Two types of Religious Experience

It's not often that we find a psychologist who is at the same time a social philosopher. Erich Seligmann Fromm (1900-1980) is one such and to me, a good one too. He is good not simply because of the vast knowledge he possesses within his own field of psychology and psychoanalysis. He is good because of the sharpness of his insights. Over the welcome mid-week break, I read one of his articles "An Analysis of Some Types of Religious Experience", taken from one of the numerous books he has written, Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950). He is also the authors of the following books. The Fear of Freedom (1941), Man for himself, an inquiry into the psychology of ethics (1947), Forgotten language; an introduction to the understanding of dreams, fairy tales, and myths (1951),The Sane Society (1955), The Art of Loving (1956), Sigmund Freud's mission; an analysis of his personality and influence (1959), Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism (1960), May Man Prevail? An Inquiry into the facts and fictions of foreign policy (1961), Marx's Concept of Man (1961), Beyond the Chains of Illusion: my encounter with Marx and Freud (1962), The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture (1963), The Heart of Man, its genius for good and evil (1964), Socialist Humanism (1965), You Shall Be as Gods: a radical interpretation of the Old Testament and its tradition (1966),The Revolution of Hope, toward a humanized technology (1968), The Nature of Man (1968), The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (1970), Social character in a Mexican village; a sociopsychoanalytic study (Fromm & Maccoby) (1970), The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), To Have or To Be? (1976), Greatness and Limitation of Freud's Thought (1979), On Disobedience and other essays (1981), The Art of Being (1993), The Art of Listening (1994) and On Being Human (1997). He belongs to a group of influential social thinkers called The Frankfurt School.

To people in the West, the concept of religion is customarily centred around  an all powerful, all knowing and perfect God but because this forms the frame of reference for the understanding of all other forms of religion, religions such as Buddhism and Taoism (which do not posit the existence of any monotheistic God) are often treated as if they were not religions whilst other systems of secular authoritarian political thought like Communism, Nazism,(which to Fromm, share many psychological characteristics of a religion) are not treated as religions at all. But to Fromm, "religion" is "any system of thought and action shared by a group which gives the individual a frame of reference of orientation and an object of devotion.". In this broad sense, no past culture has been without a religion.

Why is there a need for religion? According to Fromm, the root cause is the emergence of reason, imagination and self-awareness which "disrupted the "harmony" which characterize man's "animal existence". He says, "Their emergence has made man into an anomaly, into the freak of the universe. He is part of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, yet he transcends the rest of nature...he is set apart...he is homeless, yet chained to the home he shares with all creatures. Cast into this world at an accidental place and time, he is forced out of it, again accidentally. Being aware of himself, he realizes his powerlessness and the limitations of his existence. He visualizes his own death. Never is he free from the dichotomy of his existence: he cannot rid himself of his mind, even if he should want to; he cannot rid himself of his body as along as he is alive--and his body makes him want to be alive."

Instead of being merely his blessing, reason may also be his curse: "it forces him to cope everlastingly with the task of solving an insoluble dichotomy. Human existence ...is in a state of constant and unavoidable disequilibrium. Man's life cannot 'be lived' by repeating the pattern of his species; he must live.". He has also got his individuality, not just his common humanity.

Man also has emotional and spiritual needs. "Man is the only animal that can be bored and that can be discontented, that can feel evicted from paradise. Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape." Once man has achieved self-awareness, he cannot go back to the prehuman state of harmony with Nature. He must develop his reason until he becomes the master of nature and of himself!  In every age, man must create a world of his own in which he can feel at home with himself and his fellow men. Having lost paradise and unity with Nature, he has become an eternal wanderer (an Odysseus, Oedipus, Abraham, Faust). He is forced to go forward to make the unknown known by filling the blank spaces in his knowledge and must give an account of himself to himself and of the meaning of his existence and must overcome his inner split, tormented by a craving for absoluteness and for another kind of harmony which delivers the curse by which he was separated from nature, from his fellow men and from himself.

Often, man tries to restore this unity by building up another all inclusive mental image to enable himself to answer the questions: where he stands, who he is, what he ought to do. But he does not merely think. He has to act in a world of uncertainties. He has to strive for the experience of unity and oneness in respect of all spheres of his being to find a new equilibrium. Devotion to an aim or an ideal or a power transcending man such as God, is an expression of this need for completeness in the process  of living. This is a most potent need in man. It is so potent that in a sense, he has no freedom to choose whether to have an "ïdeal" but only what kind of ideal: reason, or love, worship of power or destruction. To Fromm, the most "satanic manifestation" of man's mind are expressions not of his flesh but of the idealism of his spirits. We must examine whether our ideals are conducive to the development of man's power and the degree they are a real answer to man's need for equilibrium and harmony in his world.

To Fromm, it is a dangerously erroneous idea to suggest that having some ideal or some religious feeling is valuable in itself. Man may worship animals, trees, idols of gold or stone, an invisible God, a saintly man or diabolic leaders, his ancestors, his nation or party, money or success; his religion may be conducive to the development of destructiveness or of love, of domination or of brotherliness; it may further his power of reason or paralyze it. Although the  religionist and the psycho-analyst share one common interest: the specific contents of  religion, for the psychoanalyst, it is the psychological roots, the effects and the values of various religions which interest him too. Freud suggested from his study of his patients that religion may be a collective or communal illusion based upon a universal childhood neurosis of mankind. But Fromm thinks that we may reverse their relations and interpret neurosis as a private form of religion: a regression to certain more primitive forms of current religious thoughts.

Neurosis may be looked upon as the emotional difficulties experienced by a maladapted person who fails to integrate his emotions with his rational faculties by becoming an independent, functioning individual capable of working and loving and leading an otherwise satisfactory life in accordance with the prevailing standards expected of him/her by his/her community. Normally, this means achieving some sense of unity of purpose or meaning in his life in the form of either a philosophy of life or a religion which provides him with a picture of his overall position in the scheme of things in the world which roughly corresponds with the truth. Fromm thinks that if a person fails to integrate his energies in the direction of his higher self, he will canalize them in the direction of his primitive self and will create and then cling to an illusory picture with the same tenacity a religionist believes in his dogmas. Fromm says, "Indeed, man does not live by bread alone'. He has only the choice of better or worse, higher or lower, satisfactory or destructive forms of religions and philosophies." 

What about the state of contemporary Western society? In the secular world, Fromm thinks that we now find everywhere the worship of power, success, the authority of the market. But if we were to look deeper, we would find at the personal level certain older and more primitive forms of private idolatry of pre-Christian religious worship like ancestor worship ( infantile fixation or attachment to a father or mother), totemism (devotion to a party, state, the flag or other holy object or an ideology like fascism, communism, socialism, democracy etc), fetishism, ritualism (neurotic compulsive disorders such as hand washing) etc. which underlie the thin veneer of Christianity and are theoretically inconsistent with the essential teachings of such a monotheism.

To Fromm, there are two types of religion, an authoritarian religion and a humanistic religion. He adopts the definition of the Oxford Dictionary of religion as "recognition on the part of man of some higher unseen power as having control of his destiny, and as being entitled to obedience, reverence and worship." He emphasizes the word "entitled to obedience, reverence and worship". The former is based on surrender to a power transcending man. Thus its main virtue is obedience and its cardinal sin disobedience. God is conceived of as omnipotent and omniscient whilst man is conceived of as powerless and insignificant and can gain grace or help from the deity only by complete surrender. Submission to the powerful authority of God is the way through which he escapes from his feeling of limitation and loneliness. He can only gain power through losing his integrity and his independence as an individual and by identifying with protective and awe-inspiring power of his God of which he considers himself a part. Thus Calvin says, " For I do not call it humility if you suppose that we have anything left....We cannot think of ourselves as we ought to think without utterly despising everything which may be supposed an excellence in us. This humility is unfeigned submission of a mind overwhelmed with a weighty sense of its own misery and poverty; for such is the uniform description of it in the word of God". Authoritarian secular political religions like Fascism and Communism follow the same principle. Here the Fuhrer, the Father of the People/State/Race/ Socialist Fatherland as the case may be, has become the object of worship and a man's worth is in denying his own worth and strength and man's happiness is sacrifice in the here and now is sacrificed to such abstract ideals as the "future of mankind" or his "life after death".

In contrast to the authoritarian religions are what Fromm calls humanistic religions, which are centred on man's and his strength e.g. early Buddhism, Taoism, the teachings of Isaiah, Jesus, Socrates, Spinoza ( in whose thinking God is identical with all that there is in the universe and all the forces of Nature) and certain trends in Judaism and Christianity (e.g mysticism in that some mystics think that man is one with God and that perhaps God needs man as much as man needs God and that the proper relationship between God and man is one of love and union and not one of domination and submission and division) and the Religion of Reason during the French Revolution. In this type of religion, man relies upon his reasoning power to understand himself, his relationship to others and to the world and to the universe and his position therein. He takes a realistic and truthful look at his own limitations and his own potentialities and develops his power of loving himself and others and experience his solidarity with others and all living things. This type of religion is based upon the use of his reason, his experience of Oneness with the All, as grasped through his thought and his love. His aim is to achieve the greatest strength, not his greatest powerlessness and virtue is self-realization and self-actualization not obedience. Faith for him is certainty of conviction based on his authentic experience, his thoughts and his feelings, not on his intellectual assent to certain abstract propositions propounded by religious leaders. His prevailing mood is one of joy not of guilt and sorrow, as in authoritarian religions. "Inasmuch as humanistic religions are theistic, God is a symbol of man's own powers which he tries to realize in his life, and is not a symbol of force and domination, having power over man." Jesus represents the humanistic side of Christianity par excellence: he says that the Sabbath is created for man, not the other way round; that the kingdom of God is within us. His religion is the religion of the poor, the oppressed, the social outcast in Jewish society: the mad men, the prostitute, the shepherd, the carpenters, the fishermen, the widows and children. But once Christianity became institutionized , it became  authoritarian and often aligned itself with secular political authorities.   

To Fromm, authoritarian religion is not in man's true interest. "While in humanistic religion, God is the image of man's higher self, a symbol of what man potentially is or ought to become, in authoritarian religion, God becomes the sole possessor of what was originally man's: of his reason and his love. The more perfect God becomes, the more imperfect becomes man. He projects the best he has on to God and thus impoverishes himself. Now God has all love, all wisdom, all justice--and man is deprived of these qualities, he is poor." This type of projection can also be observed in sado-masochism and in certain subjects' submission to their political and religious or cult leaders. When man has thus projected his best and most valuable powers to God or a leader, he becomes alienated from such powers so that his only access to himself is through God or his leaders! "In worshiping God, he tries to get in touch with that part of himself which he has lost through projection. After having given God all he has, he begs God to return to him some of what originally was his own. But having lost his own, he is completely at God's mercy. He necessarily feels like a "sinner" since he has deprived himself of everything that is good, and it is only through God's mercy or grace that he can regain that which alone makes him human. And in order to persuade God to give him some of his love, he must prove to him how utterly deprived he is of love; in order to persuade God to guide him by his superior wisdom, he must prove to him how deprived he is of wisdom when he is left to himself".  This alienation from his own powers not only makes feel utterly dependent on God, it makes him bad too in that he will lose all faith not only in himself but also in his fellow men, whom he regards as equally unworthy. Thus in his secular life, he acts without true love, and in his religious life, he feels himself a sinner but if he wishes to win forgiveness, he must further emphasize his own helplessness and worthlessness and thus his very attempt to win forgiveness reactivates the very attitude from which his sins stem! He is caught in a vicious cycle: the more he praises God, the emptier he becomes; the emptier he becomes, the more sinful he feels; the more sinful he feels, the more he praises God and the less he is able to redeem himself. To Fromm, "The real Fall of man is his alienation from himself, his submission to power, his turning against himself even though under the guise of his worship of God.". 

Fromm agrees that we should recognize our limitations. We know that we are subject to age, illness and death and we know that although we do have certain power over Nature, Nature is greater than our puny human efforts. But to Fromm, it is one thing to recognize one's dependence, one's limitations and lack of power, it is something entirely different to indulge in this dependence and to worship the forces on which one depends. "To understand realistically and soberly how limited our power is is an essential part of wisdom and maturity; to worship it is masochistic and self-destructive. The one is humility, the other self-humiliation" says Fromm. In his experience with masochistic personalities, he finds that they have a tendency to incur sickness, accidents, humiliating situations, to belittle and weaken themselves but in fact, they unconsciously drive themselves into such situations through their desire to surrender control over their own lives, to surrender their freedom and thus to avoid personal responsibility for their own action to others but sometimes, they would simultaneously show a tendency to dominate those weaker than themselves so that the dominating and masochistic tendencies together form the two sides of the authoritarian character structure. Sometimes this is not unconscious eg. as in politics.  

Fromm thinks that man has a need to love and that God is a symbol of man's such need to love. But he asks," does it follow from the existence and intensity of this human need that there exists an outer being who correspond to this need?" He gives his own answer, which is negative: " Obviously, that follows as little as our strongest desire to love someone proves that there is a person whom we are in love. All it proves is our need and perhaps our capacity.". He makes a distinction between what man says he is and what man is, between what man thinks and feels about another and what that other may actually be. Often, he says, what we say about another tells us more about who or what we are than what it tells us about the other. He quotes Spinoza: "What Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter". In the same manner, our religious and political leaders tell us about what the purported "truths" are tell us more about such religious and political leaders than about what the purported "truths" may be. To Fromm, Spinoza's statement, tells us an essential point about Freud's theory of man: " that a great deal of what matters goes on behind one's back, and that people's conscious ideas are only one datum, which has no greater relevancy than any other behavior datum; in fact less.". Nonetheless, although we must distinguish false "rationalization" ( which Fromm calls " this counterfeit of reason") from true "reasoning", and tease out the true reason from the rationalization of others, we must not abandon the use of reason altogether as being totally unreliable. We must still rely upon "reason" as our tool for critical analysis of all the religious or psychological rationalizations because it is a most useful tool. He has not lost all hope. He says, although" The degree to which man uses his thinking to rationalize irrational passions and to justify the actions of his group shows how great the distance is which man has still to travel to become homo sapiens...we must go beyond such an awareness. We must try to understand the reasons for this phenomenon lest we fall into the error of believing that man's readiness for rationalization is part of 'human nature' which nothing can change.". 

To Fromm, man is a herd animal. We need to have close contact with others around us. . "There is no greater threat to existence than to lose this contact with the heard and to be isolated", he says. Right or wrong, true or false are often determined by the herd. But we are also human, endowed with an awareness of ourselves and with the power to reason independently: we are able to determine what we can and should do regardless of whether what we think of as the "truth" is shared by others. To Fromm, this split between what he calls our "sheep nature" and our "human nature" is the basis of two kind of orientations: the orientation by proximity to the herd and the orientation by reason. Rationalization is a compromise between our sheep and our human capacity to think. "The ambiguity of thinking, the dichotomy between reason and a rationalizing intellect, is the expression of a basic dichotomy in man, the co-extensive need for bondage and freedom." Man frequently has to struggle between these two needs. Often man's judgment is determined by his need for contact with the herd and by fear of being isolated from it. But a "few individuals can stand this isolation and say the truth in spite of the danger of losing touch. They are the true heroes of the human race, but for whom we should still be living in caves.". For to him, the vast majority whether or not they are able to develop such an independent critical faculty to think for themselves depends on whether or not there is a social order in which each individual is fully respected and not made a tool by the state or any other group, "a social order in which he need not be afraid to criticize and in which the pursuit of truth does not isolate man from his brothers but makes him feel one with them."

Fromm thinks that if we go behind minor cultural differences, we shall find that "the human reality... underlying the teachings of Buddha, Isaiah, Christ, Socrates or Spinoza is essentially the same. It is determined by the striving for love, truth, justice...Just as a parent's consciously felt or expressed concern for a child can be an expression of love or can express a wish for control and domination, a religious statement can be expressive of opposite human attitudes." He advocates the age old adage: "By their fruits shall ye know them."  We should go behind the relevant religious rationalizations. He concludes:  "If religious teachings contribute to the growth, strength, freedom and happiness of their believers, we see the fruits of love. If they contribute to the constriction of human potentialities, to unhappiness and lack of productivity, they cannot be born of love, regardless of what the dogma intends to convey.".    

Fromm is a most perceptive writer. We must thank him for teaching us to look beneath the surface of religious dogma and to apply our critical mind to what the leaders of our Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Taoist and other religious or secular pseudo-religious thought systems (under the names of various "isms" like Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, Democracy etc) tell us and scrutinize their "dogmas" and unmask what is often basically irrational emotions disguised as "rational" arguments in their support and expose what is presented to us as their "reasons" or "logic" or "arguments" for what they really are: rationalizations! He proposes a very simple, common sense but often forgotten and effective criterion for judging the validity of the relevant arguments: observe their actual effects and not what the arguments of relevant dogmas promise to bring us. Do we want an authoritarian or a humanistic religious or quasi-religious political thought system? Do we want to be the master of our own fate or be a willing slave to an externally given fate meted out to us by a purportedly almighty spiritual being who may just be our "projection" on to what is thought of as an "external" and "objective image", created by man himself, of all that is most courageous, noble and loving in himself but infinitely inflated in power and glory? Is man not worshiping an ideal form of himself or his own society's conception of the great chieftain or king or protector and dispenser of justice in alienated form?