innocence, created their gods. Having created them, not suspecting
that they themselves were the real creators, they worshipped them;
considering them as real beings infinitely superior to themselves, they
attributed omnipotence to them, and recognized themselves as their
creatures, their slaves. As fast as human ideas develop, the gods, who,
as I have already stated, were never anything more than a fantastic,
ideal, poetical reverberation or an inverted image, become idealized
also. At first gross fetiches, they gradually become pure spirits,
existing outside of the visible world, and at last, in the course of a
long historic evolution, are confounded in a single Divine Being, pure,
eternal, absolute Spirit, creator and master of the worlds.
In every development, just or false, real or imaginary, collective or
individual, it is always the first step, the first act that is the
most difficult. That step once taken, the rest follows naturally as a
necessary consequence. The difficult step in the historical development
of this terrible religious insanity which continues to obsess and crush
us was to posit a divine world as such, outside the world. This first
act of madness, so natural from the physiological point of view and
consequently necessary in the history of humanity, was not accomplished
at a single stroke. I know not how many centuries were needed to develop
this belief and make it a governing influence upon the mental customs of
men. But, once established, it became omnipotent, as each insane notion
necessarily becomes when it takes possession of man's brain. Take a
madman, whatever the object of his madness--you will find that obscure
and fixed idea which obsesses him seems to him the most natural thing in
the world, and that, on the contrary, the real things which contradict
this idea seem to him ridiculous and odious follies. Well, religion is
a collective insanity, the more powerful because it is traditional
folly, and because its origin is lost in the most remote antiquity. As
collective insanity it has penetrated to the very depths of the public
and private existence of the peoples; it is incarnate in society; it
has become, so to speak, the collective soul and thought. Every man
is enveloped in it from his birth; he sucks it in with his mother's
milk, absorbs it with all that he touches, all that he sees. He is so
exclusively fed upon it, so poisoned and penetrated by it in all his
being, that later, however powerful his natural mind, he has to make
unheard-of efforts to deliver himself from it, and even then never
completely succeeds. We have one proof of this in our modern idealists,
and another in our _doctrinaire_ materialists--the German Communists.
They have found no way to shake off the religion of the State.
The supernatural world, the divine world, once well established in the
imagination of the peoples, the development of the various religious
systems has followed its natural and logical course, conforming,
moreover, in all things to the contemporary development of economical
and political relations of which it has been in all ages, in the world
of religious fancy, the faithful reproduction and divine consecration.
Thus has the collective and historical insanity which calls itself
religion been developed since fetichism, passing through all the stages
from polytheism to Christian monotheism.
The second step in the development of religious beliefs, undoubtedly the
most difficult next to the establishment of a separate divine world,
was precisely this transition from polytheism to monotheism, from
the religious materialism of the pagans to the spiritualistic faith
of the Christians. The pagan gods--and this was their principal
characteristic--were first of all exclusively national gods. Very
numerous, they necessarily retained a more or less material character,
or, rather, they were so numerous because they were material, diversity
being one of the principal attributes of the real world. The pagan gods
were not yet strictly the negation of real things; they were only a
fantastic exaggeration of them.
We have seen how much this transition cost the Jewish people,
constituting, so to speak, its entire history. In vain did Moses and
the prophets preach the one god; the people always relapsed into their
primitive idolatry, into the ancient and comparatively much more natural
and convenient faith in many good gods, more material, more human, and
more palpable. Jehovah himself, their sole God, the God of Moses and the
prophets, was still an extremely national God, who, to reward and punish
his faithful followers, his chosen people, used material arguments,
often stupid, always gross and cruel. It does not even appear that
faith in his existence implied a negation of the existence of earlier
gods. The Jewish God did not deny the existence of these rivals; he
simply did not want his people to worship them side by side with him,
because before all Jehovah was a very jealous God. His first commandment
was this:
"I am the Lord thy God, and thou shalt have no other gods before me."
Jehovah, then, was only a first draft, very material and very rough, of
the supreme deity of modern idealism. Moreover, he was only a national
God, like the Russian God worshipped by the German generals, subjects of
the Czar and patriots of the empire of all the Russias; like the German
God, whom the pietists and the German generals, subjects of William I.
at Berlin, will no doubt soon proclaim. The supreme being cannot be a
national God; he must be the God of entire Humanity. Nor can the supreme
being be a material being; he must be the negation of all matter--pure
spirit. Two things have proved necessary to the realization of the
worship of the supreme being: (1) a realization, such as it is, of
Humanity by the negation of nationalities and national forms of worship;
(2) a development, already far advanced, of metaphysical ideas in order
to spiritualize the gross Jehovah of the Jews.
The first condition was fulfilled by the Romans, though in a very
negative way no doubt, by the conquest of most of the countries known to
the ancients and by the destruction of their national institutions. The
gods of all the conquered nations, gathered in the Pantheon, mutually
cancelled each other. This was the first draft of humanity, very gross
and quite negative.
As for the second condition, the spiritualization of Jehovah, that was
realized by the Greeks long before the conquest of their country by the
Romans. They were the creators of metaphysics. Greece, in the cradle of
her history, had already found from the Orient a divine world which had
been definitely established in the traditional faith of her peoples;
this world had been left and handed over to her by the Orient. In her
instinctive period, prior to her political history, she had developed
and prodigiously humanized this divine world through her poets; and when
she actually began her history, she already had a religion ready-made,
the most sympathetic and noble of all the religions which have existed,
so far at least as a religion--that is, a lie--can be noble and
sympathetic. Her great thinkers--and no nation has had greater than
Greece--found the divine world established, not only outside of
themselves in the people, but also in themselves as a habit of feeling
and thought, and naturally they took it as a point of departure. That
they made no theology--that is, that they did not wait in vain to
reconcile dawning reason with the absurdities of such a god, as did the
scholastics of the Middle Ages--was already much in their favor. They
left the gods out of their speculations and attached themselves directly
to the divine idea, one, invisible, omnipotent, eternal, and absolutely
spiritualistic but impersonal. As concerns Spiritualism, then, the Greek
metaphysicians, much more than the Jews, were the creators of the
Christian god. The Jews only added to it the brutal personality of
their Jehovah.
That a sublime genius like the divine Plato could have been absolutely
convinced of the reality of the divine idea shows us how contagious, how
omnipotent, is the tradition of the religious mania even on the greatest
minds. Besides, we should not be surprised at it, since, even in our
day, the greatest philosophical genius which has existed since Aristotle
and Plato, Hegel--in spite even of Kant's criticism, imperfect and too
metaphysical though it be, which had demolished the objectivity or
reality of the divine ideas--tried to replace these divine ideas upon
their transcendental or celestial throne. It is true that Hegel went
about his work of restoration in so impolite a manner that he killed the
good God for ever. He took away from these ideas their divine halo, by
showing to whoever will read him that they were never anything more
than a creation of the human mind running through history in search
of itself. To put an end to all religious insanities and the divine
_mirage_, he left nothing lacking but the utterance of those grand words
which were said after him, almost at the same time, by two great minds
who had never heard of each other--Ludwig Feuerbach, the disciple and
demolisher of Hegel, in Germany, and Auguste Comte, the founder of
positive philosophy, in France. These words were as follows:
"Metaphysics are reduced to psychology." All the metaphysical systems
have been nothing else than human psychology developing itself in
history.
To-day it is no longer difficult to understand how the divine ideas were
born, how they were created in succession by the abstractive faculty of
man. Man made the gods. But in the time of Plato this knowledge was
impossible. The collective mind, and consequently the individual mind as
well, even that of the greatest genius, was not ripe for that. Scarcely
had it said with Socrates: "Know thyself!" This self-knowledge existed
only in a state of intuition; in fact, it amounted to nothing. Hence it
was impossible for the human mind to suspect that it was itself the
sole creator of the divine world. It found the divine world before
it; it found it as history, as tradition, as a sentiment, as a habit
of thought; and it necessarily made it the object of its loftiest
speculations. Thus was born metaphysics, and thus were developed and
perfected the divine ideas, the basis of Spiritualism.
It is true that after Plato there was a sort of inverse movement in the
development of the mind. Aristotle, the true father of science and
positive philosophy, did not deny the divine world, but concerned
himself with it as little as possible. He was the first to study, like
the analyst and experimenter that he was, logic, the laws of human
thought, and at the same time the physical world, not in its ideal,
illusory essence, but in its real aspect. After him the Greeks of
Alexandria established the first school of the positive scientists. They
were atheists. But their atheism left no mark on their contemporaries.
Science tended more and more to separate itself from life. After Plato,
divine ideas were rejected in metaphysics themselves; this was done by
the Epicureans and Skeptics, two sects who contributed much to the
degradation of human aristocracy, but they had no effect upon the
masses.
Another school, infinitely more influential, was formed at Alexandria.
This was the school of neo-Platonists. These, confounding in an impure
mixture the monstrous imaginations of the Orient with the ideas of
Plato, were the true originators, and later the elaborators, of the
Christian dogmas.
Thus the personal and gross egoism of Jehovah, the not less brutal
and gross Roman conquest, and the metaphysical ideal speculation of
the Greeks, materialized by contact with the Orient, were the three
historical elements which made up the spiritualistic religion of the
Christians.
* * * * *
Before the altar of a unique and supreme God was raised on the ruins
of the numerous altars of the pagan gods, the autonomy of the various
nations composing the pagan or ancient world had to be destroyed first.
This was very brutally done by the Romans who, by conquering the
greatest part of the globe known to the ancients, laid the first
foundations, quite gross and negative ones no doubt, of humanity. A God
thus raised above the national differences, material and social, of all
countries, and in a certain sense the direct negation of them, must
necessarily be an immaterial and abstract being. But faith in the
existence of such a being, so difficult a matter, could not spring
into existence suddenly. Consequently, as I have demonstrated in the
Appendix, it went through a long course of preparation and development
at the hands of Greek metaphysics, which were the first to establish
in a philosophical manner the notion of _the divine idea_, a model
eternally creative and always reproduced by the visible world. But the
divinity conceived and created by Greek philosophy was an impersonal
divinity. No logical and serious metaphysics being able to rise, or,
rather, to descend, to the idea of a personal God, it became necessary,
therefore, to imagine a God who was one and very personal at once. He
was found in the very brutal, selfish, and cruel person of Jehovah, the
national God of the Jews. But the Jews, in spite of that exclusive
national spirit which distinguishes them even to-day, had become in
fact, long before the birth of Christ, the most international people of
the world. Some of them carried away as captives, but many more even
urged on by that mercantile passion which constitutes one of the
principal traits of their character, they had spread through all
countries, carrying everywhere the worship of their Jehovah, to whom
they remained all the more faithful the more he abandoned them.
In Alexandria this terrible god of the Jews made the personal
acquaintance of the metaphysical divinity of Plato, already much
corrupted by Oriental contact, and corrupted her still more by his own.
In spite of his national, jealous, and ferocious exclusivism, he could
not long resist the graces of this ideal and impersonal divinity
of the Greeks. He married her, and from this marriage was born
the spiritualistic--but not spirited--God of the Christians. The
neo-Platonists of Alexandria are known to have been the principal
creators of the Christian theology.
Nevertheless theology alone does not make a religion, any more than
historical elements suffice to create history. By historical elements I
mean the general conditions of any real development whatsoever--for
example in this case the conquest of the world by the Romans and the
meeting of the God of the Jews with the ideal of divinity of the Greeks.
To impregnate the historical elements, to cause them to run through a
series of new historical transformations, a living, spontaneous fact was
needed, without which they might have remained many centuries longer
in the state of unproductive elements. This fact was not lacking in
Christianity: it was the propagandism, martyrdom, and death of Jesus
Christ.
We know almost nothing of this great and saintly personage, all that
the gospels tell us being contradictory, and so fabulous that we can
scarcely seize upon a few real and vital traits. But it is certain
that he was the preacher of the poor, the friend and consoler of the
wretched, of the ignorant, of the slaves, and of the women, and that by
these last he was much loved. He promised eternal life to all who are
oppressed, to all who suffer here below; and the number is immense.
He was hanged, as a matter of course, by the representatives of the
official morality and public order of that period. His disciples and
the disciples of his disciples succeeded in spreading, thanks to the
destruction of the national barriers by the Roman conquest, and
propagated the Gospel in all the countries known to the ancients.
Everywhere they were received with open arms by the slaves and the
women, the two most oppressed, most suffering, and naturally also the
most ignorant classes of the ancient world. For even such few proselytes
as they made in the privileged and learned world they were indebted in
great part to the influence of women. Their most extensive propagandism
was directed almost exclusively among the people, unfortunate and
degraded by slavery. This was the first awakening, the first
intellectual revolt of the proletariat.
* * * * *
The great honor of Christianity, its incontestable merit, and the whole
secret of its unprecedented and yet thoroughly legitimate triumph, lay
in the fact that it appealed to that suffering and immense public to
which the ancient world, a strict and cruel intellectual and political
aristocracy, denied even the simplest rights of humanity. Otherwise it
never could have spread. The doctrine taught by the apostles of Christ,
wholly consoling as it may have seemed to the unfortunate, was too
revolting, too absurd from the standpoint of human reason, ever to have
been accepted by enlightened men. According with what joy the apostle
Paul speaks of the _scandale de la foi_ and of the triumph of that
_divine folie_ rejected by the powerful and wise of the century, but
all the more passionately accepted by the simple, the ignorant, and the
weak-minded!
Indeed there must have been a very deep-seated dissatisfaction with
life, a very intense thirst of heart, and an almost absolute poverty of
thought, to secure the acceptance of the Christian absurdity, the most
audacious and monstrous of all religious absurdities.
This was not only the negation of all the political, social, and
religious institutions of antiquity: it was the absolute overturn of
common sense, of all human reason. The living being, the real world,
were considered thereafter as nothing; whereas the product of man's
abstractive faculty, the last and supreme abstraction in which this
faculty, far beyond existing things, even beyond the most general
determinations of the living being, the ideas of space and time, having
nothing left to advance beyond, rests in contemplation of his emptiness
and absolute immobility.
That abstraction, that _caput mortuum_, absolutely void of all
contents, the true nothing, God, is proclaimed the only real, eternal,
all-powerful being. The real All is declared nothing, and the absolute
nothing the All. The shadow becomes the substance, and the substance
vanishes like a shadow.[10]
All this was audacity and absurdity unspeakable, the true _scandale
de la foi_, the triumph of credulous stupidity over the mind for
the masses; and--for a few--the triumphant irony of a mind wearied,
corrupted, disillusioned, and disgusted in honest and serious search
for truth; it was that necessity of shaking off thought and becoming
brutally stupid so frequently felt by surfeited minds:
_Credo quod absurdum._
I believe in the absurd; I believe in it, precisely and mainly, because
it is absurd. In the same way many distinguished and enlightened minds
in our day believe in animal magnetism, spiritualism, tipping tables,
and--why go so far?--believe still in Christianity, in idealism, in God.
The belief of the ancient proletariat, like that of the modern, was
more robust and simple, less _haut gout_. The Christian propagandism
appealed to its heart, not to its mind; to its eternal aspirations, its
necessities, its sufferings, its slavery, not to its reason, which still
slept and therefore could know nothing about logical contradictions and
the evidence of the absurd. It was interested solely in knowing when the
hour of promised deliverance would strike, when the kingdom of God would
come. As for theological dogmas, it did not trouble itself about them
because it understood nothing about them. The proletariat converted to
Christianity constituted its growing material but not its intellectual
strength.
As for the Christian dogmas, it is known that they were elaborated
in a series of theological and literary works and in the Councils,
principally by the converted neo-Platonists of the Orient. The Greek
mind had fallen so low that, in the fourth century of the Christian
era, the period of the first Council, the idea of a personal God, pure,
eternal, absolute mind, creator and supreme master, existing outside of
the world, was unanimously accepted by the Church Fathers; as a logical
consequence of this absolute absurdity, it then became natural and
necessary to believe in the immateriality and immortality of the human
soul, lodged and imprisoned in a body only partially mortal, there being
in this body itself a portion which, while material, is immortal like
the soul, and must be resurrected with it. We see how difficult it was,
even for the Church Fathers, to conceive pure minds outside of any
material form. It should be added that, in general, it is the character
of every metaphysical and theological argument to seek to explain one
absurdity by another.
It was very fortunate for Christianity that it met a world of slaves. It
had another piece of good luck in the invasion of the Barbarians. The
latter were worthy people, full of natural force, and, above all, urged
on by a great necessity of life and a great capacity for it; brigands
who had stood every test, capable of devastating and gobbling up
anything, like their successors, the Germans of to-day; but they were
much less systematic and pedantic than these last, much less moralistic,
less learned, and on the other hand much more independent and proud,
capable of science and not incapable of liberty, as are the bourgeois of
modern Germany. But, in spite of all their great qualities, they were
nothing but barbarians--that is, as indifferent to all questions of
theology and metaphysics as the ancient slaves, a great number of whom,
moreover, belonged to their race. So that, their practical repugnance
once overcome, it was not difficult to convert them theoretically to
Christianity.
For ten centuries Christianity, armed with the omnipotence of Church and
State and opposed by no competition, was able to deprave, debase, and
falsify the mind of Europe. It had no competitors, because outside of
the Church there were neither thinkers nor educated persons. It alone
thought, it alone spoke and wrote, it alone taught. Though heresies
arose in its bosom, they affected only the theological or practical
developments of the fundamental dogma, never that dogma itself. The
belief in God, pure spirit and creator of the world, and the belief in
the immateriality of the soul remained untouched. This double belief
became the ideal basis of the whole Occidental and Oriental civilization
of Europe; it penetrated and became incarnate in all the institutions,
all the details of the public and private life of all classes, and the
masses as well.
After that, is it surprising that this belief has lived until the
present day, continuing to exercise its disastrous influence even upon
select minds, such as those of Mazzini, Michelet, Quinet, and so many
others? We have seen that the first attack upon it came from the
_renaissance_ of the free mind in the fifteenth century, which produced
heroes and martyrs like Vanini, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo. Although
drowned in the noise, tumult, and passions of the Reformation, it
noiselessly continued its invisible work, bequeathing to the noblest
minds of each generation its task of human emancipation by the
destruction of the absurd, until at last, in the latter half of the
eighteenth century, it again reappeared in broad day, boldly waving the
flag of atheism and materialism.
The human mind, then, one might have supposed, was at last about to
deliver itself from all the divine obsessions. Not at all. The divine
falsehood upon which humanity had been feeding for eighteen centuries
(speaking of Christianity only) was once more to show itself more
powerful than human truth. No longer able to make use of the black
tribe, of the ravens consecrated by the Church, of the Catholic or
Protestant priests, all confidence in whom had been lost, it made use of
lay priests, short-robed liars and sophists, among whom the principal
_roles_ devolved upon two fatal men, one the falsest mind, the other the
most doctrinally despotic will, of the last century--J. J. Rousseau and
Robespierre.