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GOD AND THE STATE
by
MICHAEL BAKUNIN
Mother Earth Publishing Association
[Illustration: MICHAEL BAKUNIN]
GOD AND THE STATE
by
MICHAEL BAKUNIN
With a Preface by Carlo Cafiero and Elisee Reclus
First American Edition
Mother Earth Publishing Association
20 East 125th Street
New York City
Preface to the First French Edition
One of us is soon to tell in all its details the story of the life of
Michael Bakunin, but its general features are already sufficiently
familiar. Friends and enemies know that this man was great in thought,
will, persistent energy; they know also with what lofty contempt he
looked down upon wealth, rank, glory, all the wretched ambitions which
most human beings are base enough to entertain. A Russian gentleman
related by marriage to the highest nobility of the empire, he was one
of the first to enter that intrepid society of rebels who were able
to release themselves from traditions, prejudices, race and class
interests, and set their own comfort at naught. With them he fought the
stern battle of life, aggravated by imprisonment, exile, all the dangers
and all the sorrows that men of self-sacrifice have to undergo during
their tormented existence.
A simple stone and a name mark the spot in the cemetery of Berne where
was laid the body of Bakunin. Even that is perhaps too much to honor the
memory of a worker who held vanities of that sort in such slight esteem.
His friends surely will raise to him no ostentatious tombstone or
statue. They know with what a huge laugh he would have received them,
had they spoken to him of a commemorative structure erected to his
glory; they knew, too, that the true way to honor their dead is to
continue their work--with the same ardor and perseverance that they
themselves brought to it. In this case, indeed, a difficult task
demanding all our efforts, for among the revolutionists of the present
generation not one has labored more fervently in the common cause of
the Revolution.
In Russia among the students, in Germany among the insurgents of
Dresden, in Siberia among his brothers in exile, in America, in
England, in France, in Switzerland, in Italy, among all earnest men,
his direct influence has been considerable. The originality of his
ideas, the imagery and vehemence of his eloquence, his untiring zeal in
propagandism, helped too by the natural majesty of his person and by a
powerful vitality, gave Bakunin access to all the revolutionary groups,
and his efforts left deep traces everywhere, even upon those who, after
having welcomed him, thrust him out because of a difference of object or
method. His correspondence was most extensive; he passed entire nights
in preparing long letters to his friends in the revolutionary world,
and some of these letters, written to strengthen the timid, arouse the
sluggish, and outline plans of propagandism or revolt, took on the
proportions of veritable volumes. These letters more than anything else
explain the prodigious work of Bakunin in the revolutionary movement of
the century. The pamphlets published by him, in Russian, French, and
Italian, however important they may be, and however useful they may have
been in spreading the new ideas, are the smallest part of Bakunin's
work.
The present memoir, "God and the State," is really a fragment of a
letter or report. Composed in the same manner as most of Bakunin's other
writings, it has the same literary fault, lack of proportion; moreover
it breaks off abruptly: we have searched in vain to discover the end of
the manuscript. Bakunin never had the time necessary to finish all the
tasks he undertook. One work was not completed when others were already
under way. "My life itself is a fragment," he said to those who
criticised his writings. Nevertheless, the readers of "God and the
State" certainly will not regret that Bakunin's memoir, incomplete
though it be, has been published. The questions discussed in it are
treated decisively and with a singular vigor of logic. Rightly
addressing himself only to his honest opponents, Bakunin demonstrates to
them the emptiness of their belief in that divine authority on which all
temporal authorities are founded; he proves to them the purely human
genesis of all governments; finally, without stopping to discuss those
bases of the State already condemned by public morality, such as
physical superiority, violence, nobility, wealth, he does justice to the
theory which would entrust science with the government of societies.
Supposing even that it were possible to recognize, amid the conflict of
rival ambitions and intrigues, who are the pretenders and who are the
real savants, and that a method of election could be found which would
not fail to lodge the power in the hands of those whose knowledge is
authentic, what guarantee could they offer us of the wisdom and honesty
of their government? On the contrary, can we not foresee in these new
masters the same follies and the same crimes found in those of former
days and of the present time? In the first place, science is not: it
is becoming. The learned man of to-day is but the know-nothing of
to-morrow. Let him once imagine that he has reached the end, and for
that very reason he sinks beneath even the babe just born. But, could he
recognize truth in its essence, he can only corrupt himself by privilege
and corrupt others by power. To establish his government, he must try,
like all chiefs of State, to arrest the life of the masses moving below
him, keep them in ignorance in order to preserve quiet, and gradually
debase them that he may rule them from a loftier throne.
For the rest, since the _doctrinaires_ made their appearance, the true
or pretended "genius" has been trying his hand at wielding the sceptre
of the world, and we know what it has cost us. We have seen them at
work, all these savants: the more hardened the more they have studied;
the narrower in their views the more time they have spent in examining
some isolated fact in all its aspects; without any experience of life,
because they have long known no other horizon than the walls of their
cheese; childish in their passions and vanities, because they have been
unable to participate in serious struggles and have never learned the
true proportion of things. Have we not recently witnessed the foundation
of a whole school of "thinkers"--wretched courtiers, too, and people of
unclean lives--who have constructed a whole cosmogony for their sole
use? According to them, worlds have been created, societies have
developed, revolutions have overturned nations, empires have gone down
in blood, poverty, disease, and death have been the queens of humanity,
only to raise up an _elite_ of academicians, the full-blown flower, of
which all other men are but the manure. That these editors of the
_Temps_ and the _Debats_ may have leisure to "think," nations live and
die in ignorance; all other human beings are destined for death in order
that these gentlemen may become immortal!
But we may reassure ourselves: all these academicians will not have the
audacity of Alexander in cutting with his sword the Gordian knot; they
will not lift the blade of Charlemagne. Government by science is
becoming as impossible as that of divine right, wealth, or brute force.
All powers are henceforth to be submitted to pitiless criticism. Men in
whom the sentiment of equality is born suffer themselves no longer to be
governed; they learn to govern themselves. In precipitating from the
heights of the heavens him from whom all power is reputed to descend,
societies unseat also all those who reigned in his name. Such is the
revolution now in progress. States are breaking up to give place to a
new order, in which, as Bakunin was fond of saying, "human justice will
be substituted for divine justice." If it is allowable to cite any one
name from those of the revolutionists who have taken part in this
immense work of renovation, there is not one that may be singled out
with more justice than that of Michael Bakunin.
Carlo Cafiero.
Elisee Reclus.
GOD AND THE STATE
Who are right, the idealists or the materialists? The question once
stated in this way hesitation becomes impossible. Undoubtedly the
idealists are wrong and the materialists right. Yes, facts are before
ideas; yes, the ideal, as Proudhon said, is but a flower, whose root
lies in the material conditions of existence. Yes, the whole history of
humanity, intellectual and moral, political and social, is but a
reflection of its economic history.
All branches of modern science, of true and disinterested science,
concur in proclaiming this grand truth, fundamental and decisive: The
social world, properly speaking, the human world--in short, humanity--is
nothing other than the last and supreme development--at least on our
planet and as far as we know--the highest manifestation of animality.
But as every development necessarily implies a negation, that of its
base or point of departure, humanity is at the same time and essentially
the deliberate and gradual negation of the animal element in man; and it
is precisely this negation, as rational as it is natural, and rational
only because natural--at once historical and logical, as inevitable
as the development and realization of all the natural laws in the
world--that constitutes and creates the ideal, the world of intellectual
and moral convictions, ideas.
Yes, our first ancestors, our Adams and our Eves, were, if not gorillas,
very near relatives of gorillas, omnivorous, intelligent and ferocious
beasts, endowed in a higher degree than the animals of any other species
with two precious faculties--_the power to think_ and _the desire to
rebel_.
These faculties, combining their progressive action in history,
represent the essential factor, the negative power in the positive
development of human animality, and create consequently all that
constitutes humanity in man.
The Bible, which is a very interesting and here and there very profound
book when considered as one of the oldest surviving manifestations of
human wisdom and fancy, expresses this truth very naively in its myth of
original sin. Jehovah, who of all the good gods adored by men was
certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most
unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile
to human dignity and liberty--Jehovah had just created Adam and Eve, to
satisfy we know not what caprice; no doubt to while away his time, which
must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic solitude, or that
he might have some new slaves. He generously placed at their disposal
the whole earth, with all its fruits and animals, and set but a single
limit to this complete enjoyment. He expressly forbade them from
touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that
man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal
beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his
master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first
freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his
bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his
brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat
of the fruit of knowledge.
We know what followed. The good God, whose foresight, which is one of
the divine faculties, should have warned him of what would happen, flew
into a terrible and ridiculous rage; he cursed Satan, man, and the world
created by himself, striking himself so to speak in his own creation, as
children do when they get angry; and, not content with smiting our
ancestors themselves, he cursed them in all the generations to come,
innocent of the crime committed by their forefathers. Our Catholic and
Protestant theologians look upon that as very profound and very just,
precisely because it is monstrously iniquitous and absurd. Then,
remembering that he was not only a God of vengeance and wrath, but also
a God of love, after having tormented the existence of a few milliards
of poor human beings and condemned them to an eternal hell, he took pity
on the rest, and, to save them and reconcile his eternal and divine love
with his eternal and divine anger, always greedy for victims and blood,
he sent into the world, as an expiatory victim, his only son, that he
might be killed by men. That is called the mystery of the Redemption,
the basis of all the Christian religions. Still, if the divine Savior
had saved the human world! But no; in the paradise promised by Christ,
as we know, such being the formal announcement, the elect will number
very few. The rest, the immense majority of the generations present and
to come, will burn eternally in hell. In the meantime, to console us,
God, ever just, ever good, hands over the earth to the government of the
Napoleon Thirds, of the William Firsts, of the Ferdinands of Austria,
and of the Alexanders of all the Russias.
Such are the absurd tales that are told and the monstrous doctrines that
are taught, in the full light of the nineteenth century, in all the
public schools of Europe, at the express command of the government.
They call this civilizing the people! Is it not plain that all these
governments are systematic poisoners, interested stupefiers of the
masses?
I have wandered from my subject, because anger gets hold of me whenever
I think of the base and criminal means which they employ to keep the
nations in perpetual slavery, undoubtedly that they may be the better
able to fleece them. Of what consequence are the crimes of all the
Tropmanns in the world compared with this crime of treason against
humanity committed daily, in broad day, over the whole surface of the
civilized world, by those who dare to call themselves the guardians and
the fathers of the people? I return to the myth of original sin.
God admitted that Satan was right; he recognized that the devil did not
deceive Adam and Eve in promising them knowledge and liberty as a reward
for the act of disobedience which he had induced them to commit; for,
immediately they had eaten of the forbidden fruit, God himself said (see
Bible): "Behold, the man is become as one of the gods, to know good and
evil; prevent him, therefore, from eating of the fruit of eternal life,
lest he become immortal like Ourselves."
Let us disregard now the fabulous portion of this myth and consider its
true meaning, which is very clear. Man has emancipated himself; he has
separated himself from animality and constituted himself a man; he has
begun his distinctively human history and development by an act of
disobedience and science--that is, by _rebellion_ and by _thought_.
* * * * *
Three elements or, if you like, three fundamental principles constitute
the essential conditions of all human development, collective or
individual, in history: (1) _human animality_; (2) _thought_; and (3)
_rebellion_. To the first properly corresponds _social and private
economy_; to the second, _science_; to the third, _liberty_.
* * * * *
Idealists of all schools, aristocrats and _bourgeois_, theologians and
metaphysicians, politicians and moralists, religionists, philosophers,
or poets, not forgetting the liberal economists--unbounded worshippers
of the ideal, as we know--are much offended when told that man, with
his magnificent intelligence, his sublime ideas, and his boundless
aspirations, is, like all else existing in the world, nothing but
matter, only a product of _vile matter_.
We may answer that the matter of which materialists speak, matter
spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive, matter
chemically or organically determined and manifested by the properties or
forces, mechanical, physical, animal, and intelligent, which necessarily
belong to it--that this matter has nothing in common with the _vile
matter_ of the idealists. The latter, a product of their false
abstraction, is indeed a stupid, inanimate, immobile thing, incapable
of giving birth to the smallest product, a _caput mortuum_, an _ugly_
fancy in contrast to the _beautiful_ fancy which they call _God_; as the
opposite of this supreme being, matter, their matter, stripped by them
of all that constitutes its real nature, necessarily represents supreme
nothingness. They have taken away from matter intelligence, life, all
its determining qualities, active relations or forces, motion itself,
without which matter would not even have weight, leaving it nothing but
impenetrability and absolute immobility in space; they have attributed
all these natural forces, properties, and manifestations to the
imaginary being created by their abstract fancy; then, interchanging
_roles_, they have called this product of their imagination, this
phantom, this God who is nothing, "supreme Being," and, as a necessary
consequence, have declared that the real being, matter, the world, is
nothing. After which they gravely tell us that this matter is incapable
of producing anything, not even of setting itself in motion, and
consequently must have been created by their God.
At the end of this book I exposed the fallacies and truly revolting
absurdities to which one is inevitably led by this imagination of a God,
let him be considered as a personal being, the creator and organizer of
worlds; or even as impersonal, a kind of divine soul spread over the
whole universe and constituting thus its eternal principle; or let him
be an idea, infinite and divine, always present and active in the world,
and always manifested by the totality of material and definite beings.
Here I shall deal with one point only.
The gradual development of the material world, as well as of organic
animal life and of the historically progressive intelligence of man,
individually or socially, is perfectly conceivable. It is a wholly
natural movement from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the
higher, from the inferior to the superior; a movement in conformity with
all our daily experiences, and consequently in conformity also with our
natural logic, with the distinctive laws of our mind, which being formed
and developed only by the aid of these same experiences, is, so to
speak, but the mental, cerebral reproduction or reflected summary
thereof.
The system of the idealists is quite the contrary of this. It is the
reversal of all human experiences and of that universal and common good
sense which is the essential condition of all human understanding, and
which, in rising from the simple and unanimously recognized truth
that twice two are four to the sublimest and most complex scientific
considerations--admitting, moreover, nothing that has not stood the
severest tests of experience or observation of things and facts--becomes
the only serious basis of human knowledge.
Very far from pursuing the natural order from the lower to the higher,
from the inferior to the superior, and from the relatively simple to
the more complex; instead of wisely and rationally accompanying the
progressive and real movement from the world called inorganic to the
world organic, vegetables, animal, and then distinctively human--from
chemical matter or chemical being to living matter or living being, and
from living being to thinking being--the idealists, obsessed, blinded,
and pushed on by the divine phantom which they have inherited from
theology, take precisely the opposite course. They go from the higher to
the lower, from the superior to the inferior, from the complex to the
simple. They begin with God, either as a person or as divine substance
or idea, and the first step that they take is a terrible fall from the
sublime heights of the eternal ideal into the mire of the material
world; from absolute perfection into absolute imperfection; from thought
to being, or rather, from supreme being to nothing. When, how, and why
the divine being, eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect, probably weary
of himself, decided upon this desperate _salto mortale_ is something
which no idealist, no theologian, no metaphysician, no poet, has
ever been able to understand himself or explain to the profane. All
religions, past and present, and all the systems of transcendental
philosophy hinge on this unique and iniquitous mystery.[1] Holy men,
inspired lawgivers, prophets, messiahs, have searched it for life, and
found only torment and death. Like the ancient sphinx, it has devoured
them, because they could not explain it. Great philosophers, from
Heraclitus and Plato down to Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel, not to mention the Indian philosophers, have
written heaps of volumes and built systems as ingenious as sublime, in
which they have said by the way many beautiful and grand things and
discovered immortal truths, but they have left this mystery, the
principal object of their transcendental investigations, as unfathomable
as before. The gigantic efforts of the most wonderful geniuses that the
world has known, and who, one after another, for at least thirty
centuries, have undertaken anew this labor of Sisyphus, have resulted
only in rendering this mystery still more incomprehensible. Is it to be
hoped that it will be unveiled to us by the routine speculations of some
pedantic disciple of an artificially warmed-over metaphysics at a time
when all living and serious spirits have abandoned that ambiguous
science born of a compromise--historically explicable no doubt--between
the unreason of faith and sound scientific reason?
It is evident that this terrible mystery is inexplicable--that is,
absurd, because only the absurd admits of no explanation. It is evident
that whoever finds it essential to his happiness and life must renounce
his reason, and return, if he can, to naive, blind, stupid faith, to
repeat with Tertullianus and all sincere believers these words, which
sum up the very quintessence of theology: _Credo quia absurdum_. Then
all discussion ceases, and nothing remains but the triumphant stupidity
of faith. But immediately there arises another question: _How comes an
intelligent and well-informed man ever to feel the need of believing in
this mystery?_
Nothing is more natural than that the belief in God, the creator,
regulator, judge, master, curser, savior, and benefactor of the
world, should still prevail among the people, especially in the rural
districts, where it is more widespread than among the proletariat of the
cities. The people, unfortunately, are still very ignorant, and are kept
in ignorance by the systematic efforts of all the governments, who
consider this ignorance, not without good reason, as one of the
essential conditions of their own power. Weighted down by their daily
labor, deprived of leisure, of intellectual intercourse, of reading, in
short of all the means and a good portion of the stimulants that develop
thought in men, the people generally accept religious traditions without
criticism and in a lump. These traditions surround them from infancy in
all the situations of life, and artificially sustained in their minds by
a multitude of official poisoners of all sorts, priests and laymen, are
transformed therein into a sort of mental and moral habit, too often
more powerful even than their natural good sense.
There is another reason which explains and in some sort justifies the
absurd beliefs of the people--namely, the wretched situation to which
they find themselves fatally condemned by the economic organization
of society in the most civilized countries of Europe. Reduced,
intellectually and morally as well as materially, to the minimum of
human existence, confined in their life like a prisoner in his prison,
without horizon, without outlet, without even a future if we believe
the economists, the people would have the singularly narrow souls and
blunted instincts of the bourgeois if they did not feel a desire to
escape; but of escape there are but three methods--two chimerical and a
third real. The first two are the dram-shop and the church, debauchery
of the body or debauchery of the mind; the third is social revolution.
Hence I conclude this last will be much more potent than all the
theological propagandism of the freethinkers to destroy to their last
vestige the religious beliefs and dissolute habits of the people,
beliefs and habits much more intimately connected than is generally
supposed. In substituting for the at once illusory and brutal enjoyments
of bodily and spiritual licentiousness the enjoyments, as refined as
they are real, of humanity developed in each and all, the social
revolution alone will have the power to close at the same time all the
dram-shops and all the churches.
Till then the people, taken as a whole, will believe; and, if they have
no reason to believe, they will have at least a right.
There is a class of people who, if they do not believe, must at
least make a semblance of believing. This class, comprising all the
tormentors, all the oppressors, and all the exploiters of humanity;
priests, monarchs, statesmen, soldiers, public and private financiers,
officials of all sorts, policemen, gendarmes, jailers and executioners,
monopolists, capitalists, tax-leeches, contractors and landlords,
lawyers, economists, politicians of all shades, down to the smallest
vendor of sweetmeats, all will repeat in unison those words of Voltaire:
"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." For, you
understand, "the people must have a religion." That is the safety-valve.
There exists, finally, a somewhat numerous class of honest but timid
souls who, too intelligent to take the Christian dogmas seriously,
reject them in detail, but have neither the courage nor the strength nor
the necessary resolution to summarily renounce them altogether. They
abandon to your criticism all the special absurdities of religion, they
turn up their noses at all the miracles, but they cling desperately to
the principal absurdity; the source of all the others, to the miracle
that explains and justifies all the other miracles, the existence of
God. Their God is not the vigorous and powerful being, the brutally
positive God of theology. It is a nebulous, diaphanous, illusory being
that vanishes into nothing at the first attempt to grasp it; it is a
mirage, an _ignis fatuus_ that neither warms nor illuminates. And yet
they hold fast to it, and believe that, were it to disappear, all would
disappear with it. They are uncertain, sickly souls, who have lost their
reckoning in the present civilization, belonging to neither the present
nor the future, pale phantoms eternally suspended between heaven and
earth, and occupying exactly the same position between the politics of
the bourgeois and the Socialism of the proletariat. They have neither
the power nor the wish nor the determination to follow out their
thought, and they waste their time and pains in constantly endeavoring
to reconcile the irreconcilable. In public life these are known as
bourgeois Socialists.
With them, or against them, discussion is out of the question. They are
too puny.
But there are a few illustrious men of whom no one will dare to speak
without respect, and whose vigorous health, strength of mind, and good
intention no one will dream of calling in question. I need only cite the
names of Mazzini, Michelet, Quinet, John Stuart Mill.[2] Generous and
strong souls, great hearts, great minds, great writers, and the first
the heroic and revolutionary regenerator of a great nation, they are
all apostles of idealism and bitter despisers and adversaries of
materialism, and consequently of Socialism also, in philosophy as well
as in politics.
Against them, then, we must discuss this question.
First, let it be remarked that not one of the illustrious men I have
just named nor any other idealistic thinker of any consequence in our
day has given any attention to the logical side of this question
properly speaking. Not one has tried to settle philosophically the
possibility of the divine _salto mortale_ from the pure and eternal
regions of spirit into the mire of the material world. Have they feared
to approach this irreconcilable contradiction and despaired of solving
it after the failures of the greatest geniuses of history, or have
they looked upon it as already sufficiently well settled? That is
their secret. The fact is that they have neglected the theoretical
demonstration of the existence of a God, and have developed only its
practical motives and consequences. They have treated it as a fact
universally accepted, and, as such, no longer susceptible of any
doubt whatever, for sole proof thereof limiting themselves to the
establishment of the antiquity and this very universality of the
belief in God.
This imposing unanimity, in the eyes of many illustrious men and writers
to quote only the most famous of them who eloquently expressed it,
Joseph de Maistre and the great Italian patriot, Giuseppe Mazzini--is of
more value than all the demonstrations of science; and if the reasoning
of a small number of logical and even very powerful, but isolated,
thinkers is against it, so much the worse, they say, for these thinkers
and their logic, for universal consent, the general and primitive
adoption of an idea, has always been considered the most triumphant
testimony to its truth. The sentiment of the whole world, a conviction
that is found and maintained always and everywhere, cannot be mistaken;
it must have its root in a necessity absolutely inherent in the very
nature of man. And since it has been established that all peoples, past
and present, have believed and still believe in the existence of God, it
is clear that those who have the misfortune to doubt it, whatever the
logic that led them to this doubt, are abnormal exceptions, monsters.
Thus, then, the _antiquity_ and _universality_ of a belief should be
regarded, contrary to all science and all logic, as sufficient and
unimpeachable proof of its truth. Why?
Until the days of Copernicus and Galileo everybody believed that the sun
revolved about the earth. Was not everybody mistaken? What is more
ancient and more universal than slavery? Cannibalism perhaps. From the
origin of historic society down to the present day there has been
always and everywhere exploitation of the compulsory labor of the
masses--slaves, serfs, or wage-workers--by some dominant minority;
oppression of the people by the Church and by the State. Must it be
concluded that this exploitation and this oppression are necessities
absolutely inherent in the very existence of human society? These are
examples which show that the argument of the champions of God proves
nothing.
Nothing, in fact, is as universal or as ancient as the iniquitous and
absurd; truth and justice, on the contrary, are the least universal, the
youngest features in the development of human society. In this fact,
too, lies the explanation of a constant historical phenomenon--namely,
the persecution of which those who first proclaim the truth have been
and continue to be the objects at the hands of the official, privileged,
and interested representatives of "universal" and "ancient" beliefs, and
often also at the hands of the same masses who, after having tortured
them, always end by adopting their ideas and rendering them victorious.
To us materialists and Revolutionary Socialists, there is nothing
astonishing or terrifying in this historical phenomenon. Strong in our
conscience, in our love of truth at all hazards, in that passion for
logic which of itself alone constitutes a great power and outside of
which there is no thought; strong in our passion for justice and in our
unshakable faith in the triumph of humanity over all theoretical and
practical bestialities; strong, finally, in the mutual confidence and
support given each other by the few who share our convictions--we resign
ourselves to all the consequences of this historical phenomenon, in
which we see the manifestation of a social law as natural, as necessary,
and as invariable as all the other laws which govern the world.
This law is a logical, inevitable consequence of the _animal origin_
of human society; for in face of all the scientific, physiological,
psychological, and historical proofs accumulated at the present day, as
well as in face of the exploits of the Germans conquering France, which
now furnish so striking a demonstration thereof, it is no longer
possible to really doubt this origin. But from the moment that this
animal origin of man is accepted, all is explained. History then appears
to us as the revolutionary negation, now slow, apathetic, sluggish,
now passionate and powerful, of the past. It consists precisely in
the progressive negation of the primitive animality of man by the
development of his humanity. Man, a wild beast, cousin of the gorilla,
has emerged from the profound darkness of animal instinct into the light
of the mind, which explains in a wholly natural way all his past
mistakes and partially consoles us for his present errors. He has gone
out from animal slavery, and passing through divine slavery, a temporary
condition between his animality and his humanity, he is now marching on
to the conquest and realization of human liberty. Whence it results that
the antiquity of a belief, of an idea, far from proving anything in its
favor, ought, on the contrary, to lead us to suspect it. For behind us
is our animality and before us our humanity; human light, the only thing
that can warm and enlighten us, the only thing that can emancipate us,
give us dignity, freedom, and happiness, and realize fraternity among
us, is never at the beginning, but, relatively to the epoch in which we
live, always at the end of history. Let us, then, never look back,
let us look ever forward; for forward is our sunlight, forward our
salvation. If it is justifiable, and even useful and necessary, to turn
back to study our past, it is only in order to establish what we have
been and what we must no longer be, what we have believed and thought
and what we must no longer believe or think, what we have done and what
we must do nevermore.
So much for _antiquity_. As for the _universality_ of an error, it
proves but one thing--the similarity, if not the perfect identity,
of human nature in all ages and under all skies. And, since it is
established that all peoples, at all periods of their life, have
believed and still believe in God, we must simply conclude that the
divine idea, an outcome of ourselves, is an error historically necessary
in the development of humanity, and ask why and how it was produced in
history and why an immense majority of the human race still accept it
as a truth.
Until we shall account to ourselves for the manner in which the idea of
a supernatural or divine world was developed and had to be developed in
the historical evolution of the human conscience, all our scientific
conviction of its absurdity will be in vain; until then we shall never
succeed in destroying it in the opinion of the majority, because we
shall never be able to attack it in the very depths of the human being
where it had birth. Condemned to a fruitless struggle, without issue and
without end, we should for ever have to content ourselves with fighting
it solely on the surface, in its innumerable manifestations, whose
absurdity will be scarcely beaten down by the blows of common sense
before it will reappear in a new form no less nonsensical. While the
root of all the absurdities that torment the world, belief in God,
remains intact, it will never fail to bring forth new offspring. Thus,
at the present time, in certain sections of the highest society,
Spiritualism tends to establish itself upon the ruins of Christianity.
It is not only in the interest of the masses, it is in that of the
health of our own minds, that we should strive to understand the
historic genesis, the succession of causes which developed and produced
the idea of God in the consciousness of men. In vain shall we call and
believe ourselves Atheists, until we comprehend these causes, for, until
then, we shall always suffer ourselves to be more or less governed by
the clamors of this universal conscience whose secret we have not
discovered; and, considering the natural weakness of even the strongest
individual against the all-powerful influence of the social surroundings
that trammel him, we are always in danger of relapsing sooner or later,
in one way or another, into the abyss of religious absurdity. Examples
of these shameful conversions are frequent in society to-day.
* * * * *
I have stated the chief practical reason of the power still exercised
to-day over the masses by religious beliefs. These mystical tendencies
do not signify in man so much an aberration of mind as a deep discontent
at heart. They are the instinctive and passionate protest of the human
being against the narrowness, the platitudes, the sorrows, and the shame
of a wretched existence. For this malady, I have already said, there is
but one remedy--Social Revolution.
In the meantime I have endeavored to show the causes responsible for the
birth and historical development of religious hallucinations in the
human conscience. Here it is my purpose to treat this question of the
existence of a God, or of the divine origin of the world and of man,
solely from the standpoint of its moral and social utility, and I shall
say only a few words, to better explain my thought, regarding the
theoretical grounds of this belief.
All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets,
their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of
men who had not attained the full development and full possession of
their faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but a
mirage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovers his own
image, but enlarged and reversed--that is, _divinized_. The history of
religions, of the birth, grandeur, and decline of the gods who have
succeeded one another in human belief, is nothing, therefore, but the
development of the collective intelligence and conscience of mankind. As
fast as they discovered, in the course of their historically progressive
advance, either in themselves or in external nature, a power, a quality,
or even any great defect whatever, they attributed them to their gods,
after having exaggerated and enlarged them beyond measure, after the
manner of children, by an act of their religious fancy. Thanks to this
modesty and pious generosity of believing and credulous men, heaven
has grown rich with the spoils of the earth, and, by a necessary
consequence, the richer heaven became, the more wretched became humanity
and the earth. God once installed, he was naturally proclaimed the
cause, reason, arbiter, and absolute disposer of all things: the world
thenceforth was nothing, God was all; and man, his real creator, after
having unknowingly extracted him from the void, bowed down before him,
worshipped him, and avowed himself his creature and his slave.
Christianity is precisely the religion _par excellence_, because it
exhibits and manifests, to the fullest extent, the very nature and
essence of every religious system, which is _the impoverishment,
enslavement, and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity_.
God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being
truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood,
iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is
the slave. Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his
own effort, he can attain them only through a divine revelation. But
whoever says revelation says revealers, messiahs, prophets, priests,
and legislators inspired by God himself; and these, once recognized as
the representatives of divinity on earth, as the holy instructors of
humanity, chosen by God himself to direct it in the path of salvation,
necessarily exercise absolute power. All men owe them passive and
unlimited obedience; for against the divine reason there is no human
reason, and against the justice of God no terrestrial justice holds.
Slaves of God, men must also be slaves of Church and State, _in so far
as the State is consecrated by the Church_. This truth Christianity,
better than all other religions that exist or have existed, understood,
not excepting even the old Oriental religions, which included only
distinct and privileged nations, while Christianity aspires to embrace
entire humanity; and this truth Roman Catholicism, alone among all the
Christian sects, has proclaimed and realized with rigorous logic. That
is why Christianity is the absolute religion, the final religion; why
the Apostolic and Roman Church is the only consistent, legitimate, and
divine church.
With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious
idealists, philosophers, politicians, or poets: _The idea of God implies
the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive
negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of
mankind, both in theory and practice._
Unless, then, we desire the enslavement and degradation of mankind,
as the Jesuits desire it, as the _momiers_, pietists, or Protestant
Methodists desire it, we may not, must not make the slightest concession
either to the God of theology or to the God of metaphysics. He who, in
this mystical alphabet, begins with A will inevitably end with Z; he who
desires to worship God must harbor no childish allusions about the
matter, but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does
not exist.
I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle; now, therefore, let all
choose.
Is it necessary to point out to what extent and in what manner religions
debase and corrupt the people? They destroy their reason, the principal
instrument of human emancipation, and reduce them to imbecility, the
essential condition of their slavery. They dishonor human labor, and
make it a sign and source of servitude. They kill the idea and sentiment
of human justice, ever tipping the balance to the side of triumphant
knaves, privileged objects of divine indulgence. They kill human pride
and dignity, protecting only the cringing and humble. They stifle in the
heart of nations every feeling of human fraternity, filling it with
divine cruelty instead.
All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally
on the idea of sacrifice--that is, on the perpetual immolation of
humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity. In this bloody
mystery man is always the victim, and the priest--a man also, but a man
privileged by grace--is the divine executioner. That explains why the
priests of all religions, the best, the most humane, the gentlest,
almost always have at the bottom of their hearts--and, if not in their
hearts, in their imaginations, in their minds (and we know the fearful
influence of either on the hearts of men)--something cruel and
sanguinary.
None know all this better than our illustrious contemporary idealists.
They are learned men, who know history by heart; and, as they are at the
same time living men, great souls penetrated with a sincere and profound
love for the welfare of humanity, they have cursed and branded all these
misdeeds, all these crimes of religion with an eloquence unparalleled.
They reject with indignation all solidarity with the God of positive
religions and with his representatives, past, present, and on earth.
The God whom they adore, or whom they think they adore, is distinguished
from the real gods of history precisely in this--that he is not at all
a positive god, defined in any way whatever, theologically or even
metaphysically. He is neither the supreme being of Robespierre and J. J.
Rousseau, nor the pantheistic god of Spinoza, nor even the at once
immanent, transcendental, and very equivocal god of Hegel. They take
good care not to give him any positive definition whatever, feeling very
strongly that any definition would subject him to the dissolving power
of criticism. They will not say whether he is a personal or impersonal
god, whether he created or did not create the world; they will not even
speak of his divine providence. All that might compromise him. They
content themselves with saying "God" and nothing more. But, then, what
is their God? Not even an idea; it is an aspiration.
It is the generic name of all that seems grand, good, beautiful, noble,
human to them. But why, then, do they not say, "Man." Ah! because King
William of Prussia and Napoleon III. and all their compeers are likewise
men: which bothers them very much. Real humanity presents a mixture of
all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most
monstrous in the world. How do they get over this? Why, they call one
_divine_ and the other _bestial_, representing divinity and animality as
two poles, between which they place humanity. They either will not or
cannot understand that these three terms are really but one, and that to
separate them is to destroy them.
They are not strong on logic, and one might say that they despise it.
That is what distinguishes them from the pantheistical and deistical
metaphysicians, and gives their ideas the character of a practical
idealism, drawing its inspiration much less from the severe development
of a thought than from the experiences, I might almost say the emotions,
historical and collective as well as individual, of life. This gives
their propaganda an appearance of wealth and vital power, but an
appearance only; for life itself becomes sterile when paralyzed by a
logical contradiction.
This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity.
They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come
together again only to destroy each other. They say in a single breath:
"God and the liberty of man," "God and the dignity, justice, equality,
fraternity, prosperity of men"--regardless of the fatal logic by
virtue of which, if God exists, all these things are condemned to
non-existence. For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme,
absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if
he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor
prosperity are possible for him. In vain, flying in the face of good
sense and all the teachings of history, do they represent their God as
animated by the tenderest love of human liberty: a master, whoever he
may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself, remains none
the less always a master. His existence necessarily implies the slavery
of all that is beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way
could he serve human liberty--by ceasing to exist.
A jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition
of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of
Voltaire, and say that, _if God really existed, it would be necessary to
abolish him_.
The severe logic that dictates these words is far too evident to require
a development of this argument. And it seems to me impossible that the
illustrious men, whose names so celebrated and so justly respected I
have cited, should not have been struck by it themselves, and should not
have perceived the contradiction in which they involve themselves in
speaking of God and human liberty at once. To have disregarded it, they
must have considered this inconsistency or logical license _practically_
necessary to humanity's well-being.