Psychological Objections
By
H.A. Williams

The title of this lecture - Psychological Objections to Christian Belief - might suggest that my purpose is to criticize one orthodoxy, Christianity, by the dogmas of another orthodoxy, Psychology. But this would be an impossible task and for two reasons. The first reason can be stated simply in the short questions - What is Christianity? and, What is Psychology? For there is no agreed answer to either question. In the divided state of Christendom, Christianity can mean a great number of things. And even within one single Christian Communion, let us say the Roman Catholic Church, there are in practice considerable varieties of emphasis in what is held out for the contemplation of the faithful. The writings, for instance, of Dom Columba Marmion of the Order of St Benedict are noticeably different in atmosphere from the writings of Teilhard de Chardin of the Society of Jesus.

An apparent uniformity covers a considerable diversity - no bad thing unless life is bad. As for the world of psychology, it is as divided as Christendom. There are the well-known denominations - 'I am of Freud', 'I am of Jung', 'I am of Pavlov', 'I am of the half-subject psychology of the Natural Science Tripos Part I'. And within these denominations there are, as within Christian denominations, varieties of emphasis. Although, for instance, Oedipus is theoretically fundamental in the Freudian mythology, the manner in which the myth is understood and applied in practice differs considerably from analyst to analyst. There can therefore be no question of treating Christianity and Psychology as though they were two fully defined and consistent systems of thought and seeing how one can criticize the other. We have not to do with two giants. On each side there is a variety of species.

But there is a more fundamental reason why it is impossible to match a Christian orthodoxy with a psychological orthodoxy - a reason more fundamental even than the fact that such monolithic orthodoxies do not exist. The second reason concerns the manner in which beliefs about human life and destiny are apprehended. We may imagine that it is a purely intellectual process, a matter of rigorous and consistent thinking. To think hard and to think clearly is all we need to apprehend the meaning of life. But is it?

It would be absurd to underestimate the importance of giving intellectual form and content to our experience. Without doing so in some measure or other it would be impossible to live at all. But it would be equally absurd to separate the act of thinking from the person who thinks, or to claim that the thinker's dispositions and predilections, his good or bad fortune, the state of his health and the affairs of his heart will not effect the conclusions at which his thinking arrives. For man is not simply a thinking animal. He is an animal who feels and suffers. And what he feels and what he suffers will colour what he thinks. 'All our reasoning', said Pascal, 'All our reasoning reduces itself to yielding to feeling.' Or in the words of Joseph Conrad in one of his later novels Victory - 'The use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, to justify impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears'. But if what a man thinks is influenced by what he is, by what his past experience has made him, it would, in my opinion, be dishonest to set before you any system of ideas, be it labelled Christianity or Psychology, and claim for it an objective validity independent of my own subjective experience of living. I know that this is often done.

To take an example from a field of study with which I am myself concerned - I know that the New Testament is often expounded as if the exposition were the product of pure scholarship alone. And I am sure that those who thus expound it honestly believe it to be the case. They do not see the looking-glass hidden in the pages of the text they are interpreting. It was Oscar Pfister, the Calvinist Pastor and Freudian analyst, in his book Christianity and Fear who said - 'Tell me what you find in your Bible and I will tell you what sort of man you are'. A similar warning has been given by Thomas Merton the Cistercian monk, who now, after fifteen years in a Trappist monastery, says this in his latest book New Seeds of Contemplation - 'Our ideas about God tell us much more about ourselves than they do about God'. What Pfister and Merton here say about religious beliefs could be applied to those who expound Psychology - 'Tell me what you find in human nature and I will tell you what sort of man you are'. There is no escape from this subjective element, although it can, of course, be denied, either explicitly or in the form and manner of presentation.

Let me now therefore say that all I can do this evening, under the grandiose title, Psychological Objections to Christian Belief, is to tell you of an inner conflict, a conflict which has arisen between, on the one hand, what I once believed to be essential elements of Christianity, and on the other, what I have discovered about the way I work as a human person, the subterranean forces and strategies of which I have become aware within. To many of you what I say may have little or no meaning. But this, I take it, is inevitable in all attempts at communication. The farmer, said Jesus, is not deterred by the knowledge that much of the seed he sows must of necessity be wasted. No claim is being made to any superiority of insight or to any store of esoteric knowledge. Psychology must not be regarded as the Gnosticism of the twentieth century. All that is being stated is the obvious - that I am not you and therefore our experience cannot be identical. But some of you may have had experience parallel with my own. Without coinciding it may overlap. So this lecture need not be a complete waste of time for everybody.

The inner conflict of which I spoke just now centres round an apparently inexhaustible capacity to disguise the truth from myself, to believe sincerely that I am doing one thing when in fact I am doing something quite different. If I may quote Conrad again (this time Lord Jim) - 'It is my belief that no man fully understands his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge'. I agree with Conrad that the shadow seems grim, but that is because it is unknown, and we are frightened of the unknown as children are frightened of the dark. We prefer to bear, we fanatically insist on bearing those ills we have rather than fly to others that we know not of. Yet such a death to the old self and rebirth to a new life has been the message of all the great religious geniuses down the centuries. And they have told us from their own experience, that it leads, not to the suspected ills, but to a richness and peace and abundant life unimaginable before. Yet the prospect of such a voyage of discovery terrifies us.

Hence the artful dodges we employ to evade it. For some the artful dodges consist in work, for others pleasure, but the more respectable and praiseworthy the dodges appear to be, the more dangerously misleading they are. When Christianity is used as an artful dodge to allow me to escape from the discovery of what I am, when the light that is in me is thus darkness, how great is that darkness. And this, I believe, is what happens frequently. But before I speak in more general terms and in order to drive home the point, I want to tell you of something which actually happened to a man I know. Let us call him X. X was beginning to question the validity of the continuous confessions of utter sinfulness and unworthiness which were a fundamental element of the Christianity in which he had been brought up.

He went to a priest who told him that his questioning was the result of pride, an unwillingness to admit that he was a sinner. X was much comforted by this counsel and came away feeling at peace. But the peace of which he was conscious was interrupted by a series of dreams. X had a friend, Z, who was a sincere and much respected Christian and who always laid great emphasis on the importance of self-abasement before God. Five or six times X dreamt that he met Z at a strip-tease show of the most degrading and illicit kind. These dreams told him nothing whatever, of course, about Z. But they told him something of immense importance about himself. In X's feelings, Z was associated with self-abasement before God.

To dream several times of Z present at a degrading show was a clear indication that X's confessions of utter sinfulness were in fact a perverted form of lust. What appeared to be an element of sound Christianity, what was recommended on the authority of a priest, was thus in the end discovered by X to be an artful dodge to escape from the truth that an important part of him unhealthily enjoyed confessing sinfulness since it was a disguised indulgence in sexual perversion. When, at the start, he went to the priest and questioned the validity of self-abasement, he couldn't have said why he went. But clearly it was because he was beginning to grow out of his perversion. The priest's advice (which was sound enough theologically) gave him peace, since it represented permission to stay as he was and not to move out of his sickness.

The practice of Christianity seems to me to be riddled with disguises of this sort. Christopher Isherwood, in his novel The World in the Evening, makes the hero say - 'I believe in God but I hate the sort of people who do'. I think what Isherwood means is connected with these disguises. Suppose, for instance, that I were a writer who produced my best work during the time when I was having an illicit affair. Suppose the woman then died and I became a convert to some form of Christianity. I could repudiate my past as wholly wrong. Yet to it I must have owed some at least of the insight which enabled me to write so convincingly about the splendours and miseries of life. My repentance, partly genuine, is also partly me denying one of the sources of my inspiration, because in retrospect it now looks unattractive - like a dinner party one in fact enjoyed but which now, owing to an attack of jaundice, one cannot bear to think of. On one level, that is, consciously, I am responding to God's love.

At the same time, I am also concealing from myself the fact that when God's love came to me as creative inspiration through the circumstances of my past, I am not humble enough to acknowledge it because of its unapproved and (as it seems to me now) ugly medium. It is as though my acceptance of the Christ, manifestly beautiful, were partly a disguise for my refusal to accept Him when He came self-emptied of His majesty, when (so it appears now), He had no form nor comeliness, and there was no beauty that we should desire Him. We were given a memorable and moving example of this situation in the lecture last week. Many Christians today believe that a second marriage after divorce brings with it the blessing and presence of Christ. Sixty years ago, almost all Christians would have opposed that belief to the death. The climate of opinion in our society has changed. Yet, sixty years ago, Christ would have been no less present in a second marriage, for all His being unrecognized by the pious, and, in general, despised and rejected.

To deny Christ before men is not always the obvious thing it generally appears to be. Most of us have an enormous but unrealized vested interest in not recognizing Christ when he comes to us in forms of which our culture and civilization disapprove. We allow ourselves to be too deafened by the music of the Church organ to hear Him say - 'Why persecutest thou me?'

On the conscious level practising Christians are generally kind, forgiving, helpful, and apparently unselfish. But there is often something which doesn't quite ring true. Behind the consciously sincere generosity, there is often an egotism which is disturbing because it is unrecognized, and so, underhand. It is as though their Christianity were no more than a Merovingian Emperor. Behind stands the Mayor of the Palace whom they are too frightened to meet. The result is that what they honestly consider to be serving God for his own sake is really a making use of God to serve themselves. They use Him chiefly as the whitewash with which to paint the sepulchre where their own corruption lies concealed. The impression left is of something surreptitious.

So the kindly smile sickens and the helping hand depresses. And one is left feeling - 'This is not you doing this at all. You are really doing something else, trying to buy a couple of ounces of pious feeling, although of course you don't know it.' In short there is a lack of that spontaneity which is of the essence of charity. By way of contrast consider a character in a novel I hope you have all read - Randall Peronett in Iris Murdoch's An Unofficial Rose. Randall is in the usual sense of the word as selfish as hell. He leaves his wife and daughter and goes off with another woman without the slightest regard for the suffering this is bound to cause. Now please don't think I am advocating this sort of behaviour. All I want to point out is that Randall did not shelter behind any disguise. He did not hide from himself the sort of man he was or the sort of thing he was doing. He met himself and accepted what he found. And by thus being him, in spite of his deplorable behaviour, he gave.

Just by being, without any pretences, the man who was Randall Peronett, he gave to the very wife he deserted. And so much did he thus give her that she, without having any but the dimmest idea of what she was doing, concluding merely that real compassion is agnosticism, awaited his return. It is those who shed disguises who inspire devotion, because what they offer is something real, even if they behave as badly as Randall did.

Or consider two better known characters, Simon the Pharisee in St Luke's gospel and the uninvited guest who appeared at his table - the prostitute. So overlaid was Simon with official piety that he had killed within him the spontaneity of love. The uninvited guest had not. She was herself, and being so, was still capable of loving. At times it had led her to walk the streets, but it also brought her to the feet of Jesus. Simon, the good churchman, was dead. The woman was alive. And Jesus said of her - 'Her sins which are many are forgiven because she loved much'. Now I know that devotees of what Mr E.M. Forster has called the suburban Jehovah have tried to save St Luke, have tried to save Jesus Himself, from saying that the woman's sins were forgiven because she loved much. Instead Jesus is made to say - her great love shows she has been forgiven. But as Dr R.P. Casey pointed out in the Classical Review, this translation forces the Greek intolerably. (Incidentally both James Moffatt and the Revised Standard Version give the old and natural rendering.) Translating to make Jesus say what middle-class Christian dons consider suitable is not without its humorous aspect. It is a good example of the limitations of learning.

The sort of spontaneity shown by the woman who was a sinner is not encouraged by Christian pastors. They generally help us to hide from what we are by telling us to decide to be something else. We are always being told to make decisions - to decide for Christ, to decide to be forgiving, to decide to die to self. But real decisions are never calculated or thought out in this way. They mature by themselves as a tree grows. The earth beareth fruit of herself. If, for instance, I make a conscious decision to be humble, I don't become humble. I become what Blake called sneaking - the type which Dickens caricatured in Uriah Heep, although of course I do it much better than Uriah (I hope).

This is the result of my never going deep enough into myself to discover the real cause of my aggressiveness. So the engine of aggressiveness races on as before. But what it produces is no longer open and above board. Instead it produces an extremely strained meekness and mildness. I go about like a melodramatic stage version of the Lamb of God and the Suffering Servant rolled into one. 'That is the path we all choose', said George Eliot,' when we set out on the abandonment of our egotism - the path of martyrdom and endurance where the palm-branches grow'. The real aggression which supplies me with the props and paint for this performance makes itself felt through the disguise. And because it is underhand, it hits below the belt.

It is destructive of the people on whom it is exercised in a way in which open aggression never is. Such consciously contrived humility might almost be called a diabolical perversion of aggression. Bernard Shaw's epigram is applicable to the grown-up as well as to the young - 'Never strike a child except in anger'. Yet Christians are often so pathologically intent on preserving as far as they can an image of themselves as Christlike that they are totally unaware of the harm their attempted humility is doing to other people.

I said 'pathologically intent' deliberately. Psycho-pathology consists in a limited awareness of what I am combined with a dogged determination to preserve this limited vision at all costs. Part of the game, of course, is not to realize this fact. I go to Church, I read the Bible, I say my prayers, I do good works, I become a clergyman, in order to keep what I am at arm's length, draping a curtain between it and my eyes. Job did this. Job was a righteous man who hid from himself. Then God stripped everything from him. The result was at first self-pity.

This in time gave way to the horrors. What was revealed to Job was terrifying because it was utterly destructive of what Job thought he was. But the reality he saw with such terror destroyed only what Job thought he was. It did not destroy Job. On the contrary, it gave him himself. Not a Job who could claim to be the captain of his own soul, especially in the obedience he gave to God's will. But a Job who, by means of terror, saw and was satisfied. 'I heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see thee; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.' What Job despised, what he repented of in dust and ashes, was the good, God-fearing, religious Job of the early chapters, the Job who was blind, who heard about God and imagined he served him, but who in fact had never seen him. The vision which made Job into himself and destroyed what Job thought he was, this vision was not contrived. For it was precisely the Job of the early chapters who was set on contriving, contriving to be moral and religious. And this contriving for all its apparent praise-worthiness was really a disguise for the successful attempt to preserve his blindness. What happened then was beyond his control.

God shook him upside down and turned him inside out, so much so that Job wished he were dead and cursed the day on which he was born. But the final result was a genuine death to a false image of himself and a genuine birth to what he really and fully was. Now compare the drama of Job with what the churches generally say about repentance and rebirth. Stop doing a, b,c. Tell God you are sorry for doing them and start trying to do x, y, and z. The possibility of vision is excluded from the start. The path of increasing awareness is blocked. And if something within me tells me this is so, if a voice within hints that I am being disloyal to what I truly am - well, such things are never felt explicitly or articulated in any clear message.

I merely feel that being a Christian is being a strain, and for that complaint the clergyman has an answer ready to hand. Jesus told us it would be difficult to follow Him. It is such an easy, plausible and seductive lie. Last June there was an article in the Sunday Times by the Rector of Woolwich, the Reverend Nicholas Stacey, in which he said that more often than not the fundamental reason why young people are not Christians is a sin which they are not honest enough to know would have to be given up. Stacey seemed to be totally unaware of the absolutely sincere and agonizing conflict of loyalties which must come to those who are seeking the truth about themselves.

To give up what Stacey calls a sin in order to toe the line to a prefabricated pattern of behaviour may be the very sin against the Holy Ghost. For the apparent goodness of such a submission is a disguise for an evasion, a refusal to run the risk and incur the possible terror of discovering the real evil of which I am the slave, an evasion made possible by my accepting as evil and so giving up what the moral establishment dictates. Throw out the painted icon of the devil in my room, in order that the devil himself can stay put, securely invisible. 'Straight is the gate and narrow is the way', said Jesus, 'which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it'.

The churches generally preach something different - 'Few there be who, having found it, have the moral courage to walk on it or remain walking on it. For it is easy enough to find. It is plain for all to see.' The ease and certainty with which the churches point to the road and their assumption that it is obvious to all men of good will leads me to think that the road they thus recommend is not the narrow way at all but the wide gate and the broad way which leads to destruction.

The weapon with which the churches bludgeon me on to the broad way is that of inflating the feelings of guilt which lie latent in us all. Make a person feel guilty enough and he will do what he is told. This latent guilt-feeling is a non-rational sense of a harshly authoritative figure who judges and condemns us. It is as though the external authoritative figures we have known all our lives have been injected inside us like a virus and have in this way become part of ourselves.

If we think God exists, these feelings of a harsh pitiless authority get associated with Him, however much our conscious reason insists that God is Love. Even if, shall we say, a man is a Christian Theologian of the highest calibre, it is still possible for him to feel the inner Juggernaut, and in his feelings to confuse the Juggernaut with God. What H.G. Wells' Mr Polly thought of God we educated people do not think of Him. But there can be very few of us indeed who do not sometimes in a confused way feel God to be as Mr Polly considered Him - 'A limitless Being having the nature of a schoolmaster and making infinite rules, known and unknown, rules that were always ruthlessly enforced and with an infinite capacity for punishment, and, most horrible of all to think of, limitless powers of espial'.

Now it is not at all difficult to whip up this unholy ghost inside us and make him active. There is a great deal wrong with the world, and the ghost can be made to tell us that it is largely our fault. I remember a preacher making us feel that it was our selfishness which helped to cause the 1914 war, although most of us had not been born until after the armistice had been signed. But of course it is generally done with greater subtlety than that, although the object aimed at is the same, to make us feel shabby, mean, contemptible, monstrously ungrateful to the God who made us. And so the unholy ghost within us is set furiously to work.

He is what William Blake called the Nobodaddy - Nobody's daddy, He who is not. Even mild, gentlemanly, sober, cautious exhortations about sin give Nobodaddy his opportunity. In Blake's words - 'The Nobodaddy aloft farted and belched and coughed'. And the result is we feel it absolutely necessary to placate him. And here is the deadly opportunity for effective evangelism. We have been brought under old Nobodaddy's spell, and towards him we insinuate, flatter, bow and bend the knee. (If you want to know what I mean read Cranmer's two general confessions in the Book of Common Prayer.) But hope is offered to us. We shall be saved if we do what we are told. This may be giving up a sin or practising a virtue. It may be the performance of religious exercises. It may be singing 'Just as I am without one plea', and 'I am all unrighteousness'. Nobodaddy's fury subsides. We have shown the white flag and capitulated to Him. Peace is declared. But the peace is bought with a price. And the price is my destruction. For what I am and what I do is no longer the activity of a free agent. I am the slave of my own guilt-feelings, reduced to a puppet manipulated by this horrific puppeteer.

Let me now give you an actual example of what I have been describing. I know a man - he was a person of some academic intelligence - who was loyally practising his religion as a devout and rather High-Church Anglican. One night he had a nightmare which proved to be a turning point in his life. In his dream he was sitting in a theatre watching a play. He turned round and looked behind him. At the back of the theatre there was a monster in human form who was savagely hypnotizing the actors on the stage, reducing them to puppets.

The spectacle of this harsh inhuman puppeteer exercising his hypnotic powers so that the people on the stage were completely under his spell and the slaves of his will - this spectacle was so terrifying that the man awoke trembling and in a cold sweat. After several months he gradually realized that the monster of the nightmare was the god he was really worshipping in spite of his having got a First in the Theological Tripos. And to this god he had painfully to die. He had to accept the terrible truth that the practice of his religion had been a desperate attempt to keep his eyes averted from the monster of the nightmare. He had thought that, with many failures, it is true, but according to his powers, he was responding to God's love. His dream showed him that he was a devil's slave - his devotion and his goodness being a compulsive response to a deeply embedded feeling of guilt, and this in spite of his regular use of sacramental confession.

It broke him up temporarily. But later he was certain that, although he was much less religious in the usual sense, he had been brought to the straight gate and narrow way. For life and behaviour based on feelings of guilt excludes charity. To be bullied, compelled, by subtle inner unidentifiable fear to apparent worship and goodness is to destroy the self. And without a self one cannot give. There can be no charity, no love for God or man.

The dreamer whose history (with his permission) I have recounted was seen, about two years after his nightmare, drunk among the bars and brothels of Tangier. He was learning that for him evil was not what the priests had told him it was, but rather that evil was the disguised slavery to his own hidden corruption which had led him to go to Mass every day and to confession every month. And he told me that words of Jesus rang in his ears like bells of victory - the words which Jesus addressed to the churchmen of His day - 'Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the Kingdom of God before you'. Now I am not suggesting that it is a good or morally desirable thing to spend one's time drunk among the bars and brothels of any city.

What I am suggesting with all the emphasis at my command is that there are worse, much worse, evils than that. Worse because unperceived and thus sincerely imagined to be good. If you are the slave of drink or sex, somewhere inside you, you know you are a slave. But if you are the slave of guilt-feelings, you can deceive yourself and call it the service of God or even free response to God's love. That is why a congregation of 'good' people in church can be much further from the heart of God than those who have strayed from the path of conventional behaviour. 'They that are whole', said Jesus, 'have no need of the physician. But they that are sick!'

As a matter of straightforward historical fact it is true that Jesus of Nazareth was not crucified by the publicans and sinners. He was crucified by the Church. And here some words of Bishop Charles Gore should haunt us in season and out - 'I see nowhere any ground for believing that the officers under the New Covenant would be protected from error, if they should behave like the officers under the Old'. As Reinhold Niebuhr said here in Cambridge twenty years ago - 'The Church can be Anti-Christ, and if and when the Church fails to admit this, it is the Anti-Christ.'

I believe that behind the outwardness of much worship and good works there lies a fact which Christians unknowingly do all in their power to keep hidden from their eyes - the fact that they have sold themselves as slaves to the demon of guilt-feelings, however much intellectually they refuse the idea and however enlightened their theology of the atonement. For what we really believe is often very different from what we think we believe.

One final comment seems worth making. It follows from what I have said, and is about the authority of the New Testament. St Paul and St John were men of like passions to ourselves. However great their inspiration, however much they could soar into regions where we could not even begin to follow, being human, their inspiration was not even or uniform. Sometimes, like all other men, they knew not of what spirit they were. For with their inspiration went that degree of psychopathology which is the common lot of all men. They too had their inner axes to grind of which they were unaware. What therefore they tell us must have a self-authenticating quality, like music. If it doesn't, we must be prepared to refuse it. We must have the courage to disagree. But what then of the Jesus of the synoptic gospels? Some at least of his words must have been altered in tone and emphasis by the communities which handed them on before they were written down. The first Christian communities were not lacking in impulses, passions, prejudices, follies and fears. And these, without any deliberate dishonesty, must sometimes have coloured their account of what Jesus said. So His words for us must have their own inherent authority. There is surely no difficulty here. A play is not good because it is held to have been written by Shakespeare. Its quality is self-evident. So it must be with the recorded words of Jesus. Sometimes we must reject as untrue and unworthy a sentiment He is reported to have held. In practice it will be discovered that this still leaves us with incalculable riches.