RELIGION AND REVELATION
1. _The Mystery of the Religious Life_
"Thou wouldst not seek me hadst thou not already found me." In this
word that Pascal heard amid his restless search, the whole mystery of
piety is disclosed. If religion is the prayer of man, it may be said
that revelation is the response of God, but only on condition that we
add that this response is always, in germ at least, in the prayer
itself.
This thought struck me like a flash of light. It was the solution of a
problem that had long appeared to me to be insoluble. I had never read
without a certain amount of doubt, and as an oratorical exaggeration,
that promise made by Jesus to His disciples with so strange an
assurance: "Ask, and it shall be given you: seek, and ye shall find:
knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh,
receiveth: and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it
shall be opened" (Matt vii. 7, 8). Jesus had experienced a truth of
which I am only beginning to catch sight: no prayer remains unanswered,
because God to whom it is addressed is the One who has already inspired
it. The search for God cannot be fruitless: for, the moment I set out
to seek Him, He finds me and lays hold of me. Allow me to reflect a
little longer on this mystery. I seem as if I were listening to these
gospel words and promises for the first time. They sound in my ears
like deep and solemn music which, bearing to me the echo of the
religiously active soul of Jesus, brings succour to my own. The
religious life, then, is not a fixed state; it is a movement of the
soul, it is a desire, a need. The love of truth, is it not the
principle of science? To love truth above all things, is not that in
some way to be already in the truth? The point of departure, the
inward beginning of a real righteousness, is not this repentance, that
is to say the pain of not being righteous? I understand now why the
Christ has made humility and confidence the sole conditions of entrance
to His kingdom, why His Word has made riches spring from poverty,
health from sickness, and satisfaction from the very intensity of need.
Secret of the gospel, mysterious laws of spirit, pure moral essence of
the kingdom of God, paradoxes which disconcert the man immersed in the
ideas of the life of sense and self, but which contain the highest
realities of moral life, reveal yourselves with ever-growing clearness
to my consciousness, since, for me, on this first revelation all the
rest depend!
I turn to another thought of Pascal. "Piety," he says, "is God
sensible to the heart." If so, it is evident that in all piety there
is some positive manifestation of God. The ideas of religion and
revelation are therefore correlative and religiously inseparable.
Religion is simply the subjective revelation of God in man, and
revelation is religion objective in God. It is the relation of subject
and object, of effect and cause, organically united; it is one and the
same psychological phenomenon, which can neither subsist nor be
produced save by their conjunction. It is as impossible to isolate as
it is to confound them.
I conceive therefore that revelation is as universal as religion
itself, that it descends as low, goes as far, ascends as high, and
accompanies it always. No form of piety is empty; no religion is
absolutely false; no prayer is vain. Once more, revelation is in
prayer and progresses with prayer. From a revelation obtained in a
first prayer is born a purer prayer, and from this a higher revelation.
Thus light grows with life, truth with piety. This makes it possible
for me to enter into communion and sympathy with all sincerely
religious souls, however simple and however crude or gross their
worship and their faith; but if I can comprehend them, I cannot always
speak their language or share their ideas. All religions are not
equally good, nor are all prayers acceptable to my consciousness. To
return to exploded superstitions or to beliefs now recognised to be
illusory is as much a moral impossibility as it would be for a
full-grown man to return to the puerilities of his childhood.
Revelation therefore is not a communication once for all of immutable
doctrines which only need to be held fast. The object of the
revelation of God can only be God Himself, and if a definition must be
given of it, it may be said to consist of the creation, the
purification, and the progressive clearness of the consciousness of God
in man,--in the individual and in the race.
From this point of view, I see very clearly that the revelation of God
never needs to be proved to any one. The attempt would be as
contradictory as it is superfluous. Two things are equally impossible:
for an irreligious man to discover a divine revelation in a faith he
does not share, or for a truly pious man not to find one in the
religion he has espoused and which lives in his heart. With what,
moreover, and how could it be proved that light shines except by
forcing those who are asleep to awake and open their eyes? All serious
Apologetics must insist as a necessary starting-point on the awakening
and conversion of the soul.
Having always been religious, mankind has never been destitute of
revelation, that is to say of witness more or less obscure, more or
less correctly interpreted, of the presence in it and the action of
God. But if men have always maintained some relation and some commerce
with the deity, they have not always represented in the same manner the
mode in which communications have been received from Him. The notion
of revelation has progressed with the growth of mental enlightenment
and with the nature of the piety. It is therefore necessary to
criticise that notion and to see what it has now become for us. It is
to this examination that I shall devote this second meditation. The
idea of revelation has passed through three phases in the course of
history: the mythological, the dogmatic, and the critical.
2. _The Mythological Notion of Revelation_
Among the faculties of man, the first to awaken in the mental life of
the child and of the savage is the imagination. All literatures begin
with chants, all histories with legends, and all religions with myths
or symbols. Poetry always makes its appearance before prose. One can
only see the effect of an inveterate rationalism in the promptitude
with which men are scandalised at any attempt to point out in the Bible
or around the cradle of Christianity legends and myths serving as
sacred vehicles for the purest and sublimest religious revelations, as
if the divine Spirit, in order to be intelligible to the simple and the
ignorant, could not as well avail Himself of the fictions of poetry as
of logical reasonings, of the chants of the angels at Bethlehem as of
the rabbinical exegesis and argumentations of the Apostle Paul. A myth
is false in appearance only. When the heart was pure and sincere the
veils of fable always allowed the face of truth to shine through. And
why so much disdain? Does not childhood run on into maturity and old
age? What are our most abstract ideas but primitive metaphors which
have been worn and thinned by usage and reflection?
It is none the less true, as St. Paul says, that in advancing in age we
have left behind the speech and thought of infancy. The first men did
not know how to distinguish between the substance and the form of their
beliefs. This distinction has become easy to us. The most
conservative minds can no longer read the stories or the monuments of
the ancient religions without criticising and translating them.
The men of other times, timid and ingenuous as children, saw everywhere
material signs by which they believed the will of the gods was
manifested. They early formed the art of divination--an essentially
religious art. It is found among all peoples, the ancient Hebrews not
excepted. The thunder was to them the voice of God. They consulted
Him by the Urim and Thummim, and by the sacred ephod. They did not
doubt, any more than the Greeks, either the divine origin or the
prophetic sense of dreams. Elsewhere they evoked the dead, they
interrogated the flight of birds, they listened to the sound of the
wind in the foliage of the oaks, or to the noise of waters in sonorous
caverns. That was an external and, in some sort, physical conception
of revelation, from which modern peoples have escaped, but with which
all set out.
In the oldest traditions of Hebraism, God speaks to Adam, to Noah, to
Abraham, to Moses, as one man speaks to another, by articulate sounds
perceived by the ear. The sacred formula, _Thus saith the Lord_,
serves as the uniform introduction to civil, political, and ritual, as
well as to moral and religious, laws. Religion then embraced and
regulated all the life. The great empires of antiquity all claim a
divine origin. As to ancient legislations, there is not one that is
not said to have come from heaven. The Egyptians refer theirs to the
god Thoth or Hermes; Minos, in Crete, is said to have received his laws
from Jupiter; Lycurgus, in Sparta, from Apollo; Zoroaster, in Persia,
from Ahura Mazda; Numa Pompilius, at Rome, from the nymph Egeria.
Moses does not stand alone. I am not here comparing the value of the
things; I am simply pointing out the identity of the representations.
Nor was it only religious and political institutions that they referred
to the will of the gods; they referred to it all kinds of decisions and
enterprises; declarations of war, raids to make, the order of battle,
the extermination of the vanquished, the sharing of the spoils,
conditions of peace, expiations to be made; everything was done in
obedience to supernatural orders the authenticity of which no one
thought of discussing. In the same way, a divine inspiration explained
the gift of predicting the future, the eloquence of orators, the
sagacity of statesmen, the genius of great soldiers, the verve of
poets, and even the skill of the more famous artisans. "Legends!" it
is said. No doubt. But these legends are universal. Men speak
everywhere the same language, because everywhere they think in the same
fashion.
A great progress, however, is accomplished in Israel. The notion of
revelation gradually becomes interior and moral. Among the prophets,
revelation is conceived of as the action of the Spirit of Jehovah
entering and acting in the spirit of man. It is true that the mythical
conception still persists and betrays itself in this: divine
inspiration is represented as the invasion of a human being by another
being alien to him,--as a sort of mental alienation or possession. The
divine Spirit is represented as a force which comes from without, a
wind from above which no one can resist, of which the elect are as much
the victims as the organs. Its action is measured by the agitation and
commotion of the inspired, by the disorder of their faculties, by the
incoherence of their gestures and their speech. The delirium of man
becomes the sign of the presence of God. Madmen, valetudinarians,
epileptics, are regarded almost everywhere as the favourites of Heaven.
Their strange words or acts men believe to be divine oracles delivered
unconsciously and against the will.
This violent opposition between the supernatural action of the divine
Spirit and the normal exercise of rational faculties is gradually
attenuated in the course of the ages. It is easy to see that in the
great prophets of Israel the formula _Thus saith the Lord_, while still
frequent and still expressing the same subjective certitude of
inspiration, has become a simple rhetorical form. God speaks
henceforth to His people by their eloquence, by their faith, by their
genius. "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me," cries the second
Isaiah; "because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings to
the meek," etc. (Is. lxi. 1-3).
This evolution appears to have been completed in the soul of Christ.
Here inspiration ceases to be miraculous without ceasing to be
supernatural. It is no longer produced by fits and starts or
intermittently. An ancient gospel ("The Gospel of the Hebrews")
admirably marks this change. At the moment of His baptism the Holy
Spirit says to Jesus: _Mi fili, te exspectabam in omnibus prophetis, ut
venires et requiescerem in te. Tu enim es requies mea_. (My Son, in
all the prophets I awaited Thy coming in order that I might repose in
Thee. Thou art indeed my rest.)
Being continuous, the inspiration becomes normal. The ancient conflict
between the divine Spirit and the human vanishes. The immanent and
constant action of the one manifests itself in the regular and fruitful
action of the other. God lives and works in man, man lives and works
in God. Religion and Nature, the voice divine and the voice of
conscience, the subject and the object of revelation, penetrate each
other and become one. The supreme revelation of God shines forth in
the highest of all consciousnesses and the loveliest of human lives.
This progress, is it not admirable? Should it not strike the attention
all the more inasmuch as, instead of being the effect of rational
criticism, it is, in Christianity, exclusively the work of piety?
This, become more profound, has conquered the ancient antithesis
created by the ignorance of early times. Divesting itself more and
more of foreign and inferior elements, the idea of revelation has been
found to be more human as it has become more inward, more constant,
more strictly moral and religious. Christ has not given us a critical
theory of revelation; He has done what is better; He has given us
revelation itself--a perfect and permanent revelation; He presents God
and man to us so intimately united in all the acts and moments of His
inner life, that they become inseparable. The Father acts in His Son,
and the Son reveals the Father to all who wish to know Him.
Though he still retained many remnants of the ancient mythological
notion (visions, dreams, ecstasies, delirium of tongues), the Apostle
Paul seized with energy the distinguishing characteristic of the
Christian revelation, and propounded the theory of it with a sacred
boldness. That theory consists in the effusion and habitation of the
Holy Spirit in the souls of Christians who, in their turn, become
"children of God," and enjoy, by this Spirit, the same direct and
permanent communion with the Father. This Spirit is no longer an alien
guest or a perturbing force; He becomes in us a second nature. That is
why the Christian is set free from all the old tutelages; he judges
everything and is judged by nothing; he has his law within himself, so
that from this inspiration springs his autonomy and his liberty.
But neither this spiritual piety nor the lofty conception which flows
from it could long be sustained. Preoccupied in founding its
authority, and only being able to succeed in it by returning to the
idea of an external revelation, the Catholic Church made it to consist
chiefly in rules and dogmas, and, by this change, it naturally
transformed the mythological notion of revelation into a dogmatic
notion not essentially different.
3. _Dogmatic Notion_
"The Greeks," said Paul, "seek philosophy; the Jews demand miracles."
From these two tendencies combined, from Greek rationalism and Hebrew
supernaturalism, sprang the new notion that may be summed up and
defined thus: a divine doctrine legitimated by divine signs or miracles.
These two elements of the theory are mutually dependent, and form an
indivisible whole. Given to man in a supernatural way, the doctrine
surpasses the reach of the human understanding; hence it must not be
imposed upon the mind by its own evidence or examined by natural
reason. The supernatural doctrine demands supernatural proof. This
proof can only be found in the miracles which have accompanied the
doctrine from its birth. Thus mysteries, incomprehensible in the order
of reason, will necessarily be established by inexplicable events in
the order of Nature.
The theory, in this way, becomes coherent, but it is not complete. A
third term must be added. The divine doctrine must be embodied in a
form which distinguishes it from all others, and placed under an
authority that guarantees it. For Protestantism, the form and the
authority of revelation is--the Bible; for Catholicism, it is the Bible
sovereignly interpreted by the Church. The scholastic notion of
revelation is now complete. The doctors teach us to distinguish three
things in it: the object, which is dogma; the form, which is Scripture;
and the proof or criterion, which is miracle. This construction
appears to be compact in all its parts; in reality it is so fragile and
so artificial that it crumbles at a touch.
To make of dogma, that is to say of an intellectual datum, the object
of revelation is, in the first place, to eliminate from it its
religious character by separating it from piety, and in the next place
it is to place it in permanent and irreconcilable conflict with the
reason, which is always progressing. In vain do they appear to deduce
this scholastic theory from the Bible; it is simply an unfaithful
translation of the Biblical notion. They tear up from the soil of the
religious life the revelation of God in order to constitute it into a
body of supernatural verities, subsisting by itself, to which they make
it an obligation and a merit to adhere, silencing, if needs be, both
the judgment and the conscience. Faith, which, in the Bible, was an
act of confidence and consecration to God, becomes an intellectual
adherence to an historical testimony or to a doctrinal formula. A
mortal dualism starts up in religion. It is admitted that orthodoxy
may exist apart from piety, that a man may obtain and possess the
object of faith apart from the conditions that faith presupposes, and,
at a push, serve divine truth while inwardly an unbeliever and a
reprobate. Get rid of this illusion, frivolous and irreligious man!
Whatever your authorities in earth or heaven, you are not in the truth,
because you are not in piety. God has not spoken anything to you. To
the prophets He has spoken, doubtless, and to Christ and the apostles
and the saints; to you He still remains a stranger and unknown. His
revelation has not been to you a light, for you are walking in
darkness. You are like the Jews who built the tombs of the prophets
and crowned their memory with empty honours. Had you been living in
the time of the men of God, you would have been the first to stone them.
This idea of revelation is at bottom entirely pagan. In the region of
authentic Christianity you cannot separate the revealing act of God
from His redeeming and sanctifying action. God does not enlighten, on
the contrary He blinds those whom He does not save or sanctify. Let us
boldly conclude, therefore, against all traditional orthodoxies, that
the object of the revelation of God could only be God Himself, that is
to say the sense of His presence in us, awakening our soul to the life
of righteousness and love. When the word of God does not give us life,
it gives us nothing. It is true that that presence and that action of
the divine Spirit in our hearts become in them a light whose rays
illumine all the faculties of the soul. But do not hope to enjoy that
light apart from the central sun from which it flows.
The scholastic notion is not only irreligious; it is
anti-psychological. In entering the human understanding this
supernatural knowledge introduces into it a hopeless dualism. The
sacred sciences are set up alongside the profane sciences without its
being possible to organise them together into a coherent and harmonious
body, for they are not of the same nature, they do not proceed from the
same method, they do not accept the same control. You have thus a
sacred cosmogony and a profane cosmogony, a sacred history of the
origins of man and a purely human history of his beginnings, and of his
first adventures, a divine metaphysic and another purely rational. How
to make them live together and unite them? If, by a subtle theology,
you succeed in rationalising dogma, do you not see that you destroy it
in its very essence? If you demonstrate that it is essentially
irrational, do you not feel that you are instituting an endless warfare
between the authority of dogma and the authority of reason? One
remembers the generous attempt of mediaeval scholasticism, taken up
again by the Protestant theologians of the seventeenth century, and one
has not forgotten its twice fatal issue. One would need to have no
notion of the laws of human thought to be astonished at it. Nominalism
in the fifteenth century and rationalism in the eighteenth were the two
natural heirs of orthodoxy.
The intervention of miracle as a _criterion_ or proof of doctrine does
not remove the difficulties of the theory; it multiplies and aggravates
them. In consequence of the lapse of time, the incertitude of the
documents, and the demands of modern thought, miracle, which formerly
established the truth of religion, has become much more difficult to
demonstrate than religion itself. The relation between the two has
been reversed. The foundation of the edifice has become more ruinous
than the building. Examples? Consider, then, on the one hand, the
Decalogue, and on the other the thunders and lightnings of Sinai.
Peals of thunder may have served to convince the Hebrews that the law
of Moses came from the Eternal; for they looked upon thunder as
revealing the presence, in some sort material and local, of their God.
But who does not see that it is much easier to-day to prove the
excellence and the truth of the _Ten Words_ of the Law than the divine
character of the most terrible of tempests? Make the opposite
experiment: you are familiar with the Books of Joshua, Judges, Kings.
You have read in them those orders issued by Jehovah for the total
extermination of peoples whose crime was the defence of their country
against the invaders. Prodigies abound in them: the walls of Jericho
fall down at the sound of trumpets, etc., etc. Are these events
sufficient to warrant us in admitting the affirmation of the Hebrew
historian that these terrible reprisals, these crimes and violences,
which were then common in all the Semitic tribes, were commanded either
by the heavenly Father of Jesus Christ or by the impartial God of the
universe? Our conscience resists and protests. Prodigies the most
brilliant cannot make it do violence to itself or bend the law of
righteousness and love beneath any manifestation, however striking, of
brute force. Let us go further; let us come to the miracles of Christ.
Let us interrogate the best Christians of our time: let us ask
ourselves, Is it the cures that Jesus wrought which make us believe
to-day in the divine truth of His word or which give authority to the
Sermon on the Mount? Is it not rather the Gospel that helps us to
believe in the miracles by persuading us that a man who spake like this
man must have been able to do things and work works as beautiful and as
wonderful as the words which He spoke? The most conservative
Apologists of the traditional school confess to-day that miracle has
lost its evidential force; it might move those who witnessed it, but
its action and its prestige have necessarily been diminishing day by
day for the generations which have followed them.
What if we were to press the idea of miracle itself which is in process
of vanishing in proportion as the idea of Nature is transformed? What
is Nature? Who knows its secrets and its limits? The theory of the
evolution of things and beings, does it not show Nature to us as in
travail, and as if perpetually giving birth to marvels? And if this
creative energy which is in it can only religiously be referred to the
constant activity of God in the universe and in history, how can we
still oppose the laws of Nature to the will of God? Moreover, nothing
is to-day more indeterminate, more impossible to define than the notion
of miracle; it floats without ever being able to fix itself, between
the idea of an absolute violation of the laws of Nature now no longer
witnessed anywhere, to that entirely relative one of an extraordinary
event, which, seeing that it may be encountered everywhere, no longer
proves anything.
Lastly, if from the _object_ and the _criterion_ of revelation, we pass
to the form which conserves and warrants it, _i.e._ to the Bible,
questions become still more numerous and insoluble. In the seventeenth
century the notion of the Bible and that of revelation were coincident
and commensurate. But this identity depended upon two dogmas much
impaired to-day. The one was the divine origin of the two Biblical
Canons, _i.e._ of the Old and New Testaments: the other, the verbal
inspiration of all holy Scripture, considered as divinely dictated.
History and exegesis have dissipated the illusions and the ignorance on
which these two strange affirmations rested. The Bible appears to us
as the work, slowly and laboriously constructed, of the ancient Jewish
Synagogue, and of the Early Christian Church. It needed more than four
centuries to establish and to delimitate the New Testament. The books
which compose it were still in the time of Eusebius divided into two
classes: books admitted everywhere and books contested. Why then
should we not have the same liberty as Origen of doubting the
authenticity of 2 Peter, _e.g._, or as Denis of Alexandria in
discussing the apostolic origin of the Apocalypse? As to the theory of
verbal inspiration, which makes the sacred writers God's penmen merely,
no savant nowadays can defend it, so thoroughly have biblical studies
set forth the personal originality of each of them, and the merits or
the imperfections of their works. Moreover, the distinction clearly
made in all the schools between the sacred writings and revelation must
be considered as an inalienable conquest of modern theology. There is
no one now who does not admit this truth, which would have seemed
intolerable to our fathers, namely, that the word of God is in the
Bible, but that all the Bible is not the word of God.
If this be so one sees new questions surging up and awaiting solution.
What is the relation of the word of God to the Bible? By what sign may
we recognise the first and distinguish the second? Further, if there
be any word of God outside the Bible, if there has been any revelation
of God beyond the limits of the Hebrew people and primitive
Christianity--and how can we deny this without denying the worth of
religion?--what relation is there to establish, and what synthesis to
make, between the biblical revelation and the other revelations suited
to the various human families? Lastly, what place does the religion of
Jesus occupy in the religious evolution of humanity? Modern theology
seems deaf to these questions. Despairing of a solution, it hesitates
to approach them. But they must be answered. Contemporary philosophy
presses them upon the conscience of Christians. The scholastic theory,
it is clear, cannot bring any solution to these new problems. As soon
as the distinction is made in our consciousness between the word of God
and the letter of holy Scripture, the first becomes independent of all
human form and of all external guarantee. It is with it as with the
light of the sun. It is only recognised by the brightness with which
it floods us. But take care to introduce this criterion of religious
and moral evidence into the scholastic theory is to deposit an
explosive in the heart of it which shatters it to atoms.... I leave to
others the task of masking or repairing the ruins. A task more urgent
and more fruitful awaits us. We must build up, on a new principle, a
new theory of revelation, a theory that will at once bear the test of
criticism and give satisfaction to piety.
4. _Psychological Notion_
To return to psychology. In all piety there is some positive
manifestation of God. Otherwise, one might question the value of
religious phenomena.
Three consequences follow: the revelation of God will be evident,
interior, progressive.
It will be interior, because God, not having phenomenal existence, can
only reveal Himself to spirit, and in the piety that He Himself
inspires.
If revealers and prophets believed they heard the voice of God outside
themselves they were the victims of a psychological illusion that
analysis discerns and dissipates. The old theologian was right who
said:
_Nulla fides si non primum Deus ipse loquitur; Nulla que verba Dei nisi
quae in penetralibus audit Ipsa fides._[1] This interior revelation is
only made, it is true, in connection with some external event of Nature
or of History. If wonder is the beginning of philosophy it is also the
commencement of piety. Religious emotion does not spring up by chance
and unconditionally. But external signs are only revealers for those
who know how to comprehend them, and who are able to interpret them in
a religious sense. That is why the distinction sometimes made between
the _manifestation_ of God in things and divine _inspiration_ in
consciousness, between the sign or external miracle and the inward
word, is of little worth except for pedagogic purposes. The
manifestation of God in Nature or in History is always a matter of
faith. It would only appear to be such in the light on the hearth of
consciousness. Put out that inner light and everything speedily
becomes obscure: "If the light that is in thee be darkness, there will
be darkness round about thee," says Jesus. To the deaf man the
universe is mute. The starry heavens which bent the pensive brows of
Newton and of Kant before the majesty of God, said nothing to Laplace.
Lit up within, the soul of Christ saw everywhere the signs of God.
Caiaphas saw none. In the cross of Jesus, where St. Paul discerned the
manifestation of the wisdom and the power of God, the Pharisees had
only seen the crushing proof that this Messiah was a mere impostor.
[1] There is no faith save in the heart where God has first made
Himself heard, and there are no divine words except those which faith
hears in the inmost sanctuary of the soul.
This inward revelation will be also _evident_. The contrary would
imply a contradiction. He who says revelation says the veil withdrawn,
the light come. True, the word _mystery_ is often on the lips of
Jesus, and in the writings of the New Testament; but, when applied to
the essence of the Gospel it never has the meaning which is given to it
later in the language of theology. The mystery of which Jesus, Paul,
and the Apostles speak is a revealed mystery, _i.e._ a mystery which
has become evident to pure hearts and pious souls through the public
preaching of it. The Gospel is not obscurity; it is daylight, and it
is nonsense to demand a criterion of evangelical revelation other than
itself, any other evidence, _i.e._, than its own truth, beauty, and
efficiency.
Lastly, this revelation will be _progressive_. It will be developed
with the progress of the moral and religious life which God begets and
nourishes in the bosom of humanity. The word of God is not that of a
poor human founder who formulates in abstract terms ideas which are but
the pale shadows of things. It is essentially creative. It carries
with it all the substance of being and all the potency of life. It
realises that which it proclaims, and never manifests itself except by
its works. When God wished to give the Decalogue to Israel, He did not
write with His finger on tables of stone; He raised up Moses, and from
the consciousness of Moses the Decalogue sprang. In order that we
might have the Epistle to the Romans, there was no need to dictate it
to the Apostle; God had only to create the powerful individuality of
Saul of Tarsus, well knowing that when once the tree was made the fruit
would follow in due course. The same with the Gospel; He did not drop
it from the sky; He did not send it by an angel; He caused Jesus to be
born from the very bosom of the human race, and Jesus gave us the
Gospel that had blossomed in His inmost heart. Thus God reveals
Himself in the great consciousnesses that His Spirit raises, fills,
illumines one by one; they form a sacred theory through the ages and
leave on history a track of light which brightens, broadens to the
perfect day.
A new and graver problem here arises. This revelation, made in the
depths of the human soul, remains individual and subjective. How will
it become objective and concrete? How will it be made an educating,
saving power? This problem would be insoluble if Leibniz was right, if
human souls were independent monads, closed against and impenetrable to
one another, if it had been necessary, in a word, to regard them as
absolute entities, posited from the beginning by the Creator. But they
are nothing of the kind. Social philosophy has sufficiently
demonstrated that no individual exists either by himself or for himself
alone. In each man it is humanity that is realised--that is to say, a
moral life common to all. Moral goods are in essence universal. They
do not exist, doubtless, apart from the consciousness of the
individual; but no consciousness acquires them without acquiring them,
in principle at least, for all others.
Whence comes that religious kinship of souls, that facility of
communion between them, and that infinite extension and prolongation of
one and the same inspiration, if not from the presence in each of the
same indwelling God? Men are only divided by their external idols. In
proportion as they plumb their being and descend into the depths of
their spiritual nature, they discover the same altar, recite the same
prayer, aspire to the same end. It is for this profound reason that
individual revelations become universal. There are only prophets
chosen of God because there is a general vocation and election of all
men. If humanity were not potentially and in some degree an Immanuel
(God with us), there would never have issued from its bosom Him who
bore and revealed this blessed name. The religious experience He
passed through, He passed through for us; the victory He won was for
our advantage and is repeated indefinitely in every sincere soul that
joins itself to Him to live His life. Thus the revelation of God given
at one point and in one consciousness infallibly shines forth,
perpetuates and multiplies itself. A vibration set up in a soul
resounds in kindred souls. An illumined consciousness illuminates in
turn. There are religious filiations, just as there are historical
genealogies. Thus the inner revelation becomes consistent and
objective in history; it forms a chain, a continuous tradition, and
becoming incarnate in each human generation, remains not only the
richest of heritages, but the most fecund of historical powers.
One step more. Let us follow this historical incarnation of religious
tradition into its most material form. The inner experiences of men of
God and the witness of them that they give to the world, express
themselves naturally in speech, and this in its turn is transformed
into Scripture. It is in this way that in all civilised religions
divine revelation is presented to man in the form of a sacred writing;
everywhere it is gathered into collections of sacred books which have
been called the bibles of humanity. While all these have been born
according to the same psychological and historical laws, it does not
follow that they have all the same value, or that an unintelligent
syncretism has the right to mix together the various elements in them
to make of them one common and characterless Bible. No; each of them
naturally belongs to a particular stage in the ladder of divine
revelations, and there we must leave them. The highest will always be
that which contains the deepest and purest expression of inward
religion, and consequently offers to man the most precious treasure.
The rank of the Hebrew and Christian Bible is thus found to be
logically determined by the moral worth of the Hebrew and the Christian
religions. But in leaving historical criticism and religious
experience to make here the necessary demonstration and render it daily
more evident, we must once more call to mind the always human
conditions of these written collections, of those at the top as well as
those at the bottom of the ladder, conditions which forbid us ever to
identify the letter and the spirit, the divine inspiration and the
particular form in which it has been clothed.
God, wishing to speak to us, has never chosen any but human organs.
With whatever inspiration He has endowed them, that inspiration has
always therefore passed through human subjectivity; it has only been
able either to express or to translate itself in the language and the
turn of mind of a particular individual and of a particular time. Now,
no individual and historical form can be absolute. If the contents are
divine, the vessel is always earthen. The organ of the revelation of
God necessarily limits it. It must of necessity accommodate itself to
the limits of human receptivity. How could it possibly enter and
mingle with the changing waves of the intellectual and moral life of
humanity unless it flowed in the bed of the river and between its banks?
However incontestable this historical complexity of the divine and
human elements in religion, most men seem incapable of comprehending
it, and of frankly accepting it. Men of little faith, we feel
ourselves lost the moment men take from us the illusion that we ever
have before us and outside of us the divine revelation in an objective
and unadulterated form, when alongside authority and tradition they
make a place for the freedom and the interpretation of consciousness.
Is there then some chemistry by which we can separate that which God
has joined so indissolubly? Has life ever been seen apart from living
beings or light apart from luminous vibrations? Why not make an effort
to see that the wisdom of God is infinitely greater than our own, and
that what He has given us is better than that of which we dreamed.
Life and light, even if they are not absolute, propagate themselves
with none the less force.
Lastly, what is the criterion by which you may recognise an authentic
revelation of God in the books you read, in the things you are taught?
Listen: only one criterion is sufficient and infallible: every divine
revelation, every religious experience fit to nourish and sustain your
soul, must be able to repeat and continue itself as an actual
revelation and an individual experience in your own consciousness.
What cannot enter thus as a permanent and constituent element into the
woof of your inner life, to enrich, enfranchise, and transform it into
a higher life, cannot be for you a light, or, consequently, a divine
revelation. The spirit of life is not there. Do not believe that the
prophets and founders have transmitted to you their experience in order
to make yours needless, or that their revelation has been brought to
you in a book for you to receive passively and as if it were an alien
thing. Religious truth cannot be borrowed like money, or, rather, if
you do so borrow it you are none the richer. Remember what the
Samaritans said to the woman: "Now we believe, not because of thy
saying: for we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed
the Christ, the Saviour of the world" (John iv. 42). Thus the divine
revelation which is not realised in us, and does not become immediate,
does not exist for us. And I admire the counsel of God, Who, wishing
to raise man into liberty, did not give to him an objective revelation
which would have become to him a yoke of bondage. The aim of tradition
is liberty, and liberty returns lovingly to tradition when, instead of
finding it a yoke, it sees in it only a help, an aliment, a guide.
5. _Conclusion_
Such, in its principle, and with all its consequences, is the new idea
of revelation given to us by psychology and history. Before it vanish
the insoluble antitheses and conflicts raised by scholasticism between
supernatural and natural revelation, between what the theologians call
immediate and mediate, between a universal and a special revelation.
Synthesis is made, and peace is re-established.
There is not and could never have been two revelations different in
nature and opposed to each other. Revelation is one, in different
forms and various degrees. It is at once supernatural and natural:
supernatural by the cause which engenders it in souls, and which,
always remaining invisible and transcendent, never exhausts or
imprisons itself in the phenomena it produces; natural, by its effects,
because, realising itself in history, it always appears therein
conditioned by the historical environment and by the common laws which
regulate the human mind.
This revelation also is immediate for all, for the least in the kingdom
of heaven, as for the greatest of the prophets; for God desires to
admit them all into direct and personal communion with Himself; and it
is equally mediate for all; for it comes to none, whether prophets or
their disciples, unconditionally, and without previous preparation.
Lastly, it is not less false and futile to oppose universal revelation
to particular revelations as two exclusive quantities. Particular
revelations enter into general revelation as varieties into species.
Every special revelation, if it be really from God, is human, and tends
to become universal; every general revelation was once individual, for
it could only have been made in an individuality. Among the men and
peoples chosen by God as organs there is inequality in gifts but
solidarity in the common work. We must not mistake the one or the
other. The religious vocation of humanity does not exclude--it
prepares and supports--the particular vocation of Israel. In this
national vocation there is a place for that of the prophets, and, among
the prophets, for the vocation of Him who was their heir, and in Whom
the revelation of God was completed, because in His consciousness was
realised perfectly the very idea of piety.
Is everything explained in religion, then, and nothing left obscure?
Far from that! There remains the ground from which emerges the
conscious and moral life of the soul; there remains that initial
mystery, the relation in our consciousness between the individual and
the universal element, between the finite and the infinite, between God
and man. How can we comprehend their co-existence and their union, and
yet how can we doubt it? Where is the thoughtful man to-day who has
not broken the thin crust of his daily life, and caught a glimpse of
those profound and obscure waters on which floats our consciousness?
Who has not felt within himself a veiled presence and a force much
greater than his own? What worker in a lofty cause has not perceived
within his own personal activity, and saluted with a feeling of
veneration, the mysterious activity of a universal and eternal power?
_In Deo vivimus, movemur et sumus_. There is perhaps no other mystery
in religion; at all events all others are but particular forms of this.
But this mystery cannot be dissipated, for, without it, religion itself
would no longer exist.