Chinese and the Greeks; at a later date it reappeared in the teaching
of Jesus. This ancient and almost universal maxim has been stated both
positively and negatively: “Do not to others what you would not have
them do unto you,” “Do as you would be done by.” The maxim itself,
however, beyond a statement of the principle of reciprocity rather
vaguely put, has no great value for the science of ethics. Renouvier
regards it not as a principle of morality but a rule-of-thumb, and he
considers the negative statement of it to be more in harmony with what
was intended by the early ethical teachers—namely, to give a practical
warning against the committing of evil actions rather than to establish
a scientific principle of right action.
Renouvier has shown the origin of the notion of Justice as arising
primarily from an association of two persons. “Reason established a
kind of community and moral solidarity in this reciprocity.”[18] This
right and duty unite to constitute Justice. It is truly said that it is
just to fulfil one’s duty, just to demand one’s right, and Justice is
formed by a union of these two in such a manner that they always
complement one another. Bearing in mind the doctrine of personality as
an end, we get a general law of action which may be stated in these
terms: “Always act in such a way that the maxim applicable to your act
can be erected by your conscience into a law common to you and your
associate.” Now to apply this to an association of any number of
persons—_e g._, human society as a whole—we need only generalise it and
state it in these terms: “Act always in such a way that the maxim of
your conduct can be erected by your conscience into a universal law or
formulated in an article of legislation which you can look upon as
expressing the will of every rational being.” This “categorical
obligation” is the basis of ethics. It stands clear of hypothetical
cases as a general law of action, and “there is no such thing really as
practical morality,” remarks Renouvier, “except by voluntary obedience
to a law.”[19]
[18] _Ibid_., pp. 79-80.
[19] _Science de la Morale_, vol. I, p. 100.
The fulfilment of our duties to ourselves generally tends to fit us for
fulfilling our duties to others, and the neglect of the former will
lead inevitably to inability to perform these latter. Our duty to
others thus involves our duty to ourselves.[20]
[20] The notion of self-sacrifice itself involves also, to a degree,
the maintenance of self, without which there could be no self to
sacrifice. History has frequently given examples of men of all types
refusing to sacrifice their lives for a certain cause because they
wished to preserve them for some other (and possibly better—in their
minds at any rate, better) form of self-sacrifice.
Personality which lies at the root of the moral problem demands Truth
and Liberty, and it has a right to these two, for without them it is
injured. They are essential to a society of persons. Another vital
element in society is Work, the neglect of which is a grave immoral
act, for as there is in any society a certain amount of necessary work
to be performed, a “slacker” dumps his share upon his fellows to
perform in addition to their own share. With industrial or general
laziness, and the parasitism of those whose riches enable them to live
without working, is to be condemned also the shirking of intellectual
work by all. Quite apart from those who are “intellectuals” as such, a
solemn duty of work, of thought, reflection and reasoning lies on each
person in a society. Apathy among citizens is really a form of culpable
negligence. The duty of work and thought is so vital and of such
ethical, political and social importance that Renouvier suggests that
the two words, work and duty, be regarded as synonyms. It might, he
thinks, make clearer to many the obligation involved.
Justice has been made clear in the foregoing remarks, but in view of
Kant’s distinction of “large” and “strict” duties, Renouvier raises the
question of the relation of Justice and Goodness. He concludes that
acts proceeding from the latter are to be distinguished from Justice.
They proceed not from considerations of persons as such, but from their
“nature” or common humanity, and are near to being “duties to oneself.”
They are of the heart rather than of the head, proceeding from
sentiments of humanity, and sentiment is not, strictly speaking, the
foundation of justice, which is based on the notions of duties and
rights. There can be, therefore, an opposition of Justice and of
Goodness (Kindness or Love), and the sphere of the latter is often
limited by considering the former. Renouvier recognises the fact that
Justice in the moral sense of recognition and respect for personality
is itself often “constitutionally and legally” violated in societies by
custom, laws and institutions as well as by members of society in their
actions, and he notes that this “legal” injustice makes the problem of
the relation of Justice and Charity excessively difficult.
The science of ethics is faced with a double task owing to the nature
of man’s evolution and history. Human societies have been built upon a
basis which is not that of justice and right, but upon the basis of
force and tyranny—in short, upon war. There is, therefore, for the
moralist the twin duty of constructing laws and principles for the true
society founded upon an ethical basis, that is to say on conceptions of
Justice, while at the same time he must give practical advice to his
fellows living and striving in present society, where a continual state
of war exists owing to the operation of force and tyranny in place of
justice, and he must so _apply_ his principles that they may be capable
of moving this unjust existing society progressively towards the ideal
society.
In our account of Renouvier’s “Philosophy of History” we brought out
his insistence upon war as the essential feature of man’s life on this
planet, as the basis of our present “civilisation.” Here he proclaims
it again in his ethics.[21] War reigns everywhere: it is around us and
within us—individuals, families, tribes, classes, nations and races. He
includes in the term much more than open fighting with guns. The
distribution of wealth, of property (especially of land), wages, custom
duties, diplomacy, fraud, violence, bigotry, orthodoxy, and
persecution, lies themselves, are all, to him, forms of war. Its most
ludicrous stronghold is among men who pride themselves on being at
peace with all men, while they force their idea of God upon other men’s
consciences. Religious intolerance is one, and a very absurd kind of
warfare.[22]
[21] _Science de la Morale_, vol. I, p. 332.
[22] Renouvier sums up its spirit in the words: “_Crois ce que je
crois moi, où je te tue_” (_La Nouvelle Monadologie_).
The principle of justice confers upon the person a certain “right of
defence” in the midst of all this existing varied warfare of mankind.
It involves, according to Renouvier, resistance. The just man cannot
stand by and see the unjust man oppress his fellow so that the victim
is “obliged to give up his waistcoat after having had his coat torn
from him.” Otherwise we must confuse the _just_ with the _saintly_ man
who only admits one law—namely, that of sacrifice. But Renouvier will
have us be clear as to the price involved in all this violent
resistance. It means calling up powers of evil, emissaries of
injustice. He does not found his “right of defence” on rational right;
it is to misconceive it so to found it. We must recognise the use of
violence and force, even in self-defence, as in itself evil, an evil
necessitated by facts which do not conform to the rules of peace and
justice themselves. It is to a large degree necessary, unfortunately,
but is none the less evil and to be frankly regarded as evil, and
likely to multiply evil in the world, owing to the tremendous
solidarity of wickedness of which Renouvier has already spoken in
history. It is the absence of the reign of justice which necessitates
these conflicts, and we have to content ourselves with a conception of
actual “right,” a conception already based on war, not with one of
“rational right” or justice.
Right in the true sense, Renouvier insists, belongs to a state of
peace; in a state of war, such as our civilisation is perpetually in,
it cannot be realised. The objection may be made that Renouvier is then
justifying the means by the end. He emphatically denies this. By no
means is this the case, for “the evil,” he remarks, “which corrects
another evil does not therefore become good; it may be useful, but it
is none the less evil, immoral, or unjust, and what is not just is not
justifiable. Wars, rebellions, revolutions may lessen certain evils,
but they do not thereby cease to be any the less evils themselves.
Morally we are obliged to avoid all violence; a revolution is only
justified if its success gives an indication of its absolute necessity.
We must lament, from the standpoint of ethics or justice, the evil
state of affairs which gives rise to it.[23]
[23] On this point, it is interesting to compare with the above the
views of Spinoza in his _Tractatus Theologico-politicus_ and
_Tractatus-politicus_, and those of T. H. Green in his _Lectures on
Political Obligation_.
Renouvier devotes a considerable portion of his treatise to problems of
domestic morals, economic questions and problems of a political and
international character. In all these discussions, however, he
maintains as central his thesis of the supremacy of personality.
Under _droit domestique_ he defends very warmly the right of the woman
and the wife to treatment as a personality. He laments particularly the
injustice which usually rules in marriage, where, under a cloak of
legality, the married man denies to his wife a personal control of her
own body and the freedom of self-determination in matters of sexual
intercourse. So unjust and loathsome in its violation of the
personality of woman is the modern view of marriage that Renouvier
considers it little better than polygamy (which is often a better state
for women than monogamy) or prostitution. It is less just than either,
owing to its degradation of the personality of the wife. He remarked
too in his _Nouvelle Monadologie_ that love (in the popular sense),
being so largely an affair of passion and physical attraction, is
usually unjust, and that friendship is a better basis for the
relationship of marriage, which should be, while it lasts among
mankind, one of justice.[24] Consequently, it should involve neither
the idea of possession nor of obedience, but of mutual comradeship.
[24] See particularly the notes in _La Nouvelle Monadologie_ appended
to the fourth part, “Passion,” pp. 216-222.
In the economic sphere Renouvier endeavours to uphold freedom, and for
this reason he is an enemy of communism. Hostile to the communistic
doctrine of property, he is a definite defender of property which he
considers to be a necessity of personality. He considers each person in
the community entitled to property as a guarantee of his own liberty
and development. While disagreeing with communism, Renouvier is
sympathetic to the socialist view that property might be, and should
be, more justly distributed, and he advocates means to limit excessive
possession by private persons and to “generalise” the distribution of
the goods of the community among its members. Progressive taxation, a
guarantee of the “right to work” and a complete system of insurance are
among his suggestions. He is careful, however, to avoid giving to the
state too much power.
Renouvier was no lover of the state. While regarding it as necessary
under present conditions, he agrees with the anarchist idealists, to
whom government is an evil. He admits its use, however, as a guarantor
of personal liberty, but is against any semblance of state- worship.
The state is not a person, nor is it, as it exists at present, a moral
institution. One of the needs of modern times is, he points out, the
moralising of the conception of the state, and of the state itself.
Although, therefore, he has no _a priori_ objection to state
interference in the economic sphere, and would not advocate a mere
_laissez-faire_ policy, with its vicious consequences, yet he does not
look with approval upon such interference unless it be “the collective
expression of the personalities forming the community.”
The fact of living in a society, highly organised although it be, does
not diminish at all the moral significance of personality. Rights and
duties belong essentially to persons and to them only. We must beware
of the political philosophy which regards the citizens as existing only
for the state. Rather the state exists, or should exist, for the
welfare of the citizens. In the past this was a grave defect of
military despotisms, and was well illustrated by the view of the state
taken, or rather inculcated, by German political philosophy. In the
future the danger of the violation of personality may lie, Renouvier
thinks, in another direction—namely, in the establishment of
Communistic states. The basic principle of his ethic is the person as
an end in himself, and the treatment of persons as ends. If this be so,
a Communistic Republic which has as its motto “Each for all,” without
also “All for each,” may gravely violate personality and the moral law
if, by constraint, it treats all its citizens and their efforts not as
ends in themselves, but merely means to the collective ends of all.
The moral ideal demands that personality must not be obliterated.
Personality bound up with “autonomy of reason” is the fundamental
ethical fact.[25] In the last resort, responsibility rests upon the
individuals of the society for the evils of the system of social
organisation under which they live. The state itself cannot be regarded
as a moral person. Renouvier opposes strongly any doctrine which tends
to the personalisation or the deification of the state.
[25] Note that Renouvier prefers this term to Kant’s “autonomy of
will,” which he thinks confuses moral obligation and free-will.
He combats also the modern doctrines of “nationality,” and claims that
even the idea of the state is a higher one, for it at any rate involves
co-operating personalities, while a nation is a fiction, of which no
satisfactory definition can be given. He laughs at the “unity of
language, race, culture and religion,” and asks where we can find a
nation?[26] War and death have long since destroyed such united and
harmonious groups as were found in ancient times.
[27] _Science de la Morale_, vol. 2, chap. xcvi, “_Idées de la
Nationalité et d’Etat_,” pp. 416-427.
In approaching the questions of international morality Renouvier makes
clear that there is only one morality, one code of justice. Morality
cannot be divided against itself, and there cannot be an admission that
things which are immoral in the individual are justifiable, or
permissible, between different states. Morality has not been applied to
these relationships, which are governed by aggressive militarism and
diplomacy, the negation of all conceptions of justice. Ethical
obligation has only a meaning and significance for personalities, and
our states do but reflect the morality of those who constitute them;
our world reflects the relationships and immorality of the states. War
characterises our whole civilisation, domestic, economic and
international. To have inter- national peace, internal peace is
essential, and this pre- supposes the reign of justice within states.
War we shall have with us, Renouvier reminds us, in all its forms, in
our institutions, our laws and customs, until it has disappeared from
our hearts. Treaties of “peace” and federations or leagues of nations
are themselves based on injustice and on force, and in this he sees but
another instance of the “terrible solidarity of evil.”[28] Better it is
to recognise this, thinks Renouvier, than to consider ourselves in, or
even near, a Utopia, whence human greed and passion have fled.
[28] _Science de la Morale_, vol. 2, p. 474.
We find in Renouvier’s ethics a notable reversion to the individualism
which characterised the previous century. Much of the individualistic
tone of his work is, however, due to his finding himself in opposition
to the doctrines preached by communists, positivists, sociologists,
pessimistic and fatalistic historians, and supporters of the deified
state. Renouvier acclaims the freedom of the individual, but his
individualism is “personalism.” In proclaiming that the basis of
justice and of all morality is respect for personality, as such, he has
no desire to set up a standard of selfish individualism; he wishes only
to combat those heretical doctrines which would minimise and crush
personality. For him the moral “person” is not an isolated
individual—he is a social human being, free and responsible, who lives
with his fellows in society. Only upon a recognition of personality as
a supreme value can justice or peace ever be attained in human society;
and it is to this end that all moral education, Renouvier advocates,
should tend. The moral ideal should be, in practice, the constant
effort to free man from the terrible solidarity of evil which
characterises the civilisation into which he is born, and to establish
a community or association of personalities. Such an ideal does not lie
necessarily at the end of a determined evolution; Renouvier’s views on
history and progress have shown us that. Consequently it depends upon
us; it is our duty to believe in its possibility and to work, each
according to his or her power, for its realisation. The ideal or the
idea, will, in so far as it is set before self-conscious personalities
as an end, become a force. Renouvier agrees on this point with
Fouillée, to whose ethic, founded on the conception of _idées-forces_,
we now turn.
III
The philosophy of _idée-forces_ propounded by Fouillée assumes, in its
ethical aspect, a role of reconciliation (which is characteristic, as
we have noted, of his whole method and his entire philosophy) by
attempting a synthesis of individualism and humanitarianism. It is
therefore another kind of _personnalisme_, differing in type from that
of Renouvier. Fouillée’s full statement of his ethical doctrines was
not written until the year 1907,[29] but long before the conclusion of
the nineteenth century he had already indicated the essential points of
his ethics. The conclusion of his thesis _La Liberté et le
Déterminisme_ (1872) is very largely filled with his ethical views and
with his optimism. Four years later appeared his study _L’Idée moderne
du Droit en Allemagne, en Angleterre et en France_, which was followed
in 1880 by _La Science sociale contemporaine_, where the relation of
the study of ethics to that of sociology was discussed. A volume
containing much acute criticism of current ethical theories was his
_Critique des Systèmes de Morale contemporains_ (1883), which gave him
a further opportunity of offering by way of contrast his application of
the doctrine of _idées-forces_ to the solution of moral problems. To
this he added in the following year a study upon _La Propriété sociale
et la Démocratie_, where he discussed the ethical value and
significance of various political and socialist doctrines. Ethical
questions raised by the problems of education he discussed in his
_L’Enseignement au Point de Vue national_ (1891). At the close of the
century he issued his book on morality in his own country, _La France
au Point de Vue morale_ (1900).[30]
[29] His _Morale des Idées-forces_ was then published.
[30] It is interesting to note the wealth of Fouillée’s almost annual
output on ethics alone in his later years. We may cite, in the
twentieth century: _La Réforme de l’Enseignement par la Philosophie_,
1901; _La Conception morale et critique de l’Enseignement_; _Nietzsche
et l’Immoralisme_, 1904; _Le Moralisme de Kant et l’Amoralisme
contemporaine_, 1905; _Les Eléments sociologiques de la Morale_, 1905;
_La Morale des Idées-forces_, 1907; _Le Socialisme_, 1910; _La
Démocratie politique et sociale en France_, 1910; and the posthumous
volume, _Humanitaires et Libertaires au Point de Vue sociologique et
morale_, 1914.
Fouillée endeavours to unite the purely ideal aspect of ethics—that is
to say, its notion of what ought to be, with the more positive view of
ethics as dealing with what now is. His ethic is, therefore, an attempt
to relate more intimately the twin spheres of Renouvier, _l’état de
guerre_ with _l’état de paix_, for it is concerned not only with what
_is_, but with that which _tends_ to be and which _can_ be by the
simple fact that it is _thought_. As, however, what _can_ be is a
matter of intense interest to us, we are inevitably led from this to
consider what _ought_ to be—that is to say, what is better, or of more
worth or value. The ethical application of the philosophy of
_idées-forces_ is at once theoretical and practical, that philosophy
being concerned both with ideas and values.
As in his treatment of freedom we found Fouillée beginning with the
_idea_ of freedom, so here in a parallel manner he lays down the _idea_
of an end of action as an incontestable fact of experience, although
the existence of such an end is contested and is a separate question.
This idea operates in consciousness as a power of will (_volonté de
conscience_). Intelligence, power, love and happiness-in short, the
highest conscious life—are involved in it, not only for us, but for
all. Thus it comes about that the conscious subject, just because he
finds himself confronted by nature and by over-individual ends,
proposes to himself an ideal, and imposes at the same time upon himself
the obligation to act in conformity with this full consciousness which
is in all, as in him, and thus he allows universal consciousness to
operate in his own individual life. Here we have conscience, the idea
of duty or obligation, accounted for, and the principle of autonomy of
the moral person laid down. The ethical life is shown as the conscious
will in action, finding within itself its own end and rule of action,
finding also the conscious wills of others like itself. Morality is the
indefinite extension of the conscious will which brings about the
condition that others tend to become “me.” Through the increasing power
of intellectual disinterestedness and social sympathy, the old formula
“_cogito, conscius sum_” gives place to that of “_conscii sumus_,” and
this is no mere intellectual speculation, but a concrete principle of
action and feeling which is itself akin to the highest and best in all
religions.
One of the features of this ethic is its insistence upon the primacy of
self-consciousness. Indeed, it has its central point in the doctrine of
self-consciousness, which, according to Fouillée, implies the
consciousness of others and of the whole unity of mankind. Emphasising
his gospel of _idées-forces_, he outlines a morality in which the ideal
shall attract men persuasively, and not dominate them in what he
regards as the arbitrary and rather despotic manner of Kant.
By advocating the primacy of self-consciousness Fouillée claims to
establish an ethic which towers above those founded upon pleasure,
happiness and feeling. The morality of the _idées-forces_ is not purely
sentimental, not purely intellectual, not purely voluntarist; it claims
to rest on the totality of the functions of consciousness, as revealed
in the feelings, in intellect and will, acting in solidarity and in
harmony.
He endeavours to unite the positive and evolutionary views of morality
to those associated with theological or metaphysical doctrines,
concerning the deity or the morally perfect absolute. He claims,
against the theologians and on behalf of the positivists, that ethics
can be an independent study, that it is not necessarily bound up with
theological dogmas. There is no need to found the notion of duty upon
that of the existence of God. Our own existence is sufficient; the
voice of conscience is within our human nature. He objects, as did
Nietzsche, to the formality and rigour of Kant’s “categorical
imperative.” His method is free from the legalism of Kant, and in him
and Guyau is seen an attempt to relate morality itself to life,
expanding and showing itself creative of ideals and tending to their
fulfilment.
From the primacy of self-consciousness which can be expressed in the
notion, _Je pense, donc j’ai une valeur morale_, a transition is made
to a conception of values. _Je pense, donc j’evalue des objets_. The
essential element in the psychology of the _idees-forces_ then comes
into play by tending to the realisation of the ideals conceived and
based on the valuation previously made. Finally, Fouillée claims that
on this ethical operation of the _idées-forces_ can be founded the
notion of a universal society of consciences. This notion itself is a
force operating to create that society. The ideal is itself persuasive,
and Fouillee’s inherent optimism, which we have observed in his
doctrine of progress, colours also his ethical theory. He has faith in
men’s capacity to be attracted by the ideals of love and brotherhood,
and insists that in the extension of these lies the supreme duty, and
the ideal, like the notion of duty itself, is a creation of our own
thought. The realisation of the universality, altruism, love and
brotherhood of which he speaks, depends upon our action, our power to
foster ideas, to create ideals, particularly in the minds of the young,
and to strive ever for their realisation. This is the great need of our
time, Fouillée rightly urges.[31] Such a morality contains in a more
concentrated form, he thinks, the best that has been said and thought
in the world-religions; it achieves also that union of the scientific
spirit with the aspirations of man, which Fouillée regards as so
desirable, and he claims for it a philosophical value by its success in
uniting the subjective and personal factors of consciousness with those
which are objective and universal.
[31] The work of Benjamin Kidd should be compared in this connection,
particularly his _Social Evolution_, 1894; _Principles of Western
Civilisation_, 1902; and _The Science of Power_, 1918 (chap, v., “The
Emotion of the Ideal”).
Similar in several respects to the ethical doctrines of Fouillée are
those of his step-son. Guyau insists more profoundly, however, upon the
“free” conception of morality, as spontaneous and living, thus marking
a further reaction from Kant’s doctrine. Both Fouillée and Guyau
interacted upon one another in their mental relationship, and both of
them (particularly Guyau) have affinities with Nietzsche, who knew
their work. While the three thinkers are in revolt against the Kantian
conception of ethics, the two Frenchmen use their conceptions to
develop an ethic altruistic in character, far removed from the egoism
which characterises the German.[32]
[32] We find the optimism and humanitarian idealism of the Frenchmen
surprising. May not this be piecisely because the world has followed
the gospel of Nietzsche? We may dislike him, but he is a greater
painter of the real state of world-morality than are the two
Frenchmen. They, with their watchword of _fraternité_, are proclaiming
a more excellent way they are standing for an ethical ideal of the
highest type.
Guyau, after showing in his critique of English Ethics (_La Morale
anglaise contemporaine_, 1879) the inadequacies of a purely utilitarian
doctrine of morality, endeavoured to set forth in a more constructive
manner the principles of a scientific morality in his _Esquisse d’une
Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction_.
He takes as his starting-point the position where John Stuart Mill fell
foul of the word “desirable.” What, asks Guyau, is the supreme desire
of every living creature? The answer to this question is “Life.” What
we all of us desire most and constantly is Life, the most intensive and
extensive in all its relationships, physical and spiritual. In the
principle of Life we find cause and end—a unity which is a synthesis of
all desires and all desirables. Moreover, the concept or the principle
of Life embraces all functions of our nature—those within consciousness
and those which are subconscious or unconscious. It thus relates
intimately purely instinctive action and reflective acts, both of which
are manifestations of Life and can enrich and increase its power.
The purely hedonistic views of the Utilitarians he considers untrue.
Doubtless, he admits, there is a degree of truth in the doctrine that
consciousness tends to pursue the line of greatest pleasure or least
resistance, but then we must remember how slight a part this
consciousness actually plays. Instincts and an intensive subconscious
“will-to-live” are constantly operating. A purely scientific ethic, if
it is to present a complete scheme, must allow for this by admitting
that the purely hedonistic search after pleasure is not in itself a
cause of action, but is an effect of a more fundamental or dominating
factor. This factor is precisely the effort of Life to maintain itself,
to intensify itself and expand. The chief motive power lies in the
“intensity of Life.” “The end which actually determines all conscious
action is also the cause which produces every unconscious action; it is
Life itself, Life at once the most intense and the most varied in its
forms. From the first thrill of the embryo in its mother’s womb to the
last convulsion of the old man, every movement of the being has had as
cause Life in its evolution; this universal cause of actions is, from
another point of view, its constant effect and end.”[33]
[33] _Esquisse d’une Morale_, p. 87.
A true ethic proceeding upon the recognition of these principles is
scientific, and constitutes a science having as its object all the
means by which Life, material and spiritual, may be conserved and
expanded. Rising in the evolutionary development we find the variety
and scope of action increased. The highest beings find rest not in
sleep merely, but in variety and change of action. The moral ideal lies
in activity, in all the variety of its manifestations. For Guyau, as
for Bergson, the worst vice is idleness, inertia, lack of _élan vital_,
decay of personal initiative, and a consequent degeneration to merely
automatic existence.
Hedonism is quite untenable as a principle; pleasure is merely a
consequence, and its being set in the van of ethics is due to a false
psychology and false science. Granting that pleasure attends the
satisfaction of a desire, pain its repression, recognising that a
feeling of pleasure accompanies many actions which expand life, we must
live, as Guyau reminds us, before we enjoy. The activity of life surges
within us, and we do not act with a view to pleasure or with pleasure
as a motive, but life, just because it is life, seeks to expand. Man in
acting has created his pleasures and his organs. The pleasure and the
organ alike proceed from function—that is, life itself. The pleasure of
an action and even the consciousness of it are attributes, not ends.
The action arises naturally from the inherent intensity of life.
The hedonists, too, says Guyau, have been negligent of the widest
pleasures, and have frequently confined their attention to those of
eating and drinking and sexual intercourse, purely sensitive, and have
neglected those of living, willing and thinking, which are more
fundamental as being identical with the consciousness of life. But
Guyau asserts that, as the greatest intensity of life involves
necessarily its widest expansion, we must give special attention to
thought and will and feeling, which bring us into touch universally
with our fellows and promote the widest life. This expansiveness of
life has great ethical importance. With the change in the nature of
reproduction, involving the sexual union of two beings, “a new moral
phase began in the world.” It involved an expansion not merely
physical, but mental—a union, however crude, of soul.
It is in the extension of this feature of human life that Guyau sees
the ethical ideal. The most perfect organism is the most sociable, for
the ideal of the individual life is the common or social life. Morality
is for him almost synonymous with sociability, disinterestedness, love
and brotherhood, and in it we find, he says, “the flower of human
life.”
All our action should be referred to this moral ideal of sociability.
Guyau sees in the phrase “social service” a conception which should not
be confined to those who are endeavouring in some religious or
philanthropic manner to alleviate the suffering caused by evil in human
society, but a conception to which the acts, all acts, of all members
of society should be related. Like Renouvier, he gives to work an
important ethical value. “To work is to produce—that is, to be useful
to oneself and to others.” In work he sees the economic and moral
reconciliation of egoism and altruism. It is a good and it is
praiseworthy. Those who neglect and despise it are parasites, and their
existence in society is a negation of the moral ideal of sociability
and social service. In so far as the work of certain persons leads to
the accumulation of excessive capital in individual hands, it is likely
to annul itself sooner or later in luxury and idleness. Such an immoral
state of affairs, it is the concern of society, by its laws of
inheritance and possession, to prevent.
Having made clear his principle of morality, Guyau then has to face the
question of its relation to the notion of duty or obligation. Duty in
itself is an idea which he rejects as vague, and he disapproves of the
external and artificial element present in the Kantian “rigorism.” For
Guyau the very power of action contained in life itself creates an
impersonal duty. While Emerson could write:
“Duty says, ‘I must,’
The youth replies, ‘I can,’”
the view of Guyau is directly the converse; for him “I can” gives the
“I must”; it is the power which precedes and creates the obligation.
Life cannot maintain itself unless it grows and expands. The soul that
liveth to itself, that liveth solely by habit and automatism, is
already dead. Morality is the unity of the personality expanding by
action and by sympathy. It is at this point that Guyau’s thought
approaches closely to the _philosophie des idées-forces_ of his
step-father, by his doctrine of thought and action.
Immorality is really unsociability, and Guyau thinks this a better
key-note than to regard it as disobedience. If it is so to be spoken
of, it is disobedience to the social elements in one’s own self—a
mischievous duplication of personality, egoistic in character and
profoundly antisocial. The sociological elements which characterise all
Guyau’s work are here very marked. In the notion of sociability we find
an equivalent of the older and more artificial conception of Duty—a
conception which lacks concreteness and offers in itself so little
guidance because it is abstract and empty. The criterion of
sociability, Guyau claims, is much more concrete and useful. He asks us
to observe its spirituality, for the more gross and materialistic
pleasures fall short of the criterion by the very fact that they cannot
be shared. Guyau’s thought is here at its best. The higher pleasures,
which are not those of bodily enjoyment and satisfaction, but those of
the spirit, which thinks, feels, wills and loves, are precisely those
which come nearest to fulfilling the ideal of sociability, for they
tend less to divide men than to unite them and to urge them to a closer
co-operation for their spiritual advancement. Guyau writes here with
sarcasm regarding the lonely imbecile in the carriage drawn by four
horses. For his own part it is enough to have—
“. . . a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.”
He knows who really has chosen the better part. One cannot rejoice much
and rejoice alone. Companionship and love are supremely valuable
“goods,” and the pleasure of others he recognises as a very real part
of his own. The egoist’s pleasure is, on the other hand, very largely
an illusion. He loses, says Guyau, far more by his isolated enjoyment
than he would gain by sharing.
Life itself is the greatest of all goods, as it is the condition of all
others, but life’s value fades if we are not loved. It is love,
comradeship and the fellowship of kindred souls which give to the
humblest life a significance and a feeling of value. This, Guyau points
out with some tenderness, is the tragedy of suicides. These occurrences
are a social no less than an individual tragedy. The tragic element
lies in the fact that they were persons who were unable to give their
devotion to some object, and the loss of personalities in this way is a
real loss to society, but it is mainly society itself which is to blame
for them.
We need not fear, says Guyau, that such a gospel will promote unduly
the operation of mere animality or instinctive action, for in the
growth of the scientific spirit he sees the development of the great
enemy of all instinct. It is the dissolving force _par excellence_, the
revolutionary spirit which incessantly wages warfare within society
against authority, and in the individual it operates through reason
against the instinctive impulses. Every instinct tends to lapse in so
far as it is reflected upon by consciousness.
The old notion of duty or obligation must, in Guyau’s opinion, be
abandoned. The sole commandment which a scientific and positive ethic,
such as he endeavours to indicate, can recognise, is expressible only
in the words, “Develop your life in all directions, be an individual as
rich as possible in energy, intensive and extensive”—in other words,
“Be the most social and sociable being you can.” It is this which
replaces the “categorical imperative.”
He aptly points out the failure of modern society to offer scope for
devotion, which is really a superabundance of life, and its proneness
to crush out opportunities which offer a challenge to the human spirit.
There is a claim of life itself to adventure; there is a pleasure in
risk and in conflict; and this pleasure in risk and adventure has been
largely overlooked in its relation to the moral life. Such risk and
adventure are not merely a pure negation of self or of personal life,
but rather, he considers, that life raised to its highest power,
reaching the sublime. By virtue of such devotion our lives are
enriched. He draws a touching picture of the sacrifice upon which our
modern social life and civilisation are based, and draws an analogy
between the blood of dead horses used by the ploughman in fertilising
his field, and the blood of the martyrs of humanity, _qui ont fécondé
l’avenir_. Often they may have been mistaken; later generations may
wonder if their cause was worth fighting for; yet, although nothing
truly is sadder than to die in vain, that devotion was valuable in and
for itself.
With the demand of life for risk in action is bound up the impetus to
undertake risk in thought. From this springs the moral need for faith,
for belief and acceptance of some hypotheses. The very divergence or
diversity of the world-religions is not discouraging but rather the
reverse. It is a sign of healthy moral life. Uniformity would be highly
detrimental; it would cease to express life, for with conformity of
belief would come spiritual decline and stagnation. Guyau anticipates
here his doctrine of a religion of free thought, a “non-religion” of
the future, which we shall discuss in our next chapter, when we examine
his book on that subject. In the diversity of religious views Guyau
sees a moral good, for these religions are themselves an expression of
life in its richness, and the conservation and expansion of this rich
variety of life are precisely the moral ideal itself.
We must endeavour to realise how rich and varied the nature of human
life really is. Revolutionaries, Guyau points out, are always making
the mistake of regarding life and truth as too simple. Life and truth
are so complex that evolution is the key-note to what is desirable in
the individual intellect and in society, not a revolution which must
inevitably express the extreme of one side or the other. The search for
truth is slow and needs faith and patience, but the careful seekers of
it are making the future of mankind. But truth will be discovered only
in relation to action and life and in proportion to the labour put into
its realisation. The search for truth must never be divorced from the
active life, Guyau insists, and, indeed, he approaches the view that
the action will produce the knowledge, “He that doeth the will shall
know of the doctrine.” Moreover he rightly sees in action the wholesome
cure for pessimism and that cynicism which all too frequently arises
from an equal appreciation of opposing views. “Even in doubt,” he
exclaims, “we can love; even in the intellectual night, which prevents
our seeing any ultimate goal, we can stretch out a hand to him who
weeps at our feet.”[34] In other words, we must do the duty that lies
nearest, in the hope and faith that by that action itself light will
come.
[34] _Esquisse d’une Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction_, p. 178.
In the last part of his treatise Guyau deals with the difficult problem
of “sanction,” so ultimately connected with ethics, and, it must be
added, with religion. The Providence who rewards and punishes us,
according to the orthodox religious creed of Christendom, is merely a
personified “sanction” or distributive justice, operating in a
terrestrial and celestial court of assize. Guyau condemns this as an
utterly immoral conception. Religious sanctions, as he has not much
difficulty in showing, are more cruel than those which a man could
imagine himself inflicting upon his mortal enemy. The “Heavenly Father”
ought at least to be as good as earthly ones, who do not cruelly punish
their children. Guyau touches upon an important point here, which will
be further emphasised—namely, the necessity for making our idea of God,
if we have one at all, harmonious with our own ethical conceptions. The
old ideas of the divinity are profoundly immoral and are based on
physical force. This is natural because those views which have survived
in modern times are those of primitive and savage people to whom the
most holy was the most powerful and physically majestic. But, says
Guyau, now that we see that “all physical force represents moral
weakness,” the idea of God the All-terrible, with his hell-fire ready
for the sinful soul, must be condemned as immoral blasphemy itself.
“God,” he remarks, “in damning any soul might be said to damn himself.”
Virtue is really its own reward. No one should be or do good in order
to gain an entry into paradise or to escape the torments of hell. That
is to build morality on an immoral principle and on a belief, not in
goodness as valuable in and for itself, but on a basis of material
self-interest alone, “the best policy.” It is true, Guyau admits, that
virtue involves happiness, but it is not in this sense. A conflict
between “pleasure” and virtue is usually one of higher _versus_ lower
ideals. Virtue is not a precedent to sense-happiness, and in this sense
is not at all equivalent or bound up with happiness, but, as the facts
of life reveal, very often opposed to it.
Guyau opposes the ordinary view of punishment in society and shows that
it is both immoral and socially harmful in its application. It adds
evil to evil, and legal murder is really more absurd than the illegal
murder. Punishment, capital or other, is no “compensation” exacted for
the crime committed, and it never can be such. Attempts to treat and
cure the guilty one would, Guyau suggests, be far more rational, humane
and really beneficial to society itself, which at present creates by
its punishments, especially those inflicted for first offences, a
“criminal class.” One should convert the criminal before punishing him,
and then, Guvau asks, if he is converted, why punish him?
The appeal to justice denoted in the words “To everyone according to
his works” is frequently heard in the defence of punishment. This is an
excellent maxim in Guyau’s opinion, but he is careful to point out that
it is purely one of social economics. It is a plea for a just
distribution of the products of labour, but does not apply at all to
the problem of punishment. In a manner which recalls the remarks of
Renan, Guyau sees in evil-doing a lack of culture, or rather of that
sociability, which comes of social culture, from consciousness of a
membership of society and a solidarity with one’s fellows. In vice and
in virtue alike the human will appears aspiring to better things
according to its lights. As virtue is its own reward, so is evil; and
the moralist must say to the wicked: “Verily they have their reward”
(_Comme si ce n’était pas assez pour eux d’être méchants_).
Guyau comments upon the gradual modifications of punishment from a
social point of view. There was the day when the chastisement was
infinitely worse than the crime itself. Then came the morality of
reciprocity, “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” an ethic
which represented a high ideal for primitive man to reach, and one to
which, Guyau thinks, we have yet to reach to-day in some spheres of
life. Yet a further moral development will show how foolish, in a
civilised society, are wrath and hatred of the criminal and the cry for
vengeance. Society must aim at ensuring protection for itself with the
minimum of individual suffering. Punishment must be regarded as an
example for the future rather than as revenge or compensation. In the
individual himself Guyau observes how powerful can be the inner
sanction of remorse, the suffering caused by the unrealised ideal. This
is perhaps the only real moral punishment, and it is one which society
cannot itself directly enforce. Only by increasing “sociability” and
social sensitiveness can this sanction be indirectly developed.
Herein lies the highest ethical ideal, far more concrete and living, in
Guyau’s opinion, than the rigorism of a Kant or the “scholastic”[35]
temper of a Renouvier. Charity or love for all men, whatever their
value morally, intellectually or physically, must, he claims, “be the
final end pursued even by public opinion.”In co-operation and
sociability, he finds the vital moral ideal; in love and brotherhood,
he finds the real sanction which should operate.”Love supposes
mutuality of love,” he says; and there is one idea superior to that of
justice, that is the idea of brotherhood, and he remarks with a humane
tenderness “the guilty have probably more need for love than anyone
else.” “I have,” he cries, “two hands—the one for gripping the hand of
those with whom I march along in life, the other to lift up the fallen.
Indeed, to these I should be able to stretch out both hands
together.”[36]
[35] This is Guyau’s word to describe Renouvier, whom he regards as
far too much under the influence of Kant.
[36] _Esquisse d’une Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction_, p. 223.
While Fouillée and, more especially, Guyau were thus outlining an ethic
marked by a strong humanitarianism, a more definitely religious ethic
was being proclaimed by that current of philosophy of belief and of
action which has profoundly associated itself in its later developments
with “Modernism” in the Roman Church. The tendency to stress action and
the practical reason is noticeable in the work of Brochard,
Ollé-Laprune and Blondel, also in Rauh. They agree with Renouvier in
advocating the primacy of the practical reason, but their own reasons
for this are different from his, or at least in them the reasons are
more clearly enunciated. Plainly these reasons lie in the difficulties
of intellectualism and the quest of truth. They propose the quest of
the good in the hope of finding in that sphere some objectivity, some
absolute, in fact, which they cannot find out by intellectual
searching. They correspond in a somewhat parallel fashion to the
philosophy of intuition with its rejection of intellectualism as
offering a final solution. These thinkers desire by action, by doing
the will, to attain to a knowledge of the doctrine. The first word in
their gospel is—
“Im Anfang war die That.”
It is for them the beginning and the end. Their certainty is an act of
belief, which grows out of action and life. It is a curious mixture of
insistence upon life and action, such as we find in Guyau and in
Bergson, coupled with a religious Platonism. Brochard’s work is of this
type. He wrote as early as 1874 on _La Responsabilité morale_, and in
1876 on _L’Universalité des Notions morales_. Three years later
appeared his work _L’Erreur_. Ollé-Laprune and Blondel, who best
represent this tendency, do not like Guyau’s ethics, which lacks the
religious idealism which they consider should be bound up with
morality. This was the thesis developed in the volume _La Certitude
morale_, written by Ollé-Laprune in 1881. “By what right,” says
Ollé-Laprune in his subsequent book _Le Prix de la Vie_ (1895), “can
Guyau speak of a high exalted life, of a moral ideal? It is impossible
to speak so when you have only a purely naturalistic ethic; for merely
to name these things is an implication that there is not only intensity
in life, but also quality. You suppress duty because you can see in it
only a falsely mystical view of life and of nature. What you fail to
realise is that between duty and life there is a profound agreement.
You reduce duty to life, and in life itself you consider only its
quantity and intensity, and regard as illusion everything that is of a
different order from the natural physical order in which you imprison
yourself.”[37]
[37] _Le Prix de la Vie_, p. 139.
Such a criticism is not altogether fair to Guyau who, as we noted,
proclaimed the superiority of the higher qualities of spiritual life.
It does, however, attack his abandonment of the idea of Duty; and we
must now turn to examine a thinker, who, by his contribution to ethics,
endeavoured to satisfy the claims of life and of duty.
This was Rauh, whose _Essai sur le Fondement métaphysique de la Morale_
appeared in 1890. It had been preceded by a study of the psychology of
the feelings, and was later followed by _L’Expérience morale_ (1903).
In seeking a metaphysical foundation for morality, Rauh recalls Kant’s
_Metaphysic of Morals_. He, indeed, agrees with Kant in the view that
the essence of morality lies in the sentiment of obligation. Belief or
faith in an ideal, by which it behoves us to act, imposes itself, says
Rauh, upon the mind of man as essential. It is as positive a fact as
the laws of the natural sciences. Man not only states facts and
formulates general laws in a scientific manner, he also conceives and
believes in ideals, which become bound up in his mind with the
sentiment of obligation—that is, the general feeling of duty. But
beyond a general agreement upon this point, Rauh does not follow Kant.
He tends to look upon the ethical problem in the spirit which Guyau,
Bergson and Blondel show in their general philosophic outlook. In life,
action and immediacy alone can we find a solution. Nothing practical
can be deduced from the abstract principle of obligation or duty in
general. The moral consciousness of man is, in Rauh’s opinion, akin to
the intuitional perceptions of Bergson’s philosophy. Morality,
moreover, is creating itself perpetually by the reflection of sensitive
minds on action and on life itself. “Morality, or rather moral action,
is not merely the crown of metaphysical speculation, but itself the
true metaphysic, which is learnt only in living, as it is naught but
life itself.”[38] In concluding his thesis, Rauh reminds us that “the
essential and most certain factor in the midst of the uncertainties of
life and of duty lies in the constant consciousness of the moral
ideal.” In it he sees a spiritual reality which, if we keep it ever
before us, may inspire the most insignificant of our actions and render
them into a harmony, a living harmony of character.
[38] _Essai sur le Fondement métaphysique de la Morale_, p. 255.
Rauh’s doctrines, we claim, have affinities to the doctrines of action
and intuition. That does not imply, however, that the intelligence is
to be minimised—far from this; but the intelligence triumphs here in
realising that it is not all-sufficing or supreme. “The heart hath
reasons which the reason cannot know.” While Fouillée had remarked that
morality is metaphysics in action, Rauh points out that “metaphysics in
action” is the foundation of our knowledge. We must, he insists, seek
for certitude in an immediate and active adaptation to reality instead
of deducing a rule or rules of action from abstract systems.
He separates himself from the sociologists[39] by pointing out that,
however largely social environment may determine our moral ideals and
rules of conduct, nevertheless the ethical decision is fundamentally an
absolutely personal affair. The human conscience, in so far as active,
must never _passively_ accept the existing social morality. It finds
itself sometimes in agreement, sometimes obliged to give a newer
interpretation to old conventions, and at times is obliged to revolt
against them. In no case can the idea of duty be equated simply and
calmly with acquiescence in the collective general will. It must demand
from social morality its credentials and hold itself free to criticise
the current ethic of the community. More often than not society acts,
Rauh thinks, as a break rather than a stimulus; and social interest is
not a measure of the moral ideal, but rather a limitation of it.
[39] The relation of ethics and sociology is well discussed, not only
by Durkheim (who, in his _Division du Travail social_, speaks of the
development of democracy and increasing respect for human
personality), but also by Lévy-Bruhl, who followed his thesis on
_L’Idée de Responsabilité_, 1883, by the volume, _La Morale el la
Science des Moeurs_.
Although the moral ideal is one which must be personally worked out, it
is not a merely individualistic affair. Rauh does not abandon the
guidance of reason, but he objects equally to the following of instinct
or a transcendent teaching divorced from the reality of life. Our guide
must be reflection upon instinct, and this is only possible by action
and experience, the unique experience of living itself. Reason itself
is experience; and it is our duty to face problems personally and
sincerely, in a manner which the rational element in us renders
“impersonal, universal and disinterested.”
Any code of morality which is not directly in contact with life is
worthless, and all ethical ideas which are not those of our time are of
little value. Only he is truly a man who lives the life of his time.
The truly moral man is he who is alive to this spirit and who does not
unreflectingly deduce his rules of conduct from ancient books or
teachers of a past age. The art of living is the supreme art, and it is
this which the great moralists have endeavoured to show humanity.
Neither Socrates nor Jesus wrote down their ethical ideas: they lived
them.
Rauh thus reminds us partly of Guyau in his insistence upon life. He
regards the ethical life at its highest, as one _sans obligation ni
sanction_. Rather than the Kantian obligation of duty, of constraint,
he favours in his second book, _L’Expérience morale_, a state of
spontaneity, of passion and exaltation of the personal conscience which
faces the issue in a disinterested manner. The man who is morally
honest himself selects his values, his ideals, his ends, by the light
which reason gives him. Ethics becomes thus an independent science, a
science of “ends,” which Reason, as reflected in the personal
conscience, acclaims a science of the ideal ordering of life.
Such was Rauh’s conception of rational moral experience, one which he
endeavoured to apply in his lectures to the two problems which he
considered to be supreme in his time, that of patriotism and of social
justice.
These problems were further touched upon in 1896, when Léon Bourgeois
(since noted for his advocacy of the “League of Nations”) published his
little work _Solidarité_, which was also a further contribution to an
independent, positive and lay morality. In the conception of the
solidarity of humanity throughout the ages, Bourgeois accepted the
teaching of the sociologists, and urges that herein can be found an
obligation, for the present generation must repay their debt to their
ancestors and be worthy of the social heritage which has made them what
they are. Somewhat similar sentiments had Been expressed by Marion in
his Solidarité morale (1880). Ethical questions were kept in the
forefront by the society known as _L’Union pour l’Action morale_,
founded by Desjardins and supported by Lagneau (1851- 1894). After the
excitement of the Dreyfus case (1894- 1899) this society took the name
_L’Union pour la Verité_. In 1902 Lapie made an eloquent plea for a
rational morality in his _Logique de la Volonté_, and in the following
year Séailles published his _Affirmations de la Conscience moderne_.
The little _Précis_ of André Lalande, written in the form of a
catechism, was a further contribution to the establishment of a
rational and independent lay morality, which the teaching of ethics as
a subject in the _lycées_ and lay schools rendered in some degree
necessary.[40] This little work appeared in 1907, the same year in
which Paul Bureau wrote his book _La Crise morale des Temps nouveaux_.
Then Parodi (who in 1919 produced a fine study of French thought since
1890[41]) followed up the discussion of ethical problems by his work
_Le Problème morale et la Pensée contemporaine_ (1909), and in 1912
Wilbois published his contribution entitled _Devoir et Durée: Essai de
Morale sociale_.
[40] The teaching of a lay morality is a vital and practical problem
which the Government of the Republic is obliged to face. The urgent
need for such lay teaching will be more clearly demonstrated or
evident when our next chapter, dealing with the religious problem, has
been read.
[41] _La Philosophie contemporaine en France_.
Thus concludes a period in which the discussion, although not marked by
a definite turning round of positions as was manifested in our
discussions of science, freedom and progress, bears signs of a general
development. This development is shown by the greater insistence upon
the social aspects of ethics and by a turning away from the formalism
of Kant to a more concrete conception of duty, or an ethic in which the
notion of duty itself has disappeared. This is the general tendency
from Renan with his insistence upon the aesthetic element, Renouvier
with his claim for justice in terms of personality, to Fouillée, Guyau,
Ollé-Laprune and Rauh with their insistence upon action, upon love and
life.
Yet, although the departure from an intense individualism in ethics is
desirable, we must beware of the danger which threatens from the other
extreme. We cannot close this chapter without insisting upon this
point. Good must be personally realised in the inner life of
individuals, even if they form a community. The collective life is
indeed necessary, but it is not collectively that the good is
experienced. It is personal. In the neglect of this important aspect
lies the error of much Communistic philosophy and of that social
science which looks on society as purely an organism. This analogy is
false, for however largely a community exhibits a general likeness to
an organism, it is a superficial resemblance. There is not a centre of
consciousness, but a multitude of such centres each living an inner
life of personal experience which is peculiarly its own; and these
personalities, we must remember, are not simply a homogeneous mass of
social matter, they are capable of realising the good each in his or
her own manner. This is the only realisation of the good.
In this chapter we have traced the attempt to reconcile _science et
conscience_, after the way had been opened up by the maintenance of
freedom. It was recognised that reason is not entirely pure
speculation: it is also practical. Human nature seeks for goodness as
well as for truth. It is noticeable that while the insistence upon the
primacy of the practical reason developed, on the one hand, into a
philosophy of action (anti-intellectual action in its extreme
development as shown in Syndicalism), the same tendency, operating in a
different manner and upon different data, essayed to find in action,
and in the belief which arises from action, that Absolute or Ideal to
which the pure reason feels it cannot alone attain—namely, the
realisation of God. To this problem of religion we devote our next
chapter.
CHAPTER VII
RELIGION
INTRODUCTION: The religious situation in France in the nineteenth
century—The intellectual and political forces against the Roman
Catholic Church—Its claims, its orthodoxy and tyranny—The
humanitarians—The power of Rome—Church and State—The educational
problem—Clericalism—The cult of Jeanne d’Arc—The lack of a _via media_
between Roman orthodoxy and _libre pensée_—Protestantism negligible.
I. Comte’s effort in his “Religion of Humanity”—Renan and the
Church—Freedom—Denial of supernatural elements in Christianity—_Vie de
Jésus_—Renan not irreligious—Piety—Love and Goodness reveal the
Divine—God the “ideal”—Vacherot and Taine.
II. Renouvier’s efforts, with Pillon, in the _Critique philosophique_
and _Critique religieuse_—His republican theology—Freedom, personality
and God—The deity as finite—God as Goodness and as a Person.
III. Ravaisson’s blend of Hellenism and Christian
thought—Boutroux—Fouillée on the Idea of God—The importance of Guyau’s
_L’Irreligion de l’Avenir_—The decay of dogma and ecclesiasticism—The
term “irreligion” misleading—Sociology and religion-Freedom—Religious
education and tolerance—Modernism and the Church—Loisy and
others—Symbolism and _Fidéisme_.
CONCLUSION: The personal factor in faith—Freedom vital to
religion—Change of attitude since the eighteenth century—Value of
religion—Tendency towards a free religion devoid of dogmas, expressive
of the best aspirations of man’s mind.
CHAPTER VII
RELIGION
It is outside our purpose to embark upon discussions of the religious
problem in France, in so far as this became a problem of politics. Our
intention is rather to examine the inner core of religious thought, the
philosophy of religion, which forms an appropriate final chapter to our
history of the development of ideas.
Yet, although our discussion bears mainly upon the general attitude to
religion, upon the development of central religious ideas such as the
idea of God, and upon the place of religion in the future—that is to
say, upon the philosophy of religion—it is practically impossible to
understand the religious attitude of our thinkers without a brief
notice of the religious situation in France during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
In our Introduction we briefly called attention to the attempt of the
Traditionalists after the Revolution to recall their countrymen to the
Christian faith as presented in and by the Roman Catholic Church. The
efforts made by De Bonald, De Maistre, Chateaubriand, Lamennais and
Lacordaire did not succeed as they had hoped, but, nevertheless, a
considerable current of loyalty to the Church and the Catholic religion
set in. Much of this loyalty was bound up with sentimental affection
for a monarchy, and arose partly from anti-revolutionary sentiments.[1]
It cannot, however, be entirely explained by these political feelings.
There was the expression of a deeper and more spiritual reaction
directed against the materialistic and sceptical teachings of the
eighteenth century. Man’s heart craved comfort, consolation and warmth.
It had been starved in the previous century, and revolution and war had
only added to the cup of bitterness. Thus there came an epoch of
Romanticism in religion of which the sentimental and assumed orthodoxy
of Chateaubriand was a sign of the times. His _Génie du Christianisme_
may now appear to us full of sentimentality, but it was welcomed at the
time, since it expressed at least some of those aspirations which had
for long been denied an expression. It was this which marked the great
difference between the two centuries in France. The eighteenth was
mainly concerned with scoffing at religion. Its rationalism was that of
Voltaire. In the first half of the nineteenth century the pendulum
swung in the opposite direction. Romanticism, in poetry, in literature,
in philosophy and in religion was _à la mode_, and it led frequently to
sentimentality or morbidity. Lamartine, Victor Hugo and De Vigny
professed the Catholic faith for many years. We may note, and this is
important, that in France the only form of Christianity which holds any
sway over the people in general is the Roman Catholic faith. Outside
the Roman Church there is no religious organisation which is of much
account. This explains why it is so rare to find a thinker who owns
allegiance to any Church or religion, and yet it would be wrong to deem
them irreligious. There is no _via media_ between Catholicism and free
personal thought. This was a point which Renan quite keenly felt, and
of which his own spiritual pilgrimage, which took him out of the bounds
of the Church of his youth, is a fine illustration. Many of France’s
noblest sons have been brought up in the religious atmosphere of the
Church and owe much of their education to her, and Rome believes in
education. The control of education has been throughout the century a
problem severely contested by Church and State. More important for our
purpose than the details of the quarrels of Church and State is the
intellectual condition of the Church itself.
[1] De Maistre regarded the Revolution as an infliction specially
bestowed upon France for her national neglect of religion—his
religion, of course. The same crude, misleading, and vicious arguments
have since been put forward by the theologians in their efforts to
push the cause of the Church with the people. This was very noticeable
both in the war of 1870 and that of 1914. In each case it was argued
that the war was a punishment from God for France’s frivolity and
neglect of the Church. In 1914, in addition, it was deemed a direct
divine reply to “Disestablishment.”
This reveals a striking vitality, a vigour and initiative at war with
the central powers of the Vatican, a seething unrest which uniformity
and authority find annoying. How strong the power of the central
authority was, the affair of the Concordat had shown, when forty
bishops were deposed for non-acceptance of the arrangement between
Napoleon and the Pope.[2] Stronger still was the iron hand of the Pope
over intellectual freedom.
[2] The Revolution had separated Church and State and suppressed
clerical privilege by the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy” enactment
of 1790. Napoleon, alive to the patriotic value of a State Church,
repealed this law and declared the divorce of Church and State to be
null and void. His negotiations with the Pope (Pius VII.) resulted, in
1801, in the arrangement known as the _Concordat_, by which the Roman
Catholic Church was again made the established national Church, its
clergy became civil servants paid by the State, and its worship became
a branch of public administration.
Lamennais was not a “modernist,” as this term is now understood, for
his theology was orthodox. His fight with the Vatican was for freedom
in the relations of the Church to society. He pleaded in his _Essai sur
L’indifference en Matière de Religion_ for the Church to accept the
principle of freedom, to leave the cherished fondling of the royalist
cause, and to present to the world the principles of a Christian
democracy. Lamennais and other liberal-minded men desired the
separation of Church and State, and were tolerant of those who were not
Catholic. They claimed, along with their own “right to believe,” that
of others “not to believe.” His was a liberal Catholicism, but its
proposals frightened his co-religionists, and drew upon him in 1832 an
encyclical letter (_Mirari vos_) from the Vatican. The Pope denounced
liberalism absolutely as an absurd and an erroneous doctrine, a piece
of folly sprung from the “fetid source of indifferentism.” Lamennais
found he could not argue, as Renan himself later put it, “with a bar of
iron.” It was the reactionary De Maistre, with his principle of papal
authority,[3] and not Lamennais, whom the Vatican, naturally enough,
chose to favour, or rather to follow.
[3] As stated in _Du Pape_, 1819.
Thus Lamennais found himself, by an almost natural and inevitable
process, outside the Church, and this in spite of the fact that his
theology was orthodox. He endeavoured to present his case in his paper
_L’Avenir_ and in an influential brochure, _The Words of a Believer_,
which left its mark upon Hugo, Michelet, Lamartine, and George Sand.
His views blended with the current of humanitarian and democratic
doctrines which developed from the Saint-Simonists, Pierre Leroux and
similar thinkers. We have already noted that these social reformers
held to their beliefs with the conviction that in them and not in the
Roman Church lay salvation.
This brings us to a crucial point which is the clue to much of the
subsequent thought upon religion. This is the profound and seemingly
irreconcilable difference between these two conceptions of religion.
The orthodox Catholic faith believes in a supernatural revelation, and
is firmly convinced that man is inherently vile and corrupt, born in
sin from which he cannot be redeemed, save by the mystical operations
of divine grace, working only through the holy sacraments and clergy of
the one true Church, to whom all power was given, according to its
view, by the historic Jesus. Its methods are conservative, its
discipline rigid and based on tradition and authority. Its system of
salvation is excessively individualistic. It holds firmly to this
pessimistic view of human nature, based on the doctrine of original
sin, thus maintaining a creed which, in the hands of a devoted clergy,
who are free from domestic ties, works as a powerful moral force upon
the individual believer. His freedom of thought is restricted; he can
neither read nor think what he likes, and the Church, having made the
thirteenth-century doctrines of Aquinas its official philosophy, hurls
anathema at ideas scientific, political, philosophical or theological
which have appeared since. No half-measures are allowed: either one is
a loyal Catholic or one is not a Catholic at all. In this relentlessly
uncompromising attitude lies the main strength of Catholicism; herein
also is contained its weakness, or at least that element which makes it
manufacture its own greatest adversaries.
While claiming to be the one Church of Jesus Christ, it does not by any
means put him in the foreground of its religion. Its hierarchy of
saints is rather a survival of polytheism; its worship of the Virgin
and cult of the _Sacré Cœur_ issue often in a religious sentimentality
and sensuality promoted by the denial of a more healthy outlet for
instincts which are an essential part of human nature. Tribute,
however, must be paid—high tribute—to the devotion of individuals,
particularly to the work done by the religious orders of women, whose
devotion the Church having won by its intense appeal to women keeps,
consecrates and organises in a manner which no other Church has
succeeded in doing. This is largely the secret of the vigorous life of
the Church, for as a power of charity the Roman Church is remarkable
and deserves respect. Her educational efforts, her missions, hospitals,
her humbler clergy, and her orders which offer opportunity of service
or of sanctuary to all types of human nature—these constitute Roman
Catholicism in a truer manner than the diplomacy of the Jesuits or the
councils of the Vatican. It is this pulsing human heart of hers which
keeps her alive, not the rigid intellectual dogmatism and antiquated
theology which she expounds, nor her loyalty to the established
political order, which, siding with the rich and powerful, frequently
gives to this professedly spiritual power a debasing taint of
materialism.
Against all this, and in vital opposition to this, we have the
humanitarians who, rejecting the doctrine of corruption, believe that
human instincts and human reason themselves make for goodness and for
God. While Catholicism looks to the past, humanitarianism looks
forward, believes in freedom and in progress, and regards the immanent
Christ-spirit as working in mankind. Its gospel is one of love and
brotherhood, a romantic doctrine issuing in love and pity for the
oppressed and the sinful. In the collective consciousness of mankind it
sees the incarnation, the growth of the immanent God. Therefore it
claims that in democracy, socialism and world brotherhood lies the true
Christianity. This, the humanitarians claim, is the true religious
idealism—that which was preached by the Founder himself and which his
Church has betrayed. The humanitarians make service to mankind the
essence of religion, and regard themselves as more truly Christian than
the Church.
In those countries where Protestantism has a large following, the two
doctrines of humanitarian optimism and of the orthodox pessimism
regarding human nature are confused vaguely together. The English mind
in particular is able to compromise and to blend the two conflicting
philosophies in varying degrees; but in the French mind its clearer
penetration and more logical acumen prevent this. The Frenchman is an
idealist and tends to extremes, either that of whole-hearted devotion
to a dominating Church or that of the abandonment of organised
religion. In Protestantism he sees only a halfway house, built upon the
first principles of criticism, and unwilling to pursue those principles
to their conclusion—namely, the rejection of all organised Church
religion, the adoption of perfect freedom for the individual in all
matters of belief, a religion founded on freedom and on personal
thought which alone is free.
Such were the two dominant notes in religious thought in France at the
opening of our period.
Catholicism resisted the humanitarianism of 1848 and strengthened its
power after the _coup d’état_. The Church and the Vatican became more
staunch in their opposition to all doctrines of modern thought. The
French clergy profited by the alliance with the aristocracy, while
religious orders, particularly the Jesuits, increased in number and in
power. Veuillot proclaimed the virtues of Catholicism in his writings.
Meanwhile the Pope’s temporal power decreased, but his spiritual power
was increasing in extent and in intensity. Centralisation went on
within the Church, and Rome (_i.e._, the Pope and the Vatican) became
all-powerful.
Just after the half-century opens the Pope (Pius IX.), in 1854,
proclaimed his authority in announcing the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception of the Virgin Mary.[4] As France had heard the sentence,
_L’Etat, c’est moi_, from the lips of one of its greatest monarchs, it
now heard from another quarter a similar principle enunciated,
L’Eglise, c’est moi. As democracy and freedom cried out against the
one, they did so against the other. Undaunted, the Vatican continued in
its absolutism, even although it must have seen that in some quarters
revolt would be the result. Ten years later the Pope attacked the whole
of modern thought, to which he was diametrically opposed, in his
encyclical _Quanta Cura_ and in his famous _Syllabus_, which
constituted a catalogue of the modern errors and heresies which he
condemned. This famous challenge was quite clear and uncompromising in
its attitude, concluding with a curse upon “him who should maintain
that the Roman Pontiff can, and must, be reconciled and compromise with
progress, liberalism and modern civilisation!” To the doctrine of
_L’Eglise, c’est moi_ had now been added that of _La Science, aussi,
c’est moi_. This was not all. In 1870 the dogma of Papal Infallibility
was proclaimed. By a strange irony of history, however, this
declaration of spiritual absolutism was followed by an entire loss of
temporal power. The outbreak of the war in that same year between
France and Prussia led to the hasty withdrawal of French troops from
the Papal Domain and the Eternal City fell to the secular power of the
Italian national army under Victor Emmanuel.
[4] This new dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin must
not, of course, be confused, as it often is by those outside the
Catholic Church, with the quite different and more ancient proposition
which asserts the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
The defeat of France at the hands of Prussia in 1871 issued in a
revival of religious sentiment, frequently seen in defeated nations. A
special mission or crusade of national repentance gathered in large
subscriptions which built the enormous Church of the Sacré Coeur
overlooking Paris from the heights of Montmartre.[5]
[5] The anti-Catholic element, however, have had the audacity, and
evidently the legal right, to place a statue to a man who, some
centuries back, was burned at the stake for failing to salute a
religious procession, in such a position immediately in front of this
great church that the plan for the large staircase cannot be carried
out.
Seeking for religious consolation, the French people found a
Catholicism which had become embittered and centralised for warfare
upon liberal religion and humanitarianism. They found that the only
organised religion they knew was dominated by the might of Rome and the
powers of the clergy. These even wished France, demoralised as she was
for the moment, to undertake the restoration of the Pope’s temporal
power in Italy. Further, they were definitely in favour of monarchy:
“the altar and the throne” were intimately associated in the
ecclesiastical mind.
It was the realisation of this which prompted Gambetta to cry out to
the Third Republic with stern warning, “Clericalism is your enemy.”
Thus began the political fight for which Rome had been strengthening
herself. With the defeat of the clerical-monarchy party in 1877 the
safety of the Republic was assured. From then until 1905 the Republic
and the Church fought each other. Educational questions were bitterly
contested (1880). The power of the Jesuits, especially, was regarded as
a constant menace to the State. The Dreyfus affair (1894- 1899) did not
improve relations, with its intense anti-semitism and anti-clericalism.
The battle was only concluded by the legislation of Waldeck-Rousseau in
1901 and Combes in 1903, expelling religious orders. Combes himself had
studied for the priesthood and was violently anti-clerical. The
culmination came in the Separation Law of 1905 carried by Briand, in
the Pope’s protest against this, followed by the Republic’s
confiscation of much Church property, a step which might have been
avoided if the French Catholics had been allowed to have their way in
an arrangement with the State regarding their churches. This was
prevented by the severance of diplomatic relations between France and
the Vatican and by the Pope’s disagreement with the French Catholics
whose wishes he ignored in his policy of definite hostility to the
French Government.[6]
[6] Relations with the Vatican, which were seen to be desirable during
the Great European War, have since been resumed (in 1921) by the
Republic.
During our period a popular semi-nationalist and semi-religious cult of
Jeanne d’Arc, “the Maid of Orleans,” appeared in France. The clergy
expressly encouraged this, with the definite object of enlisting
sentiments of nationality and patriotism on the side of the Church.
Ecclesiastical diplomacy at headquarters quickly realised the use which
might be made of this patriotic figure whom, centuries before, the
Church had thought fit to burn as a witch. The Vatican saw a
possibility of blending French patriotism with devotion to Catholicism
and thus possibly strengthening, in the eyes of the populace at least,
the waning cause of the Church.
The adoration of Jeanne d’Arc was approved as early as 1894, but when
the Church found itself in a worse plight with its relation to the
State, it made preparations in 1903 for her enrolment among the
saints.[7] She was honoured the following year with the title of
“Venerable,” but in 1908, after the break of Church and State, she was
accorded the full status of a saint, and her statue, symbolic of
patriotism militant, stands in most French churches as conspicuous
often as that of the Virgin, who, in curious contrast, fondles the
young child, and expresses the supreme loveliness of motherhood.[8] The
cult of Jeanne d’Arc flourished particularly in 1914 on the sentiments
of patriotism, militarism and religiosity then current. This was
natural because it is for these very sentiments that she stands as a
symbol. She is evidently a worthy goddess whose worship is worth while,
for we are assured that it was through _her_ beneficent efforts that
the German Army retired from Paris in 1914 and again in 1918. The
saintly maid of Orleans reappeared and beat them back! Such is the
power of the “culte” which the Church eagerly fosters. The Sacré Coeur
also has its patriotic and military uses, figuring as it did as an
emblem on some regimental flags on the battlefield. Meanwhile, the
celebrations of Napoleon’s centenary (1921) give rise to the conjecture
that he, too, will in time rank with Joan of Arc as a saint. His
canonisation would achieve absolutely that union of patriotic and
religious sentimentality to which the Church in France directs its
activities.
[7] t is interesting to observe the literature on Jeanne d’Arc
published at this time: Anatole France, _Vie de Jeanne d’Arc_ (2
vols., 1908); Durand, _Jeanne d’Arc et l’Eglise_ (1908). These are
noteworthy, also Andrew Lang’s work, _The Maid of Orleans_ (also
1908).
[8] Herein, undoubtedly, lies the strong appeal of the Church to
women.
The vast majority of the 39,000,000 French people are at least
nominally Catholic, even if only from courtesy or from a utilitarian
point of view. Only about one in sixty of the population are
Protestant. Although among cultured conservatives there is a real
devotion to the Church, the creed of France is in general something far
more broad and human than Catholicism, in spite of the tremendously
human qualities which that Church possesses. The creed of France is
summed up better in art, nature, beauty, music, science, _la patrie_,
humanity, in the worship of life itself.[9]
[9] Those who desire to study the religious psychology of France
during our period cannot find a better revelation than that given in
the wonderful novel by Roger Martin du Card, entitled Jean Barois.
I
It was against such a background of ecclesiastical and political
affairs that the play of ideas upon religion went on. Such was the
environment, the tradition which surrounded our thinkers, and we may
very firmly claim that only by a recognition that their religious and
national _milieu_ was of such a type as we have outlined, can the real
significance of their religious thought be understood. Only when we
have grasped the essential attitude of authority and tradition of the
Roman Church, its ruthless attitude to modern thought of all kinds, can
we understand the religious attitude of men like Renan, Renouvier and
Guyau.
We are also enabled to see why the appeal of the Saint-Simonist group
could present itself as a religious and, indeed, Christian appeal
outside the Church. It enables us to understand why Cousin’s
spiritualism pleased neither the Catholics nor their opponents, and to
realise why the “Religion of Humanity,” which Auguste Comte
inaugurated, made so little appeal.[10] This has been well styled an
“inverted Catholicism,” since it endeavours to preserve the ritual of
that religion and to embody the doctrines of humanitarianism. Naturally
enough it drew upon itself the scorn of both these groups. The Catholic
saw in it only blasphemy: the humanitarian saw no way in which it might
further his ends.
[10] Littré, his disciple, as we have already noted, rejected this
part of his master’s teaching. Littré was opposed by Robinet, who laid
the stress upon the “Religion of Humanity” as the crown of Comte’s
work.
Comte’s attempt to base his new religion upon Catholicism was quite
deliberate, for he strove to introduce analogies with “everything great
and deep which the Catholic system of the Middle Ages effected or even
projected.” He offered a new and fantastic trinity, compiled a calendar
of renowned historical personalities, to replace that of unknown
saints. He proclaimed “positive dogmas “and aspired to all the
authority and infallibility of the Roman Pontiff, supported by a
trained clergy, whose word should be law. Curiously enough he, too, had
his anathemas, in that he had days set apart for the solemn cursing of
the great enemies of the human race, such as Napoleon. It was indeed a
reversed Catholicism, offering a fairly good caricature of the methods
of the Roman Church, and it was equally obnoxious in its tyrannical
attitude.[11] While it professed to express humanity and love as its
central ideas it proceeded to outline a method which is the utter
negation of these. Comte made the great mistake of not realising that
loyalty to these ideals must involve spiritual freedom, and that the
religion of humanity must be a collective inspiration of free
individuals, who will in love and fellowship tolerate differences upon
metaphysical questions. Uniformity can only be mischievous.
[11] Guyau’s criticisms of Comte’s “Religion of Humanity” in his
_L’Irreligion de l’Avenir_ are interesting. “The marriage of positive
science and blind sentiment cannot produce religion” (p. 314; Eng.
trans., p. 366). “Comtism, which consists of the rites of religion and
nothing else, is an attempt to maintain life in the body after the
departure of the soul” (p. 307; Eng. trans., p. 359).
It was because he grasped this vital point that Renan’s discussion of
the religious question is so instructive. For him, religion is
essentially an affair of personal taste. Here we have another
indication of the clear way in which Renan was able to discern the
tendencies of his time. He published his _Etudes d’Histoire religieuse_
in 1857, and his Preface to the _Nouvelles Etudes d’Histoire
religieuse_ was written in 1884. He claims there that freedom is
essential to religion, and that it is absolutely necessary that the
State should have no power whatever over it. Religion is as personal
and private a matter as taste in literature or art. There should be no
State laws, he claims, relating to religion at all, any more than dress
is prescribed for citizens by law. He well points out that only a State
which is strictly neutral in religion can ever be absolutely free from
playing the _rôle_ of persecutor. The favouring of one sect will entail
some persecution or hardship upon others. Further, he sees the iniquity
of taxing the community to pay the expenses of clergy to whose
teachings they may object, or whose doctrines are not theirs. Freedom,
Renan believed, would claim its own in the near future and, denouncing
the Concordat, he prophesied the abolition of the State Church.
The worst type of organisation Renan holds to be the theocratic state,
like Islam, or the ancient Pontifical State in which dogma reigns
supreme. He condemns also the State whose religion is based upon the
profession of a majority of its citizens. There should be, as Spinoza
was wont to style it, “liberty of philosophising.” The days of the
dominance of dogma are passing, in many quarters gone by already,
“Religion has become for once and all a matter of personal taste.”
Renan himself was deeply religious in mind. He was never an atheist and
did not care for the term “free-thinker” because of its implied
associations with the irreligion of the previous century. He stands
out, however, not only in our period of French thought, but in the
world development of the century as one of the greatest masters of
religious criticism. His historical work is important, and he possessed
a knowledge and equipment for that task. His distinguished Semitic
scholarship led to his obtaining the chair of Hebrew at the Collège de
France, and enabled him to write his Histories, one of the Jews and one
of Christianity.
It was as a volume of this _Histoire des Origines du Christianisme_
that his _Vie de Jésus_ appeared in 1863. This life of the Founder of
Christianity produced a profound stir in the camps of religious
orthodoxy, and drew upon its author severe criticisms. Apart from the
particular views set forth in that volume, we must remember that the
very fact of his writing upon “a sacred subject,” which was looked upon
as a close preserve, reserved for the theologians or churchmen alone,
was deemed at that time an original and daring feat in France.
His particular views, which created at the time such scandal, were akin
to those of Baur and the Tubingen School, which Strauss (Renan’s
contemporary) had already set forth in his _Leben Jesu_.[12] Briefly,
they may be expressed as the rejection of the supernatural. Herein is
seen the scientific or “positive” influence at work upon the dogmas of
the Christian religion, a tendency which culminated in “Modernism”
within the Church, only to be condemned violently by the Pope in 1907.
It was this temper, produced by the study of documents, by criticism
and historical research which put Renan out of the Catholic Church. His
rational mind could not accept the dogmas laid down. Lamennais (who was
conservative and orthodox in his theology, and possessed no taint of
“modernism” in the technical sense) had declared that the
starting-point should be faith and not reason. Renan aptly asks in
reply to this, “and what is to be the test, in the last resort, of the
claims of faith is not reason?”
[12] Written in 1835. Littré issued a French translation in 1839, a
year previous to the appearance of the English version by George
Eliot. Strauss’s life covers 1808-1874.
In Renan we find a good illustration of the working of the spirit of
modern thought upon a religious mind. Being a sincere and penetrating
intellect he could not, like so many people, learned folk among them,
keep his religious ideas and his reason in separate watertight
compartments. This kind of people Renan likens in his _Souvenirs
d’Enfance et de Jeunesse_ to mother-o’-pearl shells of Francois de
Sales “which are able to live in the sea without tasting a drop of salt
water.” Yet he realises the comfort of such an attitude. “I see around
me,” he continues, “men of pure and simple lives whom Christianity has
had the power to make virtuous and happy. . . . But I have noticed that
none of them have the critical faculty, for which let them bless God!”
He well realises the contentment which, springing sometimes from a
dullness of mind or lack of sensitiveness, excludes all doubt and all
problems.
In Catholicism he sees a bar of iron which will not reason or bend. “I
can only return to it by amputation of my faculties, by definitely
stigmatising my reason and condemning it to perpetual silence.” Writing
of his exit from the Seminary of Saint Sulpice, where he was trained
for the priesthood, he remarks in his _Souvenirs d’Enfance et de
Jeunesse_ that “there were times when I was sorry that I was not a
Protestant, so that I might be a philosopher without ceasing to be a
Christian.” For Renan, as for so many minds in modern France, severance
from the Roman Church is equivalent to severance from Christianity as
an organised religion. The practical dilemma is presented of
unquestioning obedience to an infallible Church on the one hand, or the
attitude of _libre-penseur_ on the other. There are not the
accommodating varieties of the Protestant presentation of the Christian
religion. Renan’s spiritual pilgrimage is but an example of many. In a
measure this condition of affairs is a source of strength to the Roman
Church for, since a break with it so often means a break with
Christianity or indeed with all definite religion, only the bolder and
stronger thinkers make the break which their intellect makes
imperative. The mass of the people, however dissatisfied they may be
with the Church, nevertheless accept it, for they see no alternative
but the opposite extreme. No half-way house of non-conformity presents
itself as a rule.
Yet, as we have insisted, Renan had an essentially religious view of
the universe, and he expressly claimed that his break with the Church
and his criticism of her were due to a devotion to pure religion, and
he even adds, to a loyalty to the spirit of her Founder. Although, as
he remarks in his _Nouvelles Etudes religieuses_, it is true that the
most modest education tends to destroy the belief in the superstitious
elements in religion, it is none the less true that the very highest
culture can never destroy religion in the highest sense. “Dogmas pass,
but piety is eternal.” The external trappings of religion have suffered
by the growth of the modern sciences of nature and of historical
criticism. The mind of cultivated persons does not now present the same
attitude to evidence in regard to religious doctrines which were once
accepted without question. The sources of the origins of the Christian
religion are themselves questionable. This, Renan says, must not
discourage the believers in true religion, for that is not the kind of
foundation upon which religion reposes. Dogmas in the past gave rise to
divisions and quarrels, only by feeling can religious persons be united
in fellowship. The most prophetic words of Jesus were, Renan points
out, those in which he indicated a time when men “would not worship God
in this mountain nor in Jerusalem, but when the true worshippers would
worship in spirit and in truth.” It was precisely this spirit which
Renan admired in Jesus, whom he considered more of a philosopher than
the Church, and he reminds the “Christians”[13] who railed against him
as an unbeliever that Jesus had had much more influence upon him than
they gave him credit for, and, more particularly, that his break with
the Church was due to loyalty to Jesus. By such loyalty Renan meant not
a blind worship, but a reverence which endeavoured to appreciate and
follow the ideals for which Jesus himself stood. It did not involve
slavish acceptance of all he said, even if that were intelligible, and
clear, which it is not. “To be a Platonist,” remarks Renan, “I need not
adore Plato, or believe _all_ that he said.”[14]
[13] Renan complains of the ignorance of the clergy of Rome regarding
his own work, which they did not understand because they had not read
it, merely relying on the Press and other sources for false and
biassed accounts.
[14] _Cf._ Renan’s Essay in _Questions contemporaines_ on “_L’Avenir
religieux des Sociétés modernes_.”
Renan is in agreement with the central ideas of Jesus’ own faith, and
he rightly regards him as one of the greatest contributors to the
world’s religious thought. Renan’s religion is free from
supernaturalism and dogma. He believes in infinite Goodness or
Providence, but he despises the vulgar and crude conceptions of God
which so mar a truly religious outlook. He points out how prayer, in
the sense of a request to Heaven for a particular object, is becoming
recognised as foolish. ‘As a “meditation,” an interview with one’s own
conscience, it has a deeply religious value. The vulgar idea of prayer
reposes on an immoral conception of God. Renan rightly sees the central
importance for religion of possessing a sane view of the divinity, not
one which belongs to primitive tribal wargods and weather-gods. He
aptly says, in this connection, that the one who was defeated in 1871
was not only France but _le bon Dieu_ to which she in vain appealed. In
his place was to be found, remarks Renan with a little sarcasm, “only a
Lord God of Hosts who was unmoved by the moral ‘délicatesse’ of the
Uhlans and the incontestable excellence of the Prussian shells.”[15] He
rightly points to the immoral use made of the divinity by pious folk
whose whole religion is utilitarian and materialistic. They do good
only in order to get to heaven or escape hell,[16] and believe in God
because it is necessary for them to have a confidant and sonsoler, to
whom they may cry in time of trouble, and to whose will they may
resignedly impute the evil chastisement which their own errors have
brought upon them individually or collectively. But, he rightly claims,
it is only where utilitarian calculations and self-interest end, that
religion begins with the sense of the Infinite and of the Ideal
Goodness and Beauty and Love.
[15] _Dialogues et Fragments philosophiques_, p. ix.
[16] One pious individual thought to convert Renan himself by writing
him every month, quite briefly, to this effect “There is a hell.”
He endeavours in his _Examen de Conscience philosophique_ (1888) to sum
up his attitude upon this question. There he affirms that it is beyond
dispute or doubt that we have no evidence whatever of the action in the
universe of one or of several wills superior to that of man. The actual
state of this universe gives no sign of any external intervention, and
we know nothing of its beginning. No beneficent interfering power, a
_deus ex machinâ_, corrects or directs the operation of blind forces,
enlightens man or improves his lot. No God appears miraculously to
prevent evils, to crush disease, stop wars, or save his children from
peril. No end or purpose is visible to us. God in the popular sense,
living and acting as a Divine Providence, is not to be seen in our
universe. The question is, however, whether this universe of ours is
the totality of existence. Doubt comes into play here, and if our
universe is not this totality, then God, although absent from his
world, might still exist outside it. Our finite world is little in
relation to the Infinite, it is a mere speck in the universe we know,
and its duration to a divine Being might be only a day.
The Infinite, continues Renan, surrounds our finite world above and
below. It stretches on the one hand to the infinitely large concourse
of worlds and systems, and, on the other, to the infinitely little as
atoms, microbes and the germs by which human life itself is passed on
from one generation to another. The prospect of the world we know
involves logically and fatally, says Renan, atheism. But this atheism,
he adds, may be due to the fact that we cannot see far enough. Our
universe is a phenomenon which has had a beginning and will have an
end. That which has had no beginning and will have no end is the
Absolute All, or God. Metaphysics has always been a science proceeding
upon this assumption, “Something exists, therefore something has
existed from all eternity.” which is akin to the scientific principle,
“No effect with- out a cause.”[17]
[17] _Examen de Conscience philosophique_, p. 412 of the volume
_Feuilles détachées_.
We must not allow ourselves to be misled too far by the constructions
or inductions about the uniformity and immutability of the laws of
nature. “A God may reveal himself, perhaps, one day.” The infinite may
dispose of our finite world, use it for its own ends. The expression,
“Nature and its author,” may not be so absurd as some seem to think it.
It is true that our experience presents no reason for forming such an
hypothesis, but we must keep our sense of the infinite. “Everything is
possible, even God,” and Renan adds, “If God exists, he must be good,
and he will finish by being just.” It is as foolish to deny as to
assert his existence in a dogmatic and thoughtless manner. It is upon
this sense of the infinite and upon the ideals of Goodness, Beauty and
Love that true faith or piety reposes.
Love, declares Renan, is one of the principal revelations of the
divine, and he laments the neglect of it by philosophy. It runs in a
certain sense through all living beings, and in man has been the school
of gentleness and courtesy—nay more, of morals and of religion. Love,
understood in the high sense, is a sacred, religious thing, or rather
is a part of religion itself. In a tone which recalls that of the New
Testament and Tolstoi, Renan beseeches us to remember that God _is_
Love, and that where Love is there God is. In loving, man is at his
best; he goes out of himself and feels himself in contact with the
infinite. The very act of love is veritably sacred and divine, the
union of body and soul with another is a holy communion with the
infinite. He remarks in his _Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse_,
doubtless remembering the simple purity and piety of his mother and
sister, that when reflection has brought us to doubt, and even to a
scepticism regarding goodness, then the spontaneous affirmation of
goodness and beauty which exists in a noble and virtuous woman saves us
from cynicism and restores us to communication with the eternal spring
in which God reflects himself. Love, which Renan with reason laments as
having been neglected on its most serious side and looked upon as mere
sentimentality, offers the highest proof of God. In it lies our
umbilical link with nature, but at the same time our communion with the
infinite. He recalls some of Browning’s views in his attitude to love
as a redeeming power. The most wretched criminal still has something
good in him, a divine spark, if he be capable of loving.
It is the spirit of love and goodness which Renan admires in the simple
faith of those separated far from him in their theological ideas. “God
forbid,” he says,[18] “that I should speak slightingly of those who,
devoid of the critical sense, and impelled by very pure and powerful
religious motives, are attached to one or other of the great
established systems of faith. I love the simple faith of the peasant,
the serious conviction of the priest.”
[18] _L’Avenir de la Science_, pp. 436, 437; Eng. trans., p. 410.
“Supprimer Dieu, serait-ce amoindrir l’univers?”
asks Guyau in one of his _Vers d’un Philosophe_.’[19] Renan observes
that if we tell the simple to live by aspiration after truth and
beauty, these words would have no meaning for them. “Tell them to love
God, not to offend God, they will understand you perfectly. God,
Providence, soul, good old words, rather heavy, but expressive and
respectable which science will explain, but will never replace with
advantage. What is God for humanity if not the category of the
_ideal_?”[20]
[19] _“Question,” Vers d’un Philosophe_, p. 65.
[20] _L’Avenir de la Science_,” p. 476; Eng. trans., p. 445.
This is the point upon which Vacherot insisted in his treatment of
religion. He claimed that the conception of God arises in the human
consciousness from a combination of two separate ideas. The first is
the notion of the Infinite which Science itself approves, the second
the notion of perfection which Science is unable to show us anywhere
unless it be found in the human consciousness and its thoughts, where
it abides as the magnetic force ever drawing us onward and acts at the
same time as a dynamic, giving power to every progressive movement,
being “the Ideal” in the mind and heart of man.
Similar was the doctrine of Taine, who saw in Reason the ideal which
would produce in mankind a new religion, which would be that of Science
and Philosophy demanding from art forms of expression in harmony with
themselves. This religion would be free in doctrine. Taine himself
looked upon religion as “a metaphysical poem accompanied by belief,”
and he approached to the conception of Spinoza of a contemplation which
may well be called an “intellectual love of God.”
II
Like Renan, Renouvier was keenly interested in religion and its
problems; he was also a keen opponent of the Roman Catholic Church and
faith, against which he brought his influence into play in two ways—by
his _néo-criticisme_ as expressed in his written volumes and by his
energetic editing of the two periodicals _La Critique philosophique_
and _La Critique religieuse_.
In undertaking the publication of these periodicals Renouvier’s
confessed aim was that of a definite propaganda. While the Roman Church
profited by the feelings of disappointment and demoralisation which
followed the Franco-Prussian War, and strove to shepherd wavering souls
again into its fold, to find there a peace which evidently the world
could not give, Renouvier (together with his friend Pillon) endeavoured
to rally his countrymen by urging the importance, and, if possible, the
acceptance of his own political and religious convictions arising out
of his philosophy. The _Critique philosophique_ appeared weekly from
its commencement in 1872 until 1884, thereafter as a monthly until
1889. Among its contributors, whose names are of religious
significance, were A. Sabatier, L. Dauriac, R. Allier[21] and William
James.
[21] Now Dean of the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Paris.
Renouvier’s great enthusiasm for his periodical is the main feature of
this period of his life, although, owing to his tremendous energy, it
does not seem to have interfered with the publication of his more
permanent works. The political and general policy of this journal may
be summed up in a sentence from the last year’s issue,[22] where we
find Renouvier remarking that it had been his aim throughout “to uphold
strictly republican principles and to fight all that savoured of
Caesar, or imperialism.” The declared foe of monarchy in politics, he
was equally the declared foe of the Pope in the religious realm. His
attitude was one of very marked hostility to the power of the Vatican,
which he realised to be increasing within the Roman Church, and one of
keen opposition to the general power of that Church and her clergy in
France. Renouvier’s paper was quite definitely and aggressively
anti-Catholic. He urged all Catholic readers of his paper who professed
loyalty to the Republic to quit the Roman Church and to affiliate
themselves to the Protestant body.
[22] _La Critique philosophique_, 1889, tome ii., p. 403.