RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY

We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy. It shrinks from dogmatic general statement and expresses itself only partially and by innuendo. It seems to me that few conceptions are less instructive than this re-interpretation of religion as perverted sexuality. It reminds one, so crudely is it often employed, of the famous Catholic taunt that the Reformation may be best understood by remembering that its fons et origo original: "source and origin." was Luther’s wish to marry a nun: the effects are infinitely wider than the alleged causes, and for the most part opposite in nature.

It is true that in the vast collection of religious phenomena, some are undisguisedly amatory—e.g., sex-deities and obscene rites in polytheism, and ecstatic feelings of union with the Saviour in a few Christian mystics. But then why not equally call religion an aberration of the digestive function, and prove one’s point by the worship of Bacchus Roman god of wine. and Ceres Roman goddess of agriculture., or by the ecstatic feelings of some other saints about the Eucharist? Religious language clothes itself in such poor symbols as our life affords, and the whole organism gives overtones of comment whenever the mind is strongly stirred to expression. Language drawn from eating and drinking is probably as common in religious literature as is language drawn from the sexual life. We “hunger and thirst” after righteousness; we “find the Lord a sweet savor;” we “taste and see that he is good.” Spiritual milk for American babes, a sub-title of the once-famous New England Primer, suggests that Christian devotional literature indeed quite floats in milk, thought of from the point of view, not of the mother, but of the greedy babe.

Saint François de Sales, for instance, thus describes the ‘prayer of quietude’: “In this state the soul is like a little child still at the breast... Our Lord desires that our will should be satisfied with sucking the milk which His Majesty pours into our mouth.”