to your
nature and a fulfillment of your needs. Like some
people you may find as the first stage a growing
conviction that Christianity holds the only
solution to social questions. Nowadays, we read
this statement more and more frequently, because
momentarily human needs are greatest in this
direction. Or you may find in historic Christian
practice that your restlessness is stilled, or your
craving for beauty is supplied, or your feelings of
guilt allayed. I cannot tell what steps it may take.
No two histories are alike. But the quest once
begun never ends, even though the goal you seek
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becomes more and more certain. Having once
experienced the blessedness of certitude, even
though but for a moment, you will never be
satisfied, but will be impelled to seek to regain
and extend this experience all your life long.
HARRY: You size me up pretty boldly -- but maybe
correctly too; I cannot yet say. Will you tell me
where the therapy comes in? You see I'm worried
about myself.
ALLEN: You will find therapy as a by-product of
your religious quest. Anyone who sets out in a
self-indulgent manner to find a cure for his inner
ailments is likely to fail in finding it. The person
who directs his attention to his religious quest
usually finds therapy along the way -- unexpectedly.
HARRY: In a vague sort of way I've known all along
that what you've just been saying is probably
right. But it's not too easy to follow this road.
ALLEN: I know: it's much easier to sit down in the
puddle and howl for help. But my guess is you're
not the type that does it.
HARRY: Thanks for thinking so. There are a lot of
people I admire and a lot that I don't admire, and
you've given me a clue to the difference between
them. Some squawk for assistance when they run
into personal trouble; the others have some sort of
inner poise that I never before quite understood.
I think I do now begin to understand it. They've
made some progress in their religious quest.
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ALLEN: I hope you see why I did not regard your
autobiography as complete. Write me another
chapter in five years, will you?
HARRY: I certainly will. I've got more thinking to
do first, and maybe some more suffering. ... I
wonder if anyone's religious ideas can be mature
before he is twenty-five or thirty years old. ...
Then if they aren't mature by thirty-five, maybe
he'll suffer the consequences as did Jung's patients.
... Well, I've got a few more years to go. ...
Anyway, you've given me something to mull over. ...
Thanks a lot.
ALLEN: Goodbye, Harry. Keep your mind on that
chapter.
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