sought to counteract the natural influences of their theological
doctrines by making additions which were inconsistent with its
"absolute" principle, but which rendered it better fitted for the
purpose of binding men together. This was especially the case under
Monotheism, where, as we have seen, such counteraction was most
necessary. From this source arose a series of supplementary doctrines,
generally tending to connect God with man, and men with each other. St.
Paul, "the real founder of Christianity," took the first step in
reducing Monotheism into a shape in which it could act as an "organic"
doctrine, and his successors followed steadily in the same path. If the
omnipotence of God raised him above all human sympathy, and tended to
destroy human sympathy in his worshippers, the doctrines of the Trinity
and the Incarnation again brought him near to them, and taught them to
reverence a humanity which was thus raised into unity with God. In the
Feast of the Eucharist all men celebrated and enjoyed their unity with
this exalted and deified humanity. The same influence, in its further
development, led to the adoration of the saints, and above all of the
Virgin Mother, in whom Christian devotion really worshipped humanity, in
its simplest and tenderest affections. Finally, if benevolent sympathies
were denied to nature, St. Paul found a place for them by attributing
them to grace, "which Thomas à Kempis admirably defines as the
equivalent of love--_gratia sive dilectio_--divine inspiration being
substituted for human impulse."[36] And the struggle between egoism and
altruism was expressed in the doctrines of the Fall and Redemption of
mankind.[37] Thus the social passion, which, according to the theory,
could not be found in humanity, was conceived to flow from a divine
influence, and became ennobled, at least as a means of salvation, in the
eyes of those who would otherwise have suppressed it. At the same time,
as Comte also contends, these additions or corrections of the original
doctrine were inconsistent or imperfect in themselves, and inadequate to
the social purpose for which they were destined; and they naturally
disappeared whenever, by the emancipation of the intelligence, the
immense egoism, which Monotheism consecrated in God and favoured in man,
was let loose from the bonds in which the Church had confined it.
Protestantism was the first indication of this change; for Protestantism
is but an organized anarchy, in which the only elements of order are
derived from an instinctive conservatism, clinging to the fragments of a
past doctrinal system, which, in principle, has been abandoned. It
contains no organic elements of its own--no positive contribution to the
progressive life of humanity; it is simply the first imperfect result of
that metaphysical individualism which, in its ultimate form, freed from
all the limits of the Catholic system, expressed itself theoretically
in Rousseau and Voltaire, and practically in the French Revolution. The
hope of mankind, however, lies in the new synthesis of Positivism, which
alone can give due value to the innate altruistic sympathies of man, and
which therefore alone can place on a permanent scientific basis that
social order which the mediæval Church attempted in vain to found on the
essentially egoistic and anarchic doctrine of Monotheism.
The fundamental conception, then, which underlies Comte's view of
progress is, that every past religion, with the partial exception of
Fetichism, has been an amalgam of two radically inconsistent elements,
one of which only was due to the theological principle itself; while the
other was due, partly to the practical instinct of its priests, which
led them to modify the logical results of that principle in conformity
with the social wants of man; and partly also to their subordinate
position, which obliged them to use the spiritual means of conviction
and persuasion instead of the ruder weapons of material force. To
criticise fully this position would be to re-write Comte's history of
religion. It will be sufficient here to point out that his view of
modern history begins in a false interpretation of Christianity, and
ends in an equally false interpretation of the Protestant Reformation.
Christianity from its origin has two aspects or elements; and if we
compare it with earlier religions, we may call these its Pantheistic and
its Monotheistic elements. But these elements are not, as Comte asserts,
joined together by a mere external necessity. They are necessarily
connected in the inner logic of the system; nor can we regard one of
them as more or less essential than the other. In the simplest words of
the Gospels we find already expressed a sense of reconciliation with
God, and therefore with the world and self, which is alien to pure
Monotheism, though there is some faint anticipation of it in the later
books of the Old Testament. For a spiritual Monotheism, while it awakens
a consciousness of the holiness of God, and the sinfulness of the
creature, tends to make fear prevail over love, and the sense of
separation over the sense of union. The idea of the unity of the Divine
and the human--an original unity which yet has to be realized by
self-sacrifice--and the corresponding idea that the individual or
natural life must be lost in order to save it, were set before humanity,
as in one great living picture, in the life and death of Christ. And
what was thus directly presented to the heart and the imagination in an
individual, was universalized in the writings of St. Paul and St. John:
in other words, it was liberated from its peculiar national setting, and
used as a key to the general moral history of man. The Messiah of the
Jews was exalted into the Divine Logos, and the Cross became the symbol
of an atonement and reconciliation between God and man, which has been
made "before the foundation of the world," yet which has to be made
again in every human life. The work of the first three centuries was to
give to this idea such logical expression as was then possible, in the
doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. It is true that this idea
of the unity of man with God was not immediately carried out to any of
the consequences which might seem to be contained in it. It remained for
a time a religion, and a religion only; it did not show itself to be the
principle of a new social or political order of life. Rather it accepted
the old order represented by the Roman Empire, and even consecrated it
as "ordained of God," only demanding for itself that it should be
allowed to purify the inner life of men. Such a separation of the things
of Cæsar and the things of God was then inevitable; for it is impossible
that a new principle can ever be received simply and without alloy into
minds, which are at the same time occupying themselves with its utmost
practical or even theoretical consequences. In this sense there is great
truth in what Comte says about the value of the separation of the
spiritual from the temporal authority. The power of directly realizing a
new religious principle, just because it draws away attention from the
principle itself to the details of its practical application, is likely
to prevent that application being either effective or even a true
expression of the principle. Such practical inferences cannot safely be
drawn by direct logical deduction; they will be made with certainty and
effect only by spirits which the principle has remoulded. The decided
withdrawal of the Christian Church from the sphere of "practical
politics" was, therefore, not merely a necessity forced upon it from
without; it was a condition which its best members gladly accepted,
because without it the inner transformation of man's life by the new
doctrine would have been impossible. If Christianity had raised an
insurrection of slaves, it never could have put an end to slavery.
But while this withdrawal was necessary, it contained a great danger;
for the inner life cannot be separated from the outer life without
becoming narrowed and distorted. Confined to the sphere of religion and
private morality, the doctrine of unity and reconciliation necessarily
became itself the source of a new dualism. What had been at first merely
neglect of the world was gradually changed into hostility to worldly
interests; and the germs of a positive morality, reconciling the flesh
and the spirit--which appear in the New Testament--were neglected and
overshadowed in the growth of asceticism. Christianity, even in its
first expression, had a negative side towards the natural life of man;
while it lifted man to God, it yet taught that humanity "cannot be
quickened except it die." But the mediæval Church, while it constantly
taught that humanity in its desires and tendencies must die, had almost
forgotten to hope that it could be quickened. Its highest morality--the
morality of the three vows--was the negation of all social obligations;
its science was the interpretation of a fixed dogma received on
authority; its religion tended to become an external service, an _opus
operatum_, a preparation for another world, rather than a principle of
action in this. Its highest act of worship, the Eucharist, in which was
celebrated the revealed unity of men with each other and with God, was
reserved in its fulness for the clergy, and even with them was finally
reduced to an external act by the doctrine of transubstantiation, in
which poetry "became logic," and in becoming logic, ceased to be truth.
Now, Comte, seeing the working of this negative tendency in mediæval
Catholicism, and regarding it as the natural work of Monotheism, is
obliged to treat all the positive side of Christianity as an external
addition suggested by the practical wisdom of the clergy. St. Paul is
supposed by him to have invented (and Comte's language would ever
suggest that he consciously invented[38]) the doctrine of grace, in
order to reconsecrate those social affections which Monotheism, in its
condemnation of nature, had either denied to exist, or, what is nearer
the truth, had treated as having no moral value. But this only shows how
imperfectly Comte grasped the Pauline conception of the moral change
which religion produces. The idea that the immediate untamed and
undisciplined will of the natural man is not a principle of morality,
and that therefore man must die to live, must rise above himself to be
himself, is one which has in it nothing discordant with the claims of
social feeling. It is the commonplace of every powerful writer on
practical ethics, from the Gospels to Thomas à Kempis, and from Luther
to Goethe.
"Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dies-es: Stirb und Werde,
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunkeln Erde."
St. Paul adds that this death to self is possible only to him in whom
another than his own natural will lives; "so then it is not I that live,
but Christ that liveth in me." Comte would probably accept the sentence
with the substitution of humanity for Christ. But either substitution
involves the negation of the natural tendencies, whether individual or
social, in their immediate natural form; and Comte himself, when he
placed not only the sexual but even the maternal impulse among those
that are merely "personal," virtually acknowledged that the natural or
instinctive basis of the altruistic affections is not in itself
moral.[39] But because he begins with a psychology which treats the
egoistic and altruistic desires, and again the intellect and the heart,
as distinct and independent entities, he is unable to do justice to an
account of moral experience which involves that they are essentially
related elements in one whole, or necessarily connected stages of its
development.
In the form in which it was first presented, the teaching of
Christianity was undoubtedly ambiguous, as, indeed, every doctrine in
its first general and abstract form must be. We cannot then call it
either social or anti-social, without limitations; it is anti-social and
ascetic, because of its negative relations to the previous forms of life
and culture; it is social and positive in so far as in its primary
doctrine of the unity of the divine and human--of divinity manifested
in man and humanity made perfect through suffering--it contains the
promise and the necessity of a development by which nature and spirit
shall be reconciled. The progressive tendency of Christendom was based
on the fact that from the earliest times the followers of Christ were
placed in the dilemma, either of denying their primary doctrine of
reconciliation between God and man and going back to pure Monotheism, or
of advancing to the reconciliation of all those other antagonisms of
spirit and nature, the world and the Church, which arose out of the
circumstances of its first publication. And modern history is more than
anything else the history of the long process whereby this logical
necessity manifested itself in fact. The negative spirit of the Middle
Age, its asceticism, its dualism, its formalism, its tendency to
transform the moral opposition of natural and spiritual into an external
opposition between two natural worlds, present and future, and thus to
substitute "other-worldliness" for worldliness, instead of substituting
unworldliness for both--all these characteristics were the natural
results of the fact that the idea of Christianity, in its first abstract
form, could not include, and therefore necessarily became opposed to,
the forms of social life and organization with which it came into
contact. But while the early Christians looked for the realization of
the kingdom of Heaven in some immediate earthly future, and the Middle
Age postponed it to another life, Christ had already taught the truth,
which alone can turn either of these hopes into something more than the
expression of an egoistic desire--the truth that "the kingdom of God is
within us." The reaction of the social necessities of mediæval society
on the doctrine--which Comte quite correctly describes as leading to the
gradual elevation of humanity and of human interests--found its main
support in the principles of the doctrine itself, so soon as its lessons
had been absorbed into the mind of the people. The irresistible force of
the movement, whereby the intelligence was emancipated from authority,
and the claims of the family and the State were asserted against the
Church, lay above all in this, that Christianity itself was felt to
involve the consecration of human life in all its interests and
relations. Luther's appeal to the New Testament and to the earliest ages
of Christianity was in some ways unhistorical, but it expressed a truth.
Protestantism was not a return to the Christianity of the first century;
it was an assertion of the relation of the individual to God, which was
itself made possible only by the long work of Latin Catholicism. But the
development of a doctrine, if it has in it any germ of truth which is
capable of development, involves a continual recurrence to its first,
and therefore its most general, expression. The elements successively
developed in the Catholic and the Protestant, the Latin and the Germanic
forms of Christianity, were both present in the original germ, and the
exaggerated prominence given in the former to the _negative_ side of
Christianity could not but lead, in the development of thought, to a
similarly exaggerated manifestation of its _positive_ side. But it is
nearly as absurd to say, as Comte does, that the true logical outcome of
Christianity is to be found in the "life of the hermits of the Thebaid,"
as it would be to say that its true logical outcome is to be found in
those vehement assertions of nature--naked and unashamed--as its own
sufficient warrant, which poured almost with the force of inspiration
from the lips of Diderot. Both extremes are equally removed from that
special moral temper and tone of feeling which we can alone call
Christian--the former by its want of sympathy and tenderness, no less
than the latter by its want of purity and self-command. Reassertion of
nature through its negation, or to put it more simply, the purification
of the natural desires by the renunciation of their immediate
gratification, is the idea that is more or less definitely present in
all phases of the history of Christianity; and, though swaying from one
side to the other, the religious life of modern times has never ceased
to present both aspects. Even a St. Augustine recoiled from the
Manichæism by which nature was regarded, not simply as fallen from its
original idea, but as essentially impure. And, on the other hand, even
Rousseau's Savoyard vicar, who has got rid of the negative or ascetic
element, as completely as is possible for any one still retaining any
tincture of Christianity or even of religion, and who insists so
strongly on the text that "the natural is the moral," is yet forced to
recognize that nature has two voices, and that the _raison commune_ has
to overcome and transform the natural inclinations of the individual. In
the life of its Founder, the Christian Church has always had before it
an individual type of that harmony of the spiritual and natural life,
which it is its ideal to realize in all the wider spiritual relations of
man; nor, till that ideal is reached, can it be said that the Christian
idea is exhausted, or that the place is vacant for a new religion,
however great may be the changes of form and expression through which
Christianity must pass under the changed conditions of modern life.
That Comte was not able to discern this, arose, as we have seen, from
the fact that he held a kind of Manichæism of his own. To him the
egoistic and altruistic desires were two kinds of innate tendencies,
both of which exist in man from the first, though with a great
preponderance on the side of egoism. Moral improvement simply consists
in altering the original proportions in favour of altruism, and moral
perfection would be the complete extinction of egoism (which with Comte
would naturally mean the extinction of all the desires classified as
personal). Hence there is a distinctly ascetic tendency in some of the
precepts of the _Politique Positive_,--_i.e._, asceticism begins to
appear, not simply as a transitionary process through which certain
natural desires are to be purified, but as a deliberate attempt to
extinguish them. A deeper analysis would have shown that the desires in
themselves, as mere natural impulses, are neither egoistic nor
altruistic, neither bad nor good; and that while, as they appear in the
conscious life, they are necessarily at first poisoned with egoism, yet
that the _ego_ is not absolutely opposed to the _alter ego_, but rather
implies it. A spiritual or self-conscious being is one who can find
himself, nay who can find himself only, in the life of others: and when
he does so find himself, there is no natural desire which for itself he
needs to renounce as impure; no natural desire which may not become the
expression of the better self, which is _ego_ and _alter ego_ in one.
But Comte, unable from the limitations of his psychology to see the true
relation of the negative and the positive side of ethics, is obliged to
treat the ascetic tendency of Christianity as involving a denial of the
existence, or the moral value, of the social sympathies; and on the
other hand, to regard the efforts of the Christian Church to cultivate
those sympathies, as the result of an external accommodation. His view
of Christianity, in short, practically coincides with the definition of
virtue given by Paley; it is "doing good to man, in obedience to the
will of God, with a view to eternal happiness." It is the pursuit of a
selfish end by means in themselves unselfish, with the pleasures and
pains of another world introduced as the link of connection; and it must
therefore leave bare selfishness in its place, so soon as doubt is cast
upon these supernatural rewards and punishments. Hence Comte is just
neither to Catholicism nor to Protestantism; considering that the former
was only _indirectly_ social, and that the latter is merely the first
step in a scepticism which, taking away the fears and hopes of another
world, must at the same time take away the last limit upon selfishness.
And, just because he is unable to understand either the negative
tendencies of the former, or the positive tendencies of the latter,
phase of modern life, he has an imperfect appreciation of that social
ideal to which both are leading, and which must combine in itself the
true elements of both. As, however, it is the temptation of writers on
social subjects to be least just to the tendencies of the time which
preceded their own, and against whose errors they have immediately to
contend, so we find that Comte is fairer towards Catholicism than he is
towards Protestantism, or towards that individualism which grew out of
Protestantism, and which he is pleased to call Metaphysics. The latter
he sees solely on their destructive side, as successive stages in the
modern movement of revolt, without appreciating the constructive
elements involved in them. Hence also he is led, in his attitude towards
this great movement, to all but identify himself with Catholic writers
like De Maistre; and his own scheme of the future is essentially
reactionary. The restoration of the spiritual power to its mediæval
position was a natural proposal for one who saw in the Protestant revolt
nothing more than an insurrectionary movement, which might clear the way
for a new social construction, but which in itself was the negation of
all government whatever.