The New Divinity

7/24/2019 The New Divinity

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The New Divinity

By Julian Huxley

This essay is taken from:

Essays of a Humanist

(Chatto & Windus, 1964)

The essay was originally published by

The Twentieth Century

The Bishop of Woolwich's courageous book, Honest to God, is impressive evidence not merely of what

he calls our present theological ferment, but of the general ideological ferment and indeed of therevolution of thought through which we are struggling.

This is the inevitable outcome of the new vision of the world and man's place and role in that world -- in

a word, of man's destiny -- which our new knowledge has revealed. This new vision is both

comprehensive and unitary. It integrates the fantastic diversity of the world into a single framework, the

pattern of all-embracing evolutionary process. In this unitary vision, all kinds of splits and dualisms are

healed. The entire cosmos is made out of one and the same world-stuff, operated by the same energy as

we ourselves. "Mind" and "matter" appears as two aspects of our unitary mind-bodies. There is no

separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no

basic cleavage between science and religion; they are both organs of evolving humanity.

This earth is one of the rare spots in the cosmos where mind has flowered. Man is a product of nearly

three billion years of evolution, in whose person the evolutionary process has at last become conscious

of itself and its possibilities. Whether he likes it or not, he is responsible for the whole further evolution

of our planet.

Dr Robinson describes the current image of God as follows: "Somewhere beyond this universe is a Being,

a centre of personal will and purpose, who created it and sustains it, who loves it and who 'visited' it in

Jesus Christ. But I need not go on, for this is 'our' God. Theism means being convinced that this Beingexists: atheism means denying that he does." However he continues as follows: "But I suspect that we

have reached a point where this mental image of God is also more of a hindrance than a help. . .. Any

image can become an idol, and I believe that Christians must go through the agonizing process in this

generation of detaching themselves from this idol." He even writes that he heartily agrees with

something I wrote many years ago in my Religion without revelation-- "The sence of spiritual relief

which comes from rejecting the idea of God as a superhuman being is enormous."


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And yet he clings to the essential personal concept of God -- "nothing," he writes, "can separate us from

the love of God"; and sums up his position in the following assertion, that "God is ultimate reality... and

ultimate reality must exist".

To the implications of these statements I shall return. Meanwhile let me state the position as I see it.

Man emerged as the dominant type on earth about a million years ago, but has only been reallyeffective as a psychosocial organism for under ten thousand years. In that mere second of cosmic time,

he has produced astonishing achievements -- but has also been guilty of unprecedented horrors and

follies. And looked at in the long perspective of evolution he is singularly imperfect, still incapable of

carrying out his planetary responsibilities in a satisfactory manner.

The radical evolutionary crisis through which man is now passing can only be surmounted by an equally

radical reorganisation of his dominant system of thought and belief. During human history, there has

been a succession of dominant systems of thought and belief, each accompanying a new organisation of

social, political and economic activities -- agriculture with its rituals of rebirth as against hunting with its

magic; early civilization with its cities and sacred kings, its written records and its priesthoods; universal

and monotheistic religion; later, the scientific, the industrial and the technological revolutions with their

corresponding patterns of thought; and now the evolutionary and humanist revolution, whose

ideological and social implications have still to be thought out.

What has all this to do with Dr Robinson's views on God, or indeed with religion at all? The answer is, a

great deal. In the first place, religion in some form is a universal function of man in society, the organ for

dealing with the problems of destiny, the destiny of individual men and women, of societies and nations,

and of the human species as a whole. Religions always have some intellectual or ideological framework,

whether myth or theological doctrine; some morality or code of behaviour, whether barbaric or ethically

rationalized; and some mode of ritualized or symbolic expression, in the form of ceremonial or

celebration, collective devotion or thanksgiving, or religious art. But, as the history and comparative

study of religions make clear, the codified morality and the ritualized expression of of a religion, and

indeed in the long run its social and personal efficacy, derives from its "theological" framework. If the

evolution of its ideological pattern does not keep pace with the growth of knowledge, with social change

and the march of events, the religion will increasingly cease to satisfy the multitude seeking assurance

about their destiny, and will become progressively less effective a a social organ.

Eventually the old ideas will no longer serve, the old ideological framework can no longer be tinkered up

to bear the weight of the facts, and a radical reconstruction becomes necessary, leading eventually to

the emergence of a quite new organisation of thought and belief, just as the emergence of new types of

bodily organization was necessary to achieve biological advance.

Such major organizations of thought may be necessary in science as much as in religion. The classical

example, of course, was the re-patterning of cosmological thought which demoted the earth from its

central position and led to the replacement of the geocentric pattern of thought by a heliocentric one. I

believe that an equally drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming

necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern. Simplified down to its bare


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essentials the stepwise reorganization of western religions thought seems to have proceeded as follows.

In its early, paleolithic stage religion was magic-centred, based on the ideas of magic force inherent in

nature, in personages such as "medicine men" and shamans, and in human incarnations, spells and

other magic practices, including witchcraft. This type of belief developed gradually into animism and so

to polydaimonism and polytheism; while with the coming of agriculture a new pattern was imposed,

centering on the ideas of fertility and rebirth, and leading to the rise of priest-kings and eventually

divinized monarchs. The next major revolution of religious thought came in the first millennium B.C with

the independent rise of the monotheist and/or universalist religions, culminating in Christianity and later

branching off into Islam. The last two thousand years have seen the development of elaborate

monotheistic theologies; but in the process their single God has broken into many, or at least has

assumed a number of distinct and indeed sometimes actively hostile forms; and their nominal

universalism has degenerated into competition for the possession of absolute truth.

Of course a great deal of magic survived into the polytheist priest-king stage, and some persists in thinly

disguised form in Christian and Mohammedan practices and ideas today. Similarly, elements of

polydaemonism and polytheism persists in the nominally monotheist religion of Christianity, in thedoctrine of the Trinity (with the virtual divinization of the Virgin in Catholicism), in the multiplication of

its Saints and Angels, and in so doing has increased its flexibility.

But to come back to DR Robinson. He is surely right in concentrating on the problem of God, rather than

on the resurrection or the after-life, for God is Christianity's central hypothesis.

But he is surely wrong in making such statements as that "God is ultimate reality". God is a hypothesis

constructed by man to help him understand what existence is all about. The god hypothesis asserts the

existence of some sort supernatural personal or superpersonal being, exerting some kind of purposeful

power over the universe and its destiny. To say that God is ultimate reality is just semantic cheating, as

well as being so vague as to become effectively meaningless (and when DR Robinson continues by

saying "and ultimate reality must exist" he is surely running round a philosophically very vicious circle).

Dr Robinson, like Dr Tillich and many other modernist theologians, seems to me, and indeed to any

humanist, to be trying to ride two horses at once, to keep his cake and eat it. He wants to be modern

and meet the challenge of our new knowledge by stripping the image of God of virtually all its spatial,

material, Freudian and anthropomorphic aspects. But he still persists in retaining the termGod, in spite

of all its implifications of supernatural power and personality; and it is these implifications, not the

modernists' fine-spun arguments, which consciously and unconsciously affect the ordinary man and

woman. Heads I win, tails you lose: humanists dislike this elaborate double-talk. The ambiguity involved

can be simply illustrated by substituting some of the modernists' definition of God for the plain word [I

think it should read world, not word -- Fredrik's comment] itself. I am sure that many opponents of freer

divorce use the phrace "whom God has joined together, let no man put asunder". If they were to

proclaim that "whom universal reality has joined together, let no man put asunder", it would not carry

the same weight.


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Today the god hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable, has lost its explanatory value and is

becoming an intellectual and moral burden to our thought. It no longer convinces or comforts, and its

abandonment often brings a deep sence of relief. Many people assert that this abandonment of the god

hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it

does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must

construct something to take its place.

Though gods and God in any meaningful sence seem destined to disappear, the stuff of divinity out of

which they have grown and developed remains. This religious raw material consists of those aspects of

nature and those experiences which are usually described as divine. Let me remind my readers that the

term divinedid not originally imply the existence of gods: on the contrary, gods were constructed to

interprete man's experiences of this quality.

Some events and some phenomena of outer nature transcend ordinary explanation and ordinary

experience. They inspire awe and seem mysterious, explicable only in terms of something beyond or

above ordinary nature.

Such magical, mysterious, awe-inspiring, divinity-suggesting facts have included wholly outer

phenomena like volcanic eruptions, thunder, and hurricanes; biological phenomena such as sex and

birth, disease and death; and also inner, psychological phenomena such as intoxication, possession,

speaking in tounges, inspiration, insanity, and mystic vision.

With the growth of knowledge most of these have ceased to be mysterious so far as rational or scientific

explicability is concerned (though there remains the fundamental mystery of existence, notably the

existence of mind). However, it is a fact that many phenomena are charged with some sort of magic or

compulsive power, and do introduce us to a realm beyond our ordinary experience. Such events and

such experience merit a special designation. For want of a better, I use the termdivine, though thisquality of divinity is not truely supernatural but transnatural-- it grows out of ordinary nature, but

transcends it. The divine is what man finds worthy of adoration, that which compels his awe.

Much of every religion is aimed at the discovery and safe-guarding of divinity in this sence, and seeks

contact and communication with what is regarded as divine. A humanist evolution-centered religion too

needs divinity, but divinity without God. It must strip the divine of the theistic qualities which man has

antropomorphically projected into it, search for its habitations in every aspect of existence, elicit it, and

establish fruitful contact with its manifestations. Divinity is the chief raw material out of which gods

have been fashioned. Today we must melt down the gods and refashion the material into new and

effective organs of religion, enabling man to exist freely and fully on the spiritual level as well as on thematerial.

What precise form these new agencies of religious thought will take it is impossible to say in this period

of violent transition. But one can make some general prophesies. The central religious hypothesis will

certainly be evolution, which by now has been checked against objective fact and has become firmly

established as a principle. Evolution is a process, of which we are products, and in which we are active

agents. There is no finality about the process, and no automatic or unified progress; but much


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improvement has occured in the past, and there could be much further improvement in the future

(though there is also the possibility of future failure and regression).

Thus the central long-term concern of religion must be to promote further evolutionary improvement

and to realise new possibilities; and this means greater fulfilment by more human individuals and fuller

achievement by more human societies

Human potentialities constitute the world's greatest resource, but at the moment only a tiny fraction of

them is being realized. The possibility of tapping and directing these vast resources of human possibility

provide the religion of the future with a powerful long-term motive. An equally powerful short-term

motive is to ensure the fullest possible development and flowering of individual personalities. In

developing a full, deep and rich personality the individual ceases to be a mere cog or cipher, and makes

his own particular contribution to evolutionary fulfilment.

In a way most important of all, an evolution-centered religion can no longer be divided off from secular

affairs in a separate supernatural compartment, but will interlock with them at every point. The only

distinction is that it is concerned with less immediate, less superficial, and therefore more enduring and

deeper aspects of existence.

Meanwhile, religious rituals and moral codes will have to be readapted or remodelled. Besides what

Nietzsche called the transvaluation of values, we shall need a transfiguration of thought, a new religious

terminology and a reformulation of religious ideas and concepts in a new idiom. A humanist religion will

have to work out its own rituals and its own basic symbolism.

In place of eternity we shall have to think in terms of enduring process; in place of salvation in terms of

attaining the satisfying states of inner being which combine energy and peace. There will be no room for

petitionary prayer, but much value in prayer involving aspiration and self-exploration. A religion offulfilment must provide bustling secular man with contacts with all that is permanent and enduring, with

the deeper and higher aspects of existence; indeed, with every possible opportunity of transcending the

limitations not only of his day-by-day existence in the equivalents of shared worship, but of his little

secular self in acts of meditation and self-examination and in retreats from the secular world of affairs. It

will of course continue to celebrate the outstanding events of personal and national existence (already

in some countries there are humanist wedding and funeral ceremonies). Furthermore, it will enlist the

aid of psychologists and psychiatrists in helping men and women to explore the depths and heights of

their own inner selves instead of restlessly pursuing external noveltry, to realize more of their mental

and spiritual possibilities, to utilize even their repressed and guilty urges, and to transcendent the

limitations and the internal conflicts of the unregenerate self in a constructive wholeness and a sense ofachieving contact or union with a fuller reality.

Christianity is a universalist and monotheist religion of salvation. Its long consolidation and explosive

spread, achieved through a long period of discussion and zealous ferment, released vast human forces

which have largely shaped the western world as we know it. An evolutionary and humanist religion of

fulfilment could be more truly universal and could release even vaster human forces, which could in

large measure shape the development of the entire world. But its consolidation and spread will need a


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period of discussion and ferment, though with modern communications this is likely to be much shorter

than for Christianity.

The evolutionary vision of man's place and role in the universe which science and scholarship have given

us, could be the revelation of the new dispensation. Dr Robinson's article is evidence of its effectiveness

in changing ideas. What we now need is a multitude of participants to take part in the great discussionand to join in the search for the larger truth and the more fruitful patterns of belief which we

confidently believe is waiting to be elicited.

The New Divinity

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