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IS THE GROUP SPIRIT EQUIVALENT TO GOD
FOR ALL PRACTICAL PURPOSES?
WILLIAM ERNEST HOCKING
Harvard University
I. A FAIR CHALLENGE
Religious ideas show something like an instinct of self-
preservation. Having combated scientific advances long
enough to discover the futility of that enterprise, they have
sought to maintain Uvelihood in regions which science does not
enter, regions above but not contrary to reason, regions beyond
proof or disproof. God has long been silent, intangible,
invisible: to many minds he has ceased to be the doer of the
particular things that are done in the world. As our religious
ideas thus withdraw beyond proof and disproof, and beyond
reproach, have they not also withdrawn beyond all value and
meaning?
It would not be difiicult to define God in such a way that
we should have to say: God does nothing. And if that is
said, it is not far to the next step: God does not exist — for us.
No one has any interest in the existence of an inert meta-
physical possibility, not even metaphysicians.
But it would also be possible to set up the postulate: God
is what God does. And if a particular definition of God proved
to be the definition of a Do-nothing, we should infer not that
God does not exist, but that we have the wrong definition.
It is at least one of the possible beginnings of a religious
philosophy to inquire: What has God been supposed to do for
men ? What has the idea meant to them ? To identify these
functions, and then to identify the agent which performs these
functions, is to identify God.
482
THE GROUP SPIRIT EQUIVALENT TO GOD? 483
This I understand to be Professor Ames's method of
approach; and I imderstand his conclusion to be that as
we become clear as to what God means to human experience
it approaches coincidence with what the spirit of the social
group means to human experience, so that the presiunption of
identity between God and the group spirit is very strong.
The method is a legitimate method; and the challenge
which lies in this conclusion is at once powerful and fair.
II. THERE IS A STRONG ANALOGY BETWEEN WHAT GOD IS
SUPPOSED TO DO, AND WHAT THE GROUP SPIRIT DOES
The evidence as one looks into it is massive — the evidence
of correspondence between what the Group Spirit actually
means to men, and what God is supposed to mean. One who
begins by tracing analogies may well end by asserting identity.
Or if one sees a certain truth — as I do — in polytheism, he
may be inclined to say that wherever there is analogy there is
identity. "Here, you say, something acts like God": then,
there is a god at work. Something of God does preside, as
Professor Ames points out, over one's occupation and one's
luck, leads the social quest of culture and the arts, calls there
for devotion and sacrifice, saves us there from self-absorption
and moral decay, connects our labor with an immortal object,
and even, in its more personal context, forgives our sins and
atones by its own sufferings for our disloyalties.
And surely no one can be unconvinced, or unmoved, by
that striking picture of our individual immersion in the social
body: it is the vine and we are the branches; in it we not only
live and move — in it we think and will; through the language
and the goods and the goals it sets before us we first find who
and what we are. The purposes we frame are in no exclusive
sense our purposes: as we learn by degrees what it is we want
and aim toward, we become consciously what we always are
subconsciously, the organ of a living organism, the general
human will.
484 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
Salvation is the central practical concept of religion; and
salvation can henceforth be no solitary individual transaction
with a supermundane God: no man can be saved except as he
is reborn into the body and blood of a divine humanity.
Thus far, I follow the analogy. If even so literal a thinker
as the hard-headed Hobbes was stirred by the meaning of his
Leviathan-State to name it " that mortal god, " with how much
more reason are we impelled toward identifying the social
spirit with the Deity.
m. BUT THERE ARE DIFFERENCES WHICH PREVENT
THE mENTIFICATION
As Bacon reminded us, we need a "table of absence" to
set beside our "table of presence." If we are to apply thor-
oughly the method which Professor Ames proposes, we must
be as intent to discover differences as resemblances: i.e., we
must ask whether there is anything which the God of instinctive
and practical religion does, which the social god does not do,
and is not in a position to do.
When the social god undertakes to preside over the fortunes
and the moral welfare of men (as through the agencies of law,
education, family counsel), is this god in a position to promote
these fortunes with adaptation to individual need and with
justice ? Is it in a position, more especially, to appreciate the
moral needs of individual men with an adequate understanding
of the human frame and an inward discernment, so that one
might turn to it with the petition, "O Lord, Thou hast searched
me and known me. . . . Thou understandest my thought afar
oflf Try me and know my thoughts: And see if there
be any wicked way in me Cleanse Thou from secret
faults. . . ."?
Or is it true that the social order, as it bears upon the
individual, is inevitably somewhat crude, wholesale, and
external, even at its best? The social order has its ideals,
and in pursuit of them it approximates sensitiveness in justice:
THE GROUP SPIRIT EQUIVALENT TO GOD? 485
but still it seems to sacrifice many lives, many finer possibili-
ties, even many demands for the most elementary moral
satisfaction, in the stern necessities of historic movement,
manned as that movement must be by persons hmited in time,
in knowledge, in power, and in good will.
If we identify God with the forces that play in human
history, including the ideal forces that play there, we can take
great satisfaction in the outcome for which we hope. But
when we remember that the whole course of history lies prior
to that goal, and is strewn with the wreck of honest causes and
honest lives torn from the vine without the vine's knowledge
or remembrance or power to help, the picture loses something
of its divine aspect. If the god or gods of our social world
function as leaders in party conflicts and national struggles —
and this is said to be one of their merits — they also accept the
fate of party struggle and of national subordination. The
forces which decide such contests incline, it is true, more and
more to the region of morale, and less and less bear out the old
rule that "Dieu est toujours pour les plus gros bataillons": but
what we discern here is a tendency, not an accomplishment;
and after every campaign, even such as has reached a decision
we call "right," there seems to remain in the hearts of indi-
vidual man a need to appeal from that victor to another spirit.
"Thou, O God, who didst not go out with our armies, give us
help from trouble; for vain is the help of man."
The truth is that society is not an organism, but is in a
perpetual process of becoming one. And only an actual organ-
ism, in which, not only the bodies and services and expressible
thoughts of men, but their subconscious impulses as well were
included, could play the part of God. That is the social ideal;
but one need not call it a "mere ideal" to indicate that what
it still lacks of complete reahty is of terrible moment for the
lives of individuals. For if this spirit becomes our god, its
judgments become absolute; its knowledge rightly turns itself
into power; and if and when it says to this or that one, "Thou
486 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
be damned, " then is that person effectively and finally damned;
the keys of heaven and hell are indeed in the hands of men —
at the best, of the court and the historian, at the worst, of the
gossip and the mob. Until society becomes its own ideal, the
soul will be one thing and social good another: and there will
be besides all the sacrifices that promote the ideal a constant
stream of brute, unnoted sacrifice, not of the worst, but of
the best.
The advocate of the social god may admit the crudity of
human adjustments, and yet believe that they are the best we
have: "Show me a God who does better," he may say, "and
I will serve him." The demand is justified, and religion — and
metaphysics — must hold themselves responsible for meeting it.
But our sole present contention is that God has been believed
to do better. It is his function to do better. The social spirit
is not identical with what God practically means.
rv. THERE ARE OTHER VITAL DIFFERENCES, WHICH AFFECT
THE SPECIFICALLY RELIGIOUS ATTITUDE OF WORSHIP
We have been speaking of the God who works in history,
contends with evil, and is interested in justice. But the reli-
gious consciousness has other concerns beside these, and may
regard justice, to itself at least, as wholly unimportant, because
it has a greater good, the good of the worshiper or mystic.
Religion has always taken upon itself to aid men in the
historic struggle, but it has also taken upon itself to give them
a conscious poise in the midst of that struggle which, while
rendering them mentally immune to its contingencies, has been
an element in their fullest efl&ciency. This consciousness has
been given the name of "peace": it implies an ultimate confi-
dence in the religious object; it corresponds to the attitude of
"absolute dependence," which is certainly not the whole of
religion, but an essential part of what we call worship.
Now in our relations to society, we remain responsible and
effortful. We depend on society; but we know that society
THE GROUP SPIRIT EQUIVALENT TO GOD? 487
also depends upon us: it will fail to be (in large measure) what
we fail to make it. If in the instinctive basis of religion there
is any support for that quest of peace, or rest, which implies
" absolute dependence, " that instinct cannot find satisfaction
in the social god.
In the entity we call society there is nothing that can think
if we men fail to think, nor will if we fail to will; it is we that
must work; it is we that must supply "society" with ideas;
it is we that must aspire; it is we that must grasp the goals of
action and interpret society to itself. When society gives to
the individual, it gives through other individuals, whose wills
take part in the giving. The social god is not more self-
conscious than the most self-conscious of its members: can we
inquire of it why the world exists, or why individuals exists
or why itself exists? Too palpably the social spirit keeps
fraternal pace with the spirits of its members, shares our
limitations, and being altogether such as we are, can hardly
claim to be without sin. Society will always stand to men for
an object of gratitude, and simultaneously as an object for
correction and improvement. If there be in the universe an
object upon which there can be reliance without criticism, a
valid object of worship, and a source of peace, that object must
be other than the social god.
We have already said that worship, while it means "peace, "
is not an idle attitude: this sort of peace is a release from the
self-anxiety that hampers our best effect. But in another sense
also worship is the focus of religious action: it fixes the degree
of the will. There can be no religion that is not a religion of
individual aspiration; there can be no aspiration unless the
world is worth aspiring in; and the world is not worth aspir-
ing in as a world of mere chance to be faced by the cosmic
bravado of unreflecting minds. If the world is worth aspiring
in it is because the successes of the spirit are already made
possible by its total constitution, and not merely made con-
ceivable by the structure of a fragment of the whole. Perhaps
488 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
the most practical of all religious functions has been its func-
tion of assuring individual minds that they may and should
aspire without limit; that in the real world the will is con-
cretely free. But if religion is to do this, it must involve the
whole sweep of the objects of the mind that worships, and not
any finite part of them. But the social spirit is a very finite
portion of the cosmos.
Finally, in religion, the worshiper seeks response. We can-
not too often remind ourselves that, whatever the object of
religious regard, whether society or something beyond society,
reHgion itself is always the religion of individual minds; and
it seeks a response which shall be an individual response.
Now my judgment must be that the response of the spirit
of society to the individual is never quite an individual re-
sponse. It is a response to a class of which an individual
happens to be a member. Society, for example, confers upon
me my "rights" — that is one of its most marked attentions, but
in doing so it never thought of me. What it does for me it
does for all such as I am: the law, the customs, the industrial
order in which we survive or perish, are provided for the
average man, but not for John Brown in particular.
And vhile through our lovers and friends the social spirit
may be said to mean us, as individuals, and to respond to us
as such, these precious gifts are after all but a fragment of the
reality with which we have to do. They are s)Tnbols of what
we could wish the whole to be.
On its specifically religious side, then, the social god fails to
meet the need for peace, for freedom of aspiration, and for
individual response. And such must be the case with any
deity who, like the social god, is fallible, mortal, and something
less than completely real. The finite god, sought by many a
brave spirit of our own time and of other times, we have no
thought of denying, neither of disputing his religious value.
We have already said that polytheism has its measure of truth,
as a protest against an abstract monism which becomes empty.
THE GROUP SPIRIT EQUIVALENT TO GOD? 489
But the value of any finite god depends on his being an aspect
of the God who is not finite.
V. THE HISTORY OF RELIGION BEARS OUT THIS VIEW
As we are dehberately confining our study to the functions
which God has been supposed to fulfil, the history of religion
should supply us with some evidence that the social gods have
not been sufficient to fill the religious horizon of mankind, and
that they appear less sufficient as religion develops.
It seems right, then, to ask whether it has ever been true,
in any stage of culture, that the social and functional deities
to which Professor Ames refers constitute the whole of the reli-
gious pantheon; or whether the supreme being among the gods
has ever been conceived in terms of the spirit of the human
society ?
In a region where our ignorance is large one cannot right-
fully speak in universal negatives; but one may surely say that
even in primitive religions and from that point onward the
typical situation is one in which some god of Nature stands
above and behind the gods directly concerned with human life.
Totemistic, ancestral, tribal gods have each their own hier-
archy, and at the top of the series melt into the powers of the
wider cosmos. The gods which are vivid and companionable,
because they are near and concrete, are felt in just that propor-
tion to lack something of finality. As Brinton puts it, speaking
of our own aborigines:
God, the ungrasped, remains behind. It is never the object of
veneration or sacrifice; no myth brings it down to apprehension; it is
not installed in his temples. Man cannot escape a belief that behind
all forms there is one essence; but the moment he would seize and define
it, it eludes his grasp, and by a sorcery more sadly ludicrous than that
which blinded Titania, he worships not the Infinite he thinks, but an
idol of his own making'
In fact, the multiplication of deities in various of the greater
pantheons can be traced, in successive steps, to efforts to name
» Myths of the New World, p. 54.
490 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
that ultimate being which the reUgious consciousness knows to
be uncontained in all its plastic and associable shapes.
If we press somewhat closer to the precise practical relation
which the gods in these early stages of religion bear to the
social interests, we shall discover, I think, that this relation
has two sharply contrasted aspects.
The gods do, in fact, embody and idealize the spirit of the
group. But they also serve to keep the individual mind from
being absorbed in the group; they help to save men from the
oppressive insistence of group claims and group psychology.
This seems to be true not alone in societies in which individual
initiative has become conspicuous, but also in very early stages
in which the group life seems to be almost the whole Ufe of all
its members. For if we interpret rightly the ideas at the basis
of fetishism, or of the rites of initiation, they mean that when
the individual reaches adolescence, the time has come for him
to shake off for a moment this childish identification with the
group spirit; he must win maturity by facing the great fact of
solitude, symbolic of the ultimate relation of man to his social
order, a solitude in which he finds his own original relation to
those powers which, for the moment, are not tribal function-
aries in any sense, but simply the powers of the great world.
It is their function now to enable him to look upon his whole
social situation from the outside, so that when he adopts it, he
shall do so as a free spirit, and not as one who has been smoth-
ered along into a relation which he has never been able to assess
because he has never had the mental picture of anything else.
The prevalence of this sort of ceremony seems to me one of
the most remarkable exhibitions of the rightness of human
instinct under the spell of religious consciousness. It amounts
to an act of self-suppression on the part of the social group;
but it is an act from which the group knows it will derive new
strength, because the member which it will now receive will
be a member bearing with him the trace of that wakening of
personahty from which all novelty and initiative must proceed.
THE GROUP SPIRIT EQUIVALENT TO GOD? 491
The group profits by the process, which is in very summary
form, the eqxiivalent of our process of "higher education";
but that fact does not alter the meaning of the process to the
individual. Its meaning is that he has first found God as God
is apart from society; and it is this greater God which enables
him to receive and appropriate the meaning of the tribal gods
and traditions. He receives these latter gods as depending
upon the God of the wider world.
Thus even primitive religion has its antisocial aspects;
because primitive religion is engaged in creating individuals
who have to bring about the later stages of religion. It does
this both directly, as we have seen, and indirectly, as by
developing the institution of property, which makes its porten-
tous connections with individual greed, brings an alienation of
neighbor from neighbor even while it enlarges the wit, the fore-
sight, and the force of the human mind. This religiously
developed institution will react by shaking the entire social
structure, breaking up in time the old modes of coherence;
and with the aid of war, which is in part its offspring, bringing
into being new unions, territorial and municipal, which modify
their social gods to suit the altered spiritual bond. Mean-
while the active divinities in this process are certainly not those
passive divinities which so serenely accept the mutations of
historic fortune.
But come at once to the highest stage of religion, where
whatever principles we find true should hold true in the highest
measure, and see if there God has not settled nearer toward
identification with the social spirit. What do we find ? We
find, perhaps to our astonishment, that religion seems to have
turned its back upon the whole social undertaking; not merely
by sustaining a momentary retreat, as in the initiation program,
but by expressly calling its followers to renounce this world
and seek their treasure in quite another.
It does not appear to me that the religion of the social spirit
has taken the full measure of this phenomenon of religious
492 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
history. Social religion is inclined to say that "the sense
of God is closely bound up with social solidarity, and that
when society is disintegrating or full of conflict God becomes
unreal and remote"; that in our own age, for example, as an
age of transition " it is hard to believe in God because we behold
his face in troubled waters. " This, I think, should be the case if
the thesis of social religion were true. But the history of reli-
gion seems to show that at its culminating point the exact
opposite is true.
Not when the human society is solidary and prosperous,
but when it is threatened, or overwhelmed, or morally bankrupt
does the religious spirit reach it highest development. I will
not quote here in explanation the remark of Hegel to the effect
that it was first in the Roman world that the soul was thor-
oughly lost. But I will remind you of the judgment of one who
would probably reject any technical designation as either
philosopher or Christian. Let me quote a passage from
Gilbert Murray's Four Stages of Greek Religion:
Any one who turns from the great writers of classical Athens, say-
Sophocles or Aristotle, to those of the Christian era must be conscious
of a great difference of tone. There is a change in the whole relation of
the writer to the world about him. The quahty is not specifically
Christian: it is just as marked in the Gnostics and Mithras-worshippers
as in the Gospels It is hard to describe. It is a rise of asceticism,
of mysticism, in a sense, of pessimism; a loss of self-confidence, of hope
in this life and of faith in normal human effort; a despair of patient
enquiry, a cry for infallible revelation; an indifference to the welfare
of the state, a conversion of the soul to God.
It is an atmosphere in which the aim of the good man is not so much
to live justly, to help the society to which he belongs and enjoy the
esteem of his fellow creatures; but rather by means of a burning faith,
by contempt for the world and its standards, by ecstasy, suffering, and
martyrdom, to be granted pardon for his unspeakable unworthiness,
his immeasurable sins. There is an intensifying of certain spiritual
emotions; an increase of sensitiveness, a failure of nerve
I do not depreciate the religions that followed on this movement by
describing the movement itself as a "failure of nerve." Mankind has
THE GROUP SPIRIT EQUIVALENT TO GOD? 493
not yet decided which of two opposite methods leads to the fuller and
deeper knowledge of the world: the patient and sympathetic study of
the good citizen who lives in it, or the ecstatic vision of the saint who
rejects it.
In the days of this movement of which Gilbert Murray speaks
Rome itself was a political success; but the movement did not
spring from that success; it sprang from Asia Minor, from
Thrace, from Greece, from Persia, from Egypt, from Palestine,
the regions of political and social failure. And what we pre-
serve today as the most precious fruit of that movement is a
religion that most clearly demands the subordination of all
social interests and ties, even the tie of the family, to the love
of a divine object which transcends every human object.
This divine object manifests itself in a kingdom which is to
have a career in this world; it is not hostile to association nor to
earthliness as principles; it intends to confirm them, not to
abolish them; but as a condition of confirming them, it de-
mands that the passion of man shall finds its primary object
outside of them. It must love first that which is not of this
world and never can be. It is not alone the individual, it is
society also, that must lose its life in order to save it.
And if we can penetrate into the secrets of subsequent social
history, we may perhaps be justified in saying with a great
historian of Europe, that had the rehgious consciousness not
reached this point of fixing its attention upon that which was
so far outside all definite social aims as to be non-tribal, non-
national, non-familial, non-pohtical, in brief, universal, Europe
could, in all probability, never have succeeded in reaching a
coherent political order. An antisocial religion made modern
Europe possible.
VI. THE METAPHYSICS OF THE CASE
We have proceeded so far empirically, by the aid of the
psychology of religion and the history of religion. Not wholly
empirically, because our reading both of psychology and of
494 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
history has been an interpretation of the facts, and not a mere
rehearsal of them. But we must live by interpretation; we
cannot Uve by facts alone.
It would be possible to leave our case at this point. But
it would be incomplete without an indication of the source of
the interpretation we have adopted. The source of every
interpretation lies in one's metaphysics, that is, in one's belief
about the ultimate nature of the world he lives in. Let me
then sketch very briefly, and therefore somewhat dogmatically,
a few propositions from which our view logically depends.
1. Every finite being is a dependent being; and in particular
every empirical knower is a dependent being. — Thus, when we
sum up reality in convenient dichotomies, as "man and his
world, " we consider man as one thing and his environment as
another thing, each limited by the other. Each of these
partial beings is dependent; in this case, each is dependent to
some extent on the other: but the presumption is that depend-
ence upon dependencies points to an independent which is not
the mere sum of the two parts.
But in this case, too, the man is an empirical knower of his
world; that is, he has to accept what is given him as fact. As
a mental being, then, he is dependent on what is presented to
him. He is not self-sufficient.
2. Society, or community, is a dependent being. — ^Society is
dependent in each of the two ways in which individual men
are dependent. For society is a member of a pair — ^society
and its environment. Society is also, as a mental being, an
empirical knower.
But society is dependent in a third respect: it depends on
the prior being of its members.
Every society is an organization of persons; and " organiza-
tion" is a relation between terms. The terms in this case are
not the same in and out of the relationship; but they are not
wholly constituted by this relationship. For they are identical
terms in other relationships, such as the relation of the indi-
THE GROUP SPIRIT EQUIVALENT TO GOD? 495
vidua! mind to its empirical objects, which are more funda-
mental to its being.
We say that the other relationships are more fundamental
for the following reason:
3. Society or community is a matter of degree, not merely a
mutter of fact; the degree of association depends on a mental
rapprochement of the terms associated; and this, in turn, depends
on the relation of those members to a being not identical with any
of them. — Community, it will be admitted, is never a finished
fact. We are always more or less intimate with one another;
always more or less involved in our social environment. We
do not always feel it our present ideal to be more intimate or
involved than we actually are. And if we in any case wish to
be more intimate we do not always find that we can be so. We
cannot become so by direct effort of will. In the one case, we
make conditions of intimacy; in the other we find that
conditions are imposed upon us.
The essence of these conditions may be stated thus. We
can approach one another, and can bear to approach one
another, only in so far as we at the same time maintain our
"selves," or as we maintain "reality" and "truth." Thus
one who sacrifices truth for the sake of a friendship finds that
the friendship is so far sacrificed and cannot be kept by main
force of will. The same holds of all human relations.
Society, then, depends on a prior relation of individual
minds to that which is true; and that which is true is, in its
most obvious aspect, the world of nature.
4. But nature also is a dependent being. — ^Hence society
depends ultimately on the relation of individual minds to that
upon which nature itself depends. We need not here inquire
what this independent being is. We shall so far beg the reli-
gious question as to say that God is the independent being, or
that God controls the universe; merely because whatever
controls the universe is God. That is the deed, of all deeds,
of Deity, in which religion is primarily interested.
496 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
Worship is the effort to approach this reality. It aims to
go behind whatever is dependent, and whatever is merely ideal
or not yet actualized. Society will not do for an object of
worship, for society is itself dependent on worship. It is depend-
ent on worship because it is dependent on truth. In its
dependence on truth it is manifestly dependent on science,
which gives the truth of Nature — -and no religion dare leave
Nature out; but worship penetrates to the truth behind
Nature, and there establishes the ultimate social bond.
Hence the common reUgious instinct of mankind has been
right. It reveres society, because it is in fact dependent on
society for the fulness of its life; but its deeper concern, its
essentially reUgious concern, is for what the Universe apart
from society is going to do with us — what it will do with us,
for instance, when society is through with us.
I was speaking not long ago with a Japanese friend about
the rites of the Shinto religion, asking him whether there was
anything corresponding to the sacraments of baptism or matri-
mony. He said that marriage was usually the occasion for a
social feast, but not for a religious ceremony; further, that,
an infant is commonly taken by its mother, during the first
few months of its life, to a local shrine, and there consecrated
to the service of the community spirit (I alter his language to
show its connection with our argument). But, he said, the
main rehgious ceremony is that called out by death; so much so
that the Japanese are often unpleasantly affected by the com-
parative casualness of the Christian burial. The great deed
of the God of Shinto piety begins, it would seem, when society
has taken leave of the soul, having, for better or for worse,
done what destiny has given it to do for that soul. And in
this respect, the divine power of Shinto piety is the divine
Power of the piety of all mankind.
