MORALITY AND RELIGION
But this internal fear, shame or moral consciousness is aroused in man
by religion. The fear is the fear of God, the shame is abasement before
his face. Primitive man wanders over the earth alone, wild, fierce,
without articulate speech, without a permanent mate, at the mercy of
his unbridled and violent passions, a "brute" rather than a man. What
can restrain him? what can rescue him from at last destroying himself?
Wise men cannot direct him, for we cannot say whence or how they can
reach him. The intervention of God cannot save him: God has withdrawn
himself to his chosen people, and has no dealings with the rest of
mankind, the Gentiles. But this "brute" is still a man: God, while
abandoning him, has left a spark of his own essence at the bottom of
his heart. See! the sky lightens: the wild creature stands awestruck
and afraid: in his mind arises the shadowy idea of something greater
than he, something divine. So he conceives or rather imagines a first
God, a Sky-god, a thundering Jupiter: and to this deity he turns to
appease his wrath or invoke his aid. But in order to conciliate him and
secure his help, he must shape his own life conformably to his purpose:
he must humble himself before his God, overcome his own pride and
arrogance, abstain from certain actions and perform others. Thus the
conception of a deity lends power to that peculiar possession of the
human will, the attempt, that is, the liberty, to control the movements
communicated to the mind by the body and to annul or to redirect them
simultaneously. With these acts of self-control, with freedom, morality
comes into existence: the fear of God has laid the foundations of human
life. Altars arise all over the earth: the caves of her mountains,
whither the man now bears the woman, ashamed as he is of gratifying his
desires before the face of the sky, which is the face of God, preside
at the first marriage-rites and shelter the first families: her bosom
opens to receive the sacred trust of the bodies of the dead. The first
and fundamental ethical institutions--worship, wedlock and burial--have
arisen.
This social and ethical power of the idea of God appears again in the
course of subsequent history: since when nations have relapsed into
savagery through warfare, and human laws have no more power over them,
religion is the only means of subduing them. It reappears again in the
individual development of human life: children indeed cannot learn
piety except through the fear of some deity; and when all natural help
fails him man requires a superior being to save him, and this being is
God. All nations believe in a divine providence: tribes living in a
society without any consciousness of God, for instance in some parts of
Brazil, among the Kafirs, and in the Antilles, are travellers' tales,
an attempt to increase the sale of their books by the narration of
portents.
If this is so,--and doubtless it is--then no doctrine can be more
foolish than that which claims to conceive a morality and civilisation
without religion. Just as no well-established physical science is
possible without the guidance of abstract mathematical truth, so
no knowledge of morality can arise except together with abstract
metaphysical truths, without, that is, the idea of God. When the
religious consciousness is extinguished or obscured the conception
of society and the state is extinguished or obscured with it. Jews,
Christians, Gentiles and Mahommedans possess this conception because
all alike believe in some deity, whether as an infinite free spirit,
or as several gods consisting of mind and body, or as one single God,
an infinite free spirit in an infinite body. The Epicureans did not
possess such a conception, attributing to God as they did body alone,
and chance together with body: nor did the Stoics, who made him subject
to fate. And Cicero made the admirable remark to the Epicurean Atticus,
that he could not discuss laws with him unless he first granted the
existence of the divine providence. Hobbes, who revived Epicureanism,
and Spinoza, who revived Stoicism, as we have seen entirely failed to
understand the nature of society and the state. One must consort with
primitive man, stupid, hirsute, unclean and dishevelled, to refute
those learned authors of "desiccated literature," with Peter Bayle at
their head, who maintain that human society can and indeed does live
without religion.
The absence of the idea of God supplied the chief argument in Vico's
criticism of Grotius and Puffendorf, two of these authors whom he held
in great honour as "princes" of the school of natural rights. Neither
of these writers, he says, lays down the principle of divine providence
as primary and essential. Grotius does not expressly deny it: but on
account of his very attachment to truth, he endeavours to exclude it,
and asserts that his system will stand even if all knowledge of God be
removed. Hence Vico accuses him of Socinianism, since he makes human
innocence consist in the simplicity of human nature. Puffendorf is
still worse: he seems to ignore providential direction, and begins
with the scandalously Epicurean supposition that man is thrown into
this world with no help or attention from God, without even that spark
within his heart which is destined to grow into the flame of morality:
and having been reproved for this, he tries to justify himself in a
special essay, but does not succeed in discovering the true principle
on which alone society can be explained.
Now why, in face of all these energetic declarations and arguments
of Vico's on the necessity of religion to morality, did we say above
that the only point of real resemblance between him and Grotius,
Puffendorf and the natural-right school generally was his purely
immanental conception of ethics? Because, if we examine the point
closely, Vico is not in opposition to the method of that school. Like
them, in constructing his science of human society he excludes with
Grotius all idea of God, and with Puffendorf considers man as without
help or attention from God, excluding him, that is, from revealed
religion and its God. As for these two writers, so for Vico the subject
under consideration is natural rights, not supernatural: the law
of the Gentiles, not of the chosen people: the law which arises of
itself among the caves, not that which comes down from Sinai. Vico's
opposition, which he expresses with his accustomed confusion and
obscurity, turns not upon assertions like these, but upon the actual
conception of religion. In one word, the religion of which he speaks is
not the same as that of which Grotius and Puffendorf spoke, or rather
did not speak.
Religion, as we have already seen, means for Vico not necessarily
revelation, but conception of reality: either that which expresses
itself as it does in the period of fully developed mind in the form
of intelligible metaphysic, which passes from the thought of God to
explain logic by its reasoning and to condescend to purify the human
heart by morality: or that which takes concrete shape, as it does in
the earliest stage of humanity, in the form of poetical metaphysics.
One may easily ignore revealed religion when inquiring into the
foundations of morality: but how can one ever ignore this natural
religion, identical as it is with knowledge of the truth? Plutarch,
discussing the primitive religions of terror, asks the question whether
it would not have been better, instead of worshipping the gods in so
impious a manner, that there should be no religion at all: but he
forgot that from these cruel superstitions brilliant civilisations
developed, and no civilisation could ever have grown from atheism.
Without a religion, whether gentle or fierce, rational or fantastic, to
give the idea, more or less clearly defined, more or less elevated, of
something superior to the individual and uniting all individuals, the
moral will would have no object for its volition.
At this point we see the meaning of what we have described as the
second, practical or ethical, signification of the word "religion" in
Vico. In this signification, Vico justifies and vindicates the impious
saying that "fear creates the gods": he even places the source of
religion in the longing for eternal life which man feels when stirred
by a universal sense of immortality hidden in the depths of the mind.
In this second signification, religion is a practical fact, indeed it
is morality itself, as in the first meaning it was truth itself.
If the meaning of religion for Vico, either as the condition of
morality, in the first sense of the word, or as synonymous with it,
in the second, is once understood, it is clear that when he condemned
Grotius and Puffendorf for their omission of this most important
concept, he was substantially doing nothing but clenching his criticism
of the insipid moralising and the concealed utilitarianism of these
two thinkers. On other occasions also he resorted to the valuable
weapon of the concept of religion, with the same end in view. Because
if he sometimes credited philosophy with the task of assisting
mankind by raising and directing fallen human nature, at other times
he decided that philosophy is rather adapted to reasoning, and that
the moral philosophers with the greatest powers of reasoning are of
value only to stimulate the senses by their eloquence to perform the
duties of virtue, while religion alone has the power of making men act
virtuously. Then in the empirical science corresponding to this part of
the philosophy of mind, Vico turns religion (or poetical metaphysic)
and philosophy into two historical epochs, making the former
characteristic of the barbaric period and the latter of the civilised.
He maintains, as he is clearly bound to do, that religion is the sole
foundation of all civilisation and of philosophy itself, and rejects
Polybius's saying that if there had been philosophers in the world
religion would have been unnecessary. How could philosophy have arisen,
he objects, had not states, that is, civilisation, arisen first? and
how could states have arisen without the aid of religion? Thus the
saying ought to be reversed: without religion there is no philosophy.
It was religion, it was the divine providence that tamed the sons of
Polyphemus and reduced them to the humanity of Aristides and Socrates,
of Laelius and Scipio Africanus.
The conception again of the "state of nature," which served in the
treatises of the school of natural rights as an hypothesis and a
means of exposition with a view either to developing the argument
independently of mystical theology without evoking too many protests,
or to conveying implicitly their utilitarian theories, acquired in
Vico's hands a new function and a new content. A perfectly honest
Catholic, having satisfied his conscience by separating revealed from
human religion, he was in a position to assume the state of nature
as a literal and actual reality. It is an ideal reality, in so far
as it represents in the dialectic of the practical consciousness a
moment necessary for the genesis of reality, the pre-moral moment: a
historical and empirical reality, as the approximately actual condition
of those periods of anarchy and disturbance which precede the rise of
civilisations or follow upon their fall. The natural-right school
acquiesced more or less in the traditional doctrine of the church,
namely that the Gentiles, in the dispersion following on the confusion
of Babel, had taken away with them a residuum of revealed religion, a
vague memory of the true God, and that hence arose the possibility of
social life and of false gods, shadows of the true God: and thus the
"state of nature" had been put forward in their system as something
abstract and unreal. Vico worked out strictly the distinction between
Jews and Gentiles, and conceived the state of nature as devoid of
any help coming from previous revelation: as a state in which man
stood alone, so to speak, face to face with his own chaotic and
turbulent passions. It was a state actually without morality, but--in
contradistinction to the utilitarian hypothesis--pregnant with moral
requirements, and was transcended by this implicit character becoming
explicit. But this transcendence was brought about naturally, not by
means of divine grace: the true divine grace is human nature itself,
shared by Gentiles no less than Jews, all equally illuminated by a
divine light.
Man's will is free, weak though it is, to make his passions into
virtues; and in his struggle towards virtue he is helped in a natural
manner by God through providence. Certainly Vico did not intend to deny
the efficacy of direct and personal divine grace as well: but following
his usual method he separates the latter from the natural operation of
providence, which is the only question of importance for him and the
only one he considers. So far as concerns the controversies on grace,
he always likes to maintain a middle position between two extremes
represented typically, according to him, by Pelagianism and Calvinism:
and ever since as a young man he studied the works of Richard, the
theologian of the Sorbonne, he had accepted his demonstration of
the superiority of the Augustinian doctrine, just because it was
intermediate between these extremes. A moderate doctrine of this
kind seemed to him, as he says, to provide a suitable foundation for
a principle of the natural rights of nations which should explain the
origin of Roman and other Gentile law, while at the same time remaining
in agreement with the Catholic religion. He was inclined to admit that
there was a privileged nation, namely the Jewish; and that in the
struggle against the passions the Christian had an advantage over the
non-Christian, because in cases where natural grace failed he might be
helped by supernatural. But, in a word, miracles are miracles, and the
New Science is not a science of the miraculous.
That it is not, is proved by Vico's criticism on the third of the
"principles" of natural rights, against John Selden, a famous man in
his day though forgotten later, and author of _De iure naturali et
gentium iuxta disciplinant Hebraeorum_ (1640). Selden disagreed with
Grotius, in this as in certain other questions, in not denying, and
even in exalting, the value of religion: he conceived moral and civil
life impossible for mankind except through revelation. This revelation,
made by God to the Jewish people, passed from them according to Selden
by several channels to the Gentiles: Pythagoras for instance had learnt
from Ezekiel; Aristotle, at the time of the campaigns of Alexander in
Asia, formed a friendship with Simon the Just; Numa Pompilius acquired
some knowledge of the Bible and the prophets. This was enough to
reassure any believer who had been frightened away from the works of
the natural-right school by their heterodox tendencies. But Vico will
have none of this ultra-religious system. If Grotius ignored providence
and Puffendorf denied it, Selden was wrong, said Vico, in supplying it,
making it a _deus ex machina,_ without explaining it by the essential
character of the human mind. It was a system not only unphilosophical
but incompatible with sacred history, which admits to a certain extent
even in the case of the Jews a natural, not revealed, law: and it was
only because, during the captivity in Egypt, they lost sight of this
that the direct intervention of God with the laws given to Moses took
place. Nor did the theory agree, as to the alleged dissemination of
Jewish knowledge and laws among the Gentiles, with the words of the Jew
Josephus and of Lactantius; and in general, it was unsupported by even
the smallest documentary evidence. Vico's conclusion therefore remains
unaltered. The Jews enjoyed in addition the extraordinary aid of the
true God: but the other nations attained civilisation solely through
the ordinary light of providence.
Whether or no Vico quoted and interpreted Grotius and Puffendorf
accurately is for us a question of small importance. His exposition
and estimate of other philosophers matter less than his own doctrines,
whatever their historical relations, which, to tell the truth, are many
in number. Nevertheless it will be as well to indicate briefly, as
regards the difficulties which may arise upon this point, the answer
which we think plausible. Any one who after reading Vico's censures
opened the _De iure belli et pacis_ and found that Grotius explicitly
includes among his three fundamental principles, with reason and the
social nature, the divine will, and that this ignoring of God amounts
to little more than a mere phrase laying emphasis on the power of the
social nature and reason, which would take effect "even if we were
to grant that God does not exist" (_etiamsi dar emus non esse Deum_)
or that he does not care for human affairs, "which cannot be granted
without the grossest impiety" (_quod sine summo scelere dari nequit_):
any one who opened Puffendorf and read a most solemn denunciation of
the Grotian hypothesis as impious and absurd, and a declaration that
natural laws would remain hanging in the air devoid of force apart
from the will of God as legislator; any one who read these words might
be led to accuse Vico of negligence or even of insincerity in his
criticisms of his predecessors. But in truth Vico did not know what to
make of a God set side by side with other sources of morality, or set
above them as a superfluous source for the sources: he, searching for
God as he did in the heart of man, saw and felt the gulf fixed between
him and those who no longer had him in their hearts and barely kept
him on their lips through habit or prudence. A more subtle question
would be to ask why,--if Vico agreed with the natural-right school in
ignoring revelation, and if he instead of rejecting it deepened their
superficial immanental doctrine,--why he put himself forward as their
implacable enemy and persisted in boasting loudly before prelates and
pontiffs of having formulated a system of natural rights different from
that of the three Protestant authors and adapted to the Roman church.
The supposition that he acted thus through politic caution might be
advanced if instead of Vico we were dealing with, for instance, a
passionate and powerful but deceitful friar like Tommaso Campanella:
but the spotless character of Vico entirely precludes it, and we can
only suppose that, lacking as his ideas always were in clarity, on
this occasion he indulged his tendency to confusion and nourished his
illusions, to the extent of conferring upon himself the flattering
style and title of _Defensor Ecclesiae_ at the very moment when he
was destroying the religion of the church by means of the religion of
humanity.