The "Religious Sense" as Described by Prof. Huston Smith

 

"The Religious Sense" according to Prof. Huston Smith

(with annotations by Julius-Kei Kato)

[Source]  Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief (New York: Harper, 2001), 274.

(The main text is from Huston Smith. Sub-section titles, emphases, and annotations are my own -jkk)

 

[jkk] This is how the great teacher of world religions, the late Huston Smith, explained what he called the "religious sense." It is framed in an imagined letter that he writes to his colleagues who are
scientists and who tend to dismiss too easily the spiritual and religious dimensions of life in favour of a materialistic view of the universe.

 ***

Most simply stated, to be religiously "musical" ... is to possess a distinctive sensibility that I shall call the "religious sense." It has four parts that lock together into a single whole. 

[jkk] When you say, “Someone is musical,” that means: This person has a “sense for music.” This is applied by Huston Smith to a person’s “sense for religion.” I just want to observe here that, it seems, Huston Smith thinks that this “sense for religion” is not an accident but a fundamental characteristic of being human, hence, it is present in every single human being (see his remarks below). One just has to become more aware of it.

 

[#1] Ultimate Questions   The religious sense recognizes instinctively that the ultimate questions human beings ask--What is the meaning of existence? Why are there pain and death? Why, in the end, is life worth living? What does reality consists of and what is its object?--are the defining essence of our humanity. They are not just speculative imponderables that certain people of inquisitive bent get around to asking after they have attended to the serious business of working out strategies for survival (jkk-confer for example Maslowe’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’). They are the determining substance of what makes human beings human. This religious definition of human beings delves deeper than Aristotle's definition of man as a rational animal. In the religious definition, man is the animal whose rationality leads him to ask ultimate questions of the sort just mentioned. It is the intrusion of these questions into our consciousness that tells us most precisely and definitively the kind of creature we are. Our humanness flourishes to the extent that we steep ourselves in these questions--ponder them, circle them, obsess over them, and in the end allow the obsession to consume us.

[jkk] Asking ultimate questions is “the defining essence of our humanity.” Humans are, in Augustine's words, "restless until they rest in God." This is the "capax Dei" (“capability for God”) that the same Augustine refers to. There is a theory that <it is precisely because we can begin to imagine what the Ultimate is and that we strongly tend toward that Ultimate> that actually proves there is an ultimate. It is like the innate tendency of a sunflower to face the sun. This "tendency" somehow proves that there is a great source of light and heat. Do you agree or disagree?

 

[#2] The Ultimate Mysteriousness of Life   Following on the heels of the above, the religious sense is visited by a desperate, at times frightening, realization of the distance between these questions and their answers. As the urgency of the questions increases, we see with alarming finality that our finitude precludes all possibility of our answering them.

[jkk] ‘God’ and ‘the Meaning of It All’ remain, in the final analysis, profound “mysteries” because although we passionately search to understand these matters deeply, we will never succeed in answering them fully this side of the grave. They are the ultimate “limit” questions – questions that show us how limited we are in our ability to answer the profound mysteries of life.  Here the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner’s image (which could be applied to the human quest for God) comes in useful (Geist in Welt 1939. Smith also uses it in section #3 below). The human spirit, in its relentless pursuit of a greater something that could fulfill its most profound desires, can be described using the image of a quest to reach an ever-receding horizon: humans are continually drawn to search for the ultimate/the divine like one is drawn towards a beautiful horizon. However, one never actually reaches the horizon. This is symbolic of the fact that, on this side of life, humans will never fully comprehend the ultimate/the divine. The horizon that draws humans is, of course, the gracious mystery that Christianity calls “God”: mysterious because God is ultimately unfathomable, yet gracious because it is full of love

 

[#3] Continually Seeking for Answers to the Ultimate Questions   The conviction that the questions have answers never wavers, however, and this keeps us from giving up on them. Though final answers are unattainable, we can advance toward them as we advance toward horizons that recede with our every step. In our faltering steps toward the horizon we need all the help we can get, so we school ourselves to the myriad of seekers who have pondered the ultimate questions before us.  ... (there is a part here where he addresses scientists about their precursors) ... But it is easier in science to see what should be retained and what retired, for scientific truths are cumulative whereas religious truth is not. (jkk: I don't exactly understand what he means by that. I think it means: in every valid and up-to-date scientific statement, all the valid, past results of science are already implicitly presupposed and included. That is not true for religious statements.)  This requires that we keep dialoguing with our past as seriously as this book has tried to do, while also dialoguing expectantly with our present (which this book has also tried to do).

[jkk] Here we see why continuing to ask “perplexing questions” (even the ultimately unanswerable ‘ultimate’ questions) is important. <“Asking” and “Living” these perplexing existential questions> is a fundamental part of being human and the sure way to go deeper into the human spiritual journey. 

In a letter written to a young protégé, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said, “I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer” (Letters to a Young Poet).

 

[#4] A Communal Effort to Pursue the Ultimate Questions   Finally, we conduct our search together--collectively, in congregations as you do in your laboratories and professional societies. Emile Durkheim, the nineteenth century sociologist, thought religion was entirely a social affair, a reification of the shared values of the tribe. Today our individualistic society comes close to assuming the opposite, that religion is altogether an individual affair. ... As usual the Buddha walked the middle path. "Be ye lamps unto yourselves," for sure; but do not forget that the sangha (the monastic community, and by extension the company of the holy) is one of the Three Jewels of Buddhism.

[jkk] “Community” is an integral part of all religious and spiritual paths because <sharing one’s life and experiences with others> is essential to realizing our true nature. That “true nature” is -- that we are all interconnected and one with Spirit. Conducting the search together is also a means to verify and authenticate one’s religious or spiritual experience – it is, moreover, a means to guard against being self-deluded in our efforts to touch Spirit. Just as in science, an experiment conducted in one center should be replicated in other centers in order to confirm the validity of the original results; so too in spirituality, we have to verify our experiences of Spirit with other spiritual practitioners so as to see the validity of our own experiences.

---