paradises: that state of being which on earth was called hell is the
paradise of those given over to animal passions. The paradise of the
ascetics is an eternal Shrove Tuesday, with the eternal prospect of an
eternal Ash Wednesday; the case of Tantalus reversed and made
pleasurable. All good Buddhists have attained Nirvana. The righteous
Mahometan is distracted by the charms of innumerable _houris_. We
Epicureans enjoy that moment which is eternity; and every man is
justified in his own eyes."
"It is charming," said Leo.
"It is more," said Renan; "it is rational. How puerile is the mortal
conception of paradise! Man has imagined a place where virtue is
rewarded and vice punished. He believes in it with a passionate
conviction, because he is not quite sure. He forgets that virtue must be
disinterested, or it ceases to be virtue. If man is capable of a free
and unhampered choice between vice and virtue, if the distinction
between them be clear and precise, and the reward or punishment entailed
by the choice definite and finally revealed, mankind, then, is obviously
divided into two parts: the astute and the infatuate. One feels
immediately that both the reward and the punishment are excessive; or
else that vice and virtue have ceased to exist. However, in mortal
things there is always an element of doubt, and perhaps the chief glory
of man is born from it. Our choice is not entirely free, the distinction
is not absolutely clear, the reward is purely hypothetical."
"Ah, M. Renan," said Leo, "why are you here? You were always a believer
at heart; one might almost say a scholastic. You invented a system of
doubt, as others might a system of faith; even your doubts were
affirmations. Science with you was only a synonym for God, and round it
you constructed an hierarchy of saints and martyrs, a church suffering,
militant, triumphant. Lucian----"
"He is here," said Renan.
"Lucian," continued Leo, "imagined the soul of Plato inhabiting a
paradise constructed after the model of his own Republic. I imagine you
projected into that strange future which you announced in your
_Dialogues Philosophiques_."
"Doubt must be systematic," answered Renan; "but there is no need for
system in religion. The essence of a creed is in its assertions, not in
its arguments. Its arguments are nearly always a series of
after-thoughts, of apologies; its reason is always _à priori_; the very
fact that an argument should be considered necessary is blasphemous and
heretical. You exaggerate my scholasticism; but there was always in me
the nature of a priest, and I could not put away from me my education,
as I could put off my ecclesiastical dress. I imported the unction of a
priest into the region of philosophic doubt, and by that means invented
a substitute for faith. Science, in limiting the field of its
researches, has increased the mystery which lies beyond. I became, as it
were, the priest of an unknown God; and the first article of my creed
was, that perhaps he did not exist at all. 'Sois béni pour ton mystère,'
I cried in my _Magnificat_; 'béni pour t'être caché, béni pour avoir
reservé la pleine liberté de nos cœurs.' The _Dialogues Philosophiques_
were written at a time when the whole thought of France was depressed
and reactionary. They were a play of intelligence upon contemporary
ideas. Progress does not tend to establish a scientific aristocracy at
the head of its affairs; science is progressive because it has saturated
the commercial classes with its ideals; it has increased production, and
economised in by-products. This alliance between democracy and the
scientific spirit is the unique characteristic of our age. I think,
myself, that society is tending to adopt the Chinese model. Kingship,
the State, the present conventions of society, may continue to exist in
atrophied and rudimentary forms; but I imagine the whole earth in a few
thousand years regulated by examinations and trade-unions, with an
effete mandarinate surviving amid the débris of the ancient order, like
the solitary column of Phocas in the Roman Forum, or the teeth in an
embryonic whale."
"In this paradise," said Leo with an elusive smile, "you have,
doubtless, infinite leisure for the discussion of these academic
questions."
"Naturally," answered Renan; "and we have a little Academy modelled on
the Académie Française. I hope, Monsieur, to have the honour of
welcoming you among us, and of replying to your _discours de réception_;
it is an amiable duty which my colleagues have delegated to me.
Sometimes; it is what remains of my mortal vanity, Monsieur; I imagine
that I have some talent in these things."
Leo had intended to be ironical; but his own vanity was now flattered.
One ambition is always left to those who occupy a throne; it is to be
considered equal with the great.
"Your response, Monsieur, will be my apotheosis," he replied. "But, tell
me, are you become a socialist? Your prophecy of the reformation of the
earth on the Chinese model seems to point that way."
Renan smiled.
"No," he said; "the Chinese are not a socialistic nation. They have not
the notion of the State which is peculiar to socialism. But they are a
nation governed by trades-unions and examining boards; and through the
same institutions we may arrive at the same stagnation. Our progress at
present seems to follow that direction, because the aim of our
materialistic civilisation is to make everything cheap, food, education,
state-offices; and its final effect will be to make men cheap, then we
shall have large, flat, arid masses of humanity, to whom few luxuries
will be possible, and the forms of our civilisation will become
stereotyped. As it was with Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt, as it is with
China, so it will be with us. Evolution is the progress from homogeneity
to heterogeneity; but the process is not indefinite.
"After a race or a nation has produced a great number of diverse
personalities, it becomes decadent and tends to produce a single type:
the process of evolution is arrested, and the race may either lie
dormant for centuries if like the Chinese it has been prolific and
exists in sufficient numbers; or, if sparse and scattered like the
Phœnicians, they may be completely annihilated by their more vigorous
neighbours. Socialism is neither a remedy nor a disease, but it may be a
symptom. No society has been free from socialistic groups. Jerusalem had
its _ebionim_; there was the eclectic philosophy of Rome under Nero, the
Flavians, and the Antonines; primitive Christianity was communistic, and
Neo-Christianity under Joachim of Flora and St Francis was an imitation
of it. The Jacobins had communistic notions. The poor, the humble, the
oppressed have always been liable to the dreams of millenarism; and the
difference between the Maccabean aspiration, which was, according to
Daniel, to establish the kingdom of God upon earth, and the aspiration
of Robespierre, who wished 'to found upon earth the empire of wisdom, of
justice, and of virtue,' is merely the difference of time and place. A
beautiful, but intangible vision; a divine inspiration! Like all divine
inspirations, alas! it is by its nature impracticable. Imagine a sudden
uprising of the proletariate, a vast social movement, an European
revolution. Slowly, after its momentary chaos, a new cohesion would take
effect. The abstract virtues, from which the movement had had its
derivation, would become personified in our most popular legislators;
the new constitution would include, beside the disadvantages of an
untried mechanism, many errors latent in the old patterns which it would
necessarily follow; and we should discover, after a series of futile and
extravagant adventures, that the laws which govern society are
essentially natural laws, the slow growth of tacit acceptance, and not
merely the dusty records of a popular legislating assembly. Mankind does
not learn the lesson easily. One revolution engenders another, and
eventually the habit becomes ingrained. The history of mine own country,
from 1789 through the nineteenth century, a history of revolution, of
the conflict between ideals and realities, is a signal and a reminder to
the nations."
"You treat Christianity and Jacobinism as cognate ideas," said Leo,
after a pause. "There is surely this distinction between them, that one
was almost entirely religious, and the other almost entirely political."
"Ah," said Renan, with a deprecating smile, "all religions are
political, just as all politics are religious. Christianity with its
notion of mankind as a brotherhood, and the Papacy with its notions of a
spiritual empire, a suzerainty, over all peoples, have destroyed the
ancient conception of the unity of Church and State. The religion of the
Greeks was embodied in their laws; and the politics of the Jews, in
their religion. The ideal conception of religion as something quite
distinct from the State has proved unworkable, if not disastrous. All
the churches have had to smite their mystics with the thunders of
excommunication, to extinguish the inward light, to restrain the free
play of thought. Even the most primitive form of Christianity, the
Messianic notion, was purely political. If we are to talk on social
questions we cannot separate religion from politics. The distinction
between them is artificial; they are merely the opposite poles of a
single idea."
"Ah, well!" said Leo, shrugging his shoulders; "the progress of humanity
is a chimæra if it ends merely in stagnation. These bleak, arid masses
of mankind living without pleasures in their Chinese frugality, what
future have they before them?"
"An awakening," said Renan prophetically; "the Kings of Uruk reigning
over a decadent civilisation, Sardanapalus foreseeing the stagnation of
his people did not dream of a future which they had helped to create.
The process of evolution acts in tides; there is a continuous ebb and
flow; the seed lies hidden in the ground until the wizardry of Spring
calls it forth, and rain and sunlight nourishing it into new life, it
ripens for the harvest. Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen. In the
ruined palaces of Nineveh the beasts of the desert bring forth their
young, and the green lizards creep out from the crevices to sun
themselves upon a fragment of some boastful inscription; but the music
which echoed in its painted halls, the dancing and the choirs, the great
processions of its Kings, its wisdom and folly, its vain desires and
failures, its tears and laughter, these have their being still, they
move mysteriously in us, a breath would quicken them into life again, we
can rebuild them in moments that seem to have all the profundity of
time."
"Poet!" said Leo, with a smile creasing about his lean jaws. "The world
does not become socialist, it becomes Chinese; our civilisation tends to
a variety of forms, becomes uniform, and then again becomes diverse in
endless recurrence. Continue, Monsieur, but let us keep within the
bounds of our own age. Socialism is a definite political force; and even
if it do not triumph completely it must create certain new conditions.
I, myself, have condemned socialism in one of my encyclicals. I have
denied the sacred right of insurrection. Human institutions, which we
may think have survived their usefulness, are in reality only waiting
for their transformation, their character is moulded from outside. We
may sometimes fail to understand their mission, or to grasp the reasons
which impel them to follow certain paths, because these reasons are pale
reflections of some unappreciated causes. The world seems to progress,
within the limits of natural laws, by a series of unforeseen
developments. The future is latent in us; but the force which impels it
is hidden."
"Yes," answered Renan; "some internal conscience directs all progress,
and is the force which impels humanity on its way. This conscience has a
secret action long before it finds a voice. Its influence at first is
something subterranean and obscure; its bias is necessarily against the
official creeds, but it moves against them slowly, informing them with
the new spirit. I like to find this conscience acting through the poorer
and humbler classes of the people, the folk who are of the soil, whose
faith is something native and spontaneous, whose life and happiness
depends upon the sun and rain. It is significant that all the gods were
originally agricultural gods, that the history of every nation begins in
Eden. To the artisan, the dweller in towns, whose whole life consists in
turning out from a machine certain articles of a stereotyped pattern,
the universe is simply a piece of mechanism; he is himself merely a
machine, or part of a machine, performing a certain number of invariable
motions to produce a definite and invariable result. He lacks
inspiration, he has no vivid knowledge of the great element of chance
which moves, like one of those primitive elemental gods, behind all
human affairs, at times compassionate and friendly to man, at times
bursting out into a sudden fury of wanton destruction. He demands a
fixed wage, fixed hours of work, fixed prices for the commodities which
he consumes, the certainty of a pension in his old age. In a world of
fluctuations and vicissitudes he demands absolute security. He is
confident that he is going to do great things, that he has already
worked wonders. With the aid of science and art, which he starves, he is
going to make the earth pleasant and beautiful. He is quite confident
that in a few generations he will be born in an incubator, and die,
without pain, of sheer satiety. For him a fantastic assembly of
politicians, removable at his own will, represents Providence and the
divine wisdom. Is he less absurd than the savages who employ rain-makers
and witch doctors? I do not think so. Clearly he is not a person from
whom we can expect any but the most crude and mechanical readings of
life; his vague, restless, childish discontent, that hunger for barren
and tawdry pleasures which is characteristic of half-educated minds,
that lack of intercourse with the great elemental forces of Nature, can
issue in nothing but his own mental, moral, and physical damnation.
"For any new readings of life, for any renaissance of art and religion,
we must look to the simple folk, who are still close to the breasts of
Earth: the folk who of old imagined Apollo as a herd in the service of
Admetus; who found Demeter sitting by the well, and comforted her; who,
after the vintage had been gathered in, took down the grotesque masks,
which they had hung upon the vines to scare the birds and foxes from the
grapes, and acted in them, singing the hymns of Dionysos to the music of
pipes and flutes. Poetry, religion, love, the three things which quicken
life to new effort, are never far from the soil. The great conventional
middle-classes, even those heretics from Philistia, the followers of
Comte and Marx, the mediocre intelligences whose political principles
are communist, and whose religious principles are positivist, these have
little influence on the future. Socialism differs from all previous
Utopian dreams simply because it lacks their vital energy; it is
material and mechanical where the older ideas were spiritual and
natural; it is lacking in a sense of morality, in a sense of beauty, in
a sense of truth. You will not find the conscience of humanity in any of
these creeds."
"It seems," said Leo, "that we do not know where we are going."
"You have said that human institutions are only waiting for their
transformation," Renan replied. "An institution represents a need. It
has been formed by the spontaneous action of the community; but the
moment it has been thus constituted it becomes fixed, and ceases to
represent the living, developing forces which deposited it. Christianity
at first was perfectly fluid; the teaching of Paul was unsystematic,
local, momentary; but Christianity became a religion, not of inspiration
but of authority, it crystallised into an hierarchy and perished. In the
same way the idyll of St Francis and his companions crystallised into an
order, and perished. They exist among us as monuments, these
institutions; but the same forces which crystallised them are now
dissolving them; the moment they cut themselves off from the stream of
life they perished. I do not think that the future will differ
essentially from the past. Socialism is simply the cry of the poor
against the rich. Dives is well-clad and fares sumptuously every day; no
other crime is alleged against him, but these are sufficient to ensure
his damnation. Perhaps the maker of the parable saw some peculiar virtue
in poverty and suffering, which filled the heart with a spiritual grace,
and uplifted it with moral fortitude. Perhaps he saw the wealth of Dives
as poverty, as a lack of spiritual experience.
"Socialism, however, does not share this view; on the contrary, it
asserts that wealth is the sole condition of spiritual grace and moral
fortitude, and it is therefore bent on sharing with Dives the good
things of this world. Consequently socialism has against it the two most
deeply-rooted of human instincts, the instinct of acquisition and the
family instinct; because it denies the right of possession and the right
of bequest. How deeply-rooted the notion of property is we can see
exemplified in France, where the abolition of the right of primogeniture
has not had the effect which was expected of it, even the peasants in
certain departments having held out against it. But if the power of
bequest were entirely abolished, would people marry? The object for a
legalised relation is gone, and the production of our kind becomes
subject to the hazard of personal choice. It is possible that the State
would have to intervene and make maternity an honourable profession
under its own control, and that Plato's ideal of the State as a
foster-mother would be realised. This notion has, I confess, a singular
attraction for me. The substitution of a stock derived from careful
selection of parents for our present inferior stock; the careful
breeding of an aristocratic caste, appeals to the imagination, as it
shows the State actually realising what has always been its ideal.
"I could wish, Monsieur, that the socialists would form themselves into
monastic communities, practising the virtues of obedience and, if not
poverty, the community of goods. Yes; they should found a little Abbey
of Theleme, and take their whole rule from Rabelais. They would not
practise celibacy, but eugenics; and the education of their children
would be the same as that devised for Gargantua by Ponocrates. So they
would increase and multiply, and the whole earth would be filled with
the glory of their names. I fear that, unfortunately, the first verse of
what was written above the gate of Theleme would debar many from
entering. But grant that this Utopia is possible; it is surely no less
possible than the monastic ideal! And granted that a great aristocratic
caste would arise, a dedicated folk, surrounded by the decadent
populations of helots and hetairai, and that they would be able to
gather into their own hands the supreme control of things? what would be
the result? They would crystallise into an hierarchy, and perish. They
would rule as the priests ruled Egypt, and as the priests ruled mediæval
Europe. They would resuscitate the double tyranny of the Church and
State in one body. The whole progress of the last four hundred years has
been toward individual liberty in thought and word. That ideal would be
lost."
"I do not see the necessity of such ideals," said Leo. "I object to
socialism because it would mean the absolute tyranny of the State, the
despotism of a narrow and intolerant bureaucracy, tempered, as at
present in Russia, by a more or less indiscriminate system of
assassination. I have not the same objection to the tyranny of one man.
A philosopher on the throne, Monsieur, your charming Marcus Aurelius for
instance, may rule with wisdom and moderation; but an oligarchy of
philosophers, like the Thirty at Athens: hell is naked before them and
destruction hath no covering! Such experiments, as you say, infect the
people with a lust for revolution. History, the only guide for political
prophets, shows us that sudden disturbance of the social order breeds a
whole series, whether such a disturbance occur among the ancient Greeks,
or the Romans, or the French. The diverse natures of the peoples, the
different conditions of the age in which they lived, and of their
political methods do not alter the central fact. Humanity in the lump is
a beast more terrible than any in Revelations."
"Ah, no!" cried Renan, with a sudden vivacity. "There is the chief glory
of the human race. They will sacrifice themselves for an impossible
ideal. None of us can contemplate that great tragedy of the French
Revolution without feeling cleansed by it. The enthusiasm of the people
has a kind of terrible grandeur. In such moments of divine delirium all
men assume heroic proportions. We may pity it for its fanaticism; we may
pity it for being so easily duped; but it is impossible to deny its
magnificent devotion to an ideal."
Leo was unmoved.
"You consider it a great moral movement, Monsieur?"
"Moral because all petty egoisms were obliterated," answered Renan. "Men
seemed for a moment to become the incarnations of ideas. Oh, on both
sides. Charlotte Corday, Danton, Madame Roland, Robespierre, Desmoulins,
Larochejacquelin; each individuality seems to have had its definite
mission, each seems to have been equally necessary, equally an
instrument of justice."
"You have said, Monsieur," continued Leo, after a pause, "that the
socialists would revive in one form the twin tyrannies of Church and
State, and destroy the ideal of individual liberty. You have also said
that the ancient conception of Church and State was a unity. Would the
kind of socialism which you sketch resemble the Greek State?"
"No ancient State, not even Athens, extended to its citizens the liberty
which we enjoy," answered Renan. "The State intervened in the private
affairs of the citizens; and Athens is notorious for having pursued the
philosophers with accusations of impiety. The noble conservative
families and the priesthood combined to stifle the new liberal thought.
The State, however, was democratic; the people ruled, decided by their
votes the policy of the State, and served on juries, or as judges.
Socialism condemns democracy: it aspires to govern not by the will of
the people, but according to its own interpretation of what it calls
scientific principles; and it seems that in its application of these
principles, it would be more bigoted and intolerant than the democratic
State in Greece ever was."
"Nothing then is permanent, which crystallises into an hierarchy, or is
limited by an institution," said Leo. "It seems to me that your gospel
is purely destructive. The whole progress of modern science is marked by
the ruins of ancient altars; you have freed mankind from all moral
obligations in denying that he is a responsible agent, and in showing
that he is merely a creature of inherited instincts; you have shown him
that his life is no more than a ripple on the water, a sudden stir of
wind in the leaves, a momentary light in the darkness; you have denied
the God that his heart fashioned as a solace to his grief, a lamp to
guide him; you have taught him to seek for the perishable glories of the
earth. How will you make him a moral being again?"
Renan smiled.