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Let us first settle some just logical, or some technical questions. I have -- would like you to have as a running text my little book on the Christian future, which is over at the bookstore. And I want you to acquire it. At least, there are four great religious persons and the American scene as of today are treated as the religion of the soldiers of the second World War. There are a number of letters and documents of these -- of my friends who went to war. My own experience as a soldier is in it, too. But let us have this out of the way. The book is called "The Christian Future."

Then, let us now proceed very simply, about what I have to do here if we want to succeed. You must be aware that "religion" is the most debatable word today and we will have to agree as we proceed, step by step, if there is any such thing as religion today. That's very doubtful, because people think that religion is private -- a private affair. There is no such religion that is private. You can't have a private religion. So, if you think you can, then you have no religion. That's one of the heresies of today. And all the heresies today are so wrong. But I'm -- we must proceed slowly. Let me first make a statement that would be true about any course that is comparing religions or states. Comparative literature. Who took the course comparative literature? You know it is a very celebrated course here on campus -- a whole department of comparative literature.

Gentlemen, there are two ways in which the Greek mind, evading religion and principles, has treated all things in the last 100 years. It's either you give the history or you compare the various appearances. This is a Greek idea that you compare or that you tell the history. Historicism that is exaggerated into in us in the origins of something is one way of escaping responsibility. You are not committed if you give the history of the United States to know where you really stand now. You can revel in Puritans, you see, or in George Washington, it's all so past, that Mr. Ford could say history is bunk. But comparative form -- to compare is also another way. You hear in most classes in this college everything compared with everything else. You compare the Constitution of Massachusetts with the Constitution of California or of the United States themselves. And let us just analyze what is there the premise of "compare." Can you compare to, let us say, the Constitution of England and of France and of the United States, which is customary -- can you compare them without knowing what government must be? That is, gentlemen, can we compare things at random, of whom we are not convinced that they are necessary? Can you compare three governments when you think the best thing would be to have no government? You cannot, because if you are convinced that no government would be better than government, you are a {global} anarchist, like Prince Kropotkin or Bakunin, or like most people

should be today in the face of these {bureaucracies}, which are so horrid. If we were {global} anarchists, and said, "To Hell with government," we have no reason to compare the different kinds of government because they are all evil and they are all unnecessary and whether you have three diseases or one, really makes no difference, government then will be a disease, wouldn't it? Let us assume that we have this opinion.

So, gentlemen, what I try to bring out, if you want to compare three governments, you first must be convinced that government has to be. And you can only do justice to the government of Switzerland or France or the United States or Italy if you are quite convinced that if you lived there you would have to establish a government, and then you can criticize this government as not being as { } good as the other government. That is, you have to have a very clear picture of some profile of government and then you can {build} in all the various governments -- one-two-three and compare them and of this standard, you can say, one government fits better in this half of the bowl and the other fits more on this half and therefore you are inclined to say that the English constitution is better in one respect and the French constitution is better in another respect. Gentlemen, you can only say that the two constitutions are better in one respect and worse in the other respect under one condition.

(The conditions you want on your particular -- )

That you know what's good and evil. You must know what good government is, don't you? You must be firmly convinced that you know exactly what it would be to have a good government. This however today is -- need not done by these sightseers, these moviegoers that you are. You go into 10 movies and perhaps you say it's a good movie or a poor movie, but you rarely are aware that you then have a very firm standard of what a good movie is. Most of you have not. And you have no right to compare movies at all. They are all equally bad for you.

Gentlemen, but I want to ask -- if we had to have a course of a quarter of a year on religion, on comparative religion, as I try -- shall try to do, the understanding must be that we develop both sides of this question. You must develop an understanding of what religion is and how the various phenomena which we call religions -- with a plural -- and what they contribute or how they they fulfill this postulate, this necessity. Today, in throwing out this suggestion to you, I bring this up to frighten you off and to tell you, gentlemen, that most of you think that one can have religion or cannot have religion. Therefore you cannot follow a course on comparative religion, because as long as you think that it is a luxury, that first you breathe and then you shit and third you eat, and then you mate and then you die and then that's very nice if at the funeral -- the place has

some ceremony -- when you call this religion, obviously you cannot compare religion, you cannot understand it because the whole thing is a hoax. It's absolutely superfluous. Why should there be such a thing? It's a nice custom, bought by Macy's or by the -- from the undertaker for so many dollars as a question of piety. But that wouldn't be worth our comparing notes about that. And that is, by and large, gentlemen, the first question when one gives a course on comparative religion: that it is very easy to compare things, but it is very difficult to know what we compare.

So the first question today is: do we compare games, do we compare folklore, do we compare superstitions, do we compare superfluities? Or do we compare something inside of which you move, whether you like it or not? You can compare, obviously, the air as to its content of oxygen in various climates. In the high Alps, as you know, the ozone is more pronounced than in a swampland, in the tropics. But first you must admit that you have to breathe. If you say, "I can live without breathing," the whole thing, the whole conversation is superfluous, it's a luxury. And I don't want to indulge in this short and precious life in things that are absolutely superfluous. We already talk too much and we are interested in too many things for which we certainly have no concern. Why should you be concerned with religion in a country that has abolished religion?

Now that's a quotation. That's not from me. An Englishman, Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson, a great political scientist, has written a book in 1905. Has anybody who has seen this man's name? He has written a very wonderful book on the war, on English history, on French history, and on a -- in a book {"Symposion,"} -- 1905. Perhaps it's worth your while to note the date. That is, before there was Communism and before there were the two world wars, and America was going strong under Theodore Roosevelt, he said -- he writes -- he has a symposium. A scholar and a Tory and a scientist and a doctor and a Socialist all meet and one of them is a journalist who has traveled far and wide and he knows the United States. And he says, "We must be aware of the fact that the United States has abolished religion. There is no religion in the United States. These sects, these derelicts of religion just prove it. There are reminiscences of religion, but the God of America, the only one, is acceleration." Acceleration as he called it, as a Britisher. You would call it speed. Speed-up. And since the people are intoxicated with the fact that they can go a little faster every day, and now they can fly around the earth in 92 hours, as you know, therefore religion has yielded to this technical being that finds its satisfaction in technical achievements. And that is possible, he says, but it means that religion is abolished. And whether it's a Catholic or a Protestant or a Jew in the country makes obviously no difference. They all have a speedometer in their car and by that, they test their happiness, their degree of happiness. And now they have planes and now they have all the races, and so on, and he's very serious. This is a very good man, this man Dickinson.

And he is not poking fun. And he says, this will come over Europe and will come over Asia, this what the Americans have done. It has only happened there 50 years earlier. He's not accusing the Americans of abolishing religion, but he's says, "This is technological man, and he has abolished religion." And so he says, in so many words -- and it's very eloquent and makes you really shudder -- he says that religion is abolished. And you look at the other side of the ledger -- go to Russia and they say where religion hasn't been abolished it must be abolished. But Mr. Dickinson would say, "Well, happy the Americans, they don't have to be Communists, because they have abolished religion already. Therefore they don't have to do it by revolution."

And if you read the modern psychology in this country, the modern economy -- I had a friend who was a Quaker. And he come to this country and he fell in with the economists and they said to him that you could buy by prosperity everything: adventure and happiness, and especially he was intrigued that young men could buy adventure, because we would be so prosperous, we could give everyone three years just to be adventurous. And he said -- and I said to him -- "That's the Devil, my dear man. If you give -- buy adventure by prosperity, then life has really no meaning anymore, and everything is just material and just boring." Well, he came home, completely given to this golden calf, { } prosperity, and his wife -- they were very happily married for 30 years at that time -- turned Roman Catholic. And she said she was so despondent, her husband had abolished religion. Mind you, he had been a Quaker. But he had believed that life could be arranged -- not with acceleration, but with money -- that prosperity makes happy. And you believe that, too.

So, in this country, it was possible on Dartmouth's campus that a man announced the lecture, "The Psychologist Looks At Jesus." Now a country in which psychology can announce such a lecture certainly has no use for religion. Imagine! The boys came to me at that time; they still had some -- some shame, and said I should announce a lecture, "Christ Looks at Psychology." But you don't -- nobody winces. It could be great issue, a lecture, "Psychology Looks at Jesus." That is the abolition of religion, of course. Here, some little specialist, some idiot, can come and can criticize the perfect man. I had another colleague here, a Jewish gentleman, who said, "Well Jesus, of course, was not a very important man because he had no sense of humor." Humor is something very second-rate. Of course he had no sense of humor because he had to deal with real things. You can have a sense of humor because you don't live. You just laugh and you play. In play, you better have a sense of humor. But gentlemen, if you say that Jesus had no sense of humor and if a psychologist looks at Jesus, that's the end of the world, in which we very happily seem to dwell at this moment. And it is -- really no reason why we shouldn't throw a bomb from boredom. It would finish all this nonsense. Do you deserve to live? I don't know. We are very doubtful creatures.

Perhaps we are at the end of our rope.

I mean, if we sell out -- and certainly the first thing we have sold out is religion -- and that people now go to church from political reasons, because it's good for their career and for their record and for the FBI. That doesn't impress me very much. When it comes to that, then obviously that's the end of the -- again, of the story. Most people do it today for political reasons. Churches have never been so crowded, because it's good to be seen.

So I raise this question in all seriousness, gentlemen, in order to ask you whether we -- you want to play with this whole issue. It's perhaps all over, and as a relic of former days where people had religion, it would be a waste of time. This is not a game of mine, gentlemen, but I'm very serious. The handicap for any such course is that most of you think you want to hear about other people's religion. And this I cannot teach you, because you couldn't understand it. It would still be just superstition of other people. I can talk comparative superstition very easily, because you're quite sure that you are not superstitious. Therefore, I could develop a course very easily about comparing other people's superstitions, but we have a very much harder task, gentlemen. I cannot teach you a course before we have been tried -- I have tried, at least, to agree on the elementary character of religion as something that despite Mr. Dickinson and despite the psychologists and despite my friend the Quaker who wants to buy adventure by prosperity -- that cannot be abolished. That's not easy.

I, of course, pondered all these weeks in preparing this course, about this -- over this problem, how to prove to you that that what you call religion is not religion. Religion is not that you go to church and religion is not that you confess something. That's all not religion, obviously. That's theology, and that's church and that's ecclesiastical and that's political and that's customary and that's tradition and that's ritual and that's all part of, you see, of religion. But it isn't religion itself. These are expressions and forms of religion and also superstitions of religion. There are superstitions. You can say a religion certainly is a power that begets superstitions. The religion of yesterday we call "superstition." And the religion of tomorrow we may call "heresy." But in between there is something which is the religion of today. And what is this? Would anybody undertake to say what -- or to help to define, to delineate what religion must be if we dismiss the visible churches and we dismiss the hocus-pocus, and we dismiss the funerals and the weddings, including these terrible receptions -- and say, we are looking for that power which generates all these forms. You can -- will admit that electricity is not the dam in Wilder. That's not electricity. But we have established this dam in Wilder because we want to have electricity. In the same sense, you would understand that the church is not the religion, the power which builds churches. You see this. Therefore by looking at the church, we yet don't

know what religion is, as very few people have any idea what electricity is -- except that it shocks you. Perhaps religion is that which shocks you. That would be not a bad definition. If it only would shock you. But as long as you smile over it, it certainly has no power.

So the first definition, gentlemen, I would suggest, is that religion is a power. And as all powers in the realm of the created universe, it is in itself not visible. Powers are not visible. You know if a man has power in politics, it is invisible. You can hardly describe it. Once you begin to analyze it, it's melting away. Power is power. And it's very hard on what it rests.

This power, gentlemen, must -- is pervasive. Either the universe has it or the universe doesn't have it. That is, it cannot be defined. It is impossible to say that one person has religion. If it is a power, it must be this way: that the religion has you. So again, gentlemen, power -- it is a power for which there is no private property. You cannot appropriate religion. You cannot have religion, although people say so. But religion can have you. You can be electric, and probably you can also be religious. Or you cannot be religious, as you can be anti-electric, or you can be lead, dead, not conducive. The electric power, if it is supposedly a current or something like that -- let's suppose that at this moment, it may dis-- leave you alone. It may bypass you. In this sense you may be not included in this current. There are people who are deaf and there are people who are dumb and there are people who in this sense are not reached by religion.

Now it's very easy to see, gentlemen, that that part of man that is most easily dismissed or bypassed by religion is the brain. The brain is the most irreligious part of man. It is always left behind. It is also the most reactionary organ. You think it's progressive. I have found my mind being always the laziest part of myself. My heart, my appetite, my desires, everything is far ahead of my brain, which is the -- as you know -- the conservative element physically because it is the only part of the body the cells of which are never renewed, as you may know. All other parts of our body are reborn but the brain isn't. So gentlemen, we have made a very important statement if I -- if you will allow me this: that the brain is the most irreligious part of man. It's the doubter, the anti-instinctive part. The brain has no hunches. And we live by hunches. And all good people live by hunches. And the clever people are so stupid because they have no hunches. They want to know it all. The smart-alecs.

So the brain is more irreligious, certainly, gentlemen, than the other organs of your equipment. Now this brings up the second question, gentlemen. It is quite general in this country that people think that Christianity is a philosophy. You must have heard this. I have a book at home now, for this course -- again, the preparation is a very sweaty affair; it's terrible what nonsense you have to read

on this topic -- it's called -- a book on Oriental philosophy, and it contains all the Oriental religions, too, because the man uses the word "philosophy," you see, as a hodge-podge, as you also do. It can be anything. Gentlemen, philosophy is the opposite from religion. Nobody who has a religion thinks at that moment of philosophy, and nobody who has a philosophy thinks at this moment of religion. They are at opposite poles. And the reason is that the brain is the leader of the enterprise called philosophy and that in religion, the brain is the one part to be controlled, and to be checked, and to be moved with great effort to come around, so to speak, to what the rest of the man knows very definitely.

So gentlemen, will you kindly take this down as the second statement? We have found that religion must be a power, that it can have nothing to do with any superstitions or customs or forms or churches or creeds or rituals, as such. But that it may create them. I mean, they may come from religion, but religion itself cannot be this. The second, even more desperate statement I have to make is that: please come to know that religion is the opposite from philosophy. Now the disturbance at this moment is this: that you are all brainchilds -- brainchildren -- and you believe that nothing that doesn't pass through the brain is good. Therefore, you're all trying to replace religion by philosophy. And you are all quite sure that you pay a compliment to religion if you say -- call it a philosophy. Isn't that true? Certainly no blame is attached if you call Christianity a philosophy. It's the greatest crime -- if you -- if the prophets, the Apostles, and the evangelists had heard this, they would have put ashes on their head and would have said, "Jesus has died in vain," because in order to defeat philosophy, He came into this world. He certainly was not a philosopher. That's why He's so important. Philosophies are so unimportant. This you must -- we have to, of course, unravel in the course of time. You can admit -- I want today to make a certain amount -- number of statements from which we have to start. Only if you allow me to say that philosophy is not religion and religion is not philosophy, will you begin to understand why religion is important, because you must admit that you are not philosophers. But that doesn't exclude the fact that you have a -- that you are religious. And that must make you feel quite happy, because you will never be philosophers, gentlemen. In Dartmouth that just doesn't happen. This college has never produced any philosopher and probably never will. And that's not so bad. It isn't necessary.

You have no philosophy, gentlemen, and the sooner you know it, the better it would be. You may have some notions, and some -- you may ape some other people's philosophy, which you probably do, but you have no philosophy. And don't try to have one. It comes by itself, by experience, that you will have certain principles and certain convictions. That is not yet a philosophy. A philosophy, gentlemen, is a system of thought, a system of thought about all the facts outside your own existence, which you as the subject can view objectively. Philosophy

has to do with the world objectified. And the objectivation takes the form of a system. That is, what we call perhaps something treated objectively, that you can systematize it. You can say: A,B, C; A plus C equals B.

So gentlemen, philosophy always omits the subject of this philosophy. In no philosophy can there be a description how the philosopher changes from one system to another, how he changes his mind. The attempt of philosophy is to treat the mind as a fixed mind, and the world in flux, and then organize the world from this fixed mind. Religion starts from the upper end and says, "The only fickle and unreliable part of man is his mind." Men, and women especially, change their mind every day. Therefore, religion tries to prevail on man to live happily, despite the fickleness of his mind. Philosophy tries to stabilize the mind, regardless of the fickleness of the senses, of the ages, of the rest of the body. Isn't that true? You can see this.

So therefore philosophy and religion are on opposite poles. No use trying to reconcile that, because it is with impunity in this country you can say that Christianity is a philosophy; it is right that Mr. Dickinson holds then there is no religion. Then there is no religion. If this can be said, and if a psychologist can get up and say "A psychologist looks at Jesus," the there is no religion, because the brain, you see, is in government, and religion therefore has nothing to say, because the brain is that which is not the starting point of the religious soul. It's not interesting, because the religious soul is the man who knows that from birth to death we have to keep an open mind and have to think differently every day.

Thoughts are changing. What's good yesterday is not good tomorrow. And what's good tomorrow is bad yesterday, gentlemen. A philosopher cannot explain this. For the religious man, that's his first experience. Gentlemen, the first religious experience, let me tell you, is that virtues become vices and vices become virtues. That every one of you will notice. It's very nice to be a student at Dartmouth at 19. Obviously, if a man would stay on for 10 years in this college and still be a student at 29, he would be vicious fellow. Isn't that true? Terrible. You see these mossy students in big cities who cannot find an end to their being students. They are horrible creatures. They have missed out in life. Virtue becomes vice, gentlemen, and vice becomes virtue. That is the first reason why philosophy isn't good enough for a man who wants to live, because according to philosophy, to read Plato, there are certain virtues that are always good, you see, and certain vices that are always bad. That's nonsense. Only philosophers can believe such nonsense -- that is, people who think that the brain is the master of life. But that would mean that the deadest part of our body, the least changing, is the steering wheel for the living parts of our body. I'm more alive in my heart and my kidneys than I am alive in my brain and why should then the brain be the taskmaster who can prevent me from moving on with my heart? That's what

you all believe, gentlemen. You are all philosophers. Gentlemen, you have to choose for one moment between religion and philosophy before you can see what part -- or in life philosophy is allowed to play. I have nothing against philosophy. I have a chair of philosophy at this college, gentlemen, but you can only be a philosopher within a religious setup. And our modern philosopher is so sterile because this society in which it has to make its contribution has no order anymore of a religious kind. No power. In a powerless heart and in a powerless humanity, you can feed the brain and feed the brain and feed the brain, but it will have absolutely no vitality, because the rest of the body has -- is atrophied.

So gentlemen, philosophy and religion are at opposite poles. If you try to make religion into a philosophy, then religion ceases. When the Greeks had Plato and Aristotle, that was the end of Greek religion. That's all right, as far as Greece goes. They created thereby the academic mind. That is, they went all out for mind, mind, mind. And they did us a great service because you can now enjoy Greek mentality for four years in this liberal arts college. You are the heirs of the Greek philosophy in this sense, but you know very well that before and hereafter, you cannot live by the plays of the mind in this college here. That's an additional equipment which you get here, you see, for certain purposes in between. But it's not life itself.

There is another, even worse, mistake that has occurred -- come in, in the last 900 years, gentlemen. You say, "Well, religion is not philosophy," but you may say religion is theology. Doesn't one have to be a theologian in order to have religion, or to be religious, as I prefer to say. And that's even more difficult to refute. And I have again to throw out dogmatically today -- before this will become a little clearer -- just to warn you that theology is not religion, and that the Christian church avoided theology for the first 1100 years of her life and the Jews to this very day have no theology. Neither has Islam. So the three greatest religions, or the most numerous and tenacious religions have been very chary. Abelard, the founder of theology, was excommunicated for his beginning of theology. He wrote the first Christian theology.

So gentlemen, please don't be mistaken. There is a tremendous confusion about -- between theology and religion and you really think a theologian is a religious man. Well -- I happen to know some theologians, and I happen to know some religious people. They are never identical. They're quite different. My washerwoman is a religious woman and she is the best saint in town, here. But the theologians I know, they all will go to Hell.

This is again very hard for you to grasp, gentlemen. Theology is a part of philosophy that dealing with the gods. That's all. In antiquity, gentlemen, Plato was a theologian as much as a philosopher and you would just as well -- could

call him a theologian as a philosopher. We quite arbitrarily call him in the Christian era a philosopher because he didn't believe in Christ. So we hate to call him a theologian, but he called himself a theologian and he was called by his students a theologian, a theologos, a man who talked of God in his { }, and in all his stories.

Therefore, gentlemen, in antiquity, the split between theology and philosophy hadn't occurred yet. All the men talked about everything when they tried to philosophize, or to think. And therefore, gentlemen, you come into a world which confuses you, really, you poor people. It is -- it took me a long life before I woke up to all these truths -- very simple truths -- that part of the people who organize their thoughts in systems, they call themselves theologians and half of them call themselves philsophers. But both -- whether they call themselves theologians or whether they call them philosophers -- put the mind first. They are all brain-adorers, brain-worshipers. And they think that a system, you see, of the mind, is stable, and man's life is unstable. And they think the system will survive forever, that's the whole ambition of any philosopher. A religious person, sir, would be the -- Thomas Aquinas in the last six weeks of his life, you know he was a great theologian, but in the last six weeks of his life, he declined to go on with his Summa, with his great philosophical work, and instead interpreted the "Song of Songs" to his monks, which is the great song of love, and said that it seemed to him that he had just written chaff, that nothing of his system would last. He would be very much surprised if he would see that Protestant professors would teach the Jewish students in Chicago this Catholic doc-- theology.

Philosophy and theology, then, for all practical purposes -- to know what religion is, gentlemen -- are both handicaps. We can neither admit that theology is religion, nor that philosophy is religion. And I would say even more strongly than about philosophy that as long as you think so -- that to be a Christian you have to be -- have a theology -- you don't know what Christianity is.

So we have thrown out two misunderstandings. I think that's some step forward -- that, please, religion is a power, and therefore it is not a system. And that religion being a power -- it is not yet quite clear to us what power it could be -- but certainly it is not a power that attacks the brain first. And therefore it is not a philosophy and not a theology. Anybody who starts from his brain will end up as a theologian or a philosopher. And anybody who submits to the cosmic power called religion, wants to check -- have a check on his brain, on his mind, and wants to rule out the possibility that this mind runs riot.

Let's have a break here. Then in the second half, let's try to take one step further -- because we will, of course, have to see the relation of religion and the

mind a little more carefully, if I may.