and precedes sin in man. Bossuet expressed the same thought in
his style so full of poesy and tenderness: When God formed the
bowels of man, he originally placed goodness there. In fact, the
first determination of free will is in this natural GOODNESS, by
which man is continually incited to order, to labor, to study, to
modesty, to charity, and to sacrifice. Therefore Saint Paul
could say, without attacking free will, that, in everything
concerning the accomplishment of good, God worketh in us both to
will and to do. For all the holy aspirations of man are in him
before he begins to think and feel; and the pangs of heart which
he experiences when he violates them, the delight with which he
is filled when he obeys them, all the invitations, in short,
which come to him from society and his education, do not belong
to him.
When grace is such that the will chooses the good with joy and
love, without hesitation and without recall, it is styled
EFFICACIOUS. Every one has witnessed those transports of soul
which suddenly decide a vocation, an act of heroism. Liberty
does not perish therein; but from its predeterminations it may be
said that it was inevitable that it should so decide. And the
Pelagians, Lutherans, and others have been mistaken in saying
that grace compromised free choice and killed the creative force
of the will; since all determinations of the will come
necessarily either from society which sustains it, or from nature
which opens its career and points out its destiny.
But, on the other hand, the Augustinians, the Thomists, the
congruists, Jansen, Thomassin, Molina, etc., were strangely
mistaken when, sustaining at once free will and grace, they
failed to see that between these two terms the same relation
exists as between substance and form, and that they have
confessed an opposition which does not exist. Liberty, like
intelligence, like all substance and all force, is necessarily
determined,--that is, it has its forms and its attributes. Now,
while in matter the form and the attribute are inherent in and
contemporary with substance, in liberty the form is given by
three external agents, as it were,--the human essence, the laws
of thought, exercise or education. GRACE, in fine, like its
opposite, TEMPTATION, indicates precisely the fact of the
determination of liberty.
To sum up, all modern ideas regarding the education of humanity
are only an interpretation, a philosophy of the Catholic doctrine
of grace, a doctrine which seemed obscure to its authors only
because of their ideas upon free will, which they supposed to be
threatened as soon as grace or the source of its determinations
was spoken of. We affirm, on the contrary, that liberty,
indifferent in itself to all modality, but destined to act and to
take shape according to a preestablished order, receives its
first impulse from the Creator who inspires it with love,
intelligence, courage, resolution, and all the gifts of the Holy
Spirit, and then delivers it to the labor of experience. It
follows from this that grace is necessarily PRE-MOVING, that
without it man is capable of no sort of good, and that
nevertheless free will accomplishes its own destiny
spontaneously, with reflection and choice. In all this there is
neither contradiction nor mystery. Man, in so far as he is man,
is good; but, like the tyrant described by Plato, who was, he
too, a teacher of grace, man carries in his bosom a thousand
monsters, which the worship of justice and science, music and
gymnastics, all the graces of opportunity and condition, must
cause him to overcome. Correct one definition in Saint
Augustine, and all that doctrine of grace, famous because of the
disputes which it excited and which disconcerted the Reformation,
will seem to you brilliant with clearness and harmony.
And now is man God?
God, according to the theological hypothesis, being the
sovereign, absolute, highly synthetic being, the infinitely wise
and free, and therefore indefectible and holy, Me, it is plain
that man, the syncretism of the creation, the point of union of
all the potentialities manifested by the creation, physical,
organic, mental, and moral; man, perfectible and fallible, does
not satisfy the conditions of Divinity as he, from the nature of
his mind, must conceive them. Neither is he God, nor can he,
living, become God.
All the more, then, the oak, the lion, the sun, the universe
itself, sections of the absolute, are not God. At the same
stroke the worship of man and the worship of nature are
overthrown.
Now we have to present the counter-proof of this theory.
From the standpoint of social contradictions we have judged of
the morality of man. We are to judge, in its turn and from the
same standpoint, the morality of Providence. In other words, is
God possible, as speculation and faith offer him for the
adoration of mortals?
% 2.--Exposition of the myth of Providence.--Retrogression of
God.
Among the proofs, to the number of three, which theologians and
philosophers are accustomed to bring forward to show the
existence of a God, they give the foremost position to universal
consent.
This argument I considered when, without rejecting or admitting
it, I promptly asked myself: What does universal consent affirm
in affirming a God? And in this connection I should recall the
fact that the difference of religions is not a proof that the
human race has fallen into error in affirming a supreme Me
outside of itself, any more than the diversity of languages is a
proof of the non-reality of reason. The hypothesis of God, far
from being weakened, is strengthened and established by the very
divergence and opposition of faiths.
An argument of another sort is that which is drawn from the order
of the world. In regard to this I have observed that, nature
affirming spontaneously, by the voice of man, its own distinction
into mind and matter, it remained to find out whether an infinite
mind, a soul of the world, governs and moves the universe, as
conscience, in its obscure intuition, tells us that a mind
animates man. If, then, I added, order were an infallible sign
of the presence of mind, the presence of a God in the universe
could not be overlooked.
Unfortunately this IF is not demonstrated and cannot be. For, on
the one hand, pure mind, conceived as the opposite of matter, is
a contradictory entity, the reality of which, consequently,
nothing can attest. On the other hand, certain beings ordered in
themselves--such as crystals, plants, and the planetary system,
which, in the sensations that they make us feel, do not return us
sentiment for sentiment, as the animals do--seeming to us utterly
destitute of conscience, there is no more reason for supposing a
mind in the centre of the world than for placing one in a stick
of sulphur; and it may be that, if mind, conscience, exists
anywhere, it is only in man.
Nevertheless, if the order of the world can tell us nothing as to
the existence of God, it reveals a thing no less precious
perhaps, and which will serve us as a landmark in our
inquiries,--namely, that all beings, all essences, all phenomena
are bound together by a totality of laws resulting from their
properties, a totality which in the third chapter I have named
FATALITY or NECESSITY. Whether or not there exists then an
infinite intelligence, embracing the whole system of these laws,
the whole field of fatalism; whether or not to this infinite
intelligence is united in profound penetration a superior will,
eternally determined by the totality of the cosmic laws and
consequently infinitely powerful and free; whether or not,
finally, these three things, fatality, intelligence, will, are
contemporary in the universe, adequate to each other and
identical,--it is clear that so far we find nothing repugnant to
these positions; but it is precisely this hypothesis, this
anthropomorphism, which is yet to be demonstrated.
Thus, while the testimony of the human race reveals to us a God,
without saying what this God may be, the order of the world
reveals to us a fatality,--that is, an absolute and peremptory
totality of causes and effects,--in short, a system of
laws,--which would be, if God exists, like the sight and
knowledge of this God.
The third and last proof of the existence of God proposed by the
theists and called by them the metaphysical proof is nothing but
a tautological construction of categories, which proves
absolutely nothing.
Something exists; therefore there is something in existence.
Something is multiple; therefore something is one.
Something comes after something; therefore something is prior to
something.
Something is smaller of greater than something; therefore
something is greater than all things.
Something is moved; therefore something is mover, etc., ad
infinitum.
That is what is called even today, in the faculties and the
seminaries, by the minister of public education and by
Messeigneurs the bishops, proving the existence of God by
metaphysics. That is what the elite of the French youth are
condemned to bleat after their professors, for a year, or else
forfeit their diplomas and the privilege of studying law,
medicine, polytechnics, and the sciences. Certainly, if anything
is calculated to surprise, it is that with such philosophy Europe
is not yet atheistic. The persistence of the theistic idea by
the side of the jargon of the schools is the greatest of
miracles; it constitutes the strongest prejudice that can be
cited in favor of Divinity.
I do not know what humanity calls God.
I cannot say whether it is man, the universe, or some invisible
reality that we are to understand by that name; or indeed whether
the word stands for anything more than an ideal, a creature of
the mind. Nevertheless, to give body to my hypothesis and
influence to my inquiries, I shall consider God in accordance
with the common opinion, as a being apart, omnipresent, distinct
from creation, endowed with imperishable life as well as infinite
knowledge and activity, but above all foreseeing and just,
punishing vice and rewarding virtue. I shall put aside the
pantheistic hypothesis as hypocritical and lacking courage. God
is personal, or he does not exist: this alternative is the axiom
from which I shall deduce my entire theodicy.
Not concerning myself therefore for the present with questions
which the idea of God may raise later, the problem before me now
is to decide, in view of the facts the evolution of which in
society I have established, what I should think of the conduct of
God, as it is held up for my faith and relatively to humanity.
In short, it is from the standpoint of the demonstrated existence
of evil that I, with the aid of a new dialectical process, mean
to fathom the Supreme Being. Evil exists: upon this point
everybody seems to agree.
Now, have asked the stoics, the Epicureans, the manicheans, and
the atheists, how harmonize the presence of evil with the idea of
a sovereignly good, wise, and powerful God? How can God, after
allowing the introduction of evil into the world, whether through
weakness or negligence or malice, render responsible for their
acts creatures which he himself has created imperfect, and which
he thus delivers to all the dangers of their attractions? Why,
finally, since he promises the just a never-ending bliss after
death, or, in other words, gives us the idea and desire of
happiness, does he not cause us to enjoy this life by stripping
us of the temptation of evil, instead of exposing us to an
eternity of torture?
Such used to be the purport of the protest of the atheists.
Today this is scarcely discussed: the theists are no longer
troubled by the logical impossibilities of their system. They
want a God, especially a Providence: there is competition for
this article between the radicals and the Jesuits. The
socialists preach happiness and virtue in the name of God; in the
schools those who talk the loudest against the Church are the
first of mystics.
The old theists were more anxious about their faith. They tried,
if not to demonstrate it, at least to render it reasonable,
feeling sure, unlike their successors, that there is neither
dignity nor rest for the believer except in certainty.
The Fathers of the Church then answered the incredulous that evil
is only DEPRIVATION OF A GREATER GOOD, and that those who always
reason about the BETTER lack a point of support upon which to
establish themselves, which leads straight to absurdity. In
fact, every creature being necessarily confined and imperfect,
God, by his infinite power, can continually add to his
perfections: in this respect there is always, in some degree, a
deprivation of good in the creature. Reciprocally, however
imperfect and confined the creature is supposed to be, from the
moment that it exists it enjoys a certain degree of good, better
for it than annihilation. Therefore, though it is a rule that
man is considered good only so far as he accomplishes all the
good that he can, it is not the same with God, since the
obligation to do good infinitely is contradictory to the very
faculty of creation, perfection and creature being two terms that
necessarily exclude each other. God, then, was sole judge of the
degree of perfection which it was proper to give to each
creature: to prefer a charge against him under this head is to
slander his justice.
As for sin,--that is, moral evil,--the Fathers, to reply to the
objections of the atheists, had the theories of free will,
redemption, justification, and grace, to the discussion of which
we need not return.
I have no knowledge that the atheists have replied categorically
to this theory of the essential imperfection of the creature, a
theory reproduced with brilliancy by M. de Lamennais in his
"Esquisse." It was impossible, indeed, for them to reply to it;
for, reasoning from a false conception of evil and of free will,
and in profound ignorance of the laws of humanity, they were
equally without reasons by which either to triumph over their own
doubts or to refute the believers.
Let us leave the sphere of the finite and infinite, and place
ourselves in the conception of order. Can God make a round
circle, a right-angled square? Certainly.
Would God be guilty if, after having created the world according
to the laws of geometry, he had put it into our minds, or even
allowed us to believe without fault of our own, that a circle may
be square or a square circular, though, in consequence of this
false opinion, we should have to suffer an incalculable series of
evils? Again, undoubtedly.
Well! that is exactly what God, the God of Providence, has done
in the government of humanity; it is of that that I accuse him.
He knew from all eternity--inasmuch as we mortals have discovered
it after six thousand years of painful experience--that order in
society--that is, liberty, wealth, science--is realized by the
reconciliation of opposite ideas which, were each to be taken as
absolute in itself, would precipitate us into an abyss of misery:
why did he not warn us? Why did he not correct our judgment at
the start? Why did he abandon us to our imperfect logic,
especially when our egoism must find a pretext in his acts of
injustice and perfidy? He knew, this jealous God, that, if he
exposed us to the hazards of experience, we should not find until
very late that security of life which constitutes our entire
happiness: why did he not abridge this long apprenticeship
by a revelation of our own laws? Why, instead of fascinating us
with contradictory opinions, did he not reverse experience by
causing us to reach the antinomies by the path of analysis of
synthetic ideas, instead of leaving us to painfully clamber up
the steeps of antinomy to synthesis?
If, as was formerly thought, the evil from which humanity suffers
arose solely from the imperfection inevitable in every creature,
or better, if this evil were caused only by the antagonism of the
potentialities and inclinations which constitute our being, and
which reason should teach us to master and guide, we should have
no right to complain. Our condition being all that it could be,
God would be justified.
But, in view of this wilful delusion of our minds, a delusion
which it was so easy to dissipate and the effects of which must
be so terrible, where is the excuse of Providence? Is it not
true that grace failed man here? God, whom faith represents as a
tender father and a prudent master, abandons us to the fatality
of our incomplete conceptions; he digs the ditch under our feet;
he causes us to move blindly: and then, at every fall, he
punishes us as rascals. What do I say? It seems as if it were
in spite of him that at last, covered with bruises from our
journey, we recognize our road; as if we offended his glory in
becoming more intelligent and free through the trials which he
imposes upon us. What need, then, have we to continually invoke
Divinity, and what have we to do with those satellites of a
Providence which for sixty centuries, by the aid of a thousand
religions, has deceived and misled us?
What! God, through his gospel-bearers and by the law which he
has put in our hearts, commands us to love our neighbor as
ourselves, to do to others as we wish to be done by, to render
each his due, not to keep back anything from the laborer's hire,
and not to lend at usury; he knows, moreover, that in us charity
is lukewarm and conscience vacillating, and that the slightest
pretext always seems to us a sufficient reason for exemption from
the law: and yet he involves us, with such dispositions, in the
contradictions of commerce and property, in which, by the
necessity of the theory, charity and justice are bound to perish!
Instead of enlightening our reason concerning the bearing of
principles which impose themselves upon it with all the power of
necessity, but whose consequences, adopted by egoism, are fatal
to human fraternity, he places this abused reason at the service
of our passion; by seduction of the mind, he destroys our
equilibrium of conscience; he justifies in our own eyes our
usurpations and our avarice; he makes the separation of man from
his fellow inevitable and legitimate; he creates division and
hatred among us in rendering equality by labor and by right
impossible; he makes us believe that this equality, the law of
the world, is unjust among men; and then he proscribes us en
masse for not having known how to practise his incomprehensible
precepts! I believe I have proved, to be sure, that our
abandonment by Providence does not justify us; but, whatever our
crime, toward it we are not guilty; and if there is a being who,
before ourselves and more than ourselves, is deserving of
hell,--I am bound to name him,--it is God.
When the theists, in order to establish their dogma of
Providence, cite the order of nature as a proof, although this
argument is only a begging of the question, at least it cannot be
said that it involves a contradiction, and that the fact cited
bears witness against the hypothesis. In the system of the
world, for instance, nothing betrays the smallest anomaly,
the slightest lack of foresight, from which any prejudice
whatever can be drawn against the idea of a supreme, intelligent,
personal motor. In short, though the order of nature does not
prove the reality of a Providence, it does not contradict it.
It is a very different thing with the government of humanity.
Here order does not appear at the same time as matter; it was not
created, as in the system of the world, once and for eternity.
It is gradually developed according to an inevitable series of
principles and consequences which the human being himself, the
being to be ordered, must disengage spontaneously, by his own
energy and at the solicitation of experience. No revelation
regarding this is given him. Man is submitted at his origin to a
preestablished necessity, to an absolute and irresistible order.
That this order may be realized, man must discover it; that it
may exist, he must have divined it. This labor of invention
might be abridged; no one, either in heaven or on earth, will
come to man's aid; no one will instruct him. Humanity, for
hundreds of centuries, will devour its generations; it will
exhaust itself in blood and mire, without the God whom it
worships coming once to illuminate its reason and abridge its
time of trial. Where is divine action here? Where is
Providence?
"IF GOD DID NOT EXIST,"--it is Voltaire, the enemy of religions,
who says so,--"IT WOULD BE NECESSARY TO INVENT HIM." Why?
"Because," adds the same Voltaire, "if I were dealing with an
atheist prince whose interest it might be to have me pounded in a
mortar, I am very sure that I should be pounded." Strange
aberration of a great mind! And if you were dealing with a pious
prince, whose confessor, speaking in the name of God, should
command that you be burned alive, would you not be very sure of
being burned also? Do you forget, then, anti-Christ, the
Inquisition, and the Saint Bartholomew, and the stakes of Vanini
and Bruno, and the tortures of Galileo, and the martyrdom of so
many free thinkers? Do not try to distinguish here between use
and abuse: for I should reply to you that from a mystical and
supernatural principle, from a principle which embraces
everything, which explains everything, which justifies
everything, such as the idea of God, all consequences are
legitimate, and that the zeal of the believer is the sole judge
of their propriety.
"I once believed," says Rousseau, "that it was possible to be an
honest man and dispense with God; but I have recovered from that
error." Fundamentally the same argument as that of Voltaire, the
same justification of intolerance: Man does good and abstains
from evil only through consideration of a Providence which
watches over him; a curse on those who deny its existence! And,
to cap the climax of absurdity, the man who thus seeks for our
virtue the sanction of a Divinity who rewards and punishes is the
same man who teaches the native goodness of man as a religious
dogma.
And for my part I say: The first duty of man, on becoming
intelligent and free, is to continually hunt the idea of God out
of his mind and conscience. For God, if he exists, is
essentially hostile to our nature, and we do not depend at all
upon his authority. We arrive at knowledge in spite of him, at
comfort in spite of him, at society in spite of him; every step
we take in advance is a victory in which we crush Divinity.
Let it no longer be said that the ways of God are impenetrable.
We have penetrated these ways, and there we have read in letters
of blood the proofs of God's impotence, if not of his
malevolence. My reason, long humiliated, is gradually rising to
a level with the infinite; with time it will discover all that
its inexperience hides from it; with time I shall be less and
less a worker of misfortune, and by the light that I shall have
acquired, by the perfection of my liberty, I shall purify myself,
idealize my being, and become the chief of creation, the equal of
God. A single moment of disorder which the Omnipotent might have
prevented and did not prevent accuses his Providence and shows
him lacking in wisdom; the slightest progress which man,
ignorant, abandoned, and betrayed, makes towards good honors him
immeasurably. By what right should God still say to me: BE
HOLY, FOR I AM HOLY? Lying spirit, I will answer him, imbecile
God, your reign is over; look to the beasts for other victims. I
know that I am not holy and never can become so; and how could
you be holy, if I resemble you? Eternal father, Jupiter or
Jehovah, we have learned to know you; you are, you were, you ever
will be, the jealous rival of Adam, the tyrant of Prometheus.
So I do not fall into the sophism refuted by St. Paul, when he
forbids the vase to say to the potter: Why hast thou made me
thus? I do not blame the author of things for having made me an
inharmonious creature, an incoherent assemblage; I could exist
only in such a condition. I content myself with crying out to
him: Why do you deceive me? Why, by your silence, have you
unchained egoism within me? Why have you submitted me to the
torture of universal doubt by the bitter illusion of the
antagonistic ideas which you have put in my mind? Doubt of
truth, doubt of justice, doubt of my conscience and my liberty,
doubt of yourself, O God! and, as a result of this doubt,
necessity of war with myself and with my neighbor! That, supreme
Father, is what you have done for our happiness and your glory;
such, from the beginning, have been your will and your
government; such the bread, kneaded in blood and tears, upon
which you have fed us. The sins which we ask you to forgive, you
caused us to commit; the traps from which we implore you to
deliver us, you set for us; and the Satan who besets us is
yourself.
You triumphed, and no one dared to contradict you, when, after
having tormented in his body and in his soul the righteous Job, a
type of our humanity, you insulted his candid piety, his prudent
and respectful ignorance. We were as naught before your
invisible majesty, to whom we gave the sky for a canopy and the
earth for a footstool. And now here you are dethroned and
broken. Your name, so long the last word of the savant, the
sanction of the judge, the force of the prince, the hope of the
poor, the refuge of the repentant sinner,--this incommunicable
name, I say, henceforth an object of contempt and curses, shall
be a hissing among men. For God is stupidity and cowardice; God
is hypocrisy and falsehood; God is tyranny and misery; God is
evil. As long as humanity shall bend before an altar, humanity,
the slave of kings and priests, will be condemned; as long as one
man, in the name of God, shall receive the oath of another man,
society will be founded on perjury; peace and love will be
banished from among mortals. God, take yourself away! for, from
this day forth, cured of your fear and become wise, I swear, with
hand extended to heaven, that you are only the tormentor of my
reason, the spectre of my conscience.
I deny, therefore, the supremacy of God over humanity; I reject
his providential government, the non-existence of which is
sufficiently established by the metaphysical and economical
hallucinations of humanity,--in a word, by the martyrdom of
our race; I decline the jurisdiction of the Supreme Being over
man; I take away his titles of father, king, judge, good,
merciful, pitiful, helpful, rewarding, and avenging. All these
attributes, of which the idea of Providence is made up, are but a
caricature of humanity, irreconcilable with the autonomy of
civilization, and contradicted, moreover, by the history of its
aberrations and catastrophes. Does it follow, because God can no
longer be conceived as Providence, because we take from him that
attribute so important to man that he has not hesitated to make
it the synonym of God, that God does not exist, and that the
theological dogma from this moment is shown to be false in its
content?
Alas! no. A prejudice relative to the divine essence has been
destroyed; by the same stroke the independence of man is
established: that is all. The reality of the divine Being is
left intact, and our hypothesis still exists. In demonstrating
that it was impossible for God to be Providence, we have taken a
first step in the determination of the idea of God; the question
now is to find out whether this first datum accords with the rest
of the hypothesis, and consequently to determine, from the same
standpoint of intelligence, what God is, if he is.
For just as, after having established the guilt of man under the
influence of the economical contradictions, we have had to
account for this guilt, if we would not leave man wounded after
having made him a contemptible satire, likewise, after having
admitted the chimerical nature of the doctrine of a Providence in
God, we must inquire how this lack of Providence harmonizes with
the idea of sovereign intelligence and liberty, if we would not
sacrifice the proposed hypothesis, which nothing yet shows to be
false.
I affirm, then, that God, if there is a God, does not resemble
the effigies which philosophers and priests have made of him;
that he neither thinks nor acts according to the law of analysis,
foresight, and progress, which is the distinctive characteristic
of man; that, on the contrary, he seems rather to follow an
inverse and retrogressive course; that intelligence, liberty,
personality in God are constituted not as in us; and that this
originality of nature, perfectly accounted for, makes God an
essentially anti-civilizing, anti-liberal, anti-human being.
I prove my proposition by going from the negative to the
positive,--that is, by deducing the truth of my thesis from the
progress of the objections to it.
1. God, say the believers, can be conceived only as infinitely
good, infinitely wise, infinitely powerful, etc.,--the whole
litany of the infinites. Now, infinite perfection cannot be
reconciled with the datum of a will holding an indifferent or
even reactionary attitude toward progress: therefore, either God
does not exist, or the objection drawn from the development of
the antinomies proves only our ignorance of the mysteries of
infinity.
I answer these reasoners that, if, to give legitimacy to a wholly
arbitrary opinion, it suffices to fall back on the
unfathomability of mysteries, I am as well satisfied with the
mystery of a God without providence as with that of a Providence
without efficacy. But, in view of the facts, there is no
occasion to invoke such a consideration of probability; we must
confine ourselves to the positive declaration of experience.
Now, experience and facts prove that humanity, in its
development, obeys an inflexible necessity, whose laws are made
clear and whose system is realized as fast as the collective
reason reveals it, without anything in society to give evidence
of an external instigation, either from a providential
command or from any superhuman thought. The basis of the belief
in Providence is this necessity itself, which is, as it were, the
foundation and essence of collective humanity. But this
necessity, thoroughly systematic and progressive as it may
appear, does not on that account constitute providence either in
humanity or in God; to become convinced thereof it is enough to
recall the endless oscillations and painful gropings by which
social order is made manifest.
2. Other arguers come unexpectedly across our path, and cry:
What is the use of these abstruse researches? There is no more
an infinite intelligence than a Providence; there is neither me
nor will in the universe outside of man. All that happens, evil
as well as good, happens necessarily. An irresistible ensemble
of causes and effects embraces man and nature in the same
fatality; and those faculties in ourselves which we call
conscience, will, judgment, etc., are only particular accidents
of the eternal, immutable, and inevitable whole.
This argument is the preceding one inverted. It consists in
substituting for the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient author
that of a necessary and eternal, but unconscious and blind,
coordination. From this opposition we can already form a
presentiment that the reasoning of the materialists is no firmer
than that of the believers.
Whoever says necessity or fatality says absolute and inviolable
order; whoever, on the contrary, says disturbance and disorder
affirms that which is most repugnant to fatality. Now, there is
disorder in the world, disorder produced by the play of
spontaneous forces which no power enchains: how can that be, if
everything is the result of fate?
But who does not see that this old quarrel between theism and
materialism proceeds from a false notion of liberty and fatality,
two terms which have been considered contradictory, though really
they are not. If man is free, says the one party, all the more
surely is God free too, and fatality is but a word; if everything
is enchained in nature, answers the other party, there is neither
liberty nor Providence: and so each party argues in its own
direction till out of sight, never able to understand that this
pretended opposition of liberty and fatality is only the natural,
but not antithetical, distinction between the facts of activity
and those of intelligence.
Fatality is the absolute order, the law, the code, fatum, of the
constitution of the universe. But this code, very far from being
exclusive in itself of the idea of a sovereign legislator,
supposes it so naturally that all antiquity has not hesitated to
admit it; and today the whole question is to find out whether, as
the founders of religions have believed, the legislator preceded
the law in the universe,--that is, whether intelligence is prior
to fatality,--or whether, as the moderns claim, the law preceded
the legislator,--in other words, whether mind is born of nature.
BEFORE or AFTER, this alternative sums up all philosophy. To
dispute over the posteriority or priority of mind is all very
well, but to deny mind in the name of fatality is an exclusion
which nothing justifies. To refute it, it is sufficient to
recall the very fact on which it is based,--the existence of
evil.
Given matter and attraction, the system of the world is their
product: that is fatal. Given two correlative and contradictory
ideas, a composition must follow: that also is fatal. Fatality
clashes, not with liberty, whose destiny, on the contrary, is to
secure the accomplishment of fatality within a certain sphere,
but with disorder, with everything that acts as a barrier to the
execution of the law. Is there disorder in the world, yes or no?
The fatalists do not deny it, for, by the strangest blunder, it
is the presence of evil which has made them fatalists. Now, I
say that the presence of evil, far from giving evidence of
fatality, breaks fatality, does violence to destiny, and supposes
a cause whose erroneous but voluntary initiative is in
discordance with the law. This cause I call liberty; and I have
proved, in the fourth chapter, that liberty, like reason which
serves man as a torch, is as much greater and more perfect as it
harmonizes more completely with the order of nature, which is
fatality.
Therefore to oppose fatality to the testimony of the conscience
which feels itself free, and vice versa, is to prove that one
misconstrues ideas and has not the slightest appreciation of the
question. The progress of humanity may be defined as the
education of reason and human liberty by fatality: it is absurd
to regard these three terms as exclusive of each other and
irreconcilable, when in reality they sustain each other, fatality
serving as the base, reason coming after, and liberty crowning
the edifice. It is to know and penetrate fatality that human
reason tends; it is to conform to it that liberty aspires; and
the criticism in which we are now engaged of the spontaneous
development and instinctive beliefs of the human race is at
bottom only a study of fatality. Let us explain this.
Man, endowed with activity and intelligence, has the power to
disturb the order of the world, of which he forms a part. But
all his digressions have been foreseen, and are effected within
certain limits, which, after a certain number of goings and
comings, lead man back to order. From these oscillations of
liberty may be determined the role of humanity in the world; and,
since the destiny of man is bound up with that of creatures, it
is possible to go back from him to the supreme law of things and
even to the sources of being.
Accordingly I will no longer ask: How is it that man has the
power to violate the providential order, and how is it that
Providence allows him to do so? I state the question in other
terms: How is it that man, an integrant part of the universe, a
product of fatality, is able to break fatality? How is it that a
fatal organization, the organization of humanity, is
adventitious, contradictory, full of tumult and catastrophes?
Fatality is not confined to an hour, to a century, to a thousand
years: if science and liberty must inevitably be ours, why do
they not come sooner? For, the moment we suffer from the delay,
fatality contradicts itself; evil is as exclusive of fatality as
of Providence.
What sort of a fatality, in short, is that which is contradicted
every instant by the facts which take place within its bosom?
This the fatalists are bound to explain, quite as much as the
theists are bound to explain what sort of an infinite
intelligence that can be which is unable either to foresee or
prevent the misery of its creatures.
But that is not all. Liberty, intelligence, fatality, are at
bottom three adequate expressions, serving to designate three
different faces of being. In man reason is only a defined
liberty conscious of its limit. But within the circle of its
limitations this liberty is also fatality, a living and personal
fatality. When, therefore, the conscience of the human race
proclaims that the fatality of the universe--that is, the
highest, the supreme fatality--is adequate to an infinite reason
as well as to an infinite liberty, it simply puts forth an
hypothesis in every way legitimate, the verification of which is
incumbent upon all parties.
3. Now come the HUMANISTS, the new atheists, and say:
Humanity in its ensemble is the reality sought by the social
genius under the mystical name of God. This phenomenon of
the collective reason,--a sort of mirage in which humanity,
contemplating itself, takes itself for an external and
transcendent being who considers its destinies and presides over
them,--this illusion of the conscience, we say, has been analyzed
and explained; and henceforth to reproduce the theological
hypothesis is to take a step backward in science. We must
confine ourselves strictly to society, to man. GOD in religion,
the STATE in politics, PROPERTY in economy, such is the triple
form under which humanity, become foreign to itself, has not
ceased to rend itself with its own hands, and which today it must
reject.
I admit that every affirmation or hypothesis of Divinity proceeds
from anthropomorphism, and that God in the first place is only
the ideal, or rather, the spectre of man. I admit further that
the idea of God is the type and foundation of the principle of
authority and absolutism, which it is our task to destroy or at
least to subordinate wherever it manifests itself, in science,
industry, public affairs. Consequently I do not contradict
humanism; I continue it. Taking up its criticism of the divine
being and applying it to man, I observe:
That man, in adoring himself as God, has posited of himself an
ideal contrary to his own essence, and has declared himself an
antagonist of the being supposed to be sovereignly perfect,--in
short, of the infinite;
That man consequently is, in his own judgment, only a false
divinity, since in setting up God he denies himself; and that
humanism is a religion as detestable as any of the theisms of
ancient origin;
That this phenomenon of humanity taking itself for God is not
explainable in the terms of humanism, and requires a further
interpretation.
God, according to the theological conception, is not only
sovereign master of the universe, the infallible and
irresponsible king of creatures, the intelligible type of man; he
is the eternal, immutable, omnipresent, infinitely wise,
infinitely free being. Now, I say that these attributes of God
contain more than an ideal, more than an elevation--to whatever
power you will--of the corresponding attributes of humanity; I
say that they are a contradiction of them. God is contradictory
of man, just as charity is contradictory of justice; as sanctity,
the ideal of perfection, is contradictory of perfectibility; as
royalty, the ideal of legislative power, is contradictory of law,
etc. So that the divine hypothesis is reborn from its resolution
into human reality, and the problem of a complete, harmonious,
and absolute existence, ever put aside, ever comes back.
To demonstrate this radical antinomy it suffices to put facts in
juxtaposition with definitions.
Of all facts the most certain, most constant, most indubitable,
is certainly that in man knowledge is progressive, methodical,
the result of reflection,--in short, experimental; so much so
that every theory not having the sanction of experience--that is,
of constancy and concatenation in its representations--thereby
lacks a scientific character. In regard to this not the
slightest doubt can be raised. Mathematics themselves, though
called pure, are subject to the CONCATENATION of propositions,
and hence depend upon experience and acknowledge its law.
Man's knowledge, starting with acquired observation, then
progresses and advances in an unlimited sphere. The goal which
it has in view, the ideal which it tends to realize without ever
being able to attain it,-- placing it on the contrary farther and
farther ahead of it,--is the infinite, the absolute.
Now, what would be an infinite knowledge, an absolute knowledge,
determining an equally infinite liberty, such as speculation
supposes in God? It would be a knowledge not only universal, but
intuitive, spontaneous, as thoroughly free from hesitation as
from objectivity, although embracing at once the real and the
possible; a knowledge sure, but not demonstrative; complete, not
sequential; a knowledge, in short, which, being eternal in its
formation, would be destitute of any progressive character in the
relation of its parts.
Psychology has collected numerous examples of this mode of
knowing in the instinctive and divinatory faculties of animals;
in the spontaneous talent of certain men born mathematicians and
artists, independent of all education; finally, in most of the
primitive human institutions and monuments, products of
unconscious genius independent of theories. And the regular and
complex movements of the heavenly bodies; the marvellous
combinations of matter,--could it not be said that these too are
the effects of a special instinct, inherent in the elements?
If, then, God exists, something of him appears to us in the
universe and in ourselves: but this something is in flagrant
opposition with our most authentic tendencies, with our most
certain destiny; this something is continually being effaced from
our soul by education, and to make it disappear is the object of
our care. God and man are two natures which shun each other as
soon as they know each other; in the absence of a transformation
of one or the other or both, how could they ever be reconciled?
If the progress of reason tends to separate us from Divinity, how
could God and man be identical in point of reason? How,
consequently, could humanity become God by education?
Let us take another example.
The essential characteristic of religion is feeling. Hence, by
religion, man attributes feeling to God, as he attributes reason
to him; moreover, he affirms, following the ordinary course of
his ideas, that feeling in God, like knowledge, is infinite.
Now, that alone is sufficient to change the quality of feeling in
God, and make it an attribute totally distinct from that of man.
In man sentiment flows, so to speak, from a thousand different
sources: it contradicts itself, it confuses itself, it rends
itself; otherwise, it would not feel itself. In God, on the
contrary, sentiment is infinite,--that is, one, complete, fixed,
clear, above all storms, and not needing irritation as a contrast
in order to arrive at happiness. We ourselves experience this
divine mode of feeling when a single sentiment, absorbing all our
faculties, as in the case of ecstasy, temporarily imposes silence
upon the other affections. But this rapture exists always only
by the aid of contrast and by a sort of provocation from without;
it is never perfect, or, if it reaches fulness, it is like the
star which attains its apogee, for an indivisible instant.
Thus we do not live, we do not feel, we do not think, except by a
series of oppositions and shocks, by an internal warfare; our
ideal, then, is not infinity, but equilibrium; infinity expresses
something other than ourselves.
It is said: God has no attributes peculiar to himself; his
attributes are those of man; then man and God are one and the
same thing.
On the contrary, the attributes of man, being infinite in God,
are for that very reason peculiar and specific: it is the nature
of the infinite to become speciality, essence, from the fact that
the finite exists. Deny then, if you will, the reality of God,
as one denies the reality of a contradictory idea; reject
from science and morality this inconceivable and bloody phantom
which seems to pursue us the more, the farther it gets from us;
up to a certain point that may be justified, and at any rate can
do no harm. But do not make God into humanity, for that would be
slander of both.
Will it be said that the opposition between man and the divine
being is illusory, and that it arises from the opposition that
exists between the individual man and the essence of entire
humanity? Then it must be maintained that humanity, since it is
humanity that they deify, is neither progressive, nor contrasted
in reason and feeling; in short, that it is infinite in
everything,--which is denied not only by history, but by
psychology.
This is not a correct understanding, cry the humanists. To have
the right ideal of humanity, it must be considered, not in its
historic development, but in the totality of its manifestations,
as if all human generations, gathered into one moment, formed a
single man, an infinite and immortal man.
That is to say, they abandon the reality to seize a projection;
the true man is not the real man; to find the veritable man, the
human ideal, we must leave time and enter eternity,--what do I
say?--desert the finite for infinity, man for God! Humanity, in
the shape we know it, in the shape in which it is developed, in
the only shape in fact in which it can exist, is erect; they show
us its reversed image, as in a mirror, and then say to us: That
is man! And I answer: It is no longer man, it is God. Humanism
is the most perfect theism.
What, then, is this providence which the theists suppose in God?
An essentially human faculty, an anthropomorphic attribute, by
which God is thought to look into the future according to the
progress of events, in the same way that we men look into
the past, following the perspective of chronology and history.
Now, it is plain that, just as infinity--that is, spontaneous and
universal intuition in knowledge--is incompatible with humanity,
so providence is incompatible with the hypothesis of the divine
being. God, to whom all ideas are equal and simultaneous; God,
whose reason does not separate synthesis from antinomy; God, to
whom eternity renders all things present and contemporary,--was
unable, when creating us, to reveal to us the mystery of our
contradictions; and that precisely because he is God, because he
does not see contradiction, because his intelligence does not
fall under the category of time and the law of progress, because
his reason is intuitive and his knowledge infinite. Providence
in God is a contradiction within a contradiction; it was through
providence that God was actually made in the image of man; take
away this providence, and God ceases to be man, and man in turn
must abandon all his pretensions to divinity.
Perhaps it will be asked of what use it is to God to have
infinite knowledge, if he is ignorant of what takes place in
humanity.
Let us distinguish. God has a perception of order, the sentiment
of good. But this order, this good, he sees as eternal and
absolute; he does not see it in its successive and imperfect
aspects; he does not grasp its defects. We alone are capable of
seeing, feeling, and appreciating evil, as well as of measuring
duration, because we alone are capable of producing evil, and
because our life is temporary. God sees and feels only order;
God does not grasp what happens, because what happens is BENEATH
him, beneath his horizon. We, on the contrary, see at once the
good and the evil, the temporal and the eternal, order and
disorder, the finite and the infinite; we see within us and
outside of us; and our reason, because it is finite, surpasses
our horizon.
Thus, by the creation of man and the development of society, a
finite and providential reason, our own, has been posited in
contradiction of the intuitive and infinite reason, God; so that
God, without losing anything of his infinity in any direction,
seems diminished by the very fact of the existence of humanity.
Progressive reason resulting from the projection of eternal ideas
upon the movable and inclined plane of time, man can understand
the language of God, because he comes from God and his reason at
the start is like that of God; but God cannot understand us or
come to us, because he is infinite and cannot re-clothe himself
in finite attributes without ceasing to be God, without
destroying himself. The dogma of providence in God is shown to
be false, both in fact and in right.
It is easy now to see how the same reasoning turns against the
system of the deification of man.
Man necessarily positing God as absolute and infinite in his
attributes, whereas he himself develops in a direction the
inverse of this ideal, there is discord between the progress of
man and what man conceives as God. On the one hand, it appears
that man, by the syncretism of his constitution and the
perfectibility of his nature, is not God and cannot become God;
on the other, it is plain that God, the supreme Being, is the
antipode of humanity, the ontological summit from which it
indefinitely separates itself. God and man, having divided
between them the antagonistic faculties of being, seem to be
playing a game in which the control of the universe is the stake,
the one having spontaneity, directness, infallibility, eternity,
the other having foresight, deduction, mobility, time. God and
man hold each other in perpetual check and continually avoid
each other; while the latter goes ahead in reflection and theory
without ever resting, the former, by his providential incapacity,
seems to withdraw into the spontaneity of his nature. There is a
contradiction, therefore, between humanity and its ideal, an
opposition between man and God, an opposition which Christian
theology has allegorized and personified under the name of Devil
or Satan,--that is, contradictor, enemy of God and man.
Such is the fundamental antinomy which I find that modern critics
have not taken into account, and which, if neglected, having
sooner or later to end in the negation of the man-God and
consequently in the negation of this whole philosophical
exegesis, reopens the door to religion and fanaticism.
God, according to the humanists, is nothing but humanity itself,
the collective me to which the individual me is subjected as to
an invisible master. But why this singular vision, if the
portrait is a faithful copy of the original? Why has man, who
from his birth has known directly and with out a telescope his
body, his soul, his chief, his priest, his country, his
condition, been obliged to see himself as in a mirror, and
without recognizing himself, under the fantastic image of God?
Where is the necessity of this hallucination? What is this dim
and ambiguous consciousness which, after a certain time, becomes
purified, rectified, and, instead of taking itself for another,
definitively apprehends itself as such? Why on the part of man
this transcendental confession of society, when society itself
was there, present, visible, palpable, willing, and
acting,--when, in short, it was known as society and named as
such?
No, it is said, society did not exist; men were agglomerated, but
not associated; the arbitrary constitution of property and
the State, as well as the intolerant dogmatism of religion, prove
it.
Pure rhetoric: society exists from the day that individuals,
communicating by labor and speech, assume reciprocal obligations
and give birth to laws and customs. Undoubtedly society becomes
perfect in proportion to the advances of science and economy, but
at no epoch of civilization does progress imply any such
metamorphosis as those dreamed of by the builders of utopia; and
however excellent the future condition of humanity is to be, it
will be none the less the natural continuation, the necessary
consequence, of its previous positions.
For the rest, no system of association being exclusive in itself,
as I have shown, of fraternity and justice, it has never been
possible to confound the political ideal with God, and we see in
fact that all peoples have distinguished society from religion.
The first was taken as END, the second regarded only as MEANS;
the prince was the minister of the collective will, while God
reigned over consciences, awaiting beyond the grave the guilty
who escaped the justice of men. Even the idea of progress and
reform has never been anywhere absent; nothing, in short, of that
which constitutes social life has been entirely ignored or
misconceived by any religious nation. Why, then, once more, this
tautology of Society-Divinity, if it is true, as is pretended,
that the theological hypothesis contains nothing other than the
ideal of human society, the preconceived type of humanity
transfigured by equality, solidarity, labor, and love?
Certainly, if there is a prejudice, a mysticism, which now seems
to me deceptive in a high degree, it is no longer Catholicism,
which is disappearing, but rather this humanitary philosophy,
making man a holy and sacred being on the strength of a
speculation too learned not to have something of the arbitrary in
its composition; proclaiming him God,--that is, essentially good
and orderly in all his powers, in spite of the disheartening
evidence which he continually gives of his doubtful morality;
attributing his vices to the constraint in which he has lived,
and promising from him in complete liberty acts of the purest
devotion, because in the myths in which humanity, according to
this philosophy, has painted itself, we find described and
opposed to each other, under the names of hell and paradise, a
time of constraint and penalty and an era of happiness and
independence! With such a doctrine it would suffice--and
moreover it would be inevitable--for man to recognize that he is
neither God, nor good, nor holy, nor wise, in order to fall back
immediately into the arms of religion; so that in the last
analysis all that the world will have gained by the denial of God
will be the resurrection of God.
Such is not my view of the meaning of the religious fables.
Humanity, in recognizing God as its author, its master, its alter
ego, has simply determined its own essence by an antithesis,--an
eclectic essence, full of contrasts, emanated from the infinite
and contradictory of the infinite, developed in time and aspiring
to eternity, and for all these reasons fallible, although guided
by the sentiment of beauty and order. Humanity is the daughter
of God, as every opposition is the daughter of a previous
position: that is why humanity has formed God like itself, has
lent him its own attributes, but always by giving them a specific
character,--that is, by defining God in contradiction of itself.
Humanity is a spectre to God, just as God is a spectre to
humanity; each of the two is the other's cause, reason, and end
of existence.
It was not enough, then, to have demonstrated, by criticism
of religious ideas, that the conception of the divine me leads
back to the perception of the human me; it was also necessary to
verify this deduction by a criticism of humanity itself, and to
see whether this humanity satisfies the conditions that its
apparent divinity supposes. Now, such is the task that we
solemnly inaugurated when, starting at once with human reality
and the divine hypothesis, we began to unroll the history of
society in its economic institutions and speculative thoughts.
We have shown, on the one hand, that man, although incited by the
antagonism of his ideas, and although up to a certain point
excusable, does evil gratuitously and by the bestial impulse of
his passions, which are repugnant to the character of a free,
intelligent, and holy being. We have shown, on the other hand,
that the nature of man is not harmoniously and synthetically
constituted, but formed by an agglomeration of the potentialities
specialized in each creature,--a circumstance which, in revealing
to us the principle of the disorders committed by human liberty,
has finished the demonstration of the non- divinity of our race.
Finally, after having proved that in God providence not only does
not exist, but is impossible; after having, in other words,
separated the divine attributes of the infinite Being from the
anthropomorphic attributes,--we have concluded, contrary to the
affirmations of the old theodicy, that, relatively to the destiny
of man, a destiny essentially progressive, intelligence and
liberty in God suffered a contrast, a sort of limitation and
diminution, resulting from his eternal, immutable, and infinite
nature; so that man, instead of adoring in God his sovereign and
his guide, could and should look on him only as his antagonist.
And this last consideration will suffice to make us reject
humanism also, as tending invincibly, by the deification of
humanity, to a religious restoration. The true remedy for
fanaticism, in our view, is not to identify humanity with God,
which amounts to affirming, in social economy communism, in
philosophy mysticism and the statu quo; it is to prove to
humanity that God, in case there is a God, is its enemy.
What solution will result later from these data? Will God, in
the end, be found to be a reality?
I do not know whether I shall ever know. If it is true, on the
one hand, that I have today no more reason for affirming the
reality of man, an illogical and contradictory being, than the
reality of God, an inconceivable and unmanifested being, I know
at least, from the radical opposition of these two natures, that
I have nothing to hope or to fear from the mysterious author whom
my consciousness involuntarily supposes; I know that my most
authentic tendencies separate me daily from the contemplation of
this idea; that practical atheism must be henceforth the law of
my heart and my reason; that from observable necessity I must
continually learn the rule of my conduct; that any mystical
commandment, any divine right, which should be proposed to me,
must be rejected and combatted by me; that a return to God
through religion, idleness, ignorance, or submission, is an
outrage upon myself; and that if I must sometime be reconciled
with God, this reconciliation, impossible as long as I live and
in which I should have everything to gain and nothing to lose,
can be accomplished only by my destruction.
Let us then conclude, and inscribe upon the column which must
serve as a landmark in our later researches:
The legislator DISTRUSTS man, an abridgment of nature and a
syncretism of all beings. He DOES NOT RELY on Providence, an
inadmissible faculty in the infinite mind.
But, attentive to the succession of phenomena, submissive to the
lessons of destiny, he seeks in necessity the law of humanity,
the perpetual prophecy of his future.
He remembers also, sometimes, that, if the sentiment of Divinity
is growing weaker among men; if inspiration from above is
gradually withdrawing to give place to the deductions of
experience; if there is a more and more flagrant separation of
man and God; if this progress, the form and condition of our
life, escapes the perceptions of an infinite and consequently
non-historic intelligence; if, to say it all, appeal to
Providence on the part of a government is at once a cowardly
hypocrisy and a threat against liberty,--nevertheless the
universal consent of the peoples, manifested by the establishment
of so many different faiths, and the forever insoluble
contradiction which strikes humanity in its ideas, its
manifestations, and its tendencies indicate a secret relation of
our soul, and through it of entire nature, with the infinite,--a
relation the determination of which would express at the same
time the meaning of the universe and the reason of our existence.
END OF VOLUME FIRST.