SYMBOLIC AND MORAL FAITH.
I. Substitution of metaphysical symbolism for dogma—Liberal
Protestantism—Comparison with Brahmanism—Substitution
of moral symbolism for metaphysical symbolism—Moral
faith—Kant—Mill—Matthew Arnold—A literary explanation
of the Bible substituted for a literal explanation.
II. Criticism of symbolic faith—Inconsequence of liberal
Protestantism—Is Jesus of a more divine type than
other great geniuses—Does the Bible possess a greater
authority in matters of morals than any other masterpiece
of poetry—Criticism of Matthew Arnold’s system—Final
absorption of religions by morality.
[Sidenote: Inevitable tendency of religion toward non-religion.]
Every illogical position being in its nature unstable, the very
inconsequence of a religion obliges it to a perpetual evolution
in the direction of an ultimate non-religion, which it approaches
incessantly by almost insensible steps. The Protestant knows nothing
of the ordeal of a Catholic obliged to accept everything or to reject
everything; he knows nothing of prodigious revolutions and subjective
_coups d’état_; he possesses instinctively the art of transition, his
_credo_ is elastic. There are so many different creeds, each a little
more thorough-going than the last, that he may pass through, that he
has time to habituate his spirit to the truth before being obliged to
profess it in its simplicity. Protestantism is the only religion, in
the Occident at least, in which it is possible for one to become an
atheist unawares and without having done one’s self the shadow of a
violence in the process: the subjective theism of Mr. Moncure Conway,
for example, or any such ultra-liberal Unitarian is so near a neighbour
to ideal atheism that really the two cannot be told apart, and yet the
Unitarians, who as a matter of fact are often simply free-thinkers,
hold, so to speak, that they still believe. The truth is that an
affectionate faith long retains its charm, even after one is persuaded
that it is an error and dead in one; one caresses the lifeless
illusions and cannot bring one’s self altogether to abandon them, as
in the land of the Slavs it is the custom to kiss the pale face of the
dead in the open coffin before throwing upon it the handful of earth
which severs definitely the last visible bonds of love.
[Sidenote: Exemplified in the case of Brahmanism and Buddhism.]
Long before Christianity, other great religions, Brahmanism and
Buddhism, which are much more comprehensive and less arrested in their
development, followed the course of evolution by which a literal
faith comes to be transformed into a symbolic faith. They have been
reconciled successively with one metaphysical system after another—a
process which has been inevitably carried forward with a fresh impulse
under the English rule. To-day Sumangala, the Buddhist high-priest of
Colombo, interprets in a symbolic sense the at once profound and naïve
doctrine of the transmigration; he pretends to reject miracles. Other
enlightened Buddhists freely accept modern doctrines, from those of
Darwin to those of Spencer. On the other hand, in the bosom of Hinduism
there has grown up a really new and wholly theistical religion,
that of the Brahmaists.[54] Râm Mohum Roy founded, at the beginning
of the century, a very deeply symbolical and wide-spread faith;
his successors have gone the length, with Debendra Nâth Tâgore, of
denying the authenticity even of the very texts which they were in the
beginning most concerned to interpret mystically. This last step was
taken suddenly, under circumstances which it is worth while to detail,
because they sum up in a few characteristic strokes the universal
history of religious thought. It happened about 1847. The disciples of
Râm Mohum Roy, the Brahmaists, had been for a long time engaged in a
discussion about the Vedas, and, quite as in the case of our liberal
Protestants, had been giving especial prominence to texts in which
they imagined they found an unmistakable affirmation of the unity of
the Godhead; and they rid themselves of all concern with the passages
that seemingly contradicted this notion by denying their authenticity.
Ultimately, somewhat alarmed at their own progress, they sent four
Pundits to Benares to collate the sacred texts: it was in Benares that,
according to the tradition, the only so-called complete and authentic
manuscript was preserved. During the two years that the labour of the
Pundits covered, the Hindus waited for the truth in the same spirit
that the Hebrews had done at the foot of Sinai. Finally the authentic
version, or what purported to be such, was brought to them; and they
possessed the definitive formula of revelation. Their disappointment
was great, and they took the matter into their own hands, realizing
at one blow the revolution which the liberal Protestants are pursuing
gradually in the bosom of Christianity: they rejected definitively the
Vedas and the antique religion of the Brahmans, and proclaimed in its
stead a theistical religion, which rests in no sense whatsoever upon
revelation. The new faith must in time develop, not without heresy
and schism, but its adherents constitute to-day in India an important
element in progress.
[54] M. Goblet d’Alviella, _Evolution religieuse contemporaine_.
[Sidenote: Preservation of the letter while tampering with the spirit
of the Bible.]
In our days very estimable persons have essayed to push Christianity
also into a new path. In according the right of interpretation to
private individuals, Luther gave them the right of clothing their own
individual thoughts in the language of the antique dogmas and the
texts of the sacred books. Insomuch that by a singular revolution,
the “Word,” which was considered in the beginning as the faithful
expression of the divine thought, has tended to become for each of us
the expression of our own personal thought. The sense of the words
depending really upon ourselves, the most barbarous language can be
made at a pinch to serve us for the conveyance of the noblest ideas.
By this ingenious expedient texts become flexible, dogmas become
acclimated more or less to the intellectual atmosphere in which they
are placed, and the barbarism of the sacred books becomes disguised. By
virtue of living with the people of God we civilize them, we lend them
our ideas, inoculate them with our aspirations, everyone interprets
the Bible to suit himself, and the result is that the commentary
ultimately overgrows and half obscures the text itself; we no longer
read with undimmed vision—we look through a medium which disguises
everything that is hideous, and lends a fresh beauty to everything
that is beautiful. At bottom the veritable sacred Word is no longer
the one which God pronounced and sent forth reverberating, eternally
the same, down the centuries; it is the one which we pronounce or
rather whisper—for is it not the sense which one puts upon it
that constitutes the real value of an utterance? and it is we who
determine the sense. The Divine Spirit has passed into the believer
and, at certain times at least, the true God would seem to be one’s
own thought. This attempt at a reconciliation between religion and
free-thought is a masterpiece of tact. Religion seems always to lag
a little behind, but free-thought by exercise of a little ingenuity
always find means, in the end, of helping it forward. The progress of
the two consists of a series of arrangements, compromises, something
like what takes place between a conservative Senate and a progressive
Chamber of Deputies, honestly in search of a _modus vivendi_.
[Sidenote: Extension of symbolic interpretation to essential dogmas.]
By a procedure which Luther would never have dared to emulate
Protestants have taken the liberty of employing on essential dogmas
this power of symbolical interpretation which Luther reserved for texts
of a secondary importance. The most essential of dogmas, that upon
which all others depend, is the dogma of revelation. If, since Luther’s
time, an orthodox Protestant feels himself at liberty to discuss at
his ease whether the sense of the sacred Word is really this, that, or
the other, he never for an instant questions whether the Word itself
is really sacred in effect, or whether it really possesses any meaning
that can properly be called divine. When he holds the Bible he has no
doubt but that he has his hand upon the truth; he has only to discover
it beneath the words in which it is contained, has only to dig for it
in the sacred Book as a labourer might dig in a field in search of a
buried treasure. But is it then quite certain that the treasure is
really there, that the truth lies ready-made somewhere between the
covers of the Book? That is the question which the liberal Protestant
is asking himself, and he has already taken possession of Germany, of
England, of the United States, and possesses even in France a large
number of representatives. Previous to his advent all Christians were
at one in the belief that the sacred Word really exists somewhere; at
the present day this belief itself tends to become symbolic. No doubt
there was in Jesus a certain element of divinity, but is there not in
all of us, in one sense or another, a certain element of divinity? “Why
should we be surprised,” writes a liberal clergyman, “at finding Jesus
a mystery, when we are all of us ourselves a mystery?” According to
the new Protestants there is no longer any reason for taking anything
at its face value, not even what has hitherto been considered as the
spirit of Christianity. For the most logical of them, the Bible is
scarcely more than a book like another; custom has consecrated it;
one may find God in it if one seeks Him there, because one may find
God anywhere and put Him there, if by chance He be really not there
already. The divine halo has dropped from Christ’s head, or rather
he shares it with all the angels and all the saints. He has lost his
celestial purity or rather we share it with him, all of us; for is not
original sin also a symbol, and are we not all of us born innocent sons
of God? The miracles are but fresh symbols which represent, grossly
and visibly, the subjective power of faith. We are no longer to look
for orders directly from God; God no longer talks to us by a single
voice, but by all the voices of the universe, and it is in the midst
of the great concert of nature that we must seize and distinguish the
veritable Word. All is symbolic except God, who is the eternal truth.
[Sidenote: And even to the conception of God.]
Well, and why stop at God? Liberty of thought, which has been
incessantly turning and adapting dogma to its progress, has it in its
power to make a step beyond. Immutable faith is hemmed in by a circle
which is daily shrinking. For the liberal Protestant this contraction
has reached its extreme, and centre and circumference are one and the
process is continuing. Why should not God Himself be a symbol? What is
this mysterious Being, after all, but a popular personification of the
_divine_ or even of ideal humanity; in a word, of morality?
[Sidenote: The result practically a religion of morals. Perceived to be
so in Germany.]
Thus a purely moral symbolism comes in process of time to be
substituted for a metaphysical symbolism. We are close upon the Kantian
conception of a religion of duty, resting upon a simple postulate or
even a simple generalization of human conduct, to the effect that
morality and happiness are in the last resort in harmony. A faith in
morals, thus understood, has been adopted by many Germans as the basis
of religious faith. Hegelians have converted religion into a moral
symbolism. Strauss defines morality as the “harmonization” of man with
his species, and defines religion as the harmonization of man with the
universe; and these definitions, which seem at first sight to imply
a difference in extent and a certain opposition between morality and
religion, aim in reality at showing their ultimate unity; the ideal of
the species and the purpose of the universe are one, and if by chance
they should be distinct, it would be the more universal ideal that
morality itself would command us to follow. Von Hartmann, also, in
spite of his mystical tendencies, concludes that there is no religion
possible except one which will consecrate the moral autonomy of the
individual, his salvation by his own effort and not by that of somebody
else (autosoterism as distinguished from heterosoterism). From which
it follows that, in Von Hartmann’s opinion, the essence of religious
adoration and gratitude should be one’s respect for the essential and
impersonal element in one’s self; in other words, piety is, properly
speaking, no more than a form of morality and of absolute renouncement.
[Sidenote: Also in France.]
In France, as is well known, M. Renouvier follows Kant and bases
religion upon morality. M. Renan also makes of religion a little more
than an ideal morality: “Abnegation, devotion, sacrifice of the real
to the ideal, such,” he says, “is the very essence of religion.” And
elsewhere: “What is the state but egoism organized? what is religion
but devotion organized?” M. Renan forgets, however, that a purely
egoistic state, that is to say a purely immoral state, could not
continue to exist. It would be more accurate to say that the state is
justice organized; and since justice and devotion are in principle the
same, it follows that the state as well as religion rests ultimately
upon morality: morality is the very foundation of social life.
[Sidenote: Also in England.]
In England, also, the same process of the transformation of a
religious faith into a purely moral faith may be observed. Kant
through the intermediation of Coleridge and of Hamilton has exercised
a great influence upon English thought and upon the course of this
transformation. Coleridge brought down the Kingdom of God from Heaven
and domesticated it upon earth; the reign of God for him, as for Kant,
became that of morality. For John Stuart Mill, whose point of approach
was widely different from that of Coleridge, the outcome of the study
of religions was the same—that their essential value has always
consisted in the moral precepts they inculcate; the good that they have
done should be attributed rather to the stimulus they have given to the
moral sentiment than to the religious sentiment properly so called.
And it is to be added, Mill says, that the moral principles furnished
by religions labour under this double disability, that (1) they are
tainted with selfishness, and operate upon the individual by promises
or menaces relating to the life to come without entirely detaching him
from a preoccupation with his own interest, and, (2) they produce a
certain intellectual apathy, and even an aberration of the moral sense,
in that they attribute to an absolutely perfect being the creation of
a world so imperfect as our own, and thus in a certain measure cloak
evil itself in divinity. Nobody could adore such a god willingly
without having undergone a preliminary process of degeneration. The
true religion of the future, according to John Stuart Mill, will be
an elevated moral doctrine, going beyond an egoistic utilitarianism
and encouraging us to pursue the good of humanity in general; nay,
even of sentient beings in general. This conception of a religion of
humanity, which is not without analogy to the Positivist conception,
might be reconciled, John Stuart Mill adds, with the belief in a divine
power—a principle of goodness present in the universe. A faith in God
is immoral only when it supposes God to be omnipotent, since it, in
that case, charges him with responsibility for existing evil. A good
god can exist only on condition that he is less than omnipotent, that
he encounters in nature, nay in human nature, obstacles which hinder
him from effecting the good that he desires. Once conceive God thus,
and the formula of duty reads simply: Help God; work with Him for the
production of what is good, lend Him the concurrence that He really
needs since He is not omnipotent. Labour also with all great men—all
men like Socrates, Moses, Marcus Aurelius, Washington—do as they do,
all that you can and ought to do. This disinterested collaboration on
the part of all men with each other and with the principle of goodness,
in whatsoever manner that principle may be conceived or personified,
will be, in John Stuart Mill’s judgment, the ultimate religion. And
it is evidently no more than a magnified system of morality, erected
into a universal law for the world. What is it that we call the divine,
except this that is the best in ourselves? “God is good,” cried
Feuerbach, “signifies: goodness is divine; God is just signifies:
justice is divine.” Instead of saying: there have been divine agonies,
divine deaths, one has said, God has suffered, God has died. “God is
the apotheosis of the heart of man.”[55]
[55] Mr. Seeley, in his work entitled _Natural Religion_
(1882), takes pains to establish that of the three elements
which compose the religious idea—the love of truth or
science, the sentiment of beauty or art, the notion of duty or
morals—it is the last only that can to-day be reconciled with
Christianity.
[Sidenote: Matthew Arnold’s “Literature and Dogma.”]
An analogous thesis is maintained with great cleverness in a book which
caused considerable stir in England: Mr. Matthew Arnold’s “Literature
and Dogma.” The author, in common with religious critics generally,
remarks the growing tension that nowadays exists between science
and dogma. “An inevitable revolution, of which we all recognize the
beginnings and signs, but which has already spread, perhaps, farther
than most of us think, is befalling the religion in which we have been
brought up.” Mr. Arnold is right. At no former period have unbelievers
appeared to have so strong a hold in right reason; the old arguments
against providence, miracles, and final causes, that the Epicureans
brought into prominence, seem as nothing beside the arguments furnished
in our days by the Laplaces and the Lamarcks, and quite recently by
Darwin, the “evictor of miracles,” in Strauss’ phrase. One of the
sacred prophets whom Mr. Arnold is fond of quoting once said: “Behold,
the days come, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine
of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the
Lord: and they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even
to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord,
and shall not find it.” The time predicted by the prophet Mr. Arnold
might well recognize as our own; might it not with truth be said of
the present that it lacks the word of the Eternal, or soon will lack
it? A new spirit animates our generation; not only are we in doubt
whether the Eternal ever did speak or ever does speak to man, but
many of us believe in the existence of no other eternity than that of
a universe of mute and unfeeling matter which keeps its own secret
except as against those who have the wit to find it out. There are of
course, even to-day, some few faithful servants in the houses of the
Lord; but the Master seems to have departed for the far countries of
the past, to which memory alone has access. In Russia in the older
seigniorial estates, a disc of iron is fastened to the wall of the
mansion of the lord of the soil; and when he returns from a journey,
the first night he passes in his dominion, some follower runs to the
disc of iron and in the silence of the night beats upon the metal to
announce his vigilance and the presence of the master. Who will awaken
nowadays the voice of the bells in the church-steeples to announce
the return to His temple of the living God, and the vigilance of the
faithful? To-day the sound of the church-bells is as melancholy as
a cry in the void; they tell of the deserted house of God, of the
absence of the lord of the soil, they sound the knell of the believers.
And is there nothing that can be done to domesticate religion once
more in the heart of man? There is but one means: to see in God no
more than a symbol of what exists always at the bottom of the human
heart—morality. And it is to this expedient that Matthew Arnold also
turns his attention. But he is not content with a purely philosophic
system of morals, he aims at the preservation of religion, and in
especial of the Christian religion; and to that end he brings forward
a new method of interpretation, the literary and æsthetic method, the
purpose of which is to glean from the sacred texts whatever they may
contain of moral beauty, in the hope that it may incidentally prove
to contain also what is true. It aims at reconstructing the primitive
notions of Christianity, in whatsoever they possessed of vagueness,
of indecision, and at the same time of profundity, and to set them
in opposition over against the gross precision of popular views. In
matters of metaphysic or religion there is nothing more absurd than an
excessive precision; the truth in such matters is not to be rounded in
an epigram. Epigram can at best serve, not as a definition, but as a
suggestion of the infinities that it really does not circumscribe. And
just as the verity in such matters overpasses the measure of language,
so it overpasses the personalities and the figures which humanity has
chosen as representative of it. When an idea is powerfully conceived,
it tends to become definite, to take unto itself a visage, a voice;
our ears seem to hear and our eyes to see what our hearts feel. “Man
never knows,” said Goethe, “how anthropomorphic he is.” What is there
so surprising in the fact that humanity has personified that which in
all climes claimed its allegiance—the idea of goodness and of justice?
The Eternal, the eternally Just, the Omnipotent who squares reality
with justice, He who parcels out evil and good, the Being who weighs
all actions, who does all things by weight and measure, or rather who
is Himself weight and measure—_that_ is the God of the Jewish people,
the Javeh of adult Judaism, as He ultimately appears in the mist of
the unknown. In our days He has become transmuted into a simple moral
conception, which, having forcibly taken possession of the human mind,
has at last clothed itself in a mystical form—has become personified
by alliance with a crowd of superstitions that the “false science of
theologians” regards as inseparable from it and from which a more
delicately discriminating interpretation—an interpretation more
_literary_ and less _literal_—should set it free. God having become
one with the moral law, a further step may be taken; one may regard
Christ who immolated Himself to save the world as a moral symbol of
self-sacrifice, as the sublime type in which we find united all the
suffering of human life and all the ideal grandeur of morality. In His
figure the human and the divine are reconciled. He was a man, for He
suffered, but His devotion was so great that He was a god. And what
then is that Heaven which is reserved for those who follow Christ and
walk in the path of self-sacrifice? It is moral perfection. Hell is the
symbol of that depth of corruption to which, by hypothesis, they will
fall who, by a persistent choice of evil, ultimately lose all notion
even of goodness. The terrestrial paradise is a charming symbol for
the primitive innocence of the child: he has done as yet no evil, he
has done as yet no good; his earliest disobedience is his first sin;
when desire is awakened in him for the first time, his will has been
conquered, he has fallen, but this fall is precisely the condition of
his being set upon his feet again, of his redemption by the moral law;
behold him condemned to labour, to the hard labour of man upon himself,
to the struggle of self-mastery; without that contest to strengthen
him he would never see the god descend in him, Christ the Saviour, the
moral ideal. Thus it is in the evolution of the human conscience that a
key to human symbolism must be found.[56] Of them must be said what the
philosopher Sallust said of religious legends generally in his treatise
“On the Gods and the World”: Such things have never happened, but they
are eternally true. Religion is the morality of the people; it shows to
them, realized and divinized, the higher types of conduct which they
should force themselves to imitate here below; the dreams with which
it peoples the skies are dreams of justice, of equality of goods, of
fraternity: Heaven pays for earth. Let us then no longer employ the
names of God, of Christ, of the Resurrection except as symbols, vague
as hope itself. Then, according to Mr. Matthew Arnold, and those who
maintain the same thesis, we shall begin to love these symbols, our
faith will find a resting place in the religion which before seemed
to be but a tissue of gross absurdities. Beneath dogma, which is but
the surface, we shall find the moral law, which is the substance. This
law, it is true, has in religion become concrete; it has, so to speak,
taken on colour and form. That, however, is simply owing to the fact
that people are poets; they think in images or not at all. You can
only attract their attention by pointing your finger at something.
After all, what harm is there in the fact that the apostles, opening
the blue ether, showed the gaping nations of the earth the thrones of
gold and seraphim and white wings, and the kneeling multitude of the
elect? This spectacle fascinated the Middle Age, and at times, when
we shut our eyes, we seem to see it still. This poetry, spread upon
the surface of the moral law, lends it an attractiveness that it did
not possess in its bare austerity. Sacrifice becomes less difficult
when it presents itself crowned with a halo. The early Christians
were not fond of representing Christ as bleeding under the crown of
thorns, but as transfigured and triumphant; they preferred to keep
his agony in the background. Such pictures as ornament our Churches
would have filled them with horror; their young faith would have been
shaken by the image of the “agony upon the cross,” which caused Goethe
also a sort of a repugnance. When they represented the cross it was
no longer burdened with the God, and they took care even to cover
it with flowers and ornaments of every kind. You may see it in the
rude figures, the designs and sculptures found in the catacombs. To
hide the cross beneath an armful of flowers is precisely the marvel
realized by religion. And when religions are regarded from this
point of view, all ground vanishes for looking with disdain upon the
legends which constitute the material of popular faith. They become
comprehensible, they become lovable, one feels one’s self enveloped in
an “infinite tenderness” for this spontaneous product of naïve thought
in quest of goodness, in pursuit of the ideal, for these fairy-tales
of human morality, profounder and sweeter than all other fairy-tales.
It was necessary that religious poetry should prepare the earth long
beforehand for the coming of the mysterious ideal; should embellish
the place where it was to descend, as the mother of the Sleeping
Beauty, seeing the eyes of her daughter grow heavy with the sleep of
a hundred years, placed with confidence at the side of the bed the
embroidered cushion, on which the enamoured prince would one day kneel
to reawaken her with a kiss.
[56] Besides Mr. Matthew Arnold, consult M. L. Ménard, _Sources
du dogme Chrétien_ (_Critique religieuse, janvier, 1879._)
[Sidenote: Historical religions to be regarded historically.]
We have come a long way in all this from the servile interpretation of
the blind leaders who fasten upon particular texts and lose sight of
their subject as a whole. If one approaches a picture too near, the
perspective disappears and all the colours lose their proper value;
one must stand back a certain distance and see it in a favourable
light: and then alone the richness of the colours and the unity of
the work appear. Religions must be looked upon in the same way. If
the spectator stands sufficiently above them and aloof from them, he
loses all prejudice, all hostility, in respect to them; their sacred
books come even in time to merit in his eyes the name of sacred, and
he finds in them, Mr. Arnold says, a providential “secret,” which is
the “secret of Jesus.” Why not recognize, adds Mr. Arnold, that the
Bible is an inspired book, dictated by the Holy Spirit? After all,
everything that is spontaneous is more or less divine, providential;
whatever springs from the very sources of human thought is infinitely
venerable. The Bible is a unique book, corresponding to a peculiar
state of mind, and it can no more be made over or corrected than a
work of Phidias or Praxiteles. In spite of its moral lapses and its
frequent disaccord with the conscience of our epoch, it is a necessary
complement of Christianity; it manifests the spirit of Christian
society, it represents the tradition of it, and attaches the beliefs
of the present to those of the past.[57] The Bible and the dogmas of
the Church, having been formerly the point of departure for religious
belief, have come nowadays, no doubt, in the face of modern faith, to
be in need of justification; and this justification they will obtain;
to be understood is itself to be forgiven.
[57] See M. L. Ménard, _ibid._ (_Crit. relig., 1879._)
[Sidenote: The moral doctrine of the New Testament the main strength of
Christianity.]
If the New Testament contains at all a more or less reflective moral
theory, it is assuredly that of love. Charity, or rather affectionate
justice (charity is always justice, absolutely considered), such is
the “secret” of Jesus. The New Testament may then be considered,
according to the opinion of Mr. Matthew Arnold, as before all else a
treatise on symbolical morality. The actual superiority of the New
Testament, as compared with Paganism and with pagan philosophy, is a
moral superiority; therein lay the secret of its success. There is no
theology in the New Testament unless it be the Jewish theology, and
the Jewish theology had proved itself incapable of the conquest of
the world. The power of the New Testament lay in its morality, and it
is its morality which even in our times survives still, more or less
transformed by modern progress. And it is upon the morality of the New
Testament that modern Christian societies must of necessity lean, it
is in the morality of the New Testament that they will find their true
strength; the morality of the New Testament is the principal argument
that they can invoke in proof of the legitimacy of religion itself and,
so to speak, of God.
[Sidenote: Logical outcome of Matthew Arnold’s position.]
Mr. Matthew Arnold and the group of liberal critics, who, like him,
are inspired by the spirit of the age (_Zeitgeist_), seem thus to have
guided faith to the ultimate point beyond which nothing remains but to
break definitively with the past and its texts and dogmas.
Religious thought in these pages is bound by the slenderest threads to
religious symbolism. At bottom, if one looks close, liberal Christians
suppress religion, properly so called, and substitute a religious
morality in its stead. The believer of other times affirmed the
existence of God first, and then made His will the rule of conduct; the
liberal believer of our day affirms the existence, first of all, of
the moral law, and cloaks it in divinity afterward. He, like Matthew
Arnold, treats with Javeh on equal terms, and speaks to Him almost as
follows: “Art Thou a person? I do not know. Hast Thou had prophets, a
Messiah? I no longer believe so. Hast Thou created me? I doubt it. Dost
Thou watch over me—me in especial—dost Thou perform miracles? I deny
it. But there is one thing, and one alone, in which I do believe, and
that is in my own conception of morality; and if Thou art willing to
become a surety for that and to bend the reality into harmony with my
ideal, we will make a treaty of alliance; and by the affirmation of my
existence as a moral being, I will affirm Thine into the bargain.” We
are far away from the antique Javeh, the Power, with whom no bargain
could be made; the jealous God, who wished man’s every thought to point
toward Him alone, and who would make no treaty with His people unless
He could precisely dictate the terms.
[Sidenote: Practical attenuation of Christian faith.]
The more distinguished German, English, and American clergymen thrust
theology so far into the background for the purpose of forwarding
practical morality that one may apply to all of them the words
of an American periodical, the _North American Review_: that a
pagan, desirous of making himself acquainted with the doctrines of
Christianity, might frequent our most fashionable churches for an
entire year and not hear one word about the torments of hell or the
wrath of an incensed God. As to the fall of man and the expiatory
agony of Christ, just so much would be said as to fall short of giving
umbrage to the most fanatical believer of the theory of evolution.
Listening and observing for himself, he would reach the conclusion
that the way to salvation lies in confessing one’s belief in certain
abstract doctrines, beaten out as thin as possible by the clergyman
and by the believer, in frequenting assiduously the church and
extra-religious meetings, in dropping an obolus every Sunday into the
contribution box, and in imitating the attitudes of his neighbours.
All the terms of theology are so loosely employed that all those are
considered Christians whose character has been formed by Christian
civilization, all those who have not remained total strangers to the
current of ideas set up in the Occident by Jesus and Paul. It was an
American clergyman who had abandoned the narrow dogmas of Calvin[58]
that, after having employed a long life in becoming more and more
liberal, discovered, in his seventieth year, this large formula for his
faith: “Nobody ought to be regarded as an infidel who sees in justice
the great creed of human life, and who aims at an increasingly complete
subjection of his will to his moral sense.”
[58] Mr. Henry Ward Beecher.
II. What is the possible value and the possible duration of this moral
and metaphysical symbolism to which it is being attempted to reduce
religion?
[Sidenote: Logical hollowness of the position of the liberal
Protestants.]
Let us speak first of the liberal Protestants. Liberal Protestantism,
which resolves the very dogmas of its creed into mere symbols, stands
no doubt in the scale of progress in about the same relation to
orthodox Protestantism as the latter does in relation to Catholicism.
But far as it seems in advance of them from the point of view of morals
and society, it is inferior to them in logic. Catholicism has been
irreverently called a perfectly embalmed corpse, a Christian mummy,
in an admirable state of preservation beneath the cold embroidered
chasubles and surplices which envelop it; Luther’s Protestantism tears
the body to shreds, liberal Protestantism reduces it to dust. To
preserve Christianity while suppressing Christ the son, or at least
the messenger of God, is an undertaking of which they alone will be
capable who are little disposed to make much of what is known as logic.
Whoever does not believe in Revelation ought frankly to confess himself
a philosopher, and to hold the Bible and the New Testament as little
authoritative as the dialogues of Plato, or the treatises of Aristotle,
or the Vedas, or the Talmud. Liberal Protestants, as Herr von Hartmann,
one of their bitterest adversaries, remarks, seize upon the whole body
of modern ideas and label them Christianity. The process is not very
consistent. If you are absolutely determined to rally round a flag,
let it at least be your own. But the liberal Protestants wish, and
honestly, to be and to remain Protestants; in Germany, they obstinately
remain in the United Evangelical Church of Prussia, where they about
as truly belong as a sparrow does in the nest of a swallow. Herr von
Hartmann, whose zeal against them is unflagging, compares them to a
man whose house is riven in many places and going to ruin, and who
perceives and does all that in him lies still further to shatter it,
and continues, nevertheless, tranquilly to sleep in it and even to
call in passers-by and offer them board and lodging. Or again—always
according to Herr von Hartmann—they are like a man who should seat
himself in perfect confidence upon a chair after having first sawed
through all four legs of it. Strauss had already said: “The instant
that Jesus is regarded as no more than a man, one has no longer any
right to pray to him, to retain him as the centre of a cult, to preach
the whole year through on him, on his actions, on his adventures
and maxims; in especial, if the more important of his adventures
and actions have been recognized as fabulous, and if his maxims are
demonstrably incompatible with our present views on human life and
the world.” To understand what is peculiar in the majority of liberal
communions which always stop halfway, it is necessary to observe that
they are generally the work of ecclesiastics who have broken with the
dominant church, and that they preserve to the end some suggestion of
their former belief; they can no more think, except in the terms of the
formulæ of some dogma, than we can speak in the words of a language
with which we are unacquainted; and even when they endeavour to acquire
a new language they speak it always with an accent which betrays their
nationality. For the rest they feel instinctively that the name of
Christ lends them a certain authority, and they find it impossible to
abandon their profession and its emoluments. In Germany, and even in
France, over and above the liberal Protestants, who in the latter place
are few in number, former Catholics have sought to abandon orthodox
Catholicism, but they have not dared to abandon Christianity. The case
of Father Hyacinthe[59] is sufficiently well known. It is in vain for
those who are born Christians to try their hand at logic, and to make
an effort to rid themselves of their faith. They make one think, in
spite of one’s self, of a fly caught in a spider-web, who has freed
one wing and one leg, and only one.
[59] Dr. Junqua, whose name almost became celebrated a few
years ago, also tried to found a church, the Church of Liberty;
those who entered were at liberty to believe almost anything
they liked, not even the atheist, properly so called, being
excluded. The church in question was to have been purely
symbolic: baptism it was to recognize as the symbol of
initiation into Christian civilization; confirmation as the
symbol of an enrolment among the soldiers of Liberty; and
the eucharist, that is to say a religious love feast, as the
symbol of the brotherhood of man. It is to be added that these
sacraments were not obligatory and that the members might
abstain from them entirely if they chose. Still, they would be
members of a communion. Their faith would be designated by a
common name, they would be in relations with a priest who would
comment in their presence on texts of the New Testament, and
would talk of Christ if he and they believed in Him. The church
of Dr. Junqua might easily have succeeded in England with Mr.
Moncure Conway and the secularists.
[Sidenote: Neo-Christianity.]
Let us endeavour, however, to enter more intimately into the thoughts
of those who may be called the Neo-Christians, and let us seek for the
element of truth, if such there be, that their much-criticised doctrine
contains. If Jesus is only a man, they say, he is at least the most
extraordinary of men; at one bound, by an intuition at once natural
and divine, he discovered the supreme truth necessary to the life of
humanity; he is in advance of all times, he spoke not only for his own
people, nor for his own century, nor even for a score of centuries;
his voice rolled beyond the restricted circle of his auditors, and the
twelve apostles, beyond the people of Judea prostrate before him, to us
in whose ears it sounds the eternal truth; and it finds us even still
attentive, listening, trying to understand it, incapable of finding a
substitute for it. “In Jesus,” writes Pastor Bost in his work on “Le
Protestantisme libéral,” “the mingling of the human and the divine
was accomplished in proportions not seen elsewhere. His relation to
God is the normal and typical relation of humanity to the Creator....
Jesus stands forever as the model.” Professor Herman Schultz in a
conference in Göttingen, some years ago, also expressed the same idea,
that Jesus is really the Messiah, properly so called, in the sense
that the Jews attached to that word. He did found the kingdom of God,
not it is true by marvellous exploits like those of Moses or of Elias,
but by an exploit surpassing theirs, by the sacrifice of love, by the
voluntary gift of himself. The apostles and Christians in general
did not believe in Jesus because of the miracles he performed: they
accepted his miracles owing to their previous faith in him, a faith
the true foundation of which lay in Christ’s moral superiority, and
that subsists still even if one deny the miracles. Professor Schultz
concludes, against Strauss and M. Renan, that “a belief in Christ is
wholly independent of the results of a historical criticism of his
life.” Every one of the actions attributed to Jesus may be mythical,
but there remain to us his words and his thoughts, which find in us
an eternal echo. There are things which one discovers once for all,
and whosoever has found love has made a discovery that is not illusory
nor of brief duration. Is it not just that men should group themselves
about him, range themselves under his name? He himself loves to call
himself the Son of Man; it is under this title that humanity should
revere him. It is not destruction but reconstruction that is the
outcome of contemporary biblical exegesis, one of the representatives
of English Unitarianism, the Rev. A. Armstrong, said in 1883. It adds
to our love of Jesus to recognize in him a brother and to see in the
marvellous legends associated with him no more than the symbol of a
love more naïve than ours, that namely of his disciples. Proof by
miracle is but the ultimate form of a temptation from which humanity
should escape. In the symbolic story of the temptation in the desert,
Satan says: “Command that these stones be made bread;” he urged Christ
to be guilty of a miracle, of the prestidigitation which the ancient
prophets had employed so frequently to strike the imagination of the
people. But Jesus refused. And on another occasion he said to the
people indignantly: If you did not see prodigies and miracles you do
not believe, and to the Pharisees: “Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the
face of the sky and of the earth, ... and why even of yourselves judge
ye not what is right?” It is by the testimony of our own souls, say
the Neo-Christians; it is by our own individual conscience, our own
individual reason, that we shall find justice in the word of Christ,
and that we shall revere it; and this word is not true because it is
divine, it is divine because it is true.
[Sidenote: Modern German historical criticism and liberal
Protestantism.]
Thus understood, liberal Protestantism is a doctrine that merits
discussion; only it is sadly in lack of any distinguishing
characteristic especially to mark it off from the numerous
philosophical sects which, in the course of history, have gathered
about the opinions of some man and endeavoured to identify his
teachings with the truth and to lend to them an authority more than
human. Pythagoras was for his disciples what Jesus is to the liberal
Protestant. The traditional respect also of the Epicureans for their
master is well known, the sort of worship they rendered him, the
authority that they lent to his words.[60] Pythagoras brought to light
a great idea, that of the harmony which governs the physical and moral
universe; Epicurus, another, that of the happiness which is the true
aim of rational conduct, the measure of goodness, and even of truth;
and by their disciples these two great ideas came to be looked upon not
as parts of the truth but as truth itself in its entirety; they saw
no ground for further search. In the same way, in our own times, the
Positivists see in Auguste Comte not a profound thinker simply, but one
who has laid his finger, so to speak, on the definitive verity, one who
has traversed at a dash the whole domain of intelligence and traced out
once for all its limits. It is rigorously exact to say that Auguste
Comte is a sort of Christ for bigoted Positivists—a Christ a trifle
too recent, who did not have the happiness of dying on the cross. Each
of these sects reposes on the following belief: Before Pythagoras,
Epicurus, or Comte, nobody had seen the truth; after them nobody will
ever see it more clearly. Such a creed implicitly denies: 1. Historical
continuity, the inevitable result of which is that the man of genius is
always more or less the expression of his century and that the honour
of his discoveries is not due wholly to himself; 2. Human evolution,
the inevitable result of which is that the man of genius cannot be the
expression of all the centuries to come—that his point of view must
necessarily be some day passed by—that the truth discovered by him is
not the whole truth but simply a stage in the infinite progress of the
human mind. A _deus dixit_ is comprehensible, or if not comprehensible
at least conceivable; but to resuscitate in favour of some mere human
being, were it Jesus himself, the _magister dixit_ of the Middle Ages,
is a bit of an anachronism. Geometers have always held Euclid in the
highest respect, but each of them has done his best to contribute some
new theorem to the body of doctrine that he left behind; and is the
rule for moral truth not the same as that for mathematical truth? Is
it within the compass of one man’s powers to know and to utter all
that there is to be known? Is an autocracy the only form of government
in the sphere of mind? Liberal Protestants speak to us of the “secret
of Jesus”; but there are many secrets in this world, and each of us
carries his own; and who shall utter the secret of secrets, the last
word, the supreme verity? Nobody in particular, probably; truth is the
product of a prodigious co-operation, at which all peoples and all
generations must work. The horizon of truth can neither be taken in at
a single glance nor contracted; to perceive the whole of it one must
move forward incessantly, and at every step a new perspective is laid
bare. For humanity, to live is to learn; and before any individual
human being can tell us the great secret, he must have lived the life
of humanity, the lives of all existing beings and even of all existing
things, which seem scarcely to deserve the name of beings; he must have
concentrated in himself the universe. There can therefore properly be
no religion centred about a man. A man, be he Jesus himself, cannot
attach the human spirit to himself as to a fixed point. Liberal
Protestants think that they have seen the last of the Strausses and
Renans and their destructive criticism, because they have admitted
once for all that Jesus was not a god, but criticism will object to
them that the non-supernatural Messiah that they cherish is himself
a pure figment of the imagination. According to the rationalistic
exegesis, the doctrine of Christ, like his life, belongs more or less
to the domain of legend. Jesus never so much as conceived an idea of
the redemption—the very conception that is which lies at the root of
Christianity; he never so much as conceived an idea of the Trinity. If
one may rely upon works which stand perhaps shoulder to shoulder with
that of Strauss—the works of F. A. Müller, of Professor Weiss, of M.
Havet—Jesus was a Jew with the spiritual limitations of a Jew. His
dominant idea was that the end of the world was at hand and that on a
new-created earth would soon be realized the national kingdom looked
for by the Jews in the form of an altogether terrestrial theocracy.
The end of the world being near, it was naturally not worth while
to set up an establishment on earth for the short time that it was
still to exist; one’s entire business was properly with penitence and
the amendment of one’s conduct, in order not to be devoured by fire
at the day of judgment and excluded from the kingdom to be founded
on the new-created earth. Moreover, Jesus preached neglect of the
state, of the administration of justice, of the family, of labour
and of property; in effect, of all the essential elements of social
life. Evangelical morality itself presents to the critics of this
school little more than a disorderly mixture of the precepts of Moses
on disinterested love with the doctrine of Hillel more or less well
founded on enlightened self-interest. The original element in the New
Testament consisted less in the logical coherence of its teachings
than in a certain unction in the language employed, in a persuasive
eloquence which often took the place of reasoning. All that Christ said
others had said before him, but not with the same accent. In effect,
German historical criticism at once professes the greatest admiration
for the numerous founders of Christianity and leads its followers a
long way from the ideal man conceived by the Neo-Christians as being
the man-God whom primitive Christians adored. There exists accordingly
no more reason to attribute an element of revelation or of sacred
authority to the New Testament than to the Vedas or to any other
religious book. If Christianity is a symbolic faith, the myths of India
may quite as well be adopted as a basis of symbolism as the myths of
the Bible. And contemporary Brahmaists with their eclecticism, confused
and mystic as it often is, must be regarded as even nearer to the truth
than the liberal Protestants who still look for shelter and salvation
nowhere but under the diminishing shadow of the cross.
[60] See the author’s work on _la Morale d’Épicure et ses
rapports avec les doctrines contemporaines_, p. 186.
* * * * *
Abandoning, then, all effort to attribute a sacred authority to the
sacred books and to the Christian tradition, may one ascribe to them
at least a superior moral authority? Do they lend themselves in any
especial degree to such a purely æsthetic and moral symbolism as that
suggested by Mr. Arnold?
[Sidenote: Futility of Mr. Arnold’s method considered as an instrument
of historical criticism.]
A purely moral symbolism may be regarded from either of two points of
view: the concrete, which is that of history; or the abstract, which
is that of philosophy. Historically nothing could be more inexact than
Mr. Arnold’s method, which essentially consists in making a present
of the most refined conceptions of our epoch to primitive peoples. It
gives us to understand, for example, that the Javeh of the Hebrews
was not regarded as a perfectly definite person, a transcendent power
altogether distinct and separate from the world and manifesting
himself by acts of capricious volition, a king of the skies, a lord
of battles, bestowing on his people victory or defeat, abundance or
famine, sickness or health. It suffices to read one page of the Bible
or the New Testament to convince one’s self that a doubt as to the
personal existence of Javeh never for an instant crossed the Hebrew
mind. So be it, Mr. Arnold will say, but Javeh was in their eyes no
more, after all, than the personification of justice, because they
believed powerfully in justice. It would be more exact to say that
the Hebrews had not as yet a very philosophic notion of justice; that
they conceived it as an order received from without, a command which
it would be dangerous to disobey, a hostile will forcibly imposed
upon one’s own. Nothing could be more natural in the sequel than
to personify such a will. But is that precisely what we understand
nowadays by justice; and does it not really seem to Mr. Arnold himself
that he is playing on words, when he endeavours to make us believe
all that? Fear of the Lord is not justice. There are matters that one
cannot express in the form of legend when one has once really conceived
them—matters the true poetry of which consists in their very purity,
in their simplicity. To personify justice, to represent it as external
to ourselves under the form of a menacing power, is not to possess a
“high idea” of it; is not in the least, as Mr. Arnold phrases it, to
be aglow with it, illuminated by it; it is, on the contrary, not yet
really to have formed a conception of justice. What Mr. Arnold regards
as the sublimest expression of an altogether modern moral sentiment
is, on the contrary, a partial negation of it. Mr. Arnold’s aim, as
he says, is a “literary” criticism; but the literary method consists
in resetting the great works of human genius in the circumstances
among which they were conceived; in discovering in them the spirit of
the age in which they were written, and not of the present age. If we
endeavour to interpret history by the light of modern ideas we shall
never understand a jot of it. Mr. Arnold is pleasantly satirical at
the expense of those who find in the Bible allusions to contemporary
events, to such and such a modern custom, to such and such a dogma
unknown to primitive times. A commentator, he says, finds a prediction
of the flight to Egypt in the prophecy of Isaiah: “The Lord rideth
upon a swift cloud and shall come into Egypt”; this light cloud being
the body of Jesus born of a virgin. Another, more fantastic, perceives
in the words: “Woe unto them that draw up iniquity with cords of
vanity”—a malediction of God against church bells. That assuredly
is a singular method of interpreting the sacred texts, but at bottom
it is no more logical to look in the sacred texts for modern ideas,
good or evil, than to search them for the announcement of such and
such a distant event or for a commentary on such and such a trait of
contemporary manners. Really to practise the literary method—and the
scientific method at the same time—one must a little forget one’s
self, one’s nation, one’s century; one must live the life of past
times—must become a Greek when one reads Homer, a Hebrew when one
reads the Bible, and not desire that Racine should be a Shakespeare,
nor Boccaccio a St. Benedict, nor Jesus a free-thinker, nor Isaiah an
Epictetus or a Kant. All things and all ideas are appropriate in their
own times and circumstances. Gothic cathedrals are magnificent, our
small houses to-day are very comfortable; there is no reason why we
should not admire the one and inhabit the other; the only thing that is
really inexcusable is to be absolutely unwilling that cathedrals should
be what alone they are.
[Sidenote: Philosophical insufficiency of Mr. Arnold’s position.]
Considered not from the point of view of history but purely from
that of philosophy, Mr. Arnold’s doctrine is much more attractive,
for its aim is precisely to enable us to discover our own ideas in
the ancient books as in a mirror. Nothing could be better, but are
we really in want of this mirror? Do we really need to rediscover
our modern conceptions embodied in the form of myth and more or less
distorted in the process? Do we really need voluntarily to go back to
the state of mind of primitive peoples? Do we really need to dwell
upon the somewhat narrow conception that they possessed of justice and
of morality before we shall be capable of conceiving a justice more
generous in its proportions and a morality more worthy of its name?
Would it not be much the same sort of thing as for one who was teaching
children physics to begin by seriously inculcating the classic theory
of nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum, of immobility of the earth, etc.?
The authors of the Talmud in their naïve faith said that Javeh, filled
with veneration for the book which he had himself dictated, would
devote the first three hours of every day to a study of the sacred law.
The most orthodox Jews do not to-day oblige their God to this recurrent
period of meditation; might not one without danger permit mankind a
somewhat similar economy of time? Mr. Arnold, whose mind moves so
easily, although with so plentiful a lack of directness and of logic,
criticises somewhere or other those who feel a need of a foundation
of fable for their faith, a foundation of supernatural intervention
and marvellous legend, and he says that many religious men resemble
readers of romances or smokers of opium; the reality becomes insipid
to them, although it is really more grand than the fantastic world of
opium and romance. Mr. Arnold does not perceive that, if the reality
is, as he says, the greatest and most beautiful of things, we have no
further need of the legend of Christianity, not even interpreted as
he interprets it: the real world, and by the real world I understand
the moral not less than the physical universe, should prove abundantly
sufficient for us. Ithuriel, Mr. Arnold says, has punctured miracles
with his spear; and did he not at the same stroke puncture symbolism?
We prefer to see truth naked rather than tricked out in parti-coloured
vestments; to clothe truth is to degrade it. Mr. Arnold compares a too
absolute faith to intoxication; one might willingly compare Mr. Arnold
to Socrates, who could drain off more than any other guest at the table
without becoming intoxicated. Not to become intoxicated was, for the
Greeks, one of the prerogatives of the sage. With this reservation they
permitted him to drink, but in our days the sages make small use of the
permission; they admire Socrates without imitating him, and find that
sobriety is still the best means of keeping one’s head. One might say
as much to Matthew Arnold. The Bible with its scenes of massacre, of
rape, and of divine vengeance is in his judgment bread for the soul;
the soul can no more do without it than we can ourselves do without
eating. The reply is that he has himself proved it to be a dangerous
form of nourishment, and that it is sometimes better to fast than to
eat poison.
[Sidenote: Buddhism more deeply symbolic than Christianity.]
For the rest, if one persists in seeking in the sacred books of by-gone
ages for the expression of primitive morality, it is not in the
Bible, but rather in the Hindu books that a literary or philosophical
interpretation will find the most extraordinary example of moral
symbolism. The entire world appears to the Buddhist as the realization
of the moral law, since in his opinion beings take rank in the universe
according to their virtues or vices, mount or descend on the ladder of
life according to their moral elevation or abasement. Buddhism is in
certain respects an effort to find in morals a theory of the universe.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Dependence of religion upon morality.]
In spite of the partial lapses from logical consistency that have
been here pointed out in the theory of moral symbolism, there is one
conclusion that is logically insisted on in the books just examined,
and in especial Mr. Arnold’s book, namely: that the solidest support
of every religion is a more or less imperfect system of morals; that
the power of Christianity, as of Buddhism, has lain in its moral
injunctions, and that if one suppressed this moral injunction there
would nothing remain of the two great “universal” religions brought
forth by human intelligence. Religion serves, so to speak, as an
envelope for morality; it protects morality against the period of its
ultimate development and efflorescence, but when once moral beliefs
have gained strength enough they tend to protrude from this envelope,
like a flower bursting out of the bud. Some years ago what was at that
time called Independent Morality was much discussed; the defenders of
religion maintained that the fate of morality is intimately bound up
with it—that if morality were separated from religion it must decline.
They were perhaps right in pointing out the intimate connection between
morality and religion, but they were mistaken in maintaining that it
is the former that is dependent; it would be truer to say the precise
opposite, that it is religion that depends upon morality, that the
latter is the principal and the former the subordinate. The Ecclesiast
says somewhere, “He hath set the world in their heart.” It is for that
reason that man should first look into his own heart, and should first
of all believe in himself. Religious faith might more or less logically
issue out of moral faith, but could not produce the moral faith, and if
it should go counter to the moral faith it would condemn itself. The
religious spirit cannot therefore accommodate itself to the new order
of things except by abandoning, in the first place, all the dogmas
of a liberal faith, and then all the symbols of a more enlightened
faith and holding fast by the fundamental principle which constitutes
the life of religion and dominates its historical evolution; that
is to say, the moral sentiment of Protestantism in spite of all its
contradictions has really introduced into the world a new principle; it
is this, that conscience is its own judge, that individual initiative
should be substituted for objective authority.[61] Such a principle
includes as a logical consequence not only the suppression of real
dogmas and of mysteries, but also that of precise and determinate
symbols; of everything, in a word, which proposes to impose itself
upon the conscience as a ready-made truth. Protestantism unwittingly
contained in its own bosom the germ of the negation of every positive
religion that does not address itself exclusively and directly to
private judgment, to the moral sense of the individual. In our days
no one is willing to believe simply what he is told to believe; he
must accept it independently: he believes that the danger of private
judgment is only apparent, and that in the intellectual world, as in
the world of civil liberty, it is out of liberty that all authority
worthy of respect takes its rise. The revolution which tends thus
to replace a religious faith, founded on the authority of texts and
symbols, by a moral faith founded upon the right of private judgment
recalls the revolution accomplished three centuries ago by Descartes,
who substituted evidence and reasoning for authority. Humanity is
increasingly anxious to reason out its own beliefs, to see with its
own eyes. The truth is no longer exclusively locked up in temples;
it addresses itself to everybody, communicates with everybody, gives
everybody the right to act. In the cult of scientific truth everyone,
as in the early days of Christianity, is capable of officiating in
his turn; there are no seats reserved in the sanctuary, there is no
jealous God, or rather the temples of truth are those which each of
us rears in his own heart—temples which are no more truly Christian
than Hebrew or Buddhist. The absorption of religion into morality is
one with the dissolution of all positive and determinate religion, of
all traditional symbolism and of all dogmatism. Faith, said Heraclitus
profoundly, is a sacred malady, ἱερὰ νόσος. For us moderns it is no
longer a sacred malady, and it is one from which all of us wish to be
delivered and cured.
[61] Toward the end of his life Luther felt an increasing
discouragement and disquietude on the subject of the reform
inaugurated by him: “It is by severe laws and by superstition,”
he wrote with bitterness, “that the world desires to be guided.
If I could reconcile it with my conscience I would labour
that the Pope with all his abominations might become once
more our master.” Responsibility to one’s own conscience was
indeed Luther’s fundamental idea—the idea which justifies the
Reformation in the eyes of history, as formerly in the eyes of
its own author.