Produced by Al Haines
_Outlines of a Philosophy
of Religion based on
Psychology and History_
_By Auguste Sabatier_
_Author of the "Apostle Paul" etc._
NEW YORK
JAMES POTT & COMPANY
119-121 WEST 23D STREET.
1910
CONTENTS
PREFACE
BOOK I.--RELIGION
CHAPTER I
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ORIGIN AND THE NATURE OF RELIGION
1. First Critical Reflections
2. Initial Contradiction of the Psychological Consciousness
3. Religion the Prayer of the Heart
CHAPTER II
RELIGION AND REVELATION
1. The Mystery of the Religious Life
2. Mythological Notion of Revelation
3. Dogmatic Notion
4. Psychological Notion
5. Conclusion
CHAPTER III
MIRACLE AND INSPIRATION
1. The Notion of Miracle in Antiquity
2. Miracle and Science: Miracle and Piety
3. Religious Inspiration
CHAPTER IV
THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF HUMANITY
1. The Social Element in Religion
2. Progress in the Outward Forms of Religion
3. Progress in the Representation of the Divine
4. The History of Prayer
5. Conclusion
BOOK II.--CHRISTIANITY
CHAPTER I
HEBRAISM, OR THE ORIGINS OF THE GOSPEL
1. Prophetism
2. The Dawn of the Gospel
CHAPTER II
THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY
1. The Problem
2. The Christian Principle
3. The Gospel of Jesus
4. A Necessary Distinction
5. The Corruptions of the Christian Principle
CHAPTER III
THE GREAT HISTORICAL FORMS OF CHRISTIANITY
1. The Evolution of the Christian Principle
2. Jewish or Messianic Christianity
3. Catholic Christianity
4. Protestant Christianity
5. Conclusion
BOOK III.--DOGMA
CHAPTER I
WHAT IS A DOGMA?
1. Definition
2. Genesis of Dogma
3. The Role and the Religious Value of Dogma
CHAPTER II
THE LIFE OF DOGMAS AND THEIR HISTORICAL EVOLUTION
1. Three Prejudices
2. The Two Elements in Dogma
3. The Crisis of Dogma
CHAPTER III
THE SCIENCE OF DOGMAS
1. Mixed Character of the Science of Dogmas
2. The Science of Dogmas and the Church
3. The Science of Dogmas and Philosophy
CHAPTER IV
CRITICAL THEORY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE
1. Antiquated Theories
2. The Kantian Theory of Knowledge
3. The Two Orders of Knowledge
4. Subjectivity of Religious Knowledge
5. Teleology
6. Symbolism
7. Conclusion
APPENDIX
Reply to Criticisms
PREFACE
This volume contains three parts which are related to each other as the
three stories of one and the same edifice. The first treats of
religion and its origin; the second of Christianity and its essence;
the third of Dogma and its nature.
Proceeding thus from the general to the particular, from the elementary
forms of religion to its highest form, passing afterwards from
religious phenomena to religious doctrines, I have endeavoured to
develop a series of connected and progressive views which I do not wish
to be regarded as a system, but as the rigid application and the first
results of the method of strictly psychological and historical
observation that for years I have applied to this species of studies.
In no domain is there a greater incoherence of ideas, a sharper
conflict of feeling, or data more contradictory or, at all events, more
difficult to reconcile. In no other is it more urgent to introduce a
little sequence, clearness, harmony. Our century, from the beginning,
has had two great passions which still inflame and agitate its closing
years. It has driven abreast the twofold worship of the scientific
method and of the moral ideal; but, so far from being able to unite
them, it has pushed them to a point where they seem to contradict and
exclude each other. Every serious soul feels itself to be inwardly
divided; it would fain conciliate its most generous aspirations, the
two last motives for living and acting that still remain to it. Where
but in a renovated conception of religion will this needed
reconciliation be found?
No one nowadays underestimates the social importance of the religious
question. Philosophers, moralists, politicians, show themselves to be
alive to it; they see it dominating all others, whose solution, in the
end, it may prevent or decide. But, singular contradiction! the more
zeal and the more decision these men manifest in handling the religious
question in the social order, the more indifference or impotence they
show in solving it for themselves both in their inner and their family
life... No one has the right to impose a doctrine or the presumption,
surely, to dictate to others how they must direct their thought; but a
sincere and persuaded mind may tell how it has directed its own, and
may set forth as an experience and a "document" the views at which it
has arrived....
The solidarity of minds has now become so great, the currents of ideas,
like the currents in the atmosphere, move so quickly and create, in
circumstances so different and so far apart, states of soul so similar
that many who read these studies, and who are struggling with the same
difficulties as those which have so long engaged the author's thoughts,
may find both interest and profit in seeing how he has succeeded in
satisfying himself. Those even who have never reflected on these
questions, or have lightly turned from them because they deemed them
insoluble, will not perhaps object to be directed to them by one who
wishes, not to check their freedom of thought, but to stimulate them to
exercise it. Who, at the close of his secret meditations, on the
confines of his knowledge, at the end of his affections, of the joys he
has tasted, of the trials he has endured, has not seen rising before
him the religious question--I mean the mysterious problem of his
destiny? Of all questions it is the most vital. Men may be turned
from it for a time by manifold distractions and by a sense of
powerlessness to solve the question, but it is impossible that they
should not return to it. Has life a meaning? Is it worth living? Our
efforts, have they an end? Our works and our thoughts, have they any
permanent value to the universe? This problem, which one generation
may evade, returns with the next. Each new recruit to the human race
brings the problem along with him, because he wishes to live, and to
live is to act, and all action requires a faith. It is of the young
that I have thought while preparing these pages, and it is to them that
I dedicate them.
To a generation that believed it could repose in Positivism in
philosophy, utilitarianism in morals, and naturalism in art and poetry,
has succeeded a generation that torments itself more than ever with the
mystery of things, that is attracted by the ideal, that dreams of
social fraternity, of self-renunciation, of devotion to the little, to
the miserable, to the oppressed--devotion like the heroism of Christian
love. Hence what has been called the renaissance of Idealism, the
return, _i.e._, to general ideas, to faith in the invisible, to the
taste for symbols, and to those longings, as confused as they are
ardent, to discover a religion or to return to the religion their
fathers have disdained. Our young people, it seems to me, are pushing
bravely forward, marching between two high walls: on the one side
modern science with its rigorous methods which it is no longer possible
to ignore or to avoid; on the other, the dogmas and the customs of the
religious institutions in which they were reared, and to which they
would, but cannot, sincerely return. The sages who have led them
hitherto point to the impasse they have reached, and bid them take a
part,--either for science against religion, or for religion against
science. They hesitate, with reason, in face of this alarming
alternative. Must we then choose between pious ignorance and bare
knowledge? Must we either continue to live a moral life belied by
science, or set up a theory of things which our consciences condemn?
Is there no issue to the dark and narrow valley which our anxious youth
traverse? I think there is. I think I have caught glimpses of a steep
and narrow path that leads to wide and shining table-lands above.
Indeed I have ascended in the footsteps of some others, and I signal in
my turn to younger, braver pioneers who, in course of time, will make a
broader, safer road, along which all the caravan may pass.
BOOK FIRST
RELIGION
CHAPTER I
ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ORIGIN, AND ON THE NATURE OF RELIGION
1. _First Critical Reflections_
Why am I religious? Because I cannot help it: it is a moral necessity
of my being. They tell me it is a matter of heredity, of education, of
temperament. I have often said so to myself. But that explanation
simply puts the problem further back; it does not solve it
The necessity which I experience in my individual life I find to be
still more invincible in the collective life of humanity. Humanity is
not less incurably religious than I am. The cults it has espoused and
abandoned have deceived it in vain; in vain has the criticism of
savants and philosophers shattered its dogmas and mythologies; in vain
has religion left such tracks of blood and fire throughout the annals
of humanity; it has survived all change, all revolution, all stages of
culture and progress. Cut down a thousand times, the ancient stem has
always sent new branches forth. Whence comes this indestructible
vitality? What is the cause of the universality and perpetuity of
religion?
Before entering upon this question it will be necessary to remove a
fruitful cause of error with respect to the essence and origin of the
religious sense, especially among the peoples of Latin extraction.
This cause lies in the very word _religion_. It very badly designates
the psychological phenomenon to be studied; it envelops it in accessory
and even in alien ideas, which blind and mislead half-educated men.
The word comes to us from the least religious of the peoples of the
world. It has no synonym or equivalent in the language of the ancient
Hebrews, or in that of the Greeks, the Germans, the Celts, or the
Hindus, the human families which, in the religious order, have been the
most original and the most creative. It was Rome that imposed the word
upon us along with her language, her genius, and her institutions.
The first Christians were not acquainted with it. It is absent from
the New Testament. When, in the third century, it enters into
Christian speech, it no doubt undergoes a sort of baptism, and seems to
cover a meaning more in conformity with the spirit of the Gospel.
Lactantius defines religion as "the link which unites man to God." But
in the ancient Roman writers the word never had this profound and
mystical meaning. Instead of marking the inward and subjective side of
religion, and signalising it as a phenomenon of the life of the soul,
it defined religion by the outside, as a tradition of rites, and as a
social institution bequeathed by ancestors. The Christian baptism
through which the word passed did not efface this ancient Roman stamp.
To the majority, even now, religion is hardly anything more than a
series of traditional rites, supernatural beliefs, political
institutions; it is a Church in possession of divine sacraments,
constituted by a sacerdotal hierarchy, for the discipline and
government of souls. Such is the form under which the genius of Rome
conceived and realised Christianity in the Western world; and the
fascination that this political and social conception of religion still
exercises is so great that minds the most enlightened know no better
than to agree with M. Brunetiere, who, when wishing to set forth the
superiority of Catholicism to Protestantism, confines himself, like
Bossuet, to praising it as a perfect model of government.
By a sort of logical necessity, whenever and wherever this political
conception of religion has predominated, an analogous explanation of
its origin has always arisen. It is natural that men should have
applied to it the ancient juridical adage: _is fecit cui prodest_.
Religion admirably serves to govern the peoples; therefore it was
originally invented for that purpose. It was the work of priests and
chiefs who wished by means of it to strengthen and to ratify their
authority. So reason the Romans in the days of Cicero and the
philosophers of the eighteenth century. And there is some foundation
for their arguments. Religion has often been utilised by politics:
pious frauds are to be found in all the cults. But what then? What do
the facts prove? It is not the pious fraud that produces the religion;
it is the religion that gives occasion and opportunity to pious frauds.
Without religion there would have been no pious frauds. When I hear it
said, "Priests made religion," I simply ask, "And who, pray, made the
priests?" In order to create a priesthood, and in order that that
invention should find general acceptance with the people that were to
be subject to it, must there not have been already in the hearts of men
a religious sentiment that would clothe the institution with a sacred
character? The terms must be reversed: it is not priesthood that
explains religion, but religion that explains priesthood.
The theory propounded by Positivism is profounder and more serious.
Religion, which dates from the earliest ages, can only have been a
first attempt at an explanation of the extraordinary phenomena by which
man in his ignorance was astonished and frightened. It is the
beginning of the childish form of science, which, in course of time,
would naturally give place to higher and more rigorous forms. Children
and savages animate all things round about them with a psychical life;
they see particular wills behind every phenomenon that excites their
hope or fear. Thus the imagination of primitive man peopled the
universe with an infinite number of spirits, good and evil, whose
mysterious action made itself felt at every moment of their destiny. A
while ago we had the explanation of religion by priesthood; now we have
the explanation by mythology. But it is the same vicious circle: it is
an insufficient psychology once more mistaking the effect for the cause.
To conceive of religion as a species of knowledge is an error not less
grave than to represent it as a sort of political institution. No
doubt religious faith is always accompanied by knowledge, but this
intellectual element, however indispensable, so far from being the
basis and the substance of religion, varies continually at all the
epochs of religious evolution. Doctrinal formulas and liturgies are
means of expression and of education, of which religion avails itself,
but which it can exchange for others after each philosophical crisis.
Rites and beliefs become obliterated or die out; religion possesses a
power of perpetual resurrection, whose principle cannot be exhausted in
any external form or in any dogmatic idea.
Comte's theory of the three stages through which human thought has
passed is well known: the theological stage of primitive times, the
metaphysical stage in the Middle Ages, the positive or scientific stage
of modern times. If knowledge were the essence of religion, one could
easily understand the logical course of this evolution, an inferior
form of knowledge being condemned to disappear before a superior form.
The proof that it is nothing of the kind is the fact that religion does
not cease to reappear at all epochs and in the most widely different
conditions of culture. The three stages are not successive but
simultaneous; they do not correspond to three periods of history, but
to three permanent needs of the human soul. You find them combined in
various degrees in antiquity, in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; in
modern times, in Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Kant, Claude Bernard, and
Pasteur. The more science progresses and becomes conscious of its true
method and of its limits, the more does it become distinguished from
philosophy and religion. Scientific research, exclusively devoted to
the determination of phenomena and of their conditions in time and
space, is one thing; the philosophic need of comprehending the universe
as an intelligible whole, and of explaining all that exists by a
principle of sufficient reason, is another and a different thing; and,
lastly, differing from both, is the religious need which, rightly
understood, is but a manifestation, in the moral order, of the instinct
of every being to persevere in being. Why may not these divers
tendencies of soul, coexisting always and everywhere, manifest
themselves simultaneously and on parallel lines?
We need not go beyond the Positivists themselves for examples and
proofs of this persistence of the religious sentiment. Comte, Spencer,
and Littre may be called as witnesses. The founder of Positivism, who
had predicted the fatal extinction of the disposition to religion in
the human soul, crowned his system and ended his career by founding a
new religion, clumsily copied from the sacerdotal organisation and the
ritual practices of Roman Catholicism. There actually exists a
Positivist Church, with a calendar of saints, with relics and
anniversaries, with a catechism, and with a high priest not less
infallible than the one at Rome. A few disciples, scandalised by this
supreme temptation of the master, desired to excuse him by declaring
that he had gone mad. It was a mistake. The fact is that, arriving at
the construction of a Positive Sociology, Comte comprehended the _role_
of the religious instinct and of religious feeling in the life of
peoples, and he believed that he would only be able to cement the
edifice of society in the future by religion. It is said that those
who have been amputated sometimes feel sharp twitches in the limbs they
have lost. Comte and his disciples have experienced something similar.
Nature, with her usual irony, has avenged herself on them for the
violence they have done to her.
Of Herbert Spencer not much need be said; everybody knows that the
_Unknowable_ in his system has become a sort of undetermined and
unconscious force, eluding every effort of the mind to grasp it, but
remaining, none the less, the cause explaining evolution, and the
source profound whence all things flow. Under different names, do we
not recognise the First Cause of the philosophers, and the image,
half-effaced, of the God of believers? Need we be surprised that the
English thinker pronounces religion to be eternal? that he finally
reduces the mental life of man to these two essential and primordial
activities--the scientific activity which pursues the knowledge of
phenomena and their transformation, and religious activity delivering
itself up to mystical contemplation and to silent adoration of
universal being?
The example of Littre is more touching still. I remember reading a
sublime page in one of his works, in which the savant, after running
through the _terra firma_ of positive knowledge, reaches its utmost
limit, and, seating himself on the extremest promontory, sees himself
surrounded by the mystery of the unknowable, as by an infinite ocean.
He has neither barque, nor sails, nor compass wherewith to explore this
boundless sea; nevertheless, he stands there gazing into it; he
contemplates it; he meditates in presence of this vast unknown, and
finally abandons himself to a movement of adoration and of confidence
which renews his mental vigour and which fills his heart with peace.
What is this, I ask, but a sudden outburst of religious feeling which
positive science, so far from extinguishing, has only served to deepen
and accentuate? And since we have here the religion of the unknowable,
is it not evident that religion is not necessarily knowledge?
I now come to a third explanation which, older than either of the
others, will bring us nearer to the end at which we aim. "It is fear,"
says a Latin poet, "that engenders the gods." There is a sense in
which this is true. It cannot be doubted that religion was at first
awakened in the heart of man under the impress of the terror caused by
the disordered and destructive forces of primitive Nature. Thrown
naked and disarmed on the barely-cooled planet, walking tremblingly
upon a soil that quaked beneath his tread, his would be a state of
misery and distress which filled his heart with an infinite terror.
But the explanation needs completing. In itself and of itself, fear is
not religious; it paralyses, crushes, stuns. In order that it may
become religiously fruitful, it is necessary that, from the outset, it
should be mixed with an opposite sentiment, an impulse of hope; it is
necessary that man, the prey of fear, should conceive, in some way or
other, the possibility of surmounting it--that is to say that he should
find above him some help, some succour, by which to confront the
dangers which threaten him. Fear only gives birth to religion in man
because it awakens hope and calls forth prayer--prayer that opens an
issue to human distress. There is that amount of truth in the ancient
hypothesis. It brings us near the source we are seeking, for it places
us on the practical arena of life, and not in the theoretical region of
science. The question man puts to himself in religion is always a
question of salvation, and if he seems sometimes to be pursuing in it
the enigma of the universe, it is only that he may solve the enigma of
his life. And now we must press nearer to the problem. We must
ascertain out of what fundamental contradiction the religious feeling
arises. We may reach it by a mental analysis that every one can
follow, and verify the more easily inasmuch as it is always in course
of reconstruction, by noting our own experiences.
2. _Initial Contradiction of the Psychological Consciousness_
What is man? Externally he does not differ much from the higher
animals, the series of which seems to have been closed by his
appearance on our planet. His physical organism is composed of the
same elements, acting according to the same laws; and of the same
organs, performing analogous functions. It is by the incomparable
development of his mental life that man is distinguished, and little by
little disengages himself from animality. Phenomena and laws of a new
kind now make their appearance. The mysterious life of the spirit,
emerging from the physical life, unfolds itself gradually like a divine
flower, and gives the world, for us, its meaning and its loveliness.
The region of the true, the beautiful, the good, is opened up to
consciousness; the moral world is constituted as a higher order to
which man belongs. It is these moral laws, capable of dominating
physical laws and bending them to higher ends that, in the human
animal, realise and constitute humanity. Man is only man in so far as
he obeys them, and such is the point of transition that he occupies
between two worlds, such the necessity of the crisis by which he must
disengage himself from material animality, that, if he does not rise
above the brute, he necessarily, by the very perversion of his higher
life, falls beneath him.
From the beginning, physical life implies a double movement: a movement
inward from the outside to the centre of the ego, and a movement
outward from the centre to the circumference. The first represents the
action of external things upon the ego by sensation (passivity); the
second, the reaction of the ego upon things by the will (activity).
This internal flux and reflux is the whole mental life. From this
point we shall soon perceive the initial contradiction in which this
life is formed, and in which it goes on developing itself continually.
The passive side and the active side of the life of the mind are not
harmonious. Sensation crushes the will. The activity, the free
expansion of the ego, its desires to extend and aggrandise itself are
checked and crushed by the weight of the world, which on every side is
pressing in upon it. Springing up from the centre, the wave of life
breaks itself inevitably on the rocks of outward things. This
perpetual collision, this conflict of the ego and the universe,--this
is the primary cause and origin of all pain. Thus thrown back upon
itself, the activity of the ego returns upon the centre and heats it
like the axle of a wheel in motion. Sparks soon fly, and the inner
life of the ego is lit up. This is _consciousness_. Brought back by
painful sensations and by repeated failure of its efforts from the
outside, the ego begins to reflect upon itself; it doubles itself and
knows itself; soon it judges itself; it separates itself from the
organism with which at first it confounded itself; it opposes itself to
itself, as if there were really in itself two _beings_, an ideal ego
and an empirical ego. Hence comes its torment, its struggles, its
remorse, but also the impulse ever renewed, the indefinite progress of
its spiritual life, of which each moment seems to be but a degree from
which it ought to rise to a stage still higher.
May we not here foresee the divine purpose of pain? Without it, it
would seem as if the life of the spirit could not have arisen out of
physical life. All births are painful. Consciousness, like every
other child, was born in tears. The child of pain, it can only be
developed by pain. Where do you find intelligence the most refined,
consciousness the keenest, inner life the most intense, if not amongst
the human beings whose external activities have been repressed by
sickness or by some limitation in their social position? How else will
you explain the _Pensees_ of Pascal or of Maine de Biran, or the
_Journal_ of Amiel? Whence comes that extraordinary development of
consciousness of which we are all aware in men like these, unless it be
that they feel more profoundly than others that radical contradiction
which constitutes at once the misery and the grandeur of human destiny?
Continue this observation; follow each of our faculties in its
progressive expansion. Starting from a contradiction without which
they would not exist, you see them all end in a contradiction in which
they seem to perish, so that that which has engendered consciousness
seems as if it must destroy it. Everywhere the same discouraging
antinomy. Man cannot know himself without knowing himself to be
limited. But he cannot feel these fatal limitations without going
beyond them in thought and by desire, so that he is never satisfied
with what he possesses, and cannot be happy except with that which he
cannot attain. I desire to know; my labouring intellect is athirst to
comprehend and understand, and its first discoveries enchant it. But,
alas, my head soon runs itself against the wall of mystery. Not only
are there things it does not know, but there are things which it knows
for a certainty that it will never be able to know. How can a man jump
off his own shadow, or stand on his own shoulders, to look over the
impassable wall? That all which is intelligible to us is real, I
grant; but is all that is real intelligible to us? And then what
becomes my knowledge save a melancholy feeling of ignorance that knows
itself to be such? The same contradiction in my faculty for enjoyment.
As my seeming knowledge changed into its opposite, so now I see
pleasure and happiness changing into pain and sorrow. Let the
superficial and the vulgar lay on fate or things the blame of their
deceptions and of their inability to be happy; as for me, I can only
blame the inner constitution of my being. It is as the result of that
very constitution that enjoyment bears within itself the cause of its
own exhaustion, that pleasure is changed into disgust, and that pain is
born of all voluptuousness. Pessimism is in the right; for it is
proved by an experience only too long-lived that the only result of
happiness exclusively pursued is an increase of the capacity for
suffering. Need I speak of moral activity? I desire to do good, but
"evil is present with me." I do not do that which I approve, and I do
not approve that which I do: I feel myself free in my will, and I am
enslaved in action. The more effort I make towards an ideal
righteousness, the more that ideal, which I never reach, constitutes me
a sinner and strengthens in me the consciousness of sin; so that here
again, and here especially, the final result of my search is the
opposite of that which I set out to seek.
Whence shall deliverance come? How shall I solve this contradiction of
my being which makes me at the same time live and die? To free man
from the miseries and limitations of his nature men count upon the
progress of science and the amelioration of the conditions of his life.
But who does not see that here is a new source of despair? How can we
forget that, so far from attenuating it, science in its progress
aggravates and renders mortal the original condition of life? To make
a discovery, to explain a new phenomenon, what is this but to add
another link to the causal and necessary network which science weaves
and spreads over things? To put sequence, order, and stability into
the world, is not this, for science, to put necessity into it, and to
make necessity the sovereign ruler of the world? Science, in the
strict sense of the word, is determinist. But then, prolong this
progress of science indefinitely; multiply it by ten, by a hundred, a
thousand; what do you do but multiply proportionately the weight of
universal determinism beneath which our soul groans and ceases to
strive? We should then end in the still more tragic
contradiction--between science and conscience, physical laws and moral
laws, action and reflection. The more the one enlarges and triumphs
the vainer seems the other. Hence that philosophical dualism in which
modern thought ends--a science which cannot engender an acknowledged
morality, and a morality which cannot be the object of positive
science. We touch the cause of that strange malady _le mal du siecle_,
a sort of internal consumption by which all cultivated minds are more
or less affected. It is an intestine war which arms the human ego
against itself and dries up all the springs of life. The more one
reflects on the reasons that may be urged in favour of living and
acting, the less capable one is of effort and of action. Clearness of
thought is in inverse proportion to the energy of the will. The
Pessimists tell us that if we were fully and perfectly conscious we
should lose the will to act, and even the desire to be. And which of
us is not more or less of a Pessimist nowadays? Who does not complain
of "the weary weight of all this unintelligible world"? Who does not
feel his weakness and the pressure of external things? Who has not
marked that union now become almost habitual of frivolity of character
and intellectual culture the most perfect and refined? That sad
monotone which comes to us on every wind, from the latest volume of
philosophy, from the most popular novel, from the most successful
play,--what is it but the melancholy sigh of a life that seems to be
ready to expire, of a world that seems about to disappear. Must one
give up thinking then if he would retain the courage to live, and
resign himself to death in order to preserve the right to think?
From this feeling of distress, from this initial contradiction of the
inner life of man, religion springs. It is the rent in the rock
through which the living and life-giving waters flow. Not that
religion brings a theoretical solution to the problem. The issue it
opens and proposes to us is pre-eminently practical. It does not save
us by adding to our knowledge, but by a return to the very principle on
which our being depends, and by a moral act of confidence in the origin
and aim of life. At the same time this saving act is not an arbitrary
one; it springs from a necessity. Faith in life both is and acts like
the instinct of conservation in the physical world. It is a higher
form of that instinct Blind and fatal in organisms, in the moral life
it is accompanied by consciousness and by reflective will, and, thus
transformed, it appears under the guise of religion.
Nor is this life-impulse (_elan de la vie_) produced in the void, or
objectless. It rests upon a feeling inherent in every conscious
individual, the feeling of dependence which every man experiences with
respect to universal being. Which of us can escape this feeling of
absolute dependence? Not only is our destiny, in principle, decided
outside ourselves and apart from ourselves according to the general
laws of cosmical evolution, in the course of which we appear at a given
time and place with a heritage of forces which we have not chosen or
produced, but, not being able to discover in ourselves or in any series
of individuals the sufficient reason of our existence, we are obliged
to seek outside ourselves, in universal being, the first cause and
ultimate aim of our existence and our life. To be religious is, at
first, to recognise, to accept with confidence, with simplicity and
humility, this subjection of our individual consciousness; it is to
bring this back and bind it to its eternal principle; it is to will to
be in the order and the harmony of life. This feeling of our
subordination thus furnishes the experimental and indestructible basis
of the idea of God. This idea may possibly remain more or less
indetermined, and may indeed never be perfected in our mind; but its
object does not on that account elude our consciousness. Before all
reflection, and before all rational determination, it is given to us
and, as it were, imposed on us in the very fact of our absolute
dependence; without fear we may establish this equation: the feeling of
our dependence is that of the mysterious presence of God in us. Such
is the deep source from which the idea of the divine springs up within
us irresistibly. But it springs at once as religion and as an effect
of religion.
At the same time, it is well to note at what a cost the mind of man
accepts this subordination in relation to the principle of universal
life. We have seen this mind in conflict with external things. The
mind revolts against them because they are of a different nature to
itself, and because it is the proud prerogative of mind to comprehend,
to dominate, to rule things and not to be subordinate to them.
Pascal's phrase is to the point: "Man is but a reed, the feeblest thing
in nature; but he is a thinking reed. Were the universe to crush him,
man would still be nobler than the universe that killed him, for he
would be conscious of the calamity, and the universe would know nothing
of the advantage it possessed." That is why the material universe is
not the principle of sovereignty to which it is possible for man to
submit. The superior dignity of spirit to the totality of things can
only be preserved in our precarious individuality by an act of
confidence and communion with the universal Spirit. It is only on a
spiritual power that my consciousness does actually make both me and
the universe to depend, and in making us both to depend on the same
spiritual power, it reconciles us to each other, because, in that
universal being conceived as spirit, both I and the universe have a
common principle and a common aim. Descartes was right: the first step
of the human mind desirous of confirming to itself the sense of its own
worth and dignity is an essentially religious act. The circle of my
mental life, which opens with the conflict of these two
terms--consciousness of the ego, experience of the world--is completed
by a third in which the other terms are harmonised: the sense of their
common dependence upon God. But is not this account of the genesis of
religion too philosophic and too abstract to be capable of universal
application? If it explains the persistence of the religious sentiment
in epochs of high culture, can it also explain its appearance in the
pre-historic ages of humanity? Those who raise this objection have not
sufficiently marked the permanent nature of the initial contradiction
which constitutes, at the beginning as at the end, the empirical life
of man, and which renders it in all degrees so precarious and so
miserable. It is not a contradiction created by logic. To experience
it and to suffer from it man did not need to wait until he became a
philosopher. It manifested itself in the terrors of the savage in
presence of the cataclysms of nature, in the midst of the perils of the
primeval forest not less than in our troubled thought in presence of
the enigma of the universe and the mystery of death. The expression of
human misery and the consciousness thereof are different things; the
religious thrill which brings relief, at bottom is the same. Pascal,
with all his knowledge, did not experience less distress than primitive
man, when he exclaimed: "The eternal silence of the infinite spaces
terrifies me." The disciple of Kant, shutting himself up in despair
within the impassable limits of phenomenal knowledge, or the disciple
of Schopenhauer ending in the internecine conflict between intellect
and will, are they not smitten with a feeling of impotence still more
painful, and, when they cease to reason in order to decide to live, do
they not feel forming within themselves, and in spite of themselves, a
sigh which is the beginning of a prayer?
Religion, therefore, is immortal. Far from drying up with time, the
spring from whence it flows in the human soul enlarges, deepens, and
becomes more rich under the twofold action of philosophic reflection
and of the painful experiences of life. Those who predict its
approaching end mistake for religion that which is only its outward and
fleeting expression. The periodical crises in which it seems as if it
must perish, renew its traditions and its forms, and, so far from
proving its weakness, demonstrate its fecundity and its faculty of
rejuvenescence. Never, in all history, has the human soul been seen
entirely naked. On this tree, in which the sap divine mounts ever, the
leaves of one season only fall, however dry they may be, under the
pressure of new leaves. Religious beliefs do not die; they are simply
transformed. Let the friends of religion then cease to be alarmed and
its enemies to rejoice. The hopes of the one and the fears of the
other show an equal misconception of that which is its essence and its
principle. If they seek it in themselves, they will find it all the
more living in their inner life, the more its traditional forms outside
themselves seem menaced. The sigh, the impulse, or the melancholy of
the soul in distress are more religious than an interested or
mechanical devotion. There are hours when the heresy which suffers,
and which seeks and prays, is much nearer the source of life than the
intellectual obstinacy of an orthodoxy incapable, as it would seem, of
comprehending the dogmas that it keeps embalmed. Let the men who
despise religion learn first to know it; let them see it as it is--the
inward happy crisis by which human life is transformed and an issue
opened up to it towards the ideal life. All human development springs
from it and ends in it. Art, morals, science itself fade and waste
away if this supreme inspiration be wanting to them; the irreligious
soul expires as if from lack of breath. Man is not; he has to make
himself; and in order to this he must mount from the darkness and
bondage of earth to light and liberty. It is by religion that humanity
begins in him, and it is by religion that it is established and
completed.
3. _Religion is the Prayer of the Heart_
We shall now be able to define the essence of religion. It is a
commerce, a conscious and willed relation into which the soul in
distress enters with the mysterious power on which it feels that it and
its destiny depend. This commerce with God is realised by prayer.
Prayer is religion in act--that is to say, real religion. It is prayer
which distinguishes religious phenomena from all those which resemble
them or lie near to them, from the moral sense, for instance, or
aesthetic feeling. If religion is a practical need, the response to it
can only be a practical action. No theory would suffice. Religion is
nothing if it is not the vital act by which the whole spirit seeks to
save itself by attaching itself to its principle. This act is prayer,
by which I mean, not an empty utterance of words, not the repetition of
certain sacred formulas, but the movement of the soul putting itself
into personal relation and contact with the mysterious power whose
presence it feels even before it is able to give it a name. Where this
inward prayer is wanting there is no religion; on the other hand,
wherever this prayer springs up in the soul and moves it, even in the
absence of all form and doctrine clearly defined, there is true
religion, living piety. From this point of view, perhaps a history of
prayer would be the best history of the religious development of
mankind. That history would be seen to commence in the crudest cry for
help and to complete itself in perfect prayer which, on the lips of
Christ, is simply submission to and confidence in the Father's will.
This concrete definition of religion has the advantage of correcting by
completing that of Schleiermacher. It reconciles the two antithetic
elements which constitute the religious sentiment: the passive and the
active elements, the feeling of dependence and the movement of liberty.
Prayer, springing up out of our state of misery and oppression,
delivers us from it. There is in it both submission and faith.
Submission makes us recognise and accept our dependence, faith
transforms that dependence into liberty. These two elements correspond
to the two poles of the religious life; for in all true piety man
prostrates himself before the omnipotence that encompasses him, and he
rises with a feeling of deliverance and of concord with his God.
Schleiermacher erred in insisting only upon resignation. Thenceforth
he could neither escape Pantheism in order to arrive at liberty, nor
find any link between the religious and the moral life. Religion,
then, is a free act as well as a feeling of dependence. And such is
the character and the virtue of the act of prayer that everything is
transformed by it. The crushing feeling of my defeat becomes the
joyful and triumphant feeling of my victory. Each of these states is
changed into its opposite, so that the truly religious man lives at
once in a free obedience and in an obedient liberty. If religion has
often been an oppressive power and an instrument of servitude, it has
been at least as often the mother of all the liberties. The force
which bows me down is that which also lifts me up, for it passes into
my soul. The God that I adore comes in the end to be an inward God
whose presence drives away all fear and places me beyond the reach of
all the menaces of things. The conscious realisation of this presence
of God,--that is the true salvation of my being and my life.
I now understand why "natural religion" is not a religion. It deprives
man of prayer; it leaves God and man at a distance from each other. No
intimate commerce, no interior dialogue, no exchange between them, no
action of God in man, no return of man to God. At bottom, this
pretended religion is nothing but philosophy. It arises in periods of
rationalism, of criticism, of impersonal reason, and has never been
anything but an abstraction. The three dogmas in which it is summed
up--the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the
obligation of duty--are but the inorganic residue, the _caput mortuum_,
found at the bottom of the crucible in which all positive religions are
dissolved. This natural religion, so called, is not found in Nature;
it is no more natural than it is religious. A lifeless, artificial
creation, it shows hardly any of the characteristic marks of a
religion. For the moment, it may seem to have the advantage of
escaping the attacks of scientific criticism. On trial, it is found to
be less resistant than any other. The self-same reason that
constructed it destroys it, and its dogmas are perhaps more compromised
to-day in face of modern thought than those it professes to replace.
Religion then is inward prayer and deliverance. It is inherent in man
and could only be torn from his heart by separating man from himself,
if I may so say, and destroying that which constitutes humanity in him.
I am religious, I repeat, because I am a man, and neither have the wish
nor the power to separate myself from my kind.