Outlines of a Philosophy
of Religion based on
Psychology and History
By Auguste Sabatier
Author of the "Apostle Paul" etc.
NEW YORK
JAMES POTT & COMPANY
119-121 WEST 23D STREET.
1910
CONTENTS
PREFACE
BOOK I.—RELIGION
CHAPTER I
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ORIGIN AND THE NATURE OF RELIGION
1. First Critical Reflections
2. Initial Contradiction of the Psychological Consciousness
3. Religion the Prayer of the Heart
CHAPTER II
RELIGION AND REVELATION
1. The Mystery of the Religious Life
2. Mythological Notion of Revelation
3. Dogmatic Notion
4. Psychological Notion
5. Conclusion
CHAPTER III
MIRACLE AND INSPIRATION
1. The Notion of Miracle in Antiquity
2. Miracle and Science: Miracle and Piety
3. Religious Inspiration
CHAPTER IV
THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF HUMANITY
1. The Social Element in Religion
2. Progress in the Outward Forms of Religion
3. Progress in the Representation of the Divine
4. The History of Prayer
5. Conclusion
BOOK II.—CHRISTIANITY
CHAPTER I
HEBRAISM, OR THE ORIGINS OF THE GOSPEL
1. Prophetism
2. The Dawn of the Gospel
CHAPTER II
THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY
1. The Problem
2. The Christian Principle
3. The Gospel of Jesus
4. A Necessary Distinction
5. The Corruptions of the Christian Principle
CHAPTER III
THE GREAT HISTORICAL FORMS OF CHRISTIANITY
1. The Evolution of the Christian Principle
2. Jewish or Messianic Christianity
3. Catholic Christianity
4. Protestant Christianity
5. Conclusion
BOOK III.—DOGMA
CHAPTER I
WHAT IS A DOGMA?
1. Definition
2. Genesis of Dogma
3. The Role and the Religious Value of Dogma
CHAPTER II
THE LIFE OF DOGMAS AND THEIR HISTORICAL EVOLUTION
1. Three Prejudices
2. The Two Elements in Dogma
3. The Crisis of Dogma
CHAPTER III
THE SCIENCE OF DOGMAS
1. Mixed Character of the Science of Dogmas
2. The Science of Dogmas and the Church
3. The Science of Dogmas and Philosophy
CHAPTER IV
CRITICAL THEORY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE
1. Antiquated Theories
2. The Kantian Theory of Knowledge
3. The Two Orders of Knowledge
4. Subjectivity of Religious Knowledge
5. Teleology
6. Symbolism
7. Conclusion
APPENDIX
Reply to Criticisms
PREFACE
This volume contains three parts which are related to each other as the three stories of one and the same edifice. The first treats of religion and its origin; the second of Christianity and its essence; the third of Dogma and its nature.
Proceeding thus from the general to the particular, from the elementary forms of religion to its highest form, passing afterwards from religious phenomena to religious doctrines, I have endeavoured to develop a series of connected and progressive views which I do not wish to be regarded as a system, but as the rigid application and the first results of the method of strictly psychological and historical observation that for years I have applied to this species of studies. In no domain is there a greater incoherence of ideas, a sharper conflict of feeling, or data more contradictory or, at all events, more difficult to reconcile. In no other is it more urgent to introduce a little sequence, clearness, harmony. Our century, from the beginning, has had two great passions which still inflame and agitate its closing years. It has driven abreast the twofold worship of the scientific method and of the moral ideal; but, so far from being able to unite them, it has pushed them to a point where they seem to contradict and exclude each other. Every serious soul feels itself to be inwardly divided; it would fain conciliate its most generous aspirations, the two last motives for living and acting that still remain to it. Where but in a renovated conception of religion will this needed reconciliation be found?
No one nowadays underestimates the social importance of the religious question. Philosophers, moralists, politicians, show themselves to be alive to it; they see it dominating all others, whose solution, in the end, it may prevent or decide. But, singular contradiction! the more zeal and the more decision these men manifest in handling the religious question in the social order, the more indifference or impotence they show in solving it for themselves both in their inner and their family life... No one has the right to impose a doctrine or the presumption, surely, to dictate to others how they must direct their thought; but a sincere and persuaded mind may tell how it has directed its own, and may set forth as an experience and a "document" the views at which it has arrived....
The solidarity of minds has now become so great, the currents of ideas, like the currents in the atmosphere, move so quickly and create, in circumstances so different and so far apart, states of soul so similar that many
To a generation that believed it could repose in Positivism in philosophy, utilitarianism in morals, and naturalism in art and poetry, has succeeded a generation that torments itself more than ever with the mystery of things, that is attracted by the ideal, that dreams of social fraternity, of self-renunciation, of devotion to the little, to the miserable, to the oppressed—devotion like the heroism of Christian love. Hence what has been called the renaissance of Idealism, the return, i.e., to general ideas, to faith in the invisible, to the taste for symbols, and to those longings, as confused as they are ardent, to discover a religion or to return to the religion their fathers have disdained. Our young people, it seems to me, are pushing bravely forward, marching between two high walls: on the one side modern science with its rigorous methods which it is no longer possible to ignore or to avoid; on the other, the dogmas and the customs of the religious institutions in which they were reared, and to which they would, but cannot, sincerely return. The sages who have led them hitherto point to the impasse they have reached, and bid them take a part,—either for science against religion, or for religion against science. They hesitate, with reason, in face of this alarming alternative. Must we then choose between pious ignorance and bare knowledge? Must we either continue to live a moral life belied by science, or set up a theory of things which our consciences condemn? Is there no issue to the dark and narrow valley which our anxious youth traverse? I think there is. I think I have caught glimpses of a steep and narrow path that leads to wide and shining table-lands above. Indeed I have ascended in the footsteps of some others, and I signal in my turn to younger, braver pioneers who, in course of time, will make a broader, safer road, along which all the caravan may pass.
BOOK FIRST
RELIGION
CHAPTER I
ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ORIGIN, AND ON THE NATURE OF RELIGION
1. First Critical Reflections
Why am I religious? Because I cannot help it: it is a moral necessity of my being. They tell me it is a matter of heredity, of education, of temperament. I have often said so to myself. But that explanation simply puts the problem further back; it does not solve it
The necessity which I experience in my individual life I find to be still more invincible in the collective life of humanity. Humanity is not less incurably religious than I am. The cults it has espoused and abandoned have deceived it in vain; in vain has the criticism of savants and philosophers shattered its dogmas and mythologies; in vain has religion left such tracks of blood and fire throughout the annals of humanity; it has survived all change, all revolution, all stages of culture and progress. Cut down a thousand times, the ancient stem has always sent new branches forth. Whence comes this indestructible vitality? What is the cause of the universality and perpetuity of religion?
Before entering upon this question it will be necessary to remove a fruitful cause of error with respect to the essence and origin of the religious sense, especially among the peoples of Latin extraction. This cause lies in the very word religion. It very badly designates the psychological phenomenon to be studied; it envelops it in accessory and even in alien ideas, which blind and mislead half-educated men. The word comes to us from the least religious of the peoples of the world. It has no synonym or equivalent in the language of the ancient Hebrews, or in that of the Greeks, the Germans, the Celts, or the Hindus, the human families which, in the religious order, have been the most original and the most creative. It was Rome that imposed the word upon us along with her language, her genius, and her institutions.
The first Christians were not acquainted with it. It is absent from the New Testament. When, in the third century, it enters into Christian speech, it no doubt undergoes a sort of baptism, and seems to cover a meaning more in conformity with the spirit of the Gospel. Lactantius defines religion as "the link which unites man to God." But in the ancient Roman writers the word never had this profound and mystical meaning. Instead of marking the inward and subjective side of religion, and signalising it as a phenomenon of the life of the soul, it defined religion by the outside, as a tradition of rites, and as a social institution bequeathed by ancestors. The Christian baptism through which the word passed did not efface this ancient Roman stamp. To the majority, even now, religion is hardly anything more than a series of traditional rites, supernatural beliefs, political institutions; it is a Church in possession of divine sacraments, constituted by a sacerdotal hierarchy, for the discipline and government of souls. Such is the form under which the genius of Rome conceived and realised Christianity in the Western world; and the fascination that this political and social conception of religion still exercises is so great that minds the most enlightened know no better than to agree with M. Brunetière, who, when wishing to set forth the superiority of Catholicism to Protestantism, confines himself, like Bossuet, to praising it as a perfect model of government.
By a sort of logical necessity, whenever and wherever this political conception of religion has predominated, an analogous explanation of its origin has always arisen. It is natural that men should have applied to it the ancient juridical adage: is fecit cui prodest. Religion admirably serves to govern the peoples; therefore it was originally invented for that purpose. It was the work of priests and chiefs who wished by means of it to strengthen and to ratify their authority. So reason the Romans in the days of Cicero and the philosophers of the eighteenth century. And there is some foundation for their arguments. Religion has often been utilised by politics: pious frauds are to be found in all the cults. But what then? What do the facts prove? It is not the pious fraud that produces the religion; it is the religion that gives occasion and opportunity to pious frauds. Without religion there would have been no pious frauds. When I hear it said, "Priests made religion," I simply ask, "And who, pray, made the priests?" In order to create a priesthood, and in order that that invention should find general acceptance with the people
The theory propounded by Positivism is profounder and more serious. Religion, which dates from the earliest ages, can only have been a first attempt at an explanation of the extraordinary phenomena by which man in his ignorance was astonished and frightened. It is the beginning of the childish form of science, which, in course of time, would naturally give place to higher and more rigorous forms. Children and savages animate all things round about them with a psychical life; they see particular wills behind every phenomenon that excites their hope or fear. Thus the imagination of primitive man peopled the universe with an infinite number of spirits, good and evil, whose mysterious action made itself felt at every moment of their destiny. A while ago we had the explanation of religion by priesthood; now we have the explanation by mythology. But it is the same vicious circle: it is an insufficient psychology once more mistaking the effect for the cause.
To conceive of religion as a species of knowledge is an error not less grave than to represent it as a sort of political institution. No doubt religious faith is always accompanied by knowledge, but this intellectual element, however indispensable, so far from being the basis and the substance of religion, varies continually at all the epochs of religious evolution. Doctrinal formulas and liturgies are means of expression and of education, of which religion avails itself, but which it can exchange for others after each philosophical crisis. Rites and beliefs become obliterated or die out; religion possesses a power of perpetual resurrection, whose principle cannot be exhausted in any external form or in any dogmatic idea.
Comte's theory of the three stages through which human thought has passed is well known: the theological stage of primitive times, the metaphysical stage in the Middle Ages, the positive or scientific stage of modern times. If knowledge were the essence of religion, one could easily understand the logical course of this evolution, an inferior form of knowledge being condemned to disappear before a superior form. The proof that it is nothing of the kind is the fact that religion does not cease to reappear at all epochs and in the most widely different conditions of culture. The three stages are not successive but simultaneous; they do not correspond to three periods of history, but to three permanent needs of the human soul. You find them combined in various degrees in antiquity, in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; in modern times, in Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Kant, Claude Bernard, and Pasteur. The more science progresses and becomes conscious of its true method and of its limits, the more does it become distinguished from philosophy and religion. Scientific research, exclusively devoted to the determination of phenomena and of their conditions in time and space, is one thing; the philosophic need of comprehending the universe as an intelligible whole, and of explaining all that exists by a principle of sufficient reason, is another and a different thing; and, lastly, differing from both, is the religious need which, rightly understood, is but a manifestation, in the moral order, of the instinct of every being to persevere in being. Why may not these divers tendencies of soul, coexisting always and everywhere, manifest themselves simultaneously and on parallel lines?
We need not go beyond the Positivists themselves for examples and proofs of this persistence of the religious sentiment. Comte, Spencer, and Littré may be called as witnesses. The founder of Positivism, who had predicted the fatal extinction of the disposition to religion in the human soul, crowned his system and ended his career by founding a new religion, clumsily copied from the sacerdotal organisation and the ritual practices of Roman Catholicism. There actually exists a Positivist Church, with a calendar of saints, with relics and anniversaries, with a catechism, and with a high priest not less infallible than the one at Rome. A few disciples, scandalised by this supreme temptation of the master, desired to excuse him by declaring that he had gone mad. It was a mistake. The fact is that, arriving at the construction of a Positive Sociology, Comte comprehended the rôle of the religious instinct and of religious feeling in the life of peoples, and he believed that he would only be able to cement the edifice of society in the future by religion. It is said that those who have been amputated sometimes feel sharp twitches in the limbs they have lost. Comte and his disciples have experienced something similar. Nature, with her usual irony, has avenged herself on them for the violence they have done to her.
Of Herbert Spencer not much need be said; everybody knows that the Unknowable in his system has become a sort of undetermined and unconscious force, eluding every effort of the mind to grasp it, but remaining, none the less, the cause explaining evolution, and the source profound whence all things flow. Under different names, do we not recognise the First Cause of the philosophers, and the image, half-effaced, of the God of believers? Need we be surprised that the English thinker pronounces religion to be eternal? that he finally reduces the mental life of man to these two essential and primordial activities—the scientific activity which pursues the knowledge of phenomena and their transformation, and religious activity delivering itself up to mystical contemplation and to silent adoration of universal being?
The example of Littré is more touching still. I remember reading a sublime page in one of his works, in which the savant, after running through the terra firma of positive knowledge, reaches its utmost limit, and, seating himself on the extremest promontory, sees himself surrounded by the mystery of the unknowable, as by an infinite ocean. He has neither barque, nor sails, nor compass wherewith to explore this boundless sea; nevertheless, he stands there gazing into it; he contemplates it; he meditates in presence of this vast unknown, and finally abandons himself to a movement of adoration and of confidence which renews his mental vigour and which fills his heart with peace. What is this, I ask, but a sudden outburst of religious feeling which positive science, so far from extinguishing, has only served to deepen and accentuate? And since we have here the religion of the unknowable, is it not evident that religion is not necessarily knowledge?
I now come to a third explanation which, older than either of the others, will bring us nearer to the end at which we aim. "It is fear," says a Latin poet, "that engenders the gods." There is a sense in which this is true. It cannot be doubted that religion was at first awakened in the heart of man under the impress of the terror caused by the disordered and destructive forces of primitive Nature. Thrown naked and disarmed on the barely-cooled planet, walking tremblingly upon a soil that quaked beneath his tread, his would be a state of misery and distress which filled his heart with an infinite terror. But the explanation needs completing. In itself and of itself, fear is not religious; it paralyses, crushes, stuns. In order that it may become religiously fruitful, it is necessary that, from the outset, it should be mixed with an opposite sentiment, an impulse of hope; it is necessary that man, the prey of fear, should conceive, in some way or other, the possibility of surmounting it—that is to say that he should find above him some help, some succour, by which to confront the dangers which threaten him. Fear only gives birth to religion in man because it awakens hope and calls forth prayer—prayer that opens an issue to human distress. There is that amount of truth in the ancient hypothesis. It brings us near
2. Initial Contradiction of the Psychological Consciousness
What is man? Externally he does not differ much from the higher animals, the series of which seems to have been closed by his appearance on our planet. His physical organism is composed of the same elements, acting according to the same laws; and of the same organs, performing analogous functions. It is by the incomparable development of his mental life that man is distinguished, and little by little disengages himself from animality. Phenomena and laws of a new kind now make their appearance. The mysterious life of the spirit, emerging from the physical life, unfolds itself gradually like a divine flower, and gives the world, for us, its meaning and its loveliness. The region of the true, the beautiful, the good, is opened up to consciousness; the moral world is constituted as a higher order to which man belongs. It is these moral laws, capable of dominating physical laws and bending them to higher ends that, in the human animal, realise and constitute humanity. Man is only man in so far as he obeys them, and such is the point of transition that he occupies between two worlds, such the necessity of the crisis by which he must disengage himself from material animality, that, if he does not rise above the brute, he necessarily, by the very perversion of his higher life, falls beneath him.
From the beginning, physical life implies a double movement: a movement inward from the outside to the centre of the ego, and a movement outward from the centre to the circumference. The first represents the action of external things upon the ego by sensation (passivity); the second, the reaction of the ego upon things by the will (activity). This internal flux and reflux is the whole mental life. From this point we shall soon perceive the initial contradiction in which this life is formed, and in which it goes on developing itself continually. The passive side and the active side of the life of the mind are not harmonious. Sensation crushes the will. The activity, the free expansion of the ego, its desires to extend and aggrandise itself are checked and crushed by the weight of the world, which on every side is pressing in upon it. Springing up from the centre, the wave of life breaks itself inevitably on the rocks of outward things. This perpetual collision, this conflict of the ego and the universe,—this is the primary cause and origin of all pain. Thus thrown back upon itself, the activity of the ego returns upon the centre and heats it like the axle of a wheel in motion. Sparks soon fly, and the inner life of the ego is lit up. This is consciousness. Brought back by painful sensations and by repeated failure of its efforts from the outside, the ego begins to reflect upon itself; it doubles itself and knows itself; soon it judges itself; it separates itself from the organism with which at first it confounded itself; it opposes itself to itself, as if there were really in itself two beings, an ideal ego and an empirical ego. Hence comes its torment, its struggles, its remorse, but also the impulse ever renewed, the indefinite progress of its spiritual life, of which each moment seems to be but a degree from which it ought to rise to a stage still higher.
May we not here foresee the divine purpose of pain? Without it, it would seem as if the life of the spirit could not have arisen out of physical life. All births are painful. Consciousness, like every other child, was born in tears. The child of pain, it can only be developed by pain. Where do you find intelligence the most refined, consciousness the keenest, inner life the most intense, if not amongst the human beings whose external activities have been repressed by sickness or by some limitation in their social position? How else will you explain the Pensées of Pascal or of Maine de Biran, or the Journal of Amiel? Whence comes that extraordinary development of consciousness of which we are all aware in men like these, unless it be that they feel more profoundly than others that radical contradiction which constitutes at once the misery and the grandeur of human destiny?
Continue this observation; follow each of our faculties in its progressive expansion. Starting from a contradiction without which they would not exist, you see them all end in a contradiction in which they seem to perish, so that that which has engendered consciousness seems as if it must destroy it. Everywhere the same discouraging antinomy. Man cannot know himself without knowing himself to be limited. But he cannot feel these fatal limitations without going beyond them in thought and by desire, so that he is never satisfied with what he possesses, and cannot be happy except with that which he cannot attain. I desire to know; my labouring intellect is athirst to comprehend and understand, and its first discoveries enchant it. But, alas, my head soon runs itself against the wall of mystery. Not only are there things it does not know, but there are things which it knows for a certainty that it will never be able to know. How can a man jump off his own shadow, or stand on his own shoulders, to look over the impassable wall? That all which is intelligible to us is real, I grant; but is all that is real intelligible to us? And then what becomes my knowledge save a melancholy feeling of ignorance that knows itself to be such? The same contradiction in my faculty for enjoyment. As my seeming knowledge changed into its opposite, so now I see pleasure and happiness changing into pain and sorrow. Let the superficial and the vulgar lay on fate or things the blame of their deceptions and of their inability to be happy; as for me, I can only blame the inner constitution of my being. It is as the result of that very constitution that enjoyment bears within itself the cause of its own exhaustion, that pleasure is changed into disgust, and that pain is born of all voluptuousness. Pessimism is in the right; for it is proved by an experience only too long-lived that the only result of happiness exclusively pursued is an increase of the capacity for suffering. Need I speak of moral activity? I desire to do good, but "evil is present with me." I do not do that which I approve, and I do not approve that which I do: I feel myself free in my will, and I am enslaved in action. The more effort I make towards an ideal righteousness, the more that ideal, which I never reach, constitutes me a sinner and strengthens in me the consciousness of sin; so that here again, and here especially, the final result of my search is the opposite of that which I set out to seek.
Whence shall deliverance come? How shall I solve this contradiction of my being which makes me at the same time live and die? To free man from the miseries and limitations of his nature men count upon the progress of science and the amelioration of the conditions of his life. But who does not see that here is a new source of despair? How can we forget that, so far from attenuating it, science in its progress aggravates and renders mortal the original condition of life? To make a discovery, to explain a new phenomenon, what is this but to add another link to the causal and necessary network which science weaves and spreads over things? To put sequence, order, and stability into the world, is not this, for science, to put necessity into it, and to make necessity the sovereign ruler of the world? Science, in the
From this feeling of distress, from this initial contradiction of the inner life of man, religion springs. It is the rent in the rock through which the living and life-giving waters flow. Not that religion brings a theoretical solution to the problem. The issue it opens and proposes to us is pre-eminently practical. It does not save us by adding to our knowledge, but by a return to the very principle on which our being depends, and by a moral act of confidence in the origin and aim of life. At the same time this saving act is not an arbitrary one; it springs from a necessity. Faith in life both is and acts like the instinct of conservation in the physical world. It is a higher form of that instinct Blind and fatal in organisms, in the moral life it is accompanied by consciousness and by reflective will, and, thus transformed, it appears under the guise of religion.
Nor is this life-impulse (élan de la vie) produced in the void, or objectless. It rests upon a feeling inherent in every conscious individual, the feeling of dependence which every man experiences with respect to universal being. Which of us can escape this feeling of absolute dependence? Not only is our destiny, in principle, decided outside ourselves and apart from ourselves according to the general laws of cosmical evolution, in the course of which we appear at a given time and place with a heritage of forces which we have not chosen or produced, but, not being able to discover in ourselves or in any series of individuals the sufficient reason of our existence, we are obliged to seek outside ourselves, in universal being, the first cause and ultimate aim of our existence and our life. To be religious is, at first, to recognise, to accept with confidence, with simplicity and humility, this subjection of our individual consciousness; it is to bring this back and bind it to its eternal principle; it is to will to be in the order and the harmony of life. This feeling of our subordination thus furnishes the experimental and indestructible basis of the idea of God. This idea may possibly remain more or less indetermined, and may indeed never be perfected in our mind; but its object does not on that account elude our consciousness. Before all reflection, and before all rational determination, it is given to us and, as it were, imposed on us in the very fact of our absolute dependence; without fear we may establish this equation: the feeling of our dependence is that of the mysterious presence of God in us. Such is the deep source from which the idea of the divine springs up within us irresistibly. But it springs at once as religion and as an effect of religion.
At the same time, it is well to note at what a cost the mind of man accepts this subordination in relation to the principle of universal life. We have seen this mind in conflict with external things. The mind revolts against them because they are of a different nature to itself, and because it is the proud prerogative of mind to comprehend, to dominate, to rule things and not to be subordinate to them. Pascal's phrase is to the point: "Man is but a reed, the feeblest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. Were the universe to crush him, man would still be nobler than the universe that killed him, for he would be conscious of the calamity, and the universe would know nothing of the advantage it possessed." That is why the material universe is not the principle of sovereignty to which it is possible for man to submit. The superior dignity of spirit to the totality of things can only be preserved in our precarious individuality by an act of confidence and communion with the universal Spirit. It is only on a spiritual power that my consciousness does actually make both me and the universe to depend, and in making us both to depend on the same spiritual power, it reconciles us to each other, because, in that universal being conceived as spirit, both I and the universe have a common principle and a common aim. Descartes was right: the first step of the human mind desirous of confirming to itself the sense of its own worth and dignity is an essentially religious act. The circle of my mental life, which opens with the conflict of these two terms—consciousness of the ego, experience of the world—is completed by a third in which the other terms are harmonised: the sense of their common dependence upon God. But is not this account of the genesis of religion too philosophic and too abstract to be capable of universal application? If it explains the persistence of the religious sentiment in epochs of high culture, can it also explain its appearance in the pre-historic ages of humanity? Those who raise this objection have not sufficiently marked the permanent nature of the initial contradiction which constitutes, at the beginning as at the end, the empirical life of man, and which renders it in all degrees so precarious and so miserable. It is not a contradiction created by logic. To experience it and to suffer from it man did not need to wait until he became a philosopher. It manifested itself in the terrors of the savage in presence of the cataclysms of nature, in the midst of the perils of the primeval forest not less than in our troubled thought in presence of the enigma of the universe and the mystery of death. The expression of human misery and the consciousness thereof are different things; the religious thrill which brings relief, at bottom is the same. Pascal, with all his knowledge, did not experience less distress than primitive man, when he exclaimed: "The eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrifies me." The disciple of Kant, shutting himself up in despair within the impassable limits of phenomenal knowledge, or the disciple of Schopenhauer ending in the internecine conflict between intellect and will, are they not smitten with a feeling of impotence still more painful, and, when they cease to reason in order to decide to live, do they not feel forming within themselves, and in spite of themselves, a sigh which is the beginning of a prayer?
Religion, therefore, is immortal. Far from drying
3. Religion is the Prayer of the Heart
We shall now be able to define the essence of religion. It is a commerce, a conscious and willed relation into which the soul in distress enters with the mysterious power on which it feels that it and its destiny depend. This commerce with God is realised by prayer. Prayer is religion in act—that is to say, real religion. It is prayer which distinguishes religious phenomena from all those which resemble them or lie near to them, from the moral sense, for instance, or æsthetic feeling. If religion is a practical need, the response to it can only be a practical action. No theory would suffice. Religion is nothing if it is not the vital act by which the whole spirit seeks to save itself by attaching itself to its principle. This act is prayer, by which I mean, not an empty utterance of words, not the repetition of certain sacred formulas, but the movement of the soul putting itself into personal relation and contact with the mysterious power whose presence it feels even before it is able to give it a name. Where this inward prayer is wanting there is no religion; on the other hand, wherever this prayer springs up in the soul and moves it, even in the absence of all form and doctrine clearly defined, there is true religion, living piety. From this point of view, perhaps a history of prayer would be the best history of the religious development of mankind. That history would be seen to commence in the crudest cry for help and to complete itself in perfect prayer which, on the lips of Christ, is simply submission to and confidence in the Father's will.
This concrete definition of religion has the advantage of correcting by completing that of Schleiermacher. It reconciles the two antithetic elements which constitute the religious sentiment: the passive and the active elements, the feeling of dependence and the movement of liberty. Prayer, springing up out of our state of misery and oppression, delivers us from it. There is in it both submission and faith. Submission makes us recognise and accept our dependence, faith transforms that dependence into liberty. These two elements correspond to the two poles of the religious life; for in all true piety man prostrates himself before the omnipotence that encompasses him, and he rises with a feeling of deliverance and of concord with his God. Schleiermacher erred in insisting only upon resignation. Thenceforth he could neither escape Pantheism in order to arrive at liberty, nor find any link between the religious and the moral life. Religion, then, is a free act as well as a feeling of dependence. And such is the character and the virtue of the act of prayer that everything is transformed by it. The crushing feeling of my defeat becomes the joyful and triumphant feeling of my victory. Each of these states is changed into its opposite, so that the truly religious man lives at once in a free obedience and in an obedient liberty. If religion has often been an oppressive power and an instrument of servitude, it has been at least as often the mother of all the liberties. The force which bows me down is that which also lifts me up, for it passes into my soul. The God that I adore comes in the end to be an inward God whose presence drives away all fear and places me beyond the reach of all the menaces of things. The conscious realisation of this presence of God,—that is the true salvation of my being and my life.
I now understand why "natural religion" is not a religion. It deprives man of prayer; it leaves God and man at a distance from each other. No intimate commerce, no interior dialogue, no exchange between them, no action of God in man, no return of man to God. At bottom, this pretended religion is nothing but philosophy. It arises in periods of rationalism, of criticism, of impersonal reason, and has never been anything but an abstraction. The three dogmas in which it is summed up—the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the obligation of duty—are but the inorganic residue, the caput mortuum, found at the bottom of the crucible in which all positive religions are dissolved. This natural religion, so called, is not found in Nature; it is no more natural than it is religious. A lifeless, artificial creation, it shows hardly any of the characteristic marks of a religion. For the moment, it may seem to have the advantage of escaping the attacks of scientific criticism. On trial, it is found to be less resistant than any other. The self-same reason that constructed it destroys it, and its dogmas are perhaps more compromised to-day in face of modern thought than those it professes to replace.
Religion then is inward prayer and deliverance. It is inherent in man and could only be torn from his heart by separating man from himself, if I may so say, and destroying that which constitutes humanity in him. I am religious, I repeat, because I am a man, and neither have the wish nor the power to separate myself from my kind.
CHAPTER II
RELIGION AND REVELATION
1. The Mystery of the Religious Life
"Thou wouldst not seek me hadst thou not already found me." In this word that Pascal heard amid his restless search, the whole mystery of piety is disclosed. If religion is the prayer of man, it may be said that revelation is the response of God, but only on condition that we add that this response is always, in germ at least, in the prayer itself.
This thought struck me like a flash of light. It was the solution of a problem that had long appeared to me to be insoluble. I had never read without a certain amount of doubt, and as an oratorical exaggeration, that promise made by Jesus to His disciples with so strange an assurance: "Ask, and it shall be given you: seek, and ye shall find: knock, and it shall be opened unto you.
I turn to another thought of Pascal. "Piety," he says, "is God sensible to the heart." If so, it is evident that in all piety there is some positive manifestation of God. The ideas of religion and revelation are therefore correlative and religiously inseparable. Religion is simply the subjective revelation of God in man, and revelation is religion objective in God. It is the relation of subject and object, of effect and cause, organically united; it is one and the same psychological phenomenon, which can neither subsist nor be produced save by their conjunction. It is as impossible to isolate as it is to confound them.
I conceive therefore that revelation is as universal as religion itself, that it descends as low, goes as far, ascends as high, and accompanies it always. No form of piety is empty; no religion is absolutely false; no prayer is vain. Once more, revelation is in prayer and progresses with prayer. From a revelation obtained in a first prayer is born a purer prayer, and from this a higher revelation. Thus light grows with life, truth with piety. This makes it possible for me to enter into communion and sympathy with all sincerely religious souls, however simple and however crude or gross their worship and their faith; but if I can comprehend them, I cannot always speak their language or share their ideas. All religions are not equally good, nor are all prayers acceptable to my consciousness. To return to exploded superstitions or to beliefs now recognised to be illusory is as much a moral impossibility as it would be for a full-grown man to return to the puerilities of his childhood. Revelation therefore is not a communication once for all of immutable doctrines which only need to be held fast. The object of the revelation of God can only be God Himself, and if a definition must be given of it, it may be said to consist of the creation, the purification, and the progressive clearness of the consciousness of God in man,—in the individual and in the race.
From this point of view, I see very clearly that the revelation of God never needs to be proved to any one. The attempt would be as contradictory as it is superfluous. Two things are equally impossible: for an irreligious man to discover a divine revelation in a faith he does not share, or for a truly pious man not to find one in the religion he has espoused and which lives in his heart. With what, moreover, and how could it be proved that light shines except by forcing those who are asleep to awake and open their eyes? All serious Apologetics must insist as a necessary starting-point on the awakening and conversion of the soul.
Having always been religious, mankind has never been destitute of revelation, that is to say of witness more or less obscure, more or less correctly interpreted, of the presence in it and the action of God. But if men have always maintained some relation and some commerce with the deity, they have not always represented in the same manner the mode in which communications have been received from Him. The notion of revelation has progressed with the growth of mental enlightenment and with the nature of the piety. It is therefore necessary to criticise that notion and to see what it has now become for us. It is to this examination that I shall devote this second meditation. The idea of revelation has passed through three phases in the course of history: the mythological, the dogmatic, and the critical.
2. The Mythological Notion of Revelation
Among the faculties of man, the first to awaken in the mental life of the child and of the savage is the imagination. All literatures begin with chants, all histories with legends, and all religions with myths or symbols. Poetry always makes its appearance before prose. One can only see the effect of an inveterate rationalism in the promptitude with which men are scandalised at any attempt to point out in the Bible or around the cradle of Christianity legends and myths serving as sacred vehicles for the purest and sublimest religious revelations, as if the divine Spirit, in order to be intelligible to the simple and the ignorant, could not as well avail Himself of the fictions of poetry as of logical reasonings, of the chants of the angels at Bethlehem as of the rabbinical exegesis and argumentations of the Apostle Paul. A myth is false in appearance only. When the heart was pure and sincere the veils of fable always allowed the face of truth to shine through. And why so much disdain? Does not childhood run on into maturity and old age? What are our most abstract ideas but primitive metaphors which have been worn and thinned by usage and reflection?
It is none the less true, as St. Paul says, that in advancing in age we have left behind the speech and thought of infancy. The first men did not know how to distinguish between the substance and the form of their beliefs. This distinction has become easy to us. The most conservative minds can no longer read the stories or the monuments of the ancient religions without criticising and translating them.
The men of other times, timid and ingenuous as children, saw everywhere material signs by which they believed the will of the gods was manifested. They early formed the art of divination—an essentially religious art. It is found among all peoples, the ancient Hebrews not excepted. The thunder was to them the voice of God. They consulted Him by the Urim and Thummim, and by the sacred ephod. They did not doubt, any more than the Greeks, either the divine origin or the prophetic sense of dreams. Elsewhere they evoked the dead, they interrogated the flight of birds, they listened to the sound of the wind in the foliage of the oaks, or to the noise of waters in sonorous caverns. That was an external and, in some sort, physical conception of revelation, from which modern peoples have escaped, but with which all set out.
In the oldest traditions of Hebraism, God speaks to Adam, to Noah, to Abraham, to Moses, as one man speaks to another, by articulate sounds perceived by the ear. The sacred formula, Thus saith the Lord, serves as the uniform introduction to civil, political, and ritual, as well as to moral and religious, laws. Religion then embraced and regulated all the life. The great empires of antiquity all claim a divine origin. As to ancient legislations, there is not one that is not said to have come from heaven.
Nor was it only religious and political institutions that they referred to the will of the gods; they referred to it all kinds of decisions and enterprises; declarations of war, raids to make, the order of battle, the extermination of the vanquished, the sharing of the spoils, conditions of peace, expiations to be made; everything was done in obedience to supernatural orders the authenticity of which no one thought of discussing. In the same way, a divine inspiration explained the gift of predicting the future, the eloquence of orators, the sagacity of statesmen, the genius of great soldiers, the verve of poets, and even the skill of the more famous artisans. "Legends!" it is said. No doubt. But these legends are universal. Men speak everywhere the same language, because everywhere they think in the same fashion.
A great progress, however, is accomplished in Israel. The notion of revelation gradually becomes interior and moral. Among the prophets, revelation is conceived of as the action of the Spirit of Jehovah entering and acting in the spirit of man. It is true that the mythical conception still persists and betrays itself in this: divine inspiration is represented as the invasion of a human being by another being alien to him,—as a sort of mental alienation or possession. The divine Spirit is represented as a force which comes from without, a wind from above which no one can resist, of which the elect are as much the victims as the organs. Its action is measured by the agitation and commotion of the inspired, by the disorder of their faculties, by the incoherence of their gestures and their speech. The delirium of man becomes the sign of the presence of God. Madmen, valetudinarians, epileptics, are regarded almost everywhere as the favourites of Heaven. Their strange words or acts men believe to be divine oracles delivered unconsciously and against the will.
This violent opposition between the supernatural action of the divine Spirit and the normal exercise of rational faculties is gradually attenuated in the course of the ages. It is easy to see that in the great prophets of Israel the formula Thus saith the Lord, while still frequent and still expressing the same subjective certitude of inspiration, has become a simple rhetorical form. God speaks henceforth to His people by their eloquence, by their faith, by their genius. "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me," cries the second Isaiah; "because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings to the meek," etc. (Is. lxi. 1-3).
This evolution appears to have been completed in the soul of Christ. Here inspiration ceases to be miraculous without ceasing to be supernatural. It is no longer produced by fits and starts or intermittently. An ancient gospel ("The Gospel of the Hebrews") admirably marks this change. At the moment of His baptism the Holy Spirit says to Jesus: Mi fili, te exspectabam in omnibus prophetis, ut venires et requiescerem in te. Tu enim es requies mea. (My Son, in all the prophets I awaited Thy coming in order that I might repose in Thee. Thou art indeed my rest.)
Being continuous, the inspiration becomes normal. The ancient conflict between the divine Spirit and the human vanishes. The immanent and constant action of the one manifests itself in the regular and fruitful action of the other. God lives and works in man, man lives and works in God. Religion and Nature, the voice divine and the voice of conscience, the subject and the object of revelation, penetrate each other and become one. The supreme revelation of God shines forth in the highest of all consciousnesses and the loveliest of human lives.
This progress, is it not admirable? Should it not strike the attention all the more inasmuch as, instead of being the effect of rational criticism, it is, in Christianity, exclusively the work of piety? This, become more profound, has conquered the ancient antithesis created by the ignorance of early times. Divesting itself more and more of foreign and inferior elements, the idea of revelation has been found to be more human as it has become more inward, more constant, more strictly moral and religious. Christ has not given us a critical theory of revelation; He has done what is better; He has given us revelation itself—a perfect and permanent revelation; He presents God and man to us so intimately united in all the acts and moments of His inner life, that they become inseparable. The Father acts in His Son, and the Son reveals the Father to all who wish to know Him.
Though he still retained many remnants of the ancient mythological notion (visions, dreams, ecstasies, delirium of tongues), the Apostle Paul seized with energy the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian revelation, and propounded the theory of it with a sacred boldness. That theory consists in the effusion and habitation of the Holy Spirit in the souls of Christians who, in their turn, become "children of God," and enjoy, by this Spirit, the same direct and permanent communion with the Father. This Spirit is no longer an alien guest or a perturbing force; He becomes in us a second nature. That is why the Christian is set free from all the old tutelages; he judges everything and is judged by nothing; he has his law within himself, so that from this inspiration springs his autonomy and his liberty.
But neither this spiritual piety nor the lofty conception which flows from it could long be sustained. Preoccupied in founding its authority, and only being able to succeed in it by returning to the idea of an external revelation, the Catholic Church made it to consist chiefly in rules and dogmas, and, by this change, it naturally transformed the mythological notion of revelation into a dogmatic notion not essentially different.
3. Dogmatic Notion
"The Greeks," said Paul, "seek philosophy; the Jews demand miracles." From these two tendencies combined, from Greek rationalism and Hebrew supernaturalism, sprang the new notion that may be summed up and defined thus: a divine doctrine legitimated by divine signs or miracles.
These two elements of the theory are mutually dependent, and form an indivisible whole. Given to man in a supernatural way, the doctrine surpasses the reach of the human understanding; hence it must not be imposed upon the mind by its own evidence or examined by natural reason. The supernatural doctrine demands supernatural proof. This proof can only be found in the miracles which have accompanied the doctrine from its birth. Thus mysteries, incomprehensible in the order of reason, will necessarily be established by inexplicable events in the order of Nature.
The theory, in this way, becomes coherent, but it is not complete. A third term must be added. The divine doctrine must be embodied in a form which distinguishes it from all others, and placed under an authority that guarantees it. For Protestantism, the form and the authority of revelation is—the Bible; for Catholicism, it is the Bible sovereignly interpreted by the Church. The scholastic notion of revelation is now complete. The doctors teach us to distinguish three things in it: the object, which is dogma; the form, which is Scripture; and the proof or criterion, which is miracle. This construction appears to be compact in all its parts; in reality it is so fragile and so artificial that it crumbles at a touch.
To make of dogma, that is to say of an intellectual datum, the object of revelation is, in the first place, to eliminate from it its religious character by separating it from piety, and in the next place it is to place it in permanent and irreconcilable conflict with the reason, which is always progressing.
This idea of revelation is at bottom entirely pagan. In the region of authentic Christianity you cannot separate the revealing act of God from His redeeming and sanctifying action. God does not enlighten, on the contrary He blinds those whom He does not save or sanctify. Let us boldly conclude, therefore, against all traditional orthodoxies, that the object of the revelation of God could only be God Himself, that is to say the sense of His presence in us, awakening our soul to the life of righteousness and love. When the word of God does not give us life, it gives us nothing. It is true that that presence and that action of the divine Spirit in our hearts become in them a light whose rays illumine all the faculties of the soul. But do not hope to enjoy that light apart from the central sun from which it flows.
The scholastic notion is not only irreligious; it is anti-psychological. In entering the human understanding this supernatural knowledge introduces into it a hopeless dualism. The sacred sciences are set up alongside the profane sciences without its being possible to organise them together into a coherent and harmonious body, for they are not of the same nature, they do not proceed from the same method, they do not accept the same control. You have thus a sacred cosmogony and a profane cosmogony, a sacred history of the origins of man and a purely human history of his beginnings, and of his first adventures, a divine metaphysic and another purely rational. How to make them live together and unite them? If, by a subtle theology, you succeed in rationalising dogma, do you not see that you destroy it in its very essence? If you demonstrate that it is essentially irrational, do you not feel that you are instituting an endless warfare between the authority of dogma and the authority of reason? One remembers the generous attempt of mediæval scholasticism, taken up again by the Protestant theologians of the seventeenth century, and one has not forgotten its twice fatal issue. One would need to have no notion of the laws of human thought to be astonished at it. Nominalism in the fifteenth century and rationalism in the eighteenth were the two natural heirs of orthodoxy.
The intervention of miracle as a criterion or proof of doctrine does not remove the difficulties of the theory; it multiplies and aggravates them. In consequence of the lapse of time, the incertitude of the documents, and the demands of modern thought, miracle, which formerly established the truth of religion, has become much more difficult to demonstrate than religion itself. The relation between the two has been reversed. The foundation of the edifice has become more ruinous than the building. Examples? Consider, then, on the one hand, the Decalogue, and on the other the thunders and lightnings of Sinai. Peals of thunder may have served to convince the Hebrews that the law of Moses came from the Eternal; for they looked upon thunder as revealing the presence, in some sort material and local, of their God. But who does not see that it is much easier to-day to prove the excellence and the truth of the Ten Words of the Law than the divine character of the most terrible of tempests? Make the opposite experiment: you are familiar with the Books of Joshua, Judges, Kings. You have read in them those orders issued by Jehovah for the total extermination of peoples whose crime was the defence of their country against the invaders. Prodigies abound in them: the walls of Jericho fall down at the sound of trumpets, etc., etc. Are these events sufficient to warrant us in admitting the affirmation of the Hebrew historian that these terrible reprisals, these crimes and violences, which were then common in all the Semitic tribes, were commanded either by the heavenly Father of Jesus Christ or by the impartial God of the universe? Our conscience resists and protests. Prodigies the most brilliant cannot make it do violence to itself or bend the law of righteousness and love beneath any manifestation, however striking, of brute force. Let us go further; let us come to the miracles of Christ. Let us interrogate the best Christians of our time: let us ask ourselves, Is it the cures that Jesus wrought which make us believe to-day in the divine truth of His word or which give authority to the Sermon on the Mount? Is it not rather the Gospel that helps us to believe in the miracles by persuading us that a man who spake like this man must have been able to do things and work works as beautiful and as wonderful as the words which He spoke? The most conservative Apologists of the traditional school confess to-day that miracle has lost its evidential force; it might move those who witnessed it, but its action and its prestige have necessarily been diminishing day by day for the generations which have followed them.
What if we were to press the idea of miracle itself which is in process of vanishing in proportion as the idea of Nature is transformed? What is Nature? Who knows its secrets and its limits? The theory of the evolution of things and beings, does it not show Nature to us as in travail, and as if perpetually giving birth to marvels? And if this creative energy which is in it can only religiously be referred to the constant activity of God in the universe and in history, how can we still oppose the laws of Nature to the will of God? Moreover, nothing is to-day more indeterminate, more impossible to define than the notion of miracle; it floats without ever being able to fix itself, between the idea of an absolute violation of the laws of Nature now no longer witnessed anywhere, to that entirely relative one of an extraordinary event, which, seeing that it may be encountered everywhere, no longer proves anything.
Lastly, if from the object and the criterion of revelation, we pass to the form which conserves and warrants it, i.e. to the Bible, questions become still more numerous and insoluble. In the seventeenth century the notion of the Bible and that of revelation were coincident and commensurate. But this identity depended upon two dogmas much impaired to-day. The one was the divine origin of the two Biblical Canons, i.e. of the Old and New Testaments: the other, the verbal inspiration of all holy Scripture, considered as divinely dictated.
History and exegesis have dissipated the illusions and the ignorance on which these two strange affirmations rested. The Bible appears to us as the work, slowly and laboriously constructed, of the ancient Jewish Synagogue, and of the Early Christian Church. It needed more than four centuries to establish and to delimitate the New
If this be so one sees new questions surging up and awaiting solution. What is the relation of the word of God to the Bible? By what sign may we recognise the first and distinguish the second? Further, if there be any word of God outside the Bible, if there has been any revelation of God beyond the limits of the Hebrew people and primitive Christianity—and how can we deny this without denying the worth of religion?—what relation is there to establish, and what synthesis to make, between the biblical revelation and the other revelations suited to the various human families? Lastly, what place does the religion of Jesus occupy in the religious evolution of humanity? Modern theology seems deaf to these questions. Despairing of a solution, it hesitates to approach them. But they must be answered. Contemporary philosophy presses them upon the conscience of Christians. The scholastic theory, it is clear, cannot bring any solution to these new problems. As soon as the distinction is made in our consciousness between the word of God and the letter of holy Scripture, the first becomes independent of all human form and of all external guarantee. It is with it as with the light of the sun. It is only recognised by the brightness with which it floods us. But take care to introduce this criterion of religious and moral evidence into the scholastic theory is to deposit an explosive in the heart of it which shatters it to atoms.... I leave to others the task of masking or repairing the ruins. A task more urgent and more fruitful awaits us. We must build up, on a new principle, a new theory of revelation, a theory that will at once bear the test of criticism and give satisfaction to piety.