and the Roman. Which is the most materialistic, the most natural,
in its point of departure, and the most humanly ideal in its results?
Undoubtedly the Greek civilization. Which on the contrary, is the most
abstractly ideal in its point of departure--sacrificing the material
liberty of the man to the ideal liberty of the citizen, represented by
the abstraction of judicial law, and the natural development of human
society to the abstraction of the State--and which became nevertheless
the most brutal in its consequences? The Roman civilization, certainly.
It is true that the Greek civilization, like all the ancient
civilizations, including that of Rome, was exclusively national and
based on slavery. But, in spite of these two immense defects, the former
none the less conceived and realized the idea of humanity; it ennobled
and really idealized the life of men; it transformed human herds into
free associations of free men; it created through liberty the sciences,
the arts, a poetry, an immortal philosophy, and the primary concepts
of human respect. With political and social liberty, it created free
thought. At the close of the Middle Ages, during the period of the
Renaissance, the fact that some Greek emigrants brought a few of those
immortal books into Italy sufficed to resuscitate life, liberty,
thought, humanity, buried in the dark dungeon of Catholicism. Human
emancipation, that is the name of the Greek civilization. And the name
of the Roman civilization? Conquest, with all its brutal consequences.
And its last word? The omnipotence of the Caesars. Which means the
degradation and enslavement of nations and of men.
To-day even, what is it that kills, what is it that crushes brutally,
materially, in all European countries, liberty and humanity? It is the
triumph of the Caesarian or Roman principle.
Compare now two modern civilizations--the Italian and the German. The
first undoubtedly represents, in its general character, materialism; the
second, on the contrary, represents idealism in its most abstract, most
pure, and most transcendental form. Let us see what are the practical
fruits of the one and the other.
Italy has already rendered immense services to the cause of human
emancipation. She was the first to resuscitate and widely apply the
principle of liberty in Europe, and to restore to humanity its titles to
nobility: industry, commerce, poetry, the arts, the positive sciences,
and free thought. Crushed since by three centuries of imperial and papal
despotism, and dragged in the mud by her governing bourgeoisie, she
reappears to-day, it is true, in a very degraded condition in comparison
with what she once was. And yet how much she differs from Germany! In
Italy, in spite of this decline--temporary let us hope--one may live
and breathe humanly, surrounded by a people which seems to be born for
liberty. Italy, even bourgeois Italy, can point with pride to men like
Mazzini and Garibaldi. In Germany one breathes the atmosphere of an
immense political and social slavery, philosophically explained and
accepted by a great people with deliberate resignation and free will.
Her heroes--I speak always of present Germany, not of the Germany of the
future; of aristocratic, bureaucratic, political and bourgeoise Germany,
not of the Germany of the _proletaires_--her heroes are quite the
opposite of Mazzini and Garibaldi: they are William I., that ferocious
and ingenuous representative of the Protestant God, Messrs. Bismarck
and Moltke, Generals Manteuffel and Werder. In all her international
relations Germany, from the beginning of her existence, has been slowly,
systematically invading, conquering, ever ready to extend her own
voluntary enslavement into the territory of her neighbors; and, since
her definitive establishment as a unitary power, she has become a
menace, a danger to the liberty of entire Europe. To-day Germany is
servility brutal and triumphant.
To show how theoretical idealism incessantly and inevitably changes into
practical materialism, one needs only to cite the example of all the
Christian Churches, and, naturally, first of all, that of the Apostolic
and Roman Church. What is there more sublime, in the ideal sense, more
disinterested, more separate from all the interests of this earth, than
the doctrine of Christ preached by that Church? And what is there more
brutally materialistic than the constant practice of that same Church
since the eighth century, from which dates her definitive establishment
as a power? What has been and still is the principal object of all her
contests with the sovereigns of Europe? Her temporal goods, her revenues
first, and then her temporal power, her political privileges. We must do
her the justice to acknowledge that she was the first to discover, in
modern history, this incontestable but scarcely Christian truth that
wealth and power, the economic exploitation and the political oppression
of the masses, are the two inseparable terms of the reign of divine
ideality on earth: wealth consolidating and augmenting power, power ever
discovering and creating new sources of wealth, and both assuring,
better than the martyrdom and faith of the apostles, better than divine
grace, the success of the Christian propagandism. This is a historical
truth, and the Protestant Churches do not fail to recognize it either. I
speak, of course, of the independent churches of England, America, and
Switzerland, not of the subjected churches of Germany. The latter have
no initiative of their own; they do what their masters, their temporal
sovereigns, who are at the same time their spiritual chieftains,
order them to do. It is well known that the Protestant propagandism,
especially in England and America, is very intimately connected with
the propagandism of the material, commercial interests of those two
great nations; and it is known also that the objects of the latter
propagandism is not at all the enrichment and material prosperity of the
countries into which it penetrates in company with the Word of God, but
rather the exploitation of those countries with a view to the enrichment
and material prosperity of certain classes, which in their own country
are very covetous and very pious at the same time.
In a word, it is not at all difficult to prove, history in hand, that
the Church, that all the Churches, Christian and non-Christian, by the
side of their spiritualistic propagandism, and probably to accelerate
and consolidate the success thereof, have never neglected to organize
themselves into great corporations for the economic exploitation of the
masses under the protection and with the direct and special blessing of
some divinity or other; that all the States, which originally, as we
know, with all their political and judicial institutions and their
dominant and privileged classes, have been only temporal branches of
these various Churches, have likewise had principally in view this same
exploitation for the benefit of lay minorities indirectly sanctioned by
the Church; finally and in general, that the action of the good God and
of all the divine idealities on earth has ended at last, always and
everywhere, in founding the prosperous materialism of the few over the
fanatical and constantly famishing idealism of the masses.
We have a new proof of this in what we see to-day. With the exception
of the great hearts and great minds whom I have before referred to as
misled, who are to-day the most obstinate defenders of idealism? In the
first place, all the sovereign courts. In France, until lately, Napoleon
III. and his wife, Madame Eugenie; all their former ministers,
courtiers, and ex-marshals, from Rouher and Bazaine to Fleury and
Pietri; the men and women of this imperial world, who have so completely
idealized and saved France; their journalists and their _savants_--the
Cassagnacs, the Girardins, the Duvernois, the Veuillots, the Leverriers,
the Dumas; the black phalanx of Jesuits and Jesuitesses in every garb;
the whole upper and middle bourgeoisie of France; the doctrinaire
liberals, and the liberals without doctrine--the Guizots, the Thiers,
the Jules Favres, the Pelletans, and the Jules Simons, all obstinate
defenders of the bourgeoise exploitation. In Prussia, in Germany,
William I., the present royal demonstrator of the good God on earth; all
his generals, all his officers, Pomeranian and other; all his army,
which, strong in its religious faith, has just conquered France in that
ideal way we know so well. In Russia, the Czar and his court; the
Mouravieffs and the Bergs, all the butchers and pious proselyters of
Poland. Everywhere, in short, religious or philosophical idealism, the
one being but the more or less free translation of the other, serves
to-day as the flag of material, bloody, and brutal force, of shameless
material exploitation; while, on the contrary, the flag of theoretical
materialism, the red flag of economic equality and social justice, is
raised by the practical idealism of the oppressed and famishing masses,
tending to realize the greatest liberty and the human right of each in
the fraternity of all men on the earth.
Who are the real idealists--the idealists not of abstraction, but of
life, not of heaven, but of earth--and who are the materialists?
It is evident that the essential condition of theoretical or divine
idealism is the sacrifice of logic, of human reason, the renunciation of
science. We see, further, that in defending the doctrines of idealism
one finds himself enlisted perforce in the ranks of the oppressors and
exploiters of the masses. These are two great reasons which, it would
seem, should be sufficient to drive every great mind, every great heart,
from idealism. How does it happen that our illustrious contemporary
idealists, who certainly lack neither mind, nor heart, nor good
will, and who have devoted their entire existence to the service of
humanity--how does it happen that they persist in remaining among the
representatives of a doctrine henceforth condemned and dishonored?
They must be influenced by a very powerful motive. It cannot be logic or
science, since logic and science have pronounced their verdict against
the idealistic doctrine. No more can it be personal interests, since
these men are infinitely above everything of that sort. It must,
then, be a powerful moral motive. Which? There can be but one. These
illustrious men think, no doubt, that idealistic theories or beliefs are
essentially necessary to the moral dignity and grandeur of man, and that
materialistic theories, on the contrary, reduce him to the level of the
beasts.
And if the truth were just the opposite!
Every development, I have said, implies the negation of its point
of departure. The basis or point of departure, according to the
materialistic school, being material, the negation must be necessarily
ideal. Starting from the totality of the real world, or from what
is abstractly called matter, it logically arrives at the real
idealization--that is, at the humanization, at the full and complete
emancipation--of society. _Per contra_ and for the same reason, the
basis and point of departure of the idealistic school being ideal,
it arrives necessarily at the materialization of society, at the
organization of a brutal despotism and an iniquitous and ignoble
exploitation, under the form of Church and State. The historical
development of man according to the materialistic school, is a
progressive ascension; in the idealistic system it can be nothing
but a continuous fall.
Whatever human question we may desire to consider, we always find this
same essential contradiction between the two schools. Thus, as I have
already observed, materialism starts from animality to establish
humanity; idealism starts from divinity to establish slavery and condemn
the masses to an endless animality. Materialism denies free will and
ends in the establishment of liberty; idealism, in the name of human
dignity, proclaims free will, and on the ruins of every liberty founds
authority. Materialism rejects the principle of authority, because it
rightly considers it as the corollary of animality, and because, on the
contrary, the triumph of humanity, the object and chief significance of
history, can be realized only through liberty. In a word, you will
always find the idealists in the very act of practical materialism,
while you will see the materialists pursuing and realizing the most
grandly ideal aspirations and thoughts.
History, in the system of the idealists, as I have said, can be nothing
but a continuous fall. They begin by a terrible fall, from which they
never recover--by the _salto mortale_ from the sublime regions of pure
and absolute idea into matter. And into what kind of matter! Not into
the matter which is eternally active and mobile, full of properties and
forces, of life and intelligence, as we see it in the real world; but
into abstract matter, impoverished and reduced to absolute misery by the
regular looting of these Prussians of thought, the theologians and
metaphysicians, who have stripped it of everything to give everything
to their emperor, to their God; into the matter which, deprived of all
action and movement of its own, represents, in opposition to the divine
idea, nothing but absolute stupidity, impenetrability, inertia and
immobility.
The fall is so terrible that divinity, the divine person or idea, is
flattened out, loses consciousness of itself, and never more recovers
it. And in this desperate situation it is still forced to work miracles!
For from the moment that matter becomes inert, every movement that takes
place in the world, even the most material, is a miracle, can result
only from a providential intervention, from the action of God upon
matter. And there this poor Divinity, degraded and half annihilated by
its fall, lies some thousands of centuries in this swoon, then awakens
slowly, in vain endeavoring to grasp some vague memory of itself, and
every move that it makes in this direction upon matter becomes a
creation, a new formation, a new miracle. In this way it passes through
all degrees of materiality and bestiality--first, gas, simple or
compound chemical substance, mineral, it then spreads over the earth as
vegetable and animal organization till it concentrates itself in man.
Here it would seem as if it must become itself again, for it lights in
every human being an angelic spark, a particle of its own divine being,
the immortal soul.
How did it manage to lodge a thing absolutely immaterial in a thing
absolutely material; how can the body contain, enclose, limit, paralyze
pure spirit? This, again, is one of those questions which faith alone,
that passionate and stupid affirmation of the absurd, can solve. It is
the greatest of miracles. Here, however, we have only to establish the
effects, the practical consequences of this miracle.
After thousands of centuries of vain efforts to come back to itself,
Divinity, lost and scattered in the matter which it animates and
sets in motion, finds a point of support, a sort of focus for
self-concentration. This focus is man, his immortal soul singularly
imprisoned in a mortal body. But each man considered individually is
infinitely too limited, too small, to enclose the divine immensity; it
can contain only a very small particle, immortal like the whole, but
infinitely smaller than the whole. It follows that the divine being, the
absolutely immaterial being, mind, is divisible like matter. Another
mystery whose solution must be left to faith.
If God entire could find lodgment in each man, then each man would be
God. We should have an immense quantity of Gods, each limited by all the
others and yet none the less infinite--a contradiction which would imply
a mutual destruction of men, an impossibility of the existence of more
than one. As for the particles, that is another matter; nothing more
rational, indeed, than that one particle should be limited by another
and be smaller than the whole. Only, here another contradiction
confronts us. To be limited, to be greater and smaller are attributes of
matter, not of mind. According to the materialists, it is true, mind
is only the working of the wholly material organism of man, and the
greatness or smallness of mind depends absolutely on the greater or less
material perfection of the human organism. But these same attributes
of relative limitation and grandeur cannot be attributed to mind as
the idealists conceive it, absolutely immaterial mind, mind existing
independent of matter. There can be neither greater nor smaller nor any
limit among minds, for there is only one mind--God. To add that the
infinitely small and limited particles which constitute human souls are
at the same time immortal is to carry the contradiction to a climax. But
this is a question of faith. Let us pass on.
Here then we have Divinity torn up and lodged, in infinitely small
particles, in an immense number of beings of all sexes, ages, races, and
colors. This is an excessively inconvenient and unhappy situation, for
the divine particles are so little acquainted with each other at the
outset of their human existence that they begin by devouring each other.
Moreover, in the midst of this state of barbarism and wholly animal
brutality, these divine particles, human souls, retain as it were a
vague remembrance of their primitive divinity, and are irresistibly
drawn towards their whole; they seek each other, they seek their whole.
It is Divinity itself, scattered and lost in the natural world, which
looks for itself in men, and it is so demolished by this multitude of
human prisons in which it finds itself strewn, that, in looking for
itself, it commits folly after folly.
Beginning with fetichism, it searches for and adores itself, now in a
stone, now in a piece of wood, now in a rag. It is quite likely that it
would never have succeeded in getting out of the rag, if _the other_
divinity which was not allowed to fall into matter and which is kept in
a state of pure spirit in the sublime heights of the absolute ideal, or
in the celestial regions, had not had pity on it.
Here is a new mystery--that of Divinity dividing itself into two halves,
both equally infinite, of which one--God the Father--stays in the purely
immaterial regions, and the other--God the Son--falls into matter. We
shall see directly, between these two Divinities separated from each
other, continuous relations established, from above to below and from
below to above; and these relations, considered as a single eternal and
constant act, will constitute the Holy Ghost. Such, in its veritable
theological and metaphysical meaning, is the great, the terrible mystery
of the Christian Trinity.
But let us lose no time in abandoning these heights to see what is going
on upon earth.
God the Father, seeing from the height of his eternal splendor that the
poor God the Son, flattened out and astounded by his fall, is so plunged
and lost in matter that even having reached human state he has not yet
recovered himself, decides to come to his aid. From this immense number
of particles at once immortal, divine, and infinitely small, in which
God the Son has disseminated himself so thoroughly that he does not know
himself, God the Father chooses those most pleasing to him, picks his
inspired persons, his prophets, his "men of virtuous genius," the great
benefactors and legislators of humanity: Zoroaster, Buddha, Moses,
Confucius, Lycurgus, Solon, Socrates, the divine Plato, and above all
Jesus Christ, the complete realization of God the Son, at last collected
and concentrated in a single human person; all the apostles, Saint
Peter, Saint Paul, and Saint John before all, Constantine the Great,
Mahomet, then Charlemagne, Gregory VII., Dante, and, according to some,
Luther also, Voltaire and Rousseau, Robespierre and Danton, and many
other great and holy historical personages, all of whose names it is
impossible to recapitulate, but among whom I, as a Russian, beg that
Saint Nicholas may not be forgotten.
Then we have reached at last the manifestation of God upon earth. But
immediately God appears, man is reduced to nothing. It will be said that
he is not reduced to nothing, since he is himself a particle of God.
Pardon me! I admit that a particle of a definite, limited whole, however
small it be, is a quantity, a positive greatness. But a particle of the
infinitely great, compared with it, is necessarily infinitely small.
Multiply milliards of milliards by milliards of milliards--their
product compared to the infinitely great, will be infinitely small, and
the infinitely small is equal to zero. God is everything; therefore man
and all the real world with him, the universe, are nothing. You will not
escape this conclusion.
God appears, man is reduced to nothing; and the greater Divinity
becomes, the more miserable becomes humanity. That is the history of
all religions; that is the effect of all the divine inspirations and
legislations. In history the name of God is the terrible club with which
all divinely inspired men, the great "virtuous geniuses," have beaten
down the liberty, dignity, reason, and prosperity of man.
We had first the fall of God. Now we have a fall which interests us
more--that of man, caused solely by the apparition of God manifested on
earth.
See in how profound an error our dear and illustrious idealists find
themselves. In talking to us of God they purpose, they desire, to
elevate us, emancipate us, ennoble us, and, on the contrary, they
crush and degrade us. With the name of God they imagine that they can
establish fraternity among men, and, on the contrary, they create pride,
contempt; they sow discord, hatred, war; they establish slavery. For
with God come the different degrees of divine inspiration; humanity is
divided into men highly inspired, less inspired, uninspired. All are
equally insignificant before God, it is true; but, compared with each
other, some are greater than others; not only in fact--which would be of
no consequence, because inequality in fact is lost in the collectivity
when it cannot cling to some legal fiction or institution--but by the
divine right of inspiration, which immediately establishes a fixed,
constant, petrifying inequality. The highly inspired _must_ be listened
to and obeyed by the less inspired, and the less inspired by the
uninspired. Thus we have the principle of authority well established,
and with it the two fundamental institutions of slavery: Church and
State.
Of all despotisms that of the _doctrinaires_ or inspired religionists is
the worst. They are so jealous of the glory of their God and of the
triumph of their idea that they have no heart left for the liberty or
the dignity or even the sufferings of living men, of real men. Divine
zeal, preoccupation with the idea, finally dry up the tenderest souls,
the most compassionate hearts, the sources of human love. Considering
all that is, all that happens in the world from the point of view of
eternity or of the abstract idea, they treat passing matters with
disdain; but the whole life of real men, of men of flesh and bone, is
composed only of passing matters; they themselves are only passing
beings, who, once passed, are replaced by others likewise passing, but
never to return in person. Alone permanent or relatively eternal in men
is humanity, which steadily developing, grows richer in passing from one
generation to another. I say _relatively_ eternal, because, our planet
once destroyed--it cannot fail to perish sooner or later, since
everything which has begun must necessarily end--our planet once
decomposed, to serve undoubtedly as an element of some new formation in
the system of the universe, which alone is really eternal, who knows
what will become of our whole human development? Nevertheless, the
moment of this dissolution being an enormous distance in the future, we
may properly consider humanity, relatively to the short duration of
human life, as eternal. But this very fact of progressive humanity is
real and living only through its manifestations at definite times, in
definite places, in really living men, and not through its general idea.
The general idea is always an abstraction and, for that very reason, in
some sort a negation of real life. I have stated in the Appendix that
human thought and, in consequence of this, science can grasp and name
only the general significance of real facts, their relations,
their laws--in short, that which is permanent in their continual
transformations--but never their material, individual side, palpitating,
so to speak, with reality and life, and therefore fugitive and
intangible. Science comprehends the thought of the reality, not reality
itself; the thought of life, not life. That is its limit, its only
really insuperable limit, because it is founded on the very nature of
thought, which is the only organ of science.