RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG WOMEN.
Are women inherently predisposed toward religion
and even toward superstition?—The nature of
feminine intelligence—Predominance of the
imagination—Credulity—Conservatism—Feminine
sensibility—Predominance of sentiment—Tendency to
mysticism—Is the moral sentiment among women based upon
religion?—Influence of religion and of non-religion upon
modesty and love—Origin of modesty—Love and perpetual
virginity—M. Renan’s paradoxes on the subject of monastic
vows—How woman’s natural proclivities may be turned
to account by free-thought—Influence exercised by the
wife’s faith over the husband—Instance of a conversion to
free-thought.
Among free-thinkers themselves there are a certain number who
believe that women are by the very nature of their minds devoted to
superstition and to myth. Is the incapacity of the female mind for
philosophy more demonstrable than that of the child’s mind to which it
has so frequently been compared?
[Sidenote: Woman’s attention to details.]
We are not obliged to decide the question whether women’s mental powers
are or are not inferior to those of men.[91] We are obliged to consider
only whether the limits of female intelligence are so tightly drawn
that religion, and even superstition, are for it inevitable. Those
who maintain that women are in some sort condemned to error argue
from certain essential elements in her character; let us examine
accordingly the peculiarity of her intelligence and of her sensibility.
The female mind, it has been said, is less abstract than that of the
male; women are more impressionable on the side of the senses and of
the imagination, are more readily appealed to by what is beautiful and
striking and coloured: thence arises their need for myths, for symbols,
for a cult, for rites that speak to the eye. We reply that this need is
not absolute: are not Protestant women content with a cult which does
not appeal to the senses? And in any event, an imaginative spirit is
not necessarily superstitious. Superstition is a matter of education,
not of nature; there is a certain maturity of mind which lends no
encouragement to superstition. I have known a number of women who did
not possess one superstition among them and were incapable of acquiring
one; there was no distinction in this respect to be observed between
their intelligence and that of a man; the conception of the world as
an orderly succession of phenomena, once really accepted by the human
mind, maintains itself by its own power, without aid from without, as
the fact in the long run always does.
[91] As a general rule, Darwin says, men go farther than women,
whether the matter be one of profound meditation, of reason,
or imagination, or simply of the use of the senses or even of
the hands. According to certain statistical investigations
it appears that the modern female brain has remained almost
stationary, while the male brain has developed notably. The
brain of a Parisian woman is no larger than that of a Chinese
woman, and the Parisian woman labours under the additional
disadvantage of possessing a larger foot.
Admitting these facts one may still refuse to infer from them
the existence of a congenital incapacity, for the way in which
women have always been treated by men and the education that
they have received may well have left results which have become
hereditary. The education of women has in all times been less
strenuous than that of men; and their mind, perhaps naturally
less scientific, has never been developed by direct contact
with the external world. In the Orient and in Greece, among the
nations from whom we derive our civilization, women (at least
in families in easy circumstances) were always restricted to a
subordinate rôle, confined to woman’s quarters, or withdrawn
from all direct contact with the real world. Thence arose a
sort of tradition of ignorance and intellectual abasement which
has been handed down to us. There is nothing like the brain of
a young girl reared at home for gathering to itself completely,
and without loss, the whole residue of middle-class silliness,
of naïve and self-satisfied prejudice, of strutting ignorance
that does not see itself as others see it, of superstition
transformed into a rule of conduct. But change the education
and you will in a great measure change these results. Even
according to Darwin’s own theory, education and heredity can in
the long run undo anything that they have done. Even if there
should remain a certain balance of intelligence in favor of
the male, even if the female should prove to be in the end, as
Darwin says, incapable of pushing invention as far in advance
as man, it would not follow that her heart and intelligence
should be filled with another order of ideas and sentiments
than those which are beneficial to men. It is one thing to
invent and to widen the domain of science, and another thing
to assimilate the knowledge already acquired; it is one thing
to widen the intellectual horizon, and another thing to adapt
one’s eyes and heart to this more open habitat.
[Sidenote: Female credulity.]
A second trait of female intelligence, which has also been made use
of, is its credulity—by which religion has so largely profited. Women
are more credulous than men, in this sense: they possess a certain
confidence in men, whom they recognize as stronger and more widely
experienced than themselves; they willingly believe whatever grave men,
whom they are accustomed to venerate, men like priests, assert. Their
credulity is thus in a great part a mere form of their natural need to
lean on some member of the opposite sex. Conceive a religion originated
and administered solely by women; it would be looked upon with great
distrust by women, in general. The day men cease to believe, female
credulity—in especial that of the average woman, who is accustomed
to judge with the eyes and intelligence of someone else—will be
profoundly affected. I once asked a maid who had remained thirty years
in the same house what were her beliefs. “Those of my master,” she
replied; her master was an atheist. The same question was put to the
wife of a member of the Institute. She replied: “I was a Catholic
until I was married. After I was married I began to appreciate the
superiority of my husband’s mind, I saw that he did not believe in
religion, and I ceased to believe in it entirely myself.”
[Sidenote: Female conservatism.]
A third trait of the feminine character is its conservativeness, its
friendliness to tradition, its indisposition to initiative. Respect for
power and authority, Spencer says, predominates in women, influences
their ideas and sentiments in regard to all institutions, and tends
to strengthen political and ecclesiastical governments. For the same
reason women are particularly inclined to put faith in whatever is
imposing; doubt, criticism, a disposition to question whatever is
established is rare among them, Mr. Spencer thinks. Women certainly do
possess a more conservative disposition than men in religion and in
politics; it has been so found in England where women vote on municipal
questions, and in our judgment the rôle that woman should play in this
world is precisely that of conservatism; as a young girl, she must
guard her person as a treasure, must be always suspicious of she knows
not precisely what; then as a wife she must watch over her child, her
house, her husband; must preserve, retain, defend, embrace somebody
or something. Is it a thing to be complained of? Is it not to this
instinct that we owe our life, and if difference in sex, or sexual
functions, involves grave differences in character, must we conclude
from this fact that women possess an irremediable civil and religious
incapacity? No; conservatism may be of service in the ranks of truth
as in the ranks of error; all depends on what is given to conserve.
If women are more philosophically and scientifically educated, their
conservatism may do good service.
[Sidenote: Female timidity.]
A final trait of the feminine mind, very like the preceding, is that
women are more given to an absorption in detail, are less courageous,
are more capable of dealing with particular details than with general
ideas and things as a whole, and are more inclined to narrow and
literal interpretations than men. If a woman, for example, is intrusted
with any administrative office she will execute every rule to the
letter with an exaggerated conscientiousness and a naïve anxiety. The
conclusion is that women will always lend comfort to literal religions
and to superstitious practices. In our opinion this penchant for
minutiæ and for scrupulousness which is so frequently observed among
women may become, on the contrary, an important factor of incredulity
when women are sufficiently instructed to perceive at first hand the
innumerable contradictions and ambiguities of the texts they are
dealing with. An enlightened scruple is a keener instrument of doubt
than of faith.
We confess we do not yet see that the differences, native or acquired,
between the male and the female brain suffice to constitute women a
sort of inferior caste, devoted by their birth to religion and the
service of myth, while men are reserved for science and philosophy.
[Sidenote: Is sentiment a badge of servitude to error?]
Let me now examine the more profound reasons based on the nature of
women’s sentimental proclivities. In general, it is said that women are
dominated not by reason but by sentiment. They respond quickly to a
call made in the name of pity or of charity, and not so quickly to one
made in the name of equity. But is sentiment the exclusive possession
of religions? And are there not also men of sentiment as well as men of
thought? And are the first on that account condemned to a life of error
while the second live in the presence of the truth?
[Sidenote: Women and mysticism.]
But it is insisted that in women sentiment naturally tends toward
mysticism. Among the Greeks, Spencer says, the women were more
accessible than the men to religious excitation.[92] It may be replied
that the greatest mystics have not been women. St. Theresas have been
much less numerous than men like Plotinus (it was Plotinus who first
gave the word ἔκστασις its current sense), Porphyry, Iamblicus,
Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Bonaventure, Gerson, Richard de Saint
Victor, Eckhart, Tauler, Swedenborg. Mysticism develops in proportion
to the restriction of the individual’s activity. Women’s life, which is
less active than that of men, allows more space for the development of
mystic impulses and exercises of piety. But activity cures the diseases
of contemplation, in especial of vain and empty contemplation in which
only average and ignorant minds can take delight. Woman’s religious
activity will diminish in proportion as a wider field of activity is
opened up to her, and in proportion as an intellectual and æsthetic
education is supplied to her and she becomes interested in all the
human questions and realities of this world. It has been desired even
to render political life accessible to woman, to restore to her the
rights which have hitherto been denied her. M. Secrétan has recently
advocated this measure, which was formerly advocated by John Stuart
Mill. To do so at the present moment would be to hand over politics
directly to the priesthood, who at present control women. But when
by gradual degrees women’s religious emancipation shall have been
completed, it is possible that a certain political emancipation may
be the natural consequence of it. Her civil emancipation in any event
is only a matter of time. The equality of women before the law is a
necessary consequence of democratic ideas. When they shall be forced
thus to occupy themselves more actively in the affairs of this world
the new employment of their energy will protect them more and more from
mystical tendencies.
[92] Sir Rutherford Alcock says also, that in Japan it is
very rare to see any other worshippers in the temples than
women and children; the men are always extremely few in number
and belong to the lower classes. At least five-sixths and
often nine-tenths of the pilgrims who come to the temple of
Juggernaut are women. Among the Sikhs the women are said to
believe in more gods than the men. These examples, borrowed
as they are from different races, and at different epochs,
show sufficiently, in Spencer’s opinion, that, when we find an
analogous state of things in Catholic countries, and even in
some measure in England, we are not to attribute it solely to
the education of women; the cause, he thinks, is deeper, lies
in their nature. (See Spencer’s _Study of Sociology_.)
If an opportunity be given them to influence society they will no
doubt exercise it philanthropically. Well, pity is one of the most
powerful derivatives of mysticism. Even among religious orders it has
been remarked how much less exalted the devotion of the members of
the philanthropic orders is than of those who restrict themselves to
sterile meditation in the cloister.
[Sidenote: Female moral sentiment.]
If mysticism is no more truly indispensable to women than to men, can
it be maintained that their moral sentiment is incapable of subsistence
apart from some religion? Is women’s moral power less than that of men,
and is it only in religion that they can find the additional increment
of strength of which they are in need? Resistance to physical or moral
pain supplies a sufficiently exact measure of power. Well, women show
in maternity, with all its consequences, in pregnancy, in childbirth,
in nursing, accompanied as it is by continual watchfulness and care,
a patience of physical pain which is perhaps greater than anything
that the average man is capable of. Just so in respect to patience of
moral pain: women may suffer much from poverty, and sadness follows the
flying needle, but love and pity are the great sources of restraint. As
the sphere of her intelligence widens, a large field will be supplied
for the exercise of women’s power of love which is so highly developed.
The genuine remedy for every kind of suffering is increased activity of
mind, which means increased instruction. Action is always an anodyne
of pain. Therein lies the explanation of the power of charity to calm
personal suffering, which is always in some degree egoistic. The best
way to console one’s self, for women and men alike, will always be to
minister to someone else; hope revives in a heart which gives hope to
others. Pains become gentle as they become fertile in beneficence, and
productivity is an appeasement.
[Sidenote: Best side of female levity.]
And finally, by way of compensation, there are other respects in which
women would suffer perhaps less than men from the disappearance of
religious beliefs. Women live more completely in the present than men
do, they are somewhat bird-like in their composition, and forget the
tempest the instant it is passed. Women laugh as easily as they cry,
and their laughter soon dries their tears: they are to be forgiven
for at least one aspect of this divine levity. Moreover they have
their household, all the tender and practical preoccupations of life,
which absorb them more completely, heart and soul, than men. A woman’s
happiness is probably complete the instant she believes herself to be
beautiful and feels that she is loved; a man’s happiness is a much
more complex product and contains a much larger number of intellectual
elements. Women live more wholly within the limits of their own
generation than men, and experience a sort of contemporary immortality
in the hearts of those they love.
[Sidenote: Modesty and love.]
Among the most developed sentiments of women there are two which
constitute the strength of their disposition to propriety: modesty,
the dignity of their sex, and love, which is exclusive when it is
true. But for these two powerful causes religious motives would always
have weighed lightly with her. If religion exercises a great control
over women, it is by taking possession of these two motives: the
surest means of making women listen, and almost the sole means, is to
awaken their love, or to appeal to their modesty: to give themselves
or to refuse themselves are the two great acts which dominate their
lives, and immorality among them generally increases directly with
the diminution of their modesty. Thence arises a new and delicate
problem, whether modesty, that compound of power and grace, is not
rather a religious than a moral virtue, and if religion has maintained
it, would it not disappear with the disappearance of religion, and
be enfeebled by a religion increasingly scientific and, in a sense,
positive? Note in the first place, that if the essence of all feminine
virtue is modesty, as of all male virtue it is courage, that very
fact constitutes an additional reason for doing everything in one’s
power to make modesty independent of religion, in order that it may
stand unaffected by the doubts which necessarily, in the modern world,
will overwhelm the latter. Certainly modesty is capable of serving
remarkably well as a safeguard for beliefs, and even for irrational
beliefs; it always prevents one from pushing reason, as from pushing
desire to the end, but there is a true and a false, a useful and a
harmful modesty. The first, as we shall see, is not bound up with
religion, either in its origin or in its destiny.
[Sidenote: Origin of modesty.]
In the first place is modesty of religious origin? Every young girl
feels vaguely that she has at her disposal a treasure which a number
of people desire. This sentiment, which is confused with some obscure
consciousness of sex, was necessary to enable the female to attain
complete physical development before giving herself. Precocious
immodesty must inevitably, in effect has, resulted in an arrested
development. It might easily have produced also a comparative
sterility. Modesty is thus a guarantee for the continuance of the
species, one of the sentiments that natural selection must inevitably
have tended to preserve and to increase. It is a condition, moreover,
of sexual selection; if the female had been disposed to give herself
indiscriminately, the species would have suffered. Happily desire is
checked by modesty, an obstacle which it can remove only on condition
of the woman’s being strongly attracted by the object desired; a
quality which will subsequently be transmissible to the species. From
the point of view of sexual selection there is in modesty a great deal
of coquetry—a coquetry which is unaware of its aim, which is half
unconscious, and often mistakes for a duty what is really but a bit of
management. The art of provisional refusal, and of attractive flight,
must inevitably have attained a high development among superior
beings, for it is a powerful medium of seduction and selection. Modesty
has developed side by side with it, and really constitutes but a
fugitive moment in the eternity of female coquetry. Coquetry originates
in the young girl who is yet too ignorant to be really modest, but too
much of a woman not to love to attract and to retreat; and at the other
extreme it constitutes the last remnant of modesty in women who really
possess none. Finally, modesty is also composed largely of an element
of fear, which has been very useful in the preservation of the race.
Among animals the female almost always runs some risk in the presence
of the male, which is generally stronger than she; love-making is
not only a crisis but a danger, and she must mollify the male before
surrendering herself to him, must seduce him before satisfying him.
Even in the human race, in primitive times, women were not always safe
from violence from men. Modesty secures a sort of expectant love which
was necessary in primitive times, a proof, a period of mutual scrutiny.
Lucretius has remarked that children, by their weakness and by their
fragility, have contributed to the softening of human manners; the same
remark applies to women and to this sense of their own comparative
weakness, which they experience so acutely in modesty, and which they
to some degree communicate to men. Women’s fears and scruples have made
man’s hand less hard; their modesty has given rise in him to a certain
form of respect, to a form of desire which is less brutal and more
gentle; they have civilized love. Modesty is analogous to the species
of fright that inclines a bird to flee one’s caresses, which bruise
it. One’s very look possesses some element of hardness for a bird;
and is it not a prolongation of touch? In addition to these various
elements there goes, to the composition of a young girl’s or a young
man’s modesty, a higher and more properly human element; the fear of
love itself, the fear of something new and unknown, of the profound
and powerful instinct which is awakening in one after having up to
that time lain asleep, which abruptly arises in one and struggles for
dominance with the other forces and impulses of one’s being. The young
man, unaccustomed as yet to submit to the domination of this instinct,
finds in it something stranger and more mysterious than in any other;
_c’est l’interrogation anxieuse de chérubin_.[93]
[93] Shame is usually regarded as constituting the essence of
modesty, but shame can have been but one of the elements in its
formation; such shame as actually exists is readily explicable
as a sense of the uncleanness attaching, in especial in the
case of the woman (of whom the Hebrews required a periodic
purification), to certain animal functions. But modesty must
have been developed also by the use of clothing and the growth
of the habit of covering, first the loins and then more and
more of the entire person; and indeed the development of
modesty and of the habit of wearing clothes must each have been
aided by the other. The habit of going covered gives rise very
soon to shame at being seen uncovered. The little negresses
whom Livingstone supplied with shifts became, in a few days,
so accustomed to having the upper half of their bodies hidden
that, when they were surprised in their chambers in the
morning, they hastily covered their breasts.
[Sidenote: Religious education and modesty.]
To sum up, the sentiment of modesty neither originates in religion nor
depends upon it; it is only very indirectly allied to it. Even from the
point of view of modesty a religious education is not above reproach.
Among Protestants, is the reading of the Bible always a good school? M.
Bruston has contended for the propriety of reading the Song of Songs
in an epoch like ours when marriages are often made out of interest
rather than of inclination; and indeed we agree with him that the
reading of the Song of Songs does tend to develop certain inclinations
in young girls, but hardly an inclination to a regular and complicated
church marriage. Among Catholics how many indiscreet questions the
confessor puts to the young girl! How many prohibitions, as dangerous
in their way as suggestions! And even in the item of modesty excess is
a defect; a little wholesome liberty in education and manners would
do no harm. Catholic education sometimes distorts the woman’s mind by
making it too different from that of the man, and by accustoming it to
a perpetual timidity and discomposure in the presence of the being with
whom she must pass her life, and by rendering her modesty somewhat too
indeterminate and savage, and converting it into a sort of religion.
[Sidenote: True modesty.]
There is also sometimes manifest a sort of perversion of modesty in the
mystical tendencies of woman, which are especially strong at the age
of puberty. These tendencies, exploited by the priesthood, give rise
to convents and cloisters. A Catholic education too often constitutes
for young girls a sort of moral mutilation; one endeavours to keep them
virgins, and one succeeds in converting them into imperfect women.
Religions are too inclined to consider the union of the sexes under I
know not what mystical aspect, and, from the point of view of morals,
as a stain. Certainly purity is a power; it is with a little diamond
point that mountains, and even continents, are nowadays pierced, but
Christianity has confounded chastity with purity. True purity is that
of love, true chastity is chastity of heart; chastity of heart survives
chastity of body, and stops at the point beyond which it would become
a restriction, an obstacle to the free development of the entire
being. An eunuch or a young man studying for the priesthood may well
be destitute of chastity; the smile of a young girl at the thought
of her fiancé may be infinitely more virginal than that of a nun.
Nothing moreover stains the mind like a too exclusive preoccupation
with the things of the body; incessant attention to them necessarily
evokes a chain of immodest imagery. St. Jerome in his desert,
believing, as he relates, that he saw the Roman courtesans dancing
naked in the moonlight, was less pure in heart and brain than Socrates
unceremoniously paying a visit to Theodora. A too self-conscious
modesty is immodest. The whole grace of virginity is ignorance; the
instant virginity becomes aware of itself it is tarnished; virginity,
like certain fruits, can only be preserved by a process of desiccation.
Love and sunshine transform the universe. Modesty is simply a coat of
mail which presupposes a state of war between the sexes, and aims at
preventing a blind promiscuity; the mutual self-abandonment of love
is more chaste than the modest inquietude and the immodest suspicion
which precede it; there grows up between two people who love each
other a sort of confidence that results in their neither wishing nor
being able to keep back anything from each other; self-constraint,
suspicion, consciousness of antagonism of interest, all disappear. This
is assuredly the characteristic of the most perfect form of reunion
that can exist in this world; Plato believed that the human body is
the prison of the spirit and cuts it off from immediate communication
with its fellow-spirits; paradoxical as it may seem, it is in love that
the body becomes less opaque, and effaces itself, and soul communicates
with soul. Nay, marriage itself preserves in women a sort of moral
virginity, as one may recognize on the scarred and discoloured hands of
old women the white line that has been protected for thirty years, by
the wedding ring, against the wear and tear of life.
[Sidenote: M. Renan on celibacy.]
Modesty is a sentiment which has survived, as we have seen, because
it was useful to the propagation of the species; mysticism perverts
and corrupts it and enlists it precisely against the propagation
of the species. Between a Carmelite nun and a courtesan like Ninon
de Lenclos the sociologist might well hesitate; socially they are
almost equally worthless, their lives are almost equally miserable
and vain; the excessive macerations of the one are as foolish as the
pleasures of the other; the moral desiccation of the one is often
not without some analogy to the corruption of the other. Vows or
habits of perpetual chastity, the monastic life itself, have found
in our days an unexpected defender in M. Renan. It is true he does
not regard such matters from the point of view of Christianity. If he
has a word to say in favour of perpetual chastity, it is strictly in
the name of physiological induction; he considers chastity simply as
a means of heightening the capacity of the brain and of increasing
one’s intellectual fertility. He does not absolutely blame impurity,
he delights in a sense, as he himself says, in the joys of the
debauchee and the courtesan; he possesses the boundless curiosity and
the accomplished impudicity of the man of science. But he believes
that there exists a sort of intellectual antinomy between complete
intellectual development and bodily love. The true man of science
should concentrate his entire vitality in his brain, should devote
his life to abstractions and chimeras; by this reservation of his
entire strength for the service of his head, his intelligence will
flower in double blossoms, the monstrous beauty of which, produced
by the transformation of stamens into petals, is the achievement of
sterility. Love is a heavy tax to pay for the vanities of the world,
and in the budget of the human race women count almost exclusively on
the side of expense. Science, economical of time and force, should
teach one to disembarrass one’s self of women and love, and to leave
such futilities to the drones. These paradoxes that M. Renan puts
forth rest on a well-known scientific fact: that the most intelligent
species are those in which reproduction is least active; fertility,
generally speaking, varies inversely to cerebral energy. But love must
not quite be confounded with sexual activity, unless one is to draw the
somewhat strange conclusion that among animals hares are those who are
best acquainted with love, and among men Frenchmen are those who know
least of it. From the fact that excessive commerce with the other sex
paralyses the intelligence, it does not in the least follow that the
sentiment of love produces the same effect and that one’s intellectual
power diminishes with the growth of one’s heart.
[Sidenote: Love a cerebral stimulant.]
We believe that love may be sufficiently defended on intellectual as
well as on moral grounds. If it in certain respects involves an expense
of force, it in others so heightens the entire vital energy, that the
expense must be regarded as one of those fruitful investments which are
inseparable from the very continuance of life. To live, after all, in
the physical as well as in the moral sense of the word, is not only to
receive but to give, but above all to give one’s self to love; it is
difficult to pervert one of the most primitive elements of the human
character, without also perverting the heart and the intelligence.
Love is above all things a stimulant to the entire being and to the
brain itself; it takes possession of the whole man; it plays upon man
as upon a harp and sounds the whole compass of his being. It cannot be
replaced by coffee or hasheesh. Women not only complete men, and form
by union with them a more complete, more rounded existence, more justly
epitomizing the possibilities of life; they are capable also, by their
mere presence, by their mere smile, of doubling our individual powers
and carrying them to the highest point of energy of which they are
capable. Our manhood leans upon their grace. All other motives which
inspire man—love of reputation, of glory, even of God—are slight as
compared with the love of a woman who understands her rôle. Even the
most abstract passion, the passion for science, often fails to acquire
its entire strength until it has called to its aid the love of a woman,
which wrings a smile out of the grave alembics and fills the crucibles
with the gaiety of hope. Nothing is simple in our being; all things
amalgamate and unite together. They who invented the monk aimed at
simplifying human life; they succeeded only in unnaturally complicating
it or mutilating it.
[Sidenote: Love makes for sanity.]
But love does not only play, in the life of the man of science and of
the thinker, the rôle of stimulant; over and above its function in
inciting such men to work, it contributes indirectly to rectify the
product of their labours. Love lives in reality, and to live in reality
helps one to think justly. Rightly to understand the world in which
we live, we must not dwell beyond its bounds, must not make a world
of our own, an unnatural and frigid world, rounded by the walls of a
monastery. “To aim at being an angel is to be a beast,” says Pascal;
and not only to be a beast, but in a measure to brutalize one’s self,
to dim the precision and vivacity of one’s intelligence. A complete
acquaintance with the details of the lives of great minds would
reveal surprising traces of love in the audacity and sweep of great
metaphysical and cosmological hypotheses, in profound generalizations,
in passionate exactitude of demonstration. Love reaches everywhere;
and as the philosopher who is also a lover pushes audaciously forward
in the domain of thought, he moves more easily, more lightly, more
confidently, with a heightened faith in himself, in others, and in this
mysterious and mute universe. Love inspires one with that gentleness of
heart which inclines one to an interest in the smallest things and in
their place in the universe. There is great kindliness in the heart of
the true philosopher.
[Sidenote: Love the essence of art.]
Then, too, what is science without art? The most intimate relations
exist between the intellectual and artistic faculties.[94] Could art
exist without love? Love becomes, in matters of art, of the very tissue
of thought. To compose verses or music, to paint or model, is simply
to transmute love by diverse methods and into diverse forms. Whatever
the more or less sincere defenders of the monastic spirit and religious
mysticism may say, love, which is as old as the world, is not upon the
point of quitting it; and it is in the hearts and minds of the greatest
of mankind that it dwells most securely. “Human frailty!” someone will
murmur. “No,” we reply: “source of strength and strength itself.” If
love is the science of the ignorant it constitutes some part also
of the science of the sage. Eros is of all the gods the one on whom
Prometheus is most dependent, for it is from Eros that he steals the
sacred flame. Eros will survive in every heart, and in especial in
every woman’s heart, when all religions shall have decayed.
[94] See the author’s _Problèmes de l’esthétique
contemporaine_, livre ii.
[Sidenote: Importance of early education in woman.]
We may conclude, therefore, that the characteristic tendencies of woman
may be employed in the services of truth, science, free-thought, and
social fraternity. Everything depends on the education that is given
her, and on the influence of the man whom she marries. Woman must
be begun with in childhood. The life of a woman is more orderly and
continuous than that of a man; for that reason the habits of childhood
exercise a more permanent influence over her. There is but one great
revolution in a woman’s life: marriage. And there are women for whom
this revolution does not exist; and there are others for whom it exists
in its most attenuated form, as when, for example, the husband’s manner
of life and his beliefs are practically the same as those of the wife’s
mother and family. In a tranquil environment, such as the majority of
women exist in, the influence of early education may persist to the
end; the small number of religious or philosophical ideas that were
planted in a woman’s brain in her childhood may be found there years
afterward, practically unchanged. The home is a protection, a sort of
hot-house in which plants flourish that could not live in the open air;
the film of glass or of veiling behind which women habitually stand to
look out into the street does not protect them against sun and rain
alone. A woman’s soul, like her complexion, preserves something of its
native whiteness.
[Sidenote: Husband responsible for wife’s education.]
In France, in the majority of instances, women are children up to the
time of their marriage; and children inclined to regard the man to whom
their parents wish them to give their hand with a certain mixture of
fear and of respect. Such a woman’s intelligence is almost as virgin
as her body, and in the first months of marriage the husband may
acquire, if he chooses, a decisive influence over his wife, model her
as yet imperfectly developed brain almost to his will. If he waits,
if he temporizes, he will find his task difficult—the more so as his
wife will some day gain over him some such influence as he might at
first have gained over her. The instant a woman becomes fully aware of
her power, she almost always becomes the controlling influence in the
household; if her husband has not formed her, if he has left her with
all the prejudices and ignorances of a child, and often of a spoiled
child, she will, in the course of time, form or rather deform him—will
oblige him at first to tolerate, and ultimately to accept, her childish
beliefs and errors, and perhaps in the end, profiting by the decline of
his intelligence, with the coming on of old age, she will convert him,
and by that fact retard the intellectual progress of the household by
an entire generation. The priesthood positively count on the growing
influence of the wife in every household; but they are helpless in
the first months, or perhaps years, of marriage against the influence
that the husband may exercise. And once fashioned by him the wife may
continue to exist to the end of her life in his image, and to give him
back his own ideas and instil them into his children.
[Sidenote: Free-thinker’s difficulty.]
The free-thinker, it is true, labours under a great disadvantage in
the work of conversion: a believer may always decline to reason;
whenever an intellectual duel seems to him to be disadvantageous he may
decline to fight; a high degree of indulgent tenacity and of prudence
is necessary in a discussion with anyone who is thus ready to take
refuge in flight at the slightest alarm. What can one do against a
gentle and obstinate determination to say nothing, to intrench one’s
self in ignorance, to allow argument to shatter itself against an outer
wall. “It seemed to me,” a Russian novelist cries, “as if all my words
bounded off her like peas shot at a marble statue.” One of Shakspere’s
heroines proposes to essay matrimony as an exercise of patience. If
patience is, in the management of the household, the great virtue of
the wife, the man’s virtue should be perseverance and active obstinacy
in an effort to fashion and create her to his desire and ideal. I
once questioned a woman who had married a free-thinker with a secret
intention of converting him. The upshot of the matter was the precise
opposite, and I quote below her own account, as she gave it to me,
of the successive phases of this moral crisis. It is of course only
an isolated example, but it may serve to illustrate the character of
women, and the more or less great facility with which they may be made
to accept scientific or philosophic ideas.
[Sidenote: Wife’s effort to convert her husband.]
“The double aim of every Christian woman is to save souls, in general,
and to save her own in particular. To aid Christ, by bringing back into
the fold the sheep who have strayed away, is her great dream, and to
preserve her own purity is her constant preoccupation. When the moment
came for me to try my powers, a lively solicitude took possession of
me: should I really succeed in winning over the man to whom I was to
unite my life, or would he succeed in winning me over? Great is the
power of evil, and whoever exposes himself to temptation will perish,
but if evil is powerful, God, I assured myself, is still more powerful,
and God never abandons those who confide in him, and I confided in God.
To convince the incredulous who had systematized their incredulity into
a reasoned whole was no slight task, and I did not hope to accomplish
it in four and twenty hours. My plan was this: to be faithful in the
midst of the unfaithful, immutable and confident in my religion which
was the religion of the humble, the simple, and the ignorant; to do the
utmost good possible, according to the first of Christ’s commandments;
to practise my religion in silence but openly; to domesticate it in my
household; to inaugurate a secret, slow, incessant combat which should
last, if necessary, till the end of my life. And then to rely upon the
infinite mercy of God.
“With this disposition of mind I had no difficulty in standing mute
whenever my husband attacked my beliefs. My first object was to prove
the uselessness of all discussion, the firmness of my faith. I knew
perfectly well that I really was unable to reply, that he knew so much
and I so little. But if I had only been a doctor of theology I would
have accepted the challenge, I would have heaped up proof on proof!
With the truth and God for me, how could I have been vanquished? But
I was not in the least like a doctor of theology, and the result
was that, fortified in my ignorance, I listened placidly to all his
arguments, and the livelier, the more cogent they were, the more
profoundly I was convinced of the truth of my religion, which stood
erect under so much battering and triumphed in its immunity.
“I was inexpugnable, and the siege might have lasted long if my husband
had not recognized the strength of my position and changed his tactics.
His object was to force me to discuss, to follow his objections, to
understand them in spite of myself, to turn them over in my own mind.
He told me that it would be a help to him in his work if I should
epitomize sometimes in writing, sometimes _viva voce_, a certain number
of works on religion. He put into my hands M. Renan’s ‘Vie de Jésus,’
M. Reville’s wise and conscientious little book on ‘L’Histoire du dogme
de la divinité de Jésus Christ,’ often full of abstract inquiries in
which the sincerity of the author was evident and contagious, even
when the reader was looking for sophisms.[95] I could not refuse to
read the books without abandoning my most cherished ambition, which
was to aid my husband in his work. My conscience was involved, and I
could not consult my confessor because we were then abroad; moreover
my faith, although profound, had always been, or pretended to be,
generous and enlightened. If I was ever to hand my religion on I must
not be intolerant; and I read! M. Renan did not especially scandalize
me, he was a follower of Jesus, writing of Jesus; his book, which has
charmed many women as much as a romance, saddened me without repelling
me. I was obliged to make a written abstract of the entire book and had
to put myself into the author’s place, to see things with his eyes,
to think his thoughts; and, in spite of myself, I sometimes saw in my
own heart, side by side with the impeccable and perfect Christ God,
the figure of the imperfect, suffering, worn man, out of patience and
cursing. The other books, which were much more abstract, called for a
much greater effort on my part, but the very effort that I put forth
constrained me more completely to assimilate their contents. Every day
I lost ground, and my once passive faith became slowly transformed into
an anxious desire to know, into a hope that a more complete knowledge
would re-establish my broken defences.
[95] “Among the polemical works on Christianity I shall cite
one which is perhaps somewhat old, but precious, in that it
sums up with great impartiality the whole mass of secular
objections, including a large number of modern objections to
Christianity, the book of M. Patrice Larroque, entitled _Examen
critique des doctrines de la religion Chrétienne_.”
“One day, my husband said to me abruptly: ‘You will not refuse to
read the Bible, which is the source of your religion, from one end to
the other?’ I acceded with pleasure, I did not wait for permission—I
was beyond that; it seemed to me that to read the Bible must be the
beginning of that profound knowledge which I envied my ideal doctor of
theology. It was with trembling fingers that I opened the black-bound
book, with its closely printed pages dictated by God Himself, alive
still with the divine Word! I held in my hands the truth, the
justification of human life, the keys of the future; it seemed to me
that the tablets of Sinai had been committed to me as to the prostrate
multitude of the Hebrews at the foot of the mountain, and I also would
have kneeled humbly to receive it. But, as I made my way through the
book, the immorality of certain pages seemed to me so evident that
my whole heart rose in revolt against them. I had not been hardened
from my childhood, as Protestant girls are, to all these tales. The
Catholic education, which does what it can to keep the Sacred Books
out of sight, seems to me in this respect, and only in this respect,
much superior to the Protestant religion. In any event, it prepares one
who reads the Bible for the first time in mature years to feel much
more acutely the profound immorality of sacred history. Catholicism
often perverts the intelligence; Protestantism might naturally go the
length of perverting the heart. Unbelievers have often made the moral
monstrosities in the Bible a subject of raillery; I felt nothing but
indignation when I came across them, and I closed with disgust the book
which I had so long regarded with respect.
“What should I think of it; what should I believe? The words of
infinite love and charity which the New Testament contains came back
to me. If God was anywhere He must be there, and once more I opened
the sacred book—the book which has so often tempted humanity. After
all, it was Christ that I had adored rather than the Lord of Hosts.
My acquaintance had been almost wholly limited to the Gospel of St.
John, which I had learned was of disputable authenticity. I read the
Gospels from end to end. Even in St. John I could not find the model
man above reproach, the incarnate God, the divine Word; in the very
midst of the beauties and sublimities of the text, I myself began to
perceive innumerable contradictions, naïvetés, superstitions, and moral
failings. My beliefs no longer existed, I had been betrayed by my God,
my whole previous intellectual life looked to me more and more like a
dream. This dream had its beautiful aspects; even to-day I sometimes
regret the consolation that it once afforded me and can never afford
me again. Nevertheless, in all sincerity, if I had the chance to sleep
once more the intellectual sleep of my girlhood, to forget all that
I have learned, to return to my errors—I would not for the world
consent to take it, I would not take a step backward. The memory of the
illusions that I have lost has never disturbed the line of reasoning by
means of which I lost them. When once I had come face to face with the
reality, it maintained itself from that moment on, sometimes painfully,
but steadily in my imagination. The last thing that a human being can
willingly consent to is to be deceived.”