1. Contents and Definitions
Hitherto, or at least until recently, the problem of fear has been gravely neglected by the mental sciences. Great as is the part obviously played by fear in the life of individuals and peoples, official psychology devoted hardly any attention to it. Where it did not prefer to observe complete silence it confined itself to meaningless and inadequate descriptions and headlines. On the origins of fear, on the laws which govern its effects, on the way in which it modifies thought, sensation and volition, whether consciously or after it has been repressed into the unconscious, on the modifications taking place in the unconscious and on the changes resulting in turn in the conscious mind, psychology had nothing to say; though it required no more than a modest knowledge of mankind to show that through these omissions extensive and important spheres of mental and cultural life were removed from the field of scientific apprehension.
Recently, the meaning of fear has been more precisely defined in several directions. The pioneer work was done by the theory of neuroses and by psychiatry, both of which grasped the fact that the diseases with which they dealt were mostly very closely connected with the problem of fear, and that if this problem were neglected, they must remain inscrutable. The study of this field was undertaken with remarkable zeal and led to important results which can no longer be neglected by the mental sciences under pain of accepting severe handicaps.
Philosophy, too, learned to consider the importance of the present problem in a new light. Martin Heidegger made a careful study, with which we shall deal below, of fear in its application to philosophic thought. The line he followed may have been determined to a certain degree by two theologians, by Luther, whose own attitude to and ideas about God were largely determined by his experience of fear and its appeasement, and by Kierkegaard, who had experiences of an analogous kind and provided valuable directives to theologians as a result of his far-reaching investigation of the psychology of fear.
Curiously enough, theology and the science of religious faith lacked the courage to pursue these indications to the end. Great as was the volume of work done in the sphere of religious psychology at the end of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, it did not go far beyond sterile generalities. Vain attempts were made to make a single mental function the appropriate sphere of religion-for example, thought by Hegel, sensation by Schleiermacher and volition by Kant; and eventually agreement was reached on the triviality that these three functions have a joint share in religion as in every other mental activity.1 The problem of fear continued to be neglected until Rudolf Otto in 1917 published his work on holiness and proved to admiring theologians the dominant importance of the mysterium tremendum and consequently of fear in the life of the various religions.2
But even Otto did not think it worth while to pursue his investigation of the function of fear in the psychological and biological direction indicated above; he too, did not go beyond generalities and descriptions. His great merit consisted in the fact that he presented students of the phenomena of faith with the alternatives of either remaining baffled by the mysteriumāby fear as such-which meant capitulation in the scientific sense at the very outset; or of entering on a psychological casestudy and thinking in terms of causality.
The reason for the failures hitherto recorded lay in the absence of the scientific apparatus needed for an accurate apprehension of the origins of religious fear and of its effects and repressions. What was wanting practically was the means of illuminating the psychological process taking place in the unconscious.
William James, Theodore Flournoy, Girgensohn and others discovered that the foundation of religious experience was to be found in the unconscious-the unconscious which many had treated with a certain amount of aversion. Others felt that faith, sin in all its significance, the reality of Divine grace and all that appertains to salvation, would be endangered, if not denied, unless they continued to be derived directly from Divine revelations containing no psychological element. Their aversion from admitting a psychological basis for religious fear prevented most from facing the psychological task with any degree of concentration. There was consequently a tendency to take refuge behind the odium which in the eyes of most theologians attached to the psychology of the unconscious. Observations made by non-theological students of the psychology of the unconscious, about the individual psychological processes of faith-experience and about the nature and truth of religion in general, often evinced so great a non-comprehension and neglect of the inevitable limits of psychology and such hostility towards faith in general that the theologiansā aversion from any psychological study of fear could be readily understood; the more so since a mastery of the necessary methods requires lengthy study.
Yet I think it inadvisable to adopt the opponentsā faults in order to avoid the necessary scientific discussion. On the contrary I am convinced that theology deprives itself of essential knowledge about an important instrument if it declines to investigate religious fear by a careful psychological method. I personally found myself compelled by my duty as a pastor as well as by my theologically trained conscience as a student to devote more than 30 yearsā investigation to the problem of religious fear and of many other manifestations of conscious piety. I am acquainted with no other method than that provided by depth psychology for liberating certain patients from morbid aberrations in their judgment of certain fundamental religious facts of the Old and New Testament and of ecclesiastical history, and for teaching certain victims of religious fear how to escape from profound and helpless distress.
The following pages accordingly contain an attempt to solve the problem of religious fear on psychological lines. We start from non-religious fear because it has in the past provided psychological investigation with information of the most important kind and because it involves no danger of bringing in supranatural points of view and thus eliminating empirical investigation; before we can begin to apply the psychological method to religion the psychological basis must first be separately laid. Following in Rudolf Ottoās footsteps and continuing along his path we shall enquire after the part played by fear in religious life and in Christian piety in their historical development; we shall also enquire after the conditions and laws governing their genesis; after the effects of fear in conscious and unconscious religious life; after the disguises assumed by fear and its transformations under the influence of the unconscious; after the connection between fear of life and fear of guilt; after the latent tendencies manifested in the formation of fear and its later effects; after the influence of religious fear on mens ethical behaviour, particularly their love of God and men; after the pathological products of fear; after the conditions governing the alleviation and cure of fear; and after other psychological tasks which we are compelled to undertake in the course of a thorough investigation of the concrete manifestations in life of religious fear. It goes without saying that we are compelled to use the greatest restraint, psychologically and historically, to avoid being overwhelmed by the mass of material and making impossible demands on the reader.
The present work does not confine itself to morbid manifestations and effects of fear in Christian religious life, though it is true that the theory of fear employed and at several points developed by ourselves is largely if not exclusively based on observation of the diseased. Nor do we consider fear necessarily bad in every aspect; we admit the possibility of its containing and opening the way to positive values.1 2
What we need is a reply to these questions: What, as a matter of historical fact, has been the line taken by Christianity in dealing with fear? In what way has it actually attempted to ward off the fear of life and of guilt? In what way did it involve a new fear with consequences the connection of which with fear can be explained only by the theory of fear? Was it possible in this process for Christian religion and ethics to maintain the intentions of the Founder, or did Christian piety undergo changes which must be judged to be incompatible with them, and, in a certain sense, to be morbid? What has been the fate of religious and ethical health in Christians? What conditions must be fulfilled if Christian faith is to be preserved from morbid malformations and if Christians are to be guarded from harm? What place is the treatment of fear to take in the life-task facing Christians? Is it possible and desirable entirely to eliminate fear in man generally and in Christians in particular?
The task before us can be defined as follows: We wish to determine the effect of Christianity upon fear and of fear upon Christianity. To this historico-psychological question there is added a second one relating to the hygiene of religion. How is it possible to protect Christianity and the faithful from the morbid malformations caused by fear?
Our task is one of the greatest importance. Ecclesiastical history contains many instances showing how the gospel has been interpreted in a spirit contrary to that of its Founder. Jesus taught that God was a loving Father in heaven and declared that love of God and of oneās neighbour was the highest and indeed the only requisite in His disciples; but the history of the Christian Church contains, side by side with noble instances of conformity with the spirit of Jesus, a grievous series of dogmatic disputations and savage fanaticism breaking out into barbarous wars of religion and persecutions of heretics, into centuries of witch hunts and into other perversions of Jesusās message. The history of Christendom is not only a history of Christianity; it is also a history of non- and even of anti-Christianity. Nothing is gained by ascribing the cause of this dreadful fact, which must wring the heart of every lover of the Christian faith, to diabolic influence; such an explanation fails to account for the aberrations mentioned or to suggest a remedy. Our task is scientifically to study their genesis and to grasp their cause and the laws governing them. To this end we must gain an understanding of the relationship between Christianity and fear. Only the theory of fear explains the changes which love undergoes when life encounters certain obstacles; it alone explains the atrophy of love occurring when there is a growing sensitiveness towards the illusions caused by fear and its various compulsions as well as the eruption of primitive sadistic impulses otherwise kept in check by civilization, the herd-formation with intellectual and emotional consequences in the shape of regularly occurring collective neuroses and psychoses and innumerable other phenomena of primary importance if Christianity and Christendom are to remain in a state of health.
The problem of fear is not a distinct section within the life of the human soul; it can be solved only within the framework of the economy of the soul as a whole and indeed of human civilization as an entirety: our subject consequently ranges wide and deep.
It is all the more important to begin by setting the necessary limits. We shall refrain from applying the methods of epistemology, metaphysics, ethics and dogmatics to solve the questions arising from the solution of the problem of fear in its religiopsychological and its religio-hygienic aspects. Clearly such a delimitation must be effected; but on account of our selfimposed restrictions we are debarred from discussing it. Our investigation cannot go beyond the field of psychology and hygiene.
The meaning we attach to the hygiene of religion has been explained elsewhere1. The word is ambivalent. It can denote the hygiene which religion is supposed to afford to maneither to the individual, in which case our sphere borders on that of psychiatry, or to human society, in which case the spheres of sociology and theology come into contact. Alternatively it may denote the preservation of the health of religionin the present instance through the piety and brotherly love revealed by Jesus. If the first method is followed, the medical notion of hygiene, which deals with the normal attunement of life and the economics of human forces, undergoes an extension. The possession of physical and psychical perfection does not, in our view, suffice to make a healthy and complete man. We admit that ethics and religion cannot disregard this ānaturalisticā health. But the concept of life can expand and rise from a merely natural to a social and spiritual significance and in its cosmic and absolute aspect can soar for the Christian to the height of Jesusās mighty word:1 āBecause I live ye shall live alsoā (John 19); and the concept of health can undergo a similar expansion. In this way a lofty prospect opens before the hygiene of religion.
Our study, based as it is on the theory of fear and on the observation of man subjected to fear, cannot remain blind to the conclusion that the piety taught by Jesus undergoes a change in diseased men which must be described as in a certain sense morbid. The diseased mind must change the patientās Christianity in a sense corresponding to the disease.
For this reason the hygiene of religion ultimately is of the same meaning in its anthropological and in its religious sense. The loftiest religious hygiene and the loftiest practice of religion tend to coincide. The manner in which this happens will be explained in the course of this study.
