DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS MORALITY.
I. The first durable element of religious morality:
Respect—Alteration of respect by the addition of the
notion of the fear of God and divine vengeance.
II. Second durable element of religious morality:
Love—Alteration of this element by the addition of
ideas of grace, predestination, damnation—Caducous
elements of religious morality—Mysticism—Antagonism
of divine love and human love—Asceticism—Excesses
of asceticism—Especially in the religions of the
East—Conception of sin in the modern mind.
III. Subjective worship and prayer—The notion of
prayer from the point of view of modern science and
philosophy—Ecstasy—The survival of prayer.
Having traced the dissolution of dogma and religious symbolism it is
appropriate to consider the fate of that system of religious morality
which rests upon dogma and upon faith. There are in religious morality
some durable elements and some caducous ones which stand out in sharper
and sharper opposition in the course of the progress of human society.
The two stable elements of religious morality which will occupy us
first are respect and love; these are the elements indeed of every
system of morality, those which are in nowise related to mysticism or
symbolism, and which tend progressively to part company with them.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Superiority of element of love over that of respect.]
I. Kant regarded respect or reverence as the moral sentiment _par
excellence_; the moral law, in his opinion, was a law of reverence
and not of love, and therein lay its pretensions to universality: for
if it had been a law of love, there would have been a difficulty in
imposing it upon all reasonable beings. I can insist on your respecting
me but not on your loving me. In the sphere of society Kant is right;
the law cannot provide that men shall love each other, but only that
they shall respect each other’s rights. But is the same thing true
in the sphere of pure morality—have not the two great “universal”
religions, Buddhism and Christianity, been right in regarding love
as the controlling principle in ethics? Respect is no more than the
beginnings of ideal morality; in the attitude of respect the soul
feels itself restricted, held in check, embarrassed. And what in
effect essentially is respect, but the ability to violate a right on
the one hand and on the other a right to go inviolable? Well, there
is another sentiment which does away with the very possibility of
violence and which therefore is even purer than respect, that is to
say love, and Christianity has so understood it. Be it remarked also
that respect is necessarily implied in a properly understood moral
love; love is superior to respect not because it suppresses it but
because it completes it. Genuine love inevitably presents itself under
the form of respect, but this conception of respect, abstractly taken,
is an empty form without content; and can be filled with love alone.
What one respects in the dignity of another person is—is it not?—a
personal power held in check, a sort of moral autonomy. It is possible
to conceive a cold hard respect that is not absolutely free from some
suggestion of mechanical necessity. What one loves, on the contrary,
in the dignity of another person is the element in his character which
beckons and welcomes one. Is it possible to conceive a cold love?
Respect is a species of check, love is an outleap of emotion; respect
is the act by which will meets will; in love there is no sense of
opposition, of calculation, of hesitation; one gives one’s self simply
and entirely.
[Sidenote: The mistake of Christianity.]
Let it not therefore be made a reproach to Christianity that it sees in
love the very principle of relationship between reasonable beings, the
very principle of the moral law and of justice. Paul says with reason
that he who loves others fulfils the law. In effect, the commandments:
thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not
covet, and the rest, were summed up in: thou shalt love thy neighbor
as thyself. The defect of Christianity—a defect from which Buddhism
is free—is that the love of men is there conceived as disappearing,
in the last analysis, in the love of God. Man is not beloved except in
God and for God, and human society as a whole possesses no foundation
nor rule of life except in the relationship of men to God. Well, if
the love of man for man, properly understood, actually implies respect
for rectitude, the same thing cannot be said with the same degree
of emphasis for the love of man for God, and in God’s sight. The
conception of a society founded on the love of God contains the seeds
of theocratic government with all its abuses.
Moreover, if in Christian morality love of man resolves itself, in the
last resort, into love of God, love of God is always adulterated with
fear; the Old Testament insists upon it with positive complacency. The
fear of the Lord plays an important rôle in the celestial sanction,
and justice also, which is essential to Christianity, and which more
or less definitely antagonizes and sometimes even paralyzes it. It is
thus that, after having traced the sentiment of respect itself and of
justice to a foundation in love, Christianity suddenly reinstates the
former, re-endows it with precedence and that under its most primitive
and savage form—the form of fear in man and vengeance in God.
[Sidenote: Respect for the welfare of sentient beings in general the
essence of morality.]
This sanction, we have seen, is a special form of the notion of a
Providence. Those who believe in a special Providence distributing good
and evil admit, in the last resort, that this distribution takes place
in conformity with the conduct of the receivers and the sentiments of
approval or disapproval that that conduct inspires in the divinity. The
idea of a Providence, in the natural course of its development, becomes
therefore one with the notion of distributive justice, and this latter,
on the other hand, becomes one with the idea of divine sanction. The
idea of divine sanction has been conceived up to this point as one of
the essential elements of morality, and it seems, at first glance,
that religion and morality here coincide, that their respective needs
here unite, or rather that morality reaches completeness only by
the aid of religion. The notion of distributive justice naturally
involves the notion of a celestial distributor, but we have seen in
a preceding work that the notion of a sanction properly so called,
and the notion of a divine penal code, have in reality no essential
connection with morality; that on the contrary they possess a character
of immorality and irrationality; and that thus the religion of the
vulgar in no respect coincides with the highest morality, but that, on
the contrary, the very fundamental idea of the religion of the vulgar
is opposed to morality.[62] The founders of religion believe that the
most sacred law is the law of the strongest; but the idea of force
logically resolves itself into the relation between power on the one
hand and resistance on the other, and physical force is always, in
the sphere of morals, a confession of weakness. The _summum bonum_
therefore can contain no suggestion of force of this especial kind.
If human law, if civil law be condemned to rely upon a backing of
physical force, it is therein precisely that it lies under the reproach
of being merely civil and human. The case stands otherwise with the
moral law, which is immutable, eternal, and in some sort inviolable;
and in the presence of an inviolable law one can in no sense assume an
attitude even of suppressed violence. Force is powerless against the
moral law, and the moral law has therefore no need on its own side of
a show of force. The sole sanction of which the moral law stands in
need, the author has said elsewhere, as against the man who supposes
himself to have abrogated it, is and ought to be the mere fact of its
continued existence face to face with him, rising up before him ever
anew, as the giant Hercules believed himself to have vanquished rose
ever stronger to his embrace. To possess the attribute of eternity in
the face of violence is the only revenge that goodness personified or
not, under the figure of a god, can permit itself as against those who
violate it.[63] In human societies one of the distinguishing traits
of high civilization is slowness to take offence; with the progress of
knowledge one finds less and less ground for indignation in the conduct
of one’s fellow-men. When the being involved is by definition the very
personification of love the idea of offence becomes ridiculous; it is
impossible for any philosophic mind to admit the bare conception of
offending God, or of drawing down upon one, in the Biblical phrase,
his anger or his vengeance. Fear of an external sanction, or of any
sanction other than that of conscience, is therefore an element that
the progress of the modern mind tends to exclude from morality. It is
in vain for the Bible to say that fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom; morality does not truly begin until fear ceases to exist,
fear being, as Kant said, pathological, not moral. Fear of hell may
have possessed in former times a certain social utility, but it is
essentially a stranger in modern society, and, _a fortiori_, will be
in the society of the future. Moreover, respect for the happiness
of people in general is becoming less and less adulterated by any
admixture of fear. This respect, mingled with love and even engendered
by love, is coming to be an altogether moral, and an altogether
philosophic sentiment, purified of anything in the nature of mysticism,
and in the best sense religious.
[62] See the author’s _Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni
sanction_, p. 188, etc.
[63] “If God had consciously created the human will of such
essential perversity as to find its natural expression in
thwarting Him, He would be impotent in the face of it; could
only show Himself compassionate; could only regret His own act
in creating it. His duty would not be to punish mankind but
to the utmost possible degree to lighten their sufferings, to
show Himself gentle and good directly in proportion to this
evil; and the damned, if they were truly incurable, would be in
greater need of the joys of heaven than the elect themselves.
Either the sinner can be reclaimed; and in that event hell
would be nothing more than an immense school, an immense house
of correction for preparing the culpable with the utmost
possible rapidity for heaven; or the sinner is incorrigible,
is analogous to an incurable maniac (which is absurd), and
then he is eternally to be pitied and a supreme Goodness would
endeavour to compensate him for his misery by every imaginable
means by showering upon him every bliss that he was capable of
enjoying. Turn it as one will, the dogma of hell stands thus in
direct opposition to the truth.
“For the rest, by the very act of damning a soul, that is to
say shutting it out forever from His presence, or, in terms
less mystical, excluding it forever from a knowledge of the
truth, would not God in turn be shutting Himself out from the
soul, limiting His own power, and so to speak in some measure
damning Himself also? The penalty of the damnation would fall
in part on Him who inflicted it. As to the physical torment
of which theologians speak, interpreted metaphorically, it
becomes even more inadmissible. Instead of damning mankind God
ought eternally to gather about Him those who have strayed
from Him; it is for the culpable above all others that, as
Michel Angelo said, God opened wide his arms upon the cross. We
represent Him as looking down upon the sinning multitude from
too great a height for them ever to be anything to Him but the
incarnation of misfortune. Well, just in so far as they are
unfortunate must they not logically be the especial favourites
of divine goodness?”—_Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni
sanction_, p. 189.
[Sidenote: Unstable equilibrium of the Christian notion of absolute
love.]
II. Having seen how readily the notion of respect became corrupt in
Christianity, let us consider the fate of the notion of love. If the
importance which it gave to this principle constitutes the chief
honour of Christianity is not the God of the Christians, nevertheless,
conceived in a manner inconsistent with the very essence of His
being? The God of Christianity, or at least of orthodox Christianity,
is a conception of absolute love which involves a contradiction and
the destruction of all true fraternity. For the love affirmed to be
absolute is in fact limited, since it has to do with a world that
is marred by evil, metaphysical, sensible, moral. The love is not
even universal, since it is conceived as an especial grace more or
less arbitrarily bestowed or withheld, according to the dogma of
predestination. The doctrine of grace, round which theology has played
with such excess of subtlety, completes the highest principle of
morality, the principle of love by the addition of the grossest notion
of anthropomorphism: that of favour. God is always conceived on the
model of absolute kings who accord favour and disfavour capriciously;
one of the most vulgar of sociomorphic relations being chosen, as one
perceives, as the true analogue of God’s relation to His creatures. The
two elements of the notion of grace are antagonistic to each other.
Absolute love is in its nature universal, favouritism is in its nature
particular. There are, according to theology, a certain number of
beings who are excluded from universal love; the sentence of damnation
is in its very essence such an exclusion. Thus understood, divine
charity is incompatible with true fraternity, with true charity; for
true charity God does not possess—sets us no example of it. If we
believe that God hates and damns, it will be in vain for Him to forbid
personal vengeance. We shall inevitably espouse His hatreds, and the
very principle of vengeance will find its support and its highest
realization in Him. When St. Paul said: “Let thyself not conquer by
the instrumentality of evil, but overcome evil by goodness,” the
precept was admirable. Unhappily God was the first to violate it, to
decline to overcome evil by good. Do as I bid thee and not as I myself
do is the very spirit of Christian teachings. Is it not in the midst
of a sort of hymn to charity and forgiveness that the characteristic
phrase of St. Paul occurs: “If thine enemy have hunger give him to eat
and thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head.” Thus the apparent
forgiveness becomes transmuted into a refined form of vengeance, which
the divine sanction serves only to make more terrible, and which, under
the cloak of benefits, nay even of caresses, pours upon the head of
one’s enemy an avenging flame; one’s very charity sets the torch to the
fires of hell. This indelible stain of barbarism on the page of love,
this atavistic animal instinct of vengeance ascribed to God, shows the
dangerous side of the theological element introduced into the morality
of love.
[Sidenote: Conflict between divine and human love.]
Another danger to which a religion founded upon a divine love is
subject is mysticism; a sentiment destined to an increasing antagonism
with the modern mind and condemned, therefore, ultimately to disappear.
The heart of man, in spite of its fertility in giving birth to passions
of all sorts, has nevertheless always concentrated itself upon a small
number of objects which find their own level. God and the world are
two antagonists between which our sensibility is portioned out. One
or the other of them inevitably receives the greater share. In all
times religious sects have felt a possible opposition between absolute
love of God and love of man. In a number of religions God has shown
himself jealous of the affection devoted to others, and thus in a
sense stolen from Him. He was not content with the superfluity of the
human heart, He was bent on appropriating the soul in its entirety.
Among the Hindus, as we know, the very essence of supreme piety lies
in detachment from the world, in a life of solitude in the midst
of great forests, in the rejection of all earthly affection, in a
mystical indifference in regard to all mortal things. In the western
world, when Christianity had made its way, this thirst of solitude,
this home-sickness for the desert seized once more upon the soul, and
thousands of men fled the faces of their fellows, quitting their
families and their homes, renouncing all other love but that of God,
feeling themselves more intimately in His presence when they were
distant from all beings else but Him. The whole of the Middle Ages
were tormented by this antagonism between divine and human love. In
the end, with the immense majority of men, human love carried the day.
It could not be otherwise; the very Church could not preach complete
detachment for everybody under pain of having nobody to preach to. But
among scrupulous and strenuous souls the opposition between divine and
human love manifested itself in all the circumstances of life. One
remembers Mme. Périer’s account of Pascal. She was surprised at times
that her brother repulsed her, became suddenly cold to her, turned away
from her when she approached to soothe him in his pain; she began to
think he did not love her, she complained of it to her sister, but it
was in vain to try to undeceive her. Finally the enigma was explained
on the very day of Pascal’s death by Domat, one of his friends. Mme.
Périer learned that in Pascal’s opinion the most innocent and fraternal
friendship is a fault for which one habitually fails to take one’s self
sufficiently to task, because one underestimates its magnitude. “By
fomenting and suffering these attachments to grow up, one is giving
to someone else some portion of what belongs to God alone; one is in
a manner robbing Him of what is to Him the most precious thing in all
the world.” It would be impossible better to express the mystical
antagonism between divine and human love. This principle occupied so
prominent a place in the foreground of Pascal’s mind that, the more
readily to keep it always before him, he wrote with his own hand upon
a piece of paper: “It is unjust in me to permit anyone to form an
attachment for me, however voluntarily, and with whatever pleasure
they may do it. In the long run I should deceive them, for I belong
to nobody but to God, and have not the wherewithal to satisfy a human
affection.... I should therefore be culpable, if I should allow anyone
to love me, if I should attract people toward me.... They should pass
their lives and employ their effort in pleasing and searching for God.”
The instant God is conceived as a person and not as a simple ideal,
there inevitably arises in souls tinged with mysticism, a rivalry
between His claims and those of other persons. How can the Absolute
admit any human being to a share of what essentially is His? He must
dwell in as absolute a solitude at the bottom of man’s heart as on the
height of heaven.
[Sidenote: Exists at the present day.]
The rivalry between divine and human love perceived by the Jansenists,
as by many of the early Christians and by mystics generally, exists
even to-day for a large number of men. In certain religious houses
any excessively affectionate demonstration toward their parents is
forbidden to children, and a fraternal or filial kiss is made the basis
of a case of conscience. If Protestant education and custom are not at
one on this point with Catholic education and custom, the reason is
that Protestantism, as has already been observed, has no talent for
ultimate logical consequences. Catholicism, on the contrary, holds
logic in scrupulous respect. To cite but one example: is not the
interdiction of marriage in the case of the clergy a logical deduction
from the conception of a religion which is founded on the theory of the
fall of man, and whose purpose in the world is essentially anti-carnal?
Love for a woman is too absorbing, too exclusive, to coexist in the
heart of a priest, side by side with an undiminished love for God.
Of all the sentiments of the soul, love is the one which fills it
most nearly to the limit of its capacity. It is, in this respect, in
diametric opposition to the theological sentiment which consists in the
recognition of a sort of subjective void and personal insufficiency.
Two lovers are of all the world the beings who are most sufficient unto
themselves, they are of all the world those who experience least the
need of God. Well, for mystics, love that is not given to God is love
wasted. The lightest veil is enough to screen them once and forever
from the “intelligible sun.” It is of the very essence of such a God to
be relegated to some region above the world, exiled in a manner from
the soul of man; there are regions of love in which He does not exist
and never will exist. He calls me, and if I do not turn my face in His
direction precisely, I lose Him.
[Sidenote: Conflict between mysticism and egoism.]
The absolute detachment of the mystic leads to another consequence
which is equally in opposition to modern tendencies; it treats, that
is to say, as an absolute zero a being who has at least the value of
unity, to wit: the ego. If I aim at the welfare of all sentient beings
indiscriminatingly, I aim also in some measure at my own, who am one
of them; and moreover, it is for my own that I can labour to best
advantage. This ego counts for something in this world, it is a unit
in the sum. The pure love inculcated by mysticism, on the contrary,
lets the ego go for nothing, after the manner of the muleteer, who,
in reckoning his mules, always forgot to count the one he was sitting
on; the missing mule never turned up except when he dismounted, so
that he ultimately resolved to go forward on foot. The transcendent
and chimerical morality of mysticism might be compared to a purely
humanitarian theory of politics; it is indeed even more abstract.
Patriotism, no doubt, leans upon a delusion when it regards one’s
native country as the centre of the world, but does not humanitarianism
lean not upon one but upon a whole series of illusions? In the item
of illusions here below one must put up with the least false and most
useful. Well, it is probably not wholly without utility that each
nation in the universe should act for itself; if each should attempt
to act exclusively for the universe as a whole and for the love of the
whole, either it would not act at all or it would conceive the future
of the universe practically on the model of its own future and would
commit an uninterrupted succession of mistakes. Very frequently in this
world unconscious and indirect collaboration is more efficacious than
that which is conscious and direct. Men often do more for the best aims
of humanity by directing their attention in a spirit of rivalry toward
needs comparatively immediate but which for that very reason stimulate
their efforts and their hopes, than by uniting for the attainment of
an object so distant that it discourages them. In morals and politics
one has not only to hit upon the best means of combining the forces
of humanity, but also upon what is the best means of exciting human
effort; and on that score there is something to be said even for the
love of the parish in which one is born. One’s parish is at least a
definite object: one knows where it is, one cannot lose one’s way, one
may entertain a hope, nay even a certitude, of reaching it, and hope
and certitude are great allies. And the same is true of self-love and
love for those with whom one identifies one’s self. It is precisely
this that mysticism ignores and by that means puts itself in opposition
to the scientific spirit. For mysticism there is no compromise possible
between the fact and its ideal which denies the fact. Logically
mysticism ought to address its efforts toward total annihilation, much
after the manner of the followers of Schopenhauer and of Hartmann.
It would be better for the world to go off in smoke, so to speak; to
become sublimated like the corpses which the worshippers of the sun
used to expose to its rays, to be converted, as far as possible, into
vapour.
[Sidenote: Love of God on the decline.]
Excess destroys itself. If pleasure ends in disgust, mysticism
possesses also its seamy side in a certain disenchantment with God
himself, in a certain home-sickness for unknown joys, in that sadness
peculiar to the cloister for which Christians were obliged to invent a
new name, in the Latin language, to designate—_acedia_. When in the
Middle Ages all one’s preoccupations and affections were turned toward
heaven, human tenderness was impoverished to precisely that extent. The
intellectual and moral evolution of our days has moved in a contrary
direction; love of God is on the decline. Love of mankind, on the
contrary, and love of living beings in general, is on the increase. A
sort of substitution of the one for the other is taking place. Does
it not seem as if earth’s turn had come, and that much of the force
previously spent in futile adoration, devoted toward the clouds, is
being more and more practically employed in the service of humanity?
[Sidenote: Love of man to take its place.]
Formerly, ideas of human fraternity and loving equality were promoted
in especial by the Christians. The explanation is simple: God was
conceived by them as an actual father, a _genitor_; men seemed to
the early Christians all of one family, having a common ancestor. So
that divine love and human love were regarded by them as inseparably
bound up with each other. It is to be added that Christianity, which
made its way into the world through the lower classes of society,
had everything to gain by giving prominence to notions of fraternity
and equality; it was by this means among others that it conciliated
the masses, who were for a long time its main support. But from
the moment it found itself able to rely upon the higher classes of
society, how quickly it changed its language is well known, and at
the present moment the position of Christianity is precisely opposite
to that which it occupied in the ancient world. Ardent advocates of
the ideas of fraternity are often adversaries of religion, are often
free-thinkers, sometimes decided atheists. The system of thought which
founded the love of men for each other upon a community of origin is
almost universally rejected. Social doctrines, which in former times
were so often based upon the element of socialism in the New Testament,
are nowadays being formed and inculcated in complete independence of
religious faith and often in positive antagonism to any religious
faith whatever. Religion sometimes presents itself as an additional
obstacle, simply, to the brotherhood of man, in that it creates more
stubborn divisions among them than differences of class or even of
language. By an inevitable evolution religion has to-day come to
represent among certain nations the spirit of caste and intolerance,
and consequently of jealousy and enmity, whereas non-religion has come
to be the recognized champion of social equality, of tolerance, and of
fraternity. Behind God, rightly or wrongly, as behind their natural
defender, the partisans of the old order of things, of privilege and
hereditary enmities, have ranged themselves; in the breast of the
faithful a mystical love for God corresponds to-day as in other days
to an anathema and malediction on mankind. It was long ago remarked
that those whose blessing is most fluent can also show themselves at
need the most fluent to curse; the most mystical are the most violent.
Nothing can equal the violence of the gentle Jesus himself when he
is speaking of the Pharisees, whose doctrines possessed so close an
analogy to his own. Whoever believes himself to have felt the breath
of God upon his forehead becomes bitter and obstinate in his relations
with mere men; he is no longer one of them. So that the notion of the
divine, of the superhuman tends toward that of the antinatural and
antihuman.
[Sidenote: And also love of family.]
The aim of progress in modern societies is to domesticate peace
within their limits as well as without, to suppress mysticism, and to
concentrate upon the real universe, present or to come, the whole body
of our affections; to bind our hearts together in so intimate a union
that they shall be sufficient unto themselves and unto each other, and
that the human world, magnified by the eyes of love, may gather to
itself the totality of things. In the first place the love of family,
which scarcely existed at all in ancient times, and which in the Middle
Ages was almost entirely absorbed by the conception of authority and of
subordination, can scarcely be said to have acquired before our days
a considerable hold on human life. It is only since the eighteenth
century and the spread of the theory of equality that the father of a
family, in especial in France, has ceased to consider himself as a sort
of irresponsible sovereign, and begun to treat his wife in some sort as
his equal and to exercise over his children no more than the minimum of
possible authority. Whenever women shall receive an education almost
equivalent to that given to men, the moral equality between them and
men will have been consecrated, and as love is always more complete and
more durable between beings who consider each other as morally equal,
it follows that the love of family will increase, will draw to itself
a greater proportion of the desires and aspirations of the individual.
In positive opposition to religion, which has undertaken to combat the
love of woman by restraining it within narrow limits, the love of woman
has attained little by little an intensity that it never possessed in
ancient times: it suffices to read our poets to become convinced of
it, and it will continue to increase with the intellectual development
of women, which will make a closer and more complete union between men
and women possible than exists at present. The association of man and
woman being capable thus of becoming in a manner a sort of intellectual
association and fellowship, it will result in a fertility of a new
species: love will no longer act upon the intelligence solely as the
most powerful of stimulants, it will contribute positive elements
hitherto unknown. It is impossible to predict the sort of work that
the combined labour of man and woman will produce when they possess
a preparation for it that will be practically upon both sides equal.
Some hint of what one means may be gathered from examples actually
under one’s eyes. In the present century men and women of talent are
tending to come into closer relations with each other; and I might
cite the names of Michelet and Mme. Michelet, of John Stuart Mill
and his wife, of Lewes and George Eliot, and other names besides.
But not to give an undue prominence to great names like these, which
are after all exceptions in the human race, it is not too much to
assert that from the very top of the social ladder to the bottom the
family tends increasingly to become a unity, a more and more perfect
organism in which man will one day find scope for all of his powers
and capabilities. The importance of the family increases, as that of
the city and of the despotic tutelage of the state decreases. This
importance, which is almost non-existent in purely military societies
(of which Lacedæmon may serve as the accomplished exemplar), becomes
greater and greater in free and industrial societies such as those of
the future, and thus there opens a new field for human activity and
sensibility. The love of men and women for each other and of both for
their children, heightened by the growing sentiment of equality, is
destined in the author’s judgment to create a new and non-mystical
sort of religion, the worship of the family. If a cult for the gods
of the hearth was one of the earliest religions, perhaps it will also
be actually the last: the family hearth possesses in and of itself an
element of sacredness, of religion, since it binds together as about a
common centre beings so diverse in origin and sex. And thus the modern
family, founded on the law of equality, seems by its very spirit,
and by the sentiments which it excites, to be in growing opposition
to religious mysticism. The true type of the priest, whatever
Protestantism may say, is the solitary man, the missionary here below,
devoted body and soul to God; whereas the type of the practical
philosopher and the modern sage is a loving, thinking, labouring man,
devoted to those who are dear to him.
[Sidenote: And love of country.]
A similar antagonism may be seen between the sentiment of mysticism
and of allegiance to the state. The citizen who knows that the fate of
his country lies in his arms, who loves his country with an active and
sincere love, is a worshipper in a social religion. Great politicians
have almost always been large and liberal minds. The ancient republics
were comparatively non-religious for their time; the disappearance
of monarchy coincides in general, in the history of mankind, with
enfeeblement of faith. When everybody shall feel himself as equally and
truly a citizen as anybody else, and shall be able to devote himself
with an equal love to the good of the state, there will no longer be
so great a store of unemployed activity, of surplus sensibility lying
ready to the hand of mysticism. For the rest, let us magnify a little
the sphere of human activity; not only the family and the state are
nowadays demanding an increasingly large share of one’s attention and
affection, but the human race itself is coming to be each day more and
more intimately present to the mind of each of us. We find it more
and more difficult even in thought to isolate ourselves, to become
absorbed either in ourselves, or in God. The human world has become
infinitely more human than formerly; all the bounds which separated
men from each other (religion, language, nationality, race) are
regarded already by superior men as artificial. The human race itself
is coming to be recognized as a part only of the animal kingdom, the
entire world claims the attention of science, offers itself to our love
and opens for the devotees of mysticism the perspective of a species
of universal fraternity. Just in so far as the universe thus grows
larger, it becomes less and less insufficient in our eyes; and this
surplus of love, which formerly mounted toward heaven in search of some
transcendent resting place, finds ample room upon the surface of the
earth and of heavenly bodies not unknown to astronomy. If the mystical
tendency of the human mind be not destined completely to disappear, if
it possesses any element of permanency, it will at least change its
direction, and indeed, little by little is changing it. Christians were
in no sense wrong in finding society in ancient times too narrow and
the ancient world too cabined and confined under its dome of crystal;
the very reason for the existence of Christianity lay in this vicious
conception of society and of nature. To-day the one thing needful is
to magnify the world till it shall satisfy the needs of man; until
an equilibrium be established between the universe and the human
heart. The aim of science is not to extinguish the need to love which
constitutes so considerable an element of the religious sentiment, but
to supply that need with an actually existing object; its function is
not to put a check upon the outleap of human affection but to justify
it.
[Sidenote: But the love of a personal God must be distinguished in all
this from love of the ideal God.]
And remark, also, that if the love of a personal God mystically
conceived tends to become dim in modern societies, the same is not
true of the love of an ideal God conceived as the practical type of
conduct. The ideal God, in effect, in no sense exists in opposition
to the world, He surpasses it simply; He is at bottom identical with
the progress of human thought which, with its point of departure in
brute fact, outstrips the actual and foresees and prepares the way
for perpetual progress. In human life the real and the ideal are
harmonized, for life as a whole both is and becomes. Whoever says life,
says evolution; and evolution is the Jacob’s ladder resting both on
heaven and on earth; at the base of it we are brutes, at the summit
of it we are gods, so that religious sentiment cannot be said so much
to be in opposition to science and philosophy as to complete them;
or rather, it is at bottom identical with the spirit that animates
them. We have spoken of religion as science,—in its beginnings as
unconscious science; in the same way science may be called religion
headed back toward reality; headed, that is to say in the normal
direction. Religion says to the human race: Bind yourselves together
into a single whole; science shows the human race that all mankind are
inevitably parts of a single whole already, and the teaching of the two
is practically one.
[Sidenote: Summary.]
In effect there is taking place a certain substitution in our
affections; we are coming to love God in man, the future in the
present, the ideal in the real. The man of evolution is precisely the
man-God of Christianity. And this love of the ideal harmonized with the
love of humanity, instead of finding its vent in vain contemplation and
ecstasy, will fill the limbs with energy. We shall love God all the
more that He will be, so to speak, the work of our own hands. And if
there be really at the bottom of the human heart some indestructible
element of mysticism, it will be employed as an important factor in the
service of evolution; our heart will go out to our ideas, and we shall
adore them in proportion as we shall realize them. Religion having
become the purest of all things—pure love of the ideal—will at the
same time have become the realest and in appearance the humblest of all
things—labour.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Mysticism and asceticism.]
The natural and practical complement of mysticism is asceticism; and
asceticism is another of the elements of religious morality that are
becoming daily feebler in the presence of the modern spirit.
[Sidenote: Asceticism in the good and the bad sense.]
Austerity is of two kinds, the one quite mystical in origin, despising
art, beauty, science; the other founded on a certain moral stoicism,
a certain respect for one’s self. The latter is in no sense ascetic,
it is composed for the most part of the very love for science and art,
but it is the highest art only that it loves, and science for science’s
sake that it pursues. The excess of austerity, to which religions have
so often led, bears the same relation to virtue that avarice does to
economy. Austerity alone does not constitute a merit or an element of
superiority. Life may be much more gentle, more social, better on many
accounts among a people of loose manners like the ancient Greeks, than
among a people who regard existence as hard and dry, and who make it so
by the brutality of their faith and ignore the lightening of the burden
of life that lies in smiles and tears. One would rather live with
prodigals than with misers. Avarice, however, which may be regarded
in the life of a people or of a family as a state of transition, is
economically and morally superior to prodigality. The same may be said
of excessive rigour. Excessive rigour and avarice are defects which
are rendered tolerable by their consequences, which impoverish life
in order subsequently, with a freer hand, to enrich it. It is better
for the race if not always so for the individual to be economical to
excess than to dissipate its resources intemperately. An impulse held
in check gathers force. Austerity, like avarice, is a means of defence
and of protection, a weapon. Conquerors have often in the course of
history been the sons of misers who have amassed treasure and blood for
their benefit. From time to time it is good to regard one’s self as an
enemy, and to live and sleep in a coat of mail. For the rest, there
are temperaments that can be held in check by nothing lighter than
bars of iron, that find no mean between pure water and pure alcohol;
between a bed of roses and a crown of thorns; between moral law and
military discipline; between a moralist and a corporal. Still, one
must not represent such a state of mind at least as ideal. The ascetic
hates himself; but one must hate nobody, not even one’s self; one must
understand all things and regulate them. Hatred of self springs from
feebleness of will; whoever is gifted with self-control need not hate
himself. Instead of giving one’s self a bad name one’s duty is to make
one’s self worthy of a better. There may well be a certain legitimate
element of rigour, of inner discipline, in every system of morality;
but this discipline should be reasonable, rationally directed toward
an end which explains and justifies it: one’s business is not to break
the body but to fashion it, to bend it. The savant, for example,
should aim to develop his brain, to refine his nervous system, to
reduce his circulatory and nutritive system to their lowest terms. You
may call that asceticism if you like, but it is a fertile, a useful
asceticism; it is at bottom a moral hygiene simply—which ought to be
made a part of physical hygiene. A surgeon knows that he must lead a
severe and continent life, or his hand will lose its cunning. The very
condition of his being able to aid other people is that he in a measure
suffer privation himself; he must choose. And to make this choice
he experiences no need of a religious injunction, he requires only
the voice of conscience. It suffices for him to know enough of moral
hygiene to foresee the distant results of his conduct and to possess
a sufficient measure of firmness to be self-consistent. It is after
this fashion that, in plotting out one’s life according to scientific
laws, one may regulate it, may render it almost as hard as that of
the most self-denying monk. Every profession that is freely chosen is
in the nature of a self-imposed discipline. As to the choice of no
profession, as to voluntary idleness—that is in and of itself immoral
and necessarily leads to immorality, whatever may be the religion that
one holds.
[Sidenote: Asceticism results in a preoccupation with sin.]
The ultimate consequence of excessive rigourism is morbid preoccupation
with sin: an obsession which, with the fear of the millennium, is one
of the greatest of the futile tortures that have afflicted humanity.
It is as dangerous for man to magnify his vices as his virtues; to
believe one’s self a monster possesses no greater exemption from evil
consequences than to believe one’s self perfect. Sin in itself, and
philosophically considered, is a conception difficult to reconcile
with the modern idea of scientific determinism, which, when it has
explained everything, goes far, if not toward justifying everything, at
least toward pardoning everything. Neither the pangs nor the vanity of
sin are permissible to us nowadays when we are hardly certain really
that our own sins belong to us. Temptation comes to us in the guise of
the reawaking of an hereditary appetite, handed down to us not only
from the first man, but from the ancestors of the first man, or more
accurately from life itself, from the universe, from the God who is
immanent in the world or who transcends it, and has created it; it is
not the devil that tempts us, it is God. Like Jacob, of whom we were
speaking a moment ago, we must vanquish God, must subject life to
thought, must give the victory to the higher forms of life, as against
the lower. If we are wounded in this struggle, if we are branded with
the mark of sin, if we mount haltingly up the steps of goodness, we
ought not to be immeasurably terrified: the essential thing is to go
upward. Temptation is not in and of itself a blot, it may be even
an emblem of nobility so long as one does not yield to it. Our first
fathers were not subject to temptation, properly so called, because
they yielded to all their desires, because they made no struggle
against them. Sin or moral evil is explicable: first by the antagonism
between instinct and reflection; second, by the antagonism between
egoistic instincts and altruistic instincts. This double antagonism
between instinct and conscious purpose, between egoism and altruism,
is a necessary incident of self-knowledge and a condition of progress:
to know one’s self is to be aware more or less uneasily of a manifold,
and succession of inconsistent desires of which the moving equilibrium
constitutes life itself; self-knowledge, and knowledge in general, is
the equivalent of temptation. Life is in some sort always sin, for one
cannot eat, one cannot even breathe without some measure of affirmation
of low and egoistic instincts. Moreover asceticism logically leads
nowhere, to negation of life; the most thorough-going ascetics are the
Yoghis of India, who attain the point of living without air or food and
of going down alive into the tomb.[64] And in believing himself thus to
have realized absolute renunciation, what the ascetic actually realized
is complete and perfect egoism, for the last drops of vegetative life
which flow in his veins circulate for him alone and not a shiver of his
heart is directed beyond himself; by impoverishing and annihilating his
life, he has suppressed the generosity that fulness of life produced;
in his endeavour to kill sin he has slaughtered charity. The real moral
and religious ideal does not consist in denying one’s self everything
in order to deny one’s self what is sinful. There is nothing absolutely
evil in us, except excess; when we apply the knife to our hearts, we
should have but one aim, the one which the gardener has in view in
pruning trees, to increase our real power. Our manifold desires should
all be satisfied at one time or another; we should take example from
the mother who forces herself to eat that she may watch to the end at
the bedside of her dying child. Whoever purposes to live for others
besides himself, will find no time to sulk; for whoever possesses a
heart sufficiently great no function in life is impure. Every moral
rule should be a reconciliation between egoism and altruism, original
sin and ideal sanctity; and to accomplish this reconciliation it
suffices to show that each of our manifold and mutually exclusive
desires, if carried to the extreme, contradicts itself; that our
desires need each other, that when nature endeavours to rise above
herself she inevitably falls headlong. To govern one’s self means to
reconcile all parties. Ormuzd and Ahriman, spirit and nature, are
not so hostile to each other as seems to be believed, and either of
them indeed is powerless without the other. They are two gods whose
origin is the same, they are immortal, and for immortals some means of
accommodation must be found. Complete and unremunerated sacrifice never
can be adopted as a rule of life; never can be more than a sublime
conception, a spark in some individual existence, consuming the fuel it
feeds upon and then disappearing and leaving behind, face to face, the
two great principles, a conscious reconciliation of which constitutes
the moral mean.
[64] The fact has been verified by the English authorities and
has been commented on by the physiologist W. Preyer (_Über die
Erforschung des Lebens_, Jena, and _Sammlung physiologischer
Abhandlungen_). Yoghis who have attained the highest degree of
perfection, and are insensible to cold and to heat and have
contracted, by a series of experiments, the habit of breathing
almost not at all, have been buried alive and resuscitated at
the end of some weeks. When they were reawakened a heightening
of the temperature was noticed as in the case of the reawaking
of hibernating mammals, and it is indeed to the phenomena of
hibernation that this strange voluntary suspension of animation
most closely approaches—this mystical return to a life merely
vegetative, this absorption in the bosom of the unconscious,
where the Yoghis hopes to find God. As a preliminary discipline
the Yoghis diminishes little by little the quantity of air and
light necessary to his life; he lives in a cell which is lit
and ventilated by no more than a single chink; he minimizes all
movement in order to minimize the necessity of respiration;
he does not speak except to repeat to himself twelve thousand
times a day the mystic name of Om; he remains for hours
together motionless as a statue. He practises breathing over
again and again the same body of air, and the longer the
period between inspiration and expiration, the greater his
sanctity! Finally he carefully seals all the openings of his
body with wax and cotton and closes the opening of the throat
with the tongue, which certain incisions permit him to fold
over backward, and finally falls into a lethargy in which the
movements of respiration may be suspended without the thread of
life positively being severed.
[Sidenote: Results a priori from the nature of ideas.]
The very nature of the conceptions confirms what we have just said
respecting temptation and sin. Directly or indirectly, every idea
is a suggestion, an incitement to action; it tends even to take
exclusive possession of us, to become a fixed idea, to employ us as
a means to its own end, to realize itself often in spite of us; but
as our thought embraces all things in the universe, high and low, we
are incessantly solicited to act in opposite directions; temptation,
from this point of view, is simply the law of thought, and the law of
sensibility. And ascetics and priests have endeavoured as a means of
struggling against temptation to confine human thought, to prevent it
from playing freely about the things of this world. But the things
of this world are precisely those which are always present, which
solicit us most strongly and constantly. And the greater our effort
to exclude them from the mind, the greater their power over us. There
is nothing one sees more clearly than what one resolves not to look
at; there is nothing that makes the heart beat so quickly as what one
resolves not to love. The cure for temptation, so persistently demanded
by essentially religious people, is not restriction of thought but
enlargement of thought. The visible world cannot be hidden, it is
folly to attempt it, but it can be magnified indefinitely. Incessant
discoveries may be made in it and the peril of certain points of view
counteracted by the novelty and attractiveness of certain others,
and the known universe lost sight of in the abyss of the unknown.
Thought bears its own antidote—a science sufficiently great is more
trustworthy than innocence; a boundless curiosity is the cure for all
petty curiosities. An eye which reaches the stars will not aim long
at a low mark; it is protected by its command of space and light, for
light is purifying. By making temptation infinite one makes it salutary
and in the best sense divine. Asceticism, and the artificial maturity
that comes of a dissolute life, often amount to the same thing. One
must keep one’s youth and memory green, and one’s heart open. “I
was not a man before years of manhood,” said Marcus Aurelius. Both
asceticism and debauchery make men precociously old, wean them from
love and enthusiasm for the things of this world. The island of Cythere
and the desert of Thebes are alike deserts. To remain young long, to
remain a child even in the spontaneity and affectionateness of one’s
heart, to preserve not in externals, but in “internals,” something of
lightness and gaiety is the best means of dominating life; for what
is more powerful than youth? One must neither stiffen one’s self, nor
bristle up against life, nor cowardly abandon one’s self to it; one
must take it as it is, that is to say, according to the popular maxim,
“as it comes,” and welcome it with an infant’s smile without any other
care than to maintain one’s possession of one’s self, in order that one
may possess all things.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Prayer.]
III. Morality and religion are inseparable in all historical faiths,
and the essential act of subjective worship, the fundamental rite
commanded by religious morality, is prayer.
[Sidenote: Kinds of prayer distinguished.]
To analyze prayer into all its component elements would be very
difficult and far from simple. Prayer may be an almost mechanical
accomplishment of the rite, the babbling of vain words, and as such
it is despicable even from the point of view of religion. It may be
an egoistic demand, and as such it is mean, simply. It may be an act
of naïve faith in beliefs more or less popular and irrational, and on
this score its value is so slight that it may be neglected. But it may
be also the disinterested outpouring of a soul which believes itself
to be in some fashion or other serving someone else, acting upon the
world by the ardour of its faith, conferring a gift, an offering,
devoting something of itself to someone else. Therein lies the grandeur
of prayer: it is then no more than one of the forms of charity and
the love of mankind. But suppose it should be demonstrated that this
especial form of charity is illusory, does one imagine that the very
principle of charity itself will by that fact receive a check?
[Sidenote: Superficiality of most pleas in its behalf.]
Many arguments have been urged in favour of prayer, but the majority
of them are quite external and superficial. Prayer, it has been said,
as being a demand on a special Providence, is sovereignly consoling;
it is one of the sweetest of the satisfactions incident to religious
faith. One who had been converted to free-thought said to me recently,
“There is but one thing in my former faith that I regret, and that is
that I can no longer pray for you and imagine that I am serving you.”
Assuredly it is sad to lose a faith which consoled one; but suppose
that someone believed himself to possess the fairy-wand and to be able
to save the world. Some fine morning he finds himself undeceived, he
finds himself alone in the world with no power at his disposal more
mysterious than that of his ten fingers and his brain. He cannot but
regret his imaginary power, but he will labour nevertheless to acquire
a real power and the loss of his illusions will but serve as a stimulus
to his will. It is always dangerous to believe that one possesses a
power that one has not, for it hinders one in some degree from knowing
and exercising those that one has. The men of former times, the times
of absolute monarchy, who had access to the ear of princes, possessed a
power analogous to that which the believers on their knees in temples
still believe themselves to possess; this power, in the case of
kings, their confidential ministers have lost as the result of purely
terrestrial revolutions; and have they thereby been diminished in their
dignity as moral beings? No, a man is morally greater as a citizen than
as a courtier; one is greater as the result of what one does one’s self
only, or attempts to do, and not as the result of what one endeavours
to obtain from a master.
[Sidenote: Arguments for its utility equally good for auricular
confession.]
Will the individual never be able to do without prayers conceived as a
constant communication with God, as a daily confession, a faith in Him
and before Him? He will probably not renounce it until he is capable
of existing without it. Arguments to prove the practical utility of
prayer, conceived as a direct communication with one’s living ideal,
would all hold equally good in favour of Catholic confession before
the priest as a realization of the moral ideal. Nevertheless, when
Protestants suppressed the confession they gave a fresh development
to moral austerity: the morality of Protestant peoples, which is
defended only by the voice of conscience, is not inferior to that of
Catholic peoples.[65] Is it any more necessary for the purpose of
ascertaining one’s faults and curing them to kneel before a personified
and anthropomorphic God than before a priest beneath the roof of
a church? Experience alone can decide, and a number of men seem
already successfully to have tried the experiment. The scrutiny of a
philosophical conscience has been proved to be sufficient.
[65] See below chapter iv.
[Sidenote: Prayer as a subjective relief.]
Finally it has been said that prayer, even conceived as destitute of
objective effect, nevertheless justifies itself by the comfort it
affords; one has attempted to argue in its favour on purely subjective
grounds, but prayer runs the risk precisely of losing its power as a
consoler the instant one ceases to believe in its objective efficiency.
If nobody hears us, who will continue to offer up petitions simply to
ease the burden of his own heart? If the orator is uplifted by the
sympathy of the assembly which listens to him, does it follow that he
will experience the same effect if he deliver his oration in the void
with the knowledge that his thought, his word, his emotion, are lost,
and spend themselves in space?
[Sidenote: Subjective charity the durable element in prayer.]
If prayer is really to be its own reward, it must not consist of a
demand addressed to some Being exterior to one’s self, it must be a
subjective act of love, what Christianity calls an act of charity.
Charity is the eternal element in prayer. To ask for something for
one’s self is a thing difficult to justify; to ask for something for
someone else is at least a beginning of disinterested conduct. “How
much longer thy prayers grow, grandmama, day by day!” “The number
of those for whom I pray increases day by day.” Over and above this
element of charity, prayer contains a certain beauty—a beauty which
will not disappear with the disappearance of the superstitions which
have clustered about it. The moral beauty of prayer is intimately bound
up with certain profound human sentiments: one prays for somebody whom
one loves; one prays out of pity or of affection; one prays in despair,
in hope, in gratitude; so that the most elevated of human sentiments
sometimes ally themselves with prayer and colour it. This tension of
one’s whole being at such times finds its way out upon the visage,
and transfigures it with the intense expression that certain painters
have loved to catch and to perpetuate.[66] What is most beautiful and
probably also what is best in prayer is, more than all else, the human
and moral element in it. If there is thus an essential charity in
genuine prayer, charity of the lips is not enough, that of the heart
and hands must be added to it, and that is to say in the last resort
action must be substituted for it.
[66] This, however, is exceptional; in church, during the
services, the majority of the faces remain inexpressive, for
the reason that prayer with the majority of the faithful is
almost always mechanical.
[Sidenote: Increasing tendency for such prayer to express itself in
action.]
Prayer for love and charity tends increasingly to find vent in action:
a verification of this fact may be found in history. Formerly, in a
moment of distress, a pagan woman would have thought only of appeasing
the anger of the Gods by some blood sacrifice, by the murder of some
innocent member of the larger mammals; in the Middle Ages she would
have made a vow or founded a chapel—things still vain and powerless
to alleviate the misery of this world; in our days she would think
rather, if she were a person of some elevation of spirit, of giving
money in charity, of founding an establishment for the instruction of
the poor or the care of the infirm. One sees in that fact the march
of progress in religious ideas; the time will come when such actions
will no longer be accomplished for a directly interested end but as a
sort of exchange with the divinity, a traffic of kindness; they will
constitute a recognized part of public worship, the essence of worship
will be charity. Pascal asks, somewhere, why God has bestowed prayer
upon man, why God has commanded man to pray; and he replies profoundly
enough: “To give him the dignity of seeing himself as a cause”; but
if he who demands benefits by prayer possessed formerly the dignity
of being, in his own right, a cause, how much greater is the dignity
of him who by the exercise of his own moral will procures the object
of his desire? And if to be the cause of one’s own well-being be thus
the essence of prayer, of that which brings man nearest to God, of
that which lifts man nearest to His level—may one not say that the
most disinterested, the most sacred, the most human, the most divine
of prayers is moral conduct? In Pascal’s opinion, it is true, moral
conduct presupposes two terms, duty and power, and man cannot always
do what he should; but one must break with the antique opposition
established by Christianity, between the sentiment of duty and the
practical powerlessness of a man shorn of all adventitious aid—shorn
of grace. In reality the sentiment of duty is, in and of itself, the
first vague consciousness of a power existent in us, of a force which
tends to achieve its own realization.[67] Consciousness of his power
for good and of the power of the ideal unite in man, for this ideal is
no more than the projection, the objectification, of the highest power
within, the form that that power takes in reflective intelligence.
Every volition is at bottom no more than a capability of some sort in
labour, an action in the stage of germination: the will to do good, if
it is conscious of its own power, has no need to await the prompting
of external grace; it is itself its own grace; by the very fact of
its birth it becomes efficacious; by the very fact of wishing, nature
creates. Pascal conceived the moral end, which duty places before us,
too much after the manner of a physical and external object, that one
might be able to look upon but not to attain. “One directs one’s looks
on high,” says he, in his “Pensées,” “but one rests upon the sand and
the earth will slip from under one, and one shall fall with one’s eyes
on heaven.” But might not one respond that the heaven of which Pascal
is here speaking, the heaven we carry in our own bosoms, is something
quite different from the heaven which we perceive spread out above our
heads? Must it not here be said that to see is to touch and to possess;
that a sight of the moral end renders possible a progress toward it;
that the resting point one finds in the moral will, the most invincible
of all the forms of volition, will not give way beneath one, and that
one cannot fall, in one’s progress toward goodness and that in this
sense to lift one’s eyes toward heaven is already to have set one’s
feet on the way thither.
[67] See on this point our _Esquisse d’une morale sans
obligation_, p. 27.
[Sidenote: Ultimate claim for prayer.]
There remains one more aspect under which prayer may be considered. It
may be regarded as a species of spiritual elevation, a communication
with the universe or with God.[68] Prayer has in all times been
glorified as a means of uplifting the whole being to a plane that it
otherwise would have been unable to attain. The best of us, as Amiel
said not long since, find complete development and self-knowledge in
prayer alone.
[68] “Oh, God” said Diderot, at the end of his _Interprétation
de la nature_, “I do not know if Thou existest, but I shall
bear myself as if Thou sawest into my soul; I shall act as if I
felt myself in Thy presence.... I ask nothing of Thee in this
world, for the course of things is necessary in and of its own
nature, if Thou dost not exist, and necessary if Thou dost, by
Thy decree.”
[Sidenote: Distinction between religious ecstasy and philosophical
meditation.]
One must be on one’s guard against a multitude of illusions in this
connection, and must carefully distinguish between two very different
things: religious ecstasy and philosophical meditation. One of the
consequences of our profounder knowledge of the nervous system is an
increasing contempt for ecstasy and for all of those states of nervous
intoxication or even of intellectual intoxication which were formerly
regarded by the multitude, and sometimes even by philosophers, as
superhuman, and truly divine. Religious ecstasy, so called, may be
a phenomenon so purely physical that it suffices to apply a bit of
volatile oil of cherry laurel to induce it in certain subjects, and
to fill them with ecstatic beatitude, and make them pray and weep
and kneel. Such was the fact in the case of a hysteric patient, a
hardened courtesan of Jewish origin; it sufficed even to induce in
her definite visions, even such as that of the girl with golden hair
in the blue robe starred with gold.[69] The intoxication indulged in
by the followers of Dionysius in Greece, like that indulged in by
hasheesh-eaters, was no more than a violent means of inducing ecstasy
and of entering into communication with the supernatural world.[70]
In India,[71] and among the Christians, fasting is practised to attain
the same end, namely a nervous excitation of the nervous systems. The
macerations of the anchorite were, says Wundt, a solitary orgie, in the
course of which monks and nuns ardently pressed in their arms fantastic
images of the Virgin and the Saviour. According to a legend of
Krishnaïsm, the Queen Udayapura, Mira Bai, being pressed to abjure her
God, threw herself at the feet of the statue of Krishna and made this
prayer: “I have quitted for thee my love, my possessions, my crown; I
come to thee, oh, my refuge! Take me.” The statue listened motionless;
suddenly it opened and Mira disappeared inside of it. To vanish thus
into the bosom of one’s God is—is it not?—the perfect ideal of the
highest human religions. All of them have proposed it to man, as a
prime object of desire, to die in God; all of them have seen the
higher life as a form of ecstasy; whereas the fact is that, in a state
of ecstasy, one descends on the contrary to a lower and a vegetative
plane of existence, and that this apparent fusion with God is no more
than a return to a primitive inertia, to a mineral impassibility, to a
statuesque petrifaction. One may believe one’s self uplifted in a state
of ecstasy, and mistake for an exaltation of thought what is in reality
no more than a sterile nervous excitement. The trouble is that there
is no means of measuring the real force and extent of thought. Under
normal circumstances the only means that exist are action; one who does
not act is inevitably inclined to exaggerate the value of his thought.
Amiel himself did not escape from this danger. Fancied superiority
disappears the moment a thought seeks expression of whatsoever kind.
The dream that is told becomes absurd; the ecstasy in which one retains
complete control of one’s mind, in which one endeavours to take stock
of the confused emotions one experiences, vanishes before us and leaves
behind no more than a fatigue, a certain subjective obscurity, like a
winter twilight, which precipitates a frost upon the window-panes that
intercepts the last rays of the sun. My most beautiful verses will
never be written, the poet says: “Of my work, the better part lies
buried in myself.”[72] That is an illusion by which dream seems always
superior to reality; an illusion of the same sort as that which makes
us attach so much value to certain hours of religious exaltation. The
truth is that the poet’s best verses are those which he has written
with his own hand, his best thought is that which has possessed
vitality enough to find its formula and its music; the whole of him
lies in his poetry. And we also, we are in our actions, in our words,
in the glance of an eye or the accent of a word, in a gesture, in the
palm of a hand open in charity. To exist is to act, and a thought which
is incapable of expression is an abortion which has never really been
alive and has never merited to live. In the same way the true God is
also the one who can be domesticated in one’s own heart, who does not
fly the face of reflective consciousness, who does not show himself
in dreams alone, whom one does not invoke as a phantom or a demon.
Our ideal ought not to be some passing and fantastic apparition, but
a positive creation of our spirit; we must be able to contemplate it
without destroying it, to feed our eyes upon it as upon a reality.
For the rest this ideal of goodness and of perfection, persisting as
it does in the face of inner scrutiny, has no need of an objective
existence in some sort material, to produce its proper effect upon
the spirit. The profoundest love subsists for those who have been, as
well as for those who are, and reaches out into the future as well as
into the present. Nay, it even in a manner outstretches the measure
of existence and develops a power of divining and loving the ideal
that shall some day be. Maternal love is a model now as always for all
moral beings, in that it does not await the birth of its object before
making the first steps in its service. Long before the child is born
the mother forms an image of it in her fancy, and loves it and gives
herself to it in advance.
[69] _Report of MM. Bourru and Burot au Congrès scientifique de
Grenoble_, August 18, 1885.
[70] A defender of the use of hasheesh scientifically employed,
M. Giraud, who conceives that it is possible to induce ecstasy
at will, and to regulate it by medical doses, writes us
with enthusiasm: “A bit of hasheesh dispenses with painful
mystical expedients to induce ecstasy. There is no further
need of asceticism; the result is an intoxication, but a
sacred intoxication, which is nothing else than an excess of
activity in the higher centres.” We believe that every sort
of drunkenness, far from possessing a sacred character, will
constitute for ever and always, in the eyes of science, a
morbid state, in no sense enviable from any rational point
of view, by an individual in normal health; the constant
employment of stimulants will exhaust the nervous system and
throw it out of order, as the daily employment of nux vomica
will, in the long run, destroy the power of a healthy stomach.
[71] See above what we have already said in regard to the
Yoghis and asceticism.
[72] M. Sully-Prudhomme.
[Sidenote: The highest form of prayer.]
For a truly elevated spirit the hours consecrated to the formation
of its ideal will always be precious hours of patient attention and
meditation, not only upon what one knows or does not know, but upon
what one hopes and will attempt; upon the ideal seeking for birth
through one’s instrumentality, and leaning upon one’s heart. The
highest form of prayer is thought. Every form of philosophic meditation
possesses, like prayer, an element of consolation, not directly, for it
may well deal with the saddest of realities, but indirectly because it
enlarges the heart. Every aperture broken open upon the infinite braces
us like a current in the open air. Our personal sorrows are lost in the
immensity of the infinite, as the waters of the earth are lost in the
immensity of the sea.
As for those who are not capable of thinking for themselves, of
standing spiritually on their own feet; it will always be good for them
to retrace the thoughts which appear to them to be the highest and
the noblest product of the human mind. On this account the Protestant
custom of reading and of meditating on the Bible is, in principle,
excellent; the book however is ill-chosen. But it is good that man
should habituate himself to read or to re-read a certain number of
times a day, or a week, something else than a newspaper or a novel;
that he should turn now and then to some serious subject of meditation
and dwell on it. Perhaps the day will come when every one independently
will compose a Bible of his own; will select from among the works of
the greatest human thinkers the passages which especially appeal to
him, and will read them and re-read and assimilate them. To read a
serious and high-minded book is to deal at first hand with the greatest
of human thoughts; to admire is to pray, and it is a form of prayer
that is within the power of all of us.