CHAPTER VIIRELIGIONIt is outside our purpose to embark upon discussions of the religious problem in France, in so far as this became a problem of politics. Our intention is rather to examine the inner core of religious thought, the philosophy of religion, which forms an appropriate final chapter to our history of the development of ideas.Yet, although our discussion bears mainly upon the general attitude to religion, upon the development of central religious ideas such as the idea of God, and upon the place of religion in the future—that is to say, upon the philosophy of religion—it is practically impossible to understand the religious attitude of our thinkers without a brief notice of the religious situation in France during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.In our Introduction we briefly called attention to the attempt of the Traditionalists after the Revolution to recall their countrymen to the Christian faith as presented in and by the Roman Catholic Church. The efforts made by De Bonald, De Maistre, Chateaubriand, Lamennais and Lacordaire did not succeed as they had hoped, but, nevertheless, a considerable current of loyalty to the Church and the Catholic religion set in. Much of this loyalty was bound up with sentimental affection for a monarchy, and arose partly from anti-revolutionary sentiments.[1]It cannot, however, be entirely explained by these political feelings. There was the expression of a deeper and more spiritual reaction directed against the materialistic and sceptical teachings of the eighteenth century. Man’s heart craved comfort, consolation and warmth. It had been starved in the previous century, and revolution and war had only added to the cup of bitterness. Thus there came an epoch of Romanticism in religion of which the sentimental and assumed orthodoxy of Chateaubriand was a sign of the times. HisGénie du Christianismemay now appear to us full of sentimentality, but it was welcomed at the time, since it expressed at least some of those aspirations which had for long been denied an expression. It was this which marked the great difference between the two centuries in France. The eighteenth was mainly concerned with scoffing at religion. Its rationalism was that of Voltaire. In the first half of the nineteenth century the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. Romanticism, in poetry, in literature, in philosophy and in religion wasà la mode, and it led frequently to sentimentality or morbidity. Lamartine, Victor Hugo and De Vigny professed the Catholic faith for many years. We may note, and this is important, that in France the only form of Christianity which holds any sway over the people in general is the Roman Catholic faith. Outside the Roman Church there is no religious organisation which is of much account. This explains why it is so rare to find a thinker who owns allegiance to any Church or religion, and yet it would be wrong to deem them irreligious. There is novia mediabetween Catholicism and free personal thought. This was a point which Renan quite keenly felt, and of which his own spiritual pilgrimage, which took him out of the bounds of the Church of his youth, is a fine illustration. Many of France’s noblest sons have been brought up in the religious atmosphere of the Church and owe much of their education to her, and Rome believes in education. The control of education has been throughout the century a problem severely contested by Church and State. More important for our purpose than the details of the quarrels of Church and State is the intellectual condition of the Church itself.[1]De Maistre regarded the Revolution as an infliction specially bestowed upon France for her national neglect of religion—his religion, of course. The same crude, misleading, and vicious arguments have since been put forward by the theologians in their efforts to push the cause of the Church with the people. This was very noticeable both in the war of 1870 and that of 1914. In each case it was argued that the war was a punishment from God for France’s frivolity and neglect of the Church. In 1914, in addition, it was deemed a direct divine reply to “Disestablishment.”This reveals a striking vitality, a vigour and initiative at war with the central powers of the Vatican, a seething unrest which uniformity and authority find annoying. How strong the power of the central authority was, the affair of the Concordat had shown, when forty bishops were deposed for non-acceptance of the arrangement between Napoleon and the Pope.[2]Stronger still was the iron hand of the Pope over intellectual freedom.[2]The Revolution had separated Church and State and suppressed clerical privilege by the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy” enactment of 1790. Napoleon, alive to the patriotic value of a State Church, repealed this law and declared the divorce of Church and State to be null and void. His negotiations with the Pope (Pius VII.) resulted, in 1801, in the arrangement known as theConcordat, by which the Roman Catholic Church was again made the established national Church, its clergy became civil servants paid by the State, and its worship became a branch of public administration.Lamennais was not a “modernist,” as this term is now understood, for his theology was orthodox. His fight with the Vatican was for freedom in the relations of the Church to society. He pleaded in hisEssai sur L’indifference en Matière de Religionfor the Church to accept the principle of freedom, to leave the cherished fondling of the royalist cause, and to present to the world the principles of a Christian democracy. Lamennais and other liberal-minded men desired the separation of Church and State, and were tolerant of those who were not Catholic. They claimed, along with their own “right to believe,” that of others “not to believe.” His was a liberal Catholicism, but its proposals frightened his co-religionists, and drew upon him in 1832 an encyclical letter (Mirari vos) from the Vatican. The Pope denounced liberalism absolutely as an absurd and an erroneous doctrine, a piece of folly sprung from the “fetid source of indifferentism.” Lamennais found he could not argue, as Renan himself later put it, “with a bar of iron.” It was the reactionary De Maistre, with his principle of papal authority,[3]and not Lamennais, whom the Vatican, naturally enough, chose to favour, or rather to follow.[3]As stated inDu Pape, 1819.Thus Lamennais found himself, by an almost natural and inevitable process, outside the Church, and this in spite of the fact that his theology was orthodox. He endeavoured to present his case in his paperL’Avenirand in an influential brochure,The Words of a Believer, which left its mark upon Hugo, Michelet, Lamartine, and George Sand. His views blended with the current of humanitarian and democratic doctrines which developed from the Saint-Simonists, Pierre Leroux and similar thinkers. We have already noted that these social reformers held to their beliefs with the conviction that in them and not in the Roman Church lay salvation.This brings us to a crucial point which is the clue to much of the subsequent thought upon religion. This is the profound and seemingly irreconcilable difference between these two conceptions of religion.The orthodox Catholic faith believes in a supernatural revelation, and is firmly convinced that man is inherently vile and corrupt, born in sin from which he cannot be redeemed, save by the mystical operations of divine grace, working only through the holy sacraments and clergy of the one true Church, to whom all power was given, according to its view, by the historic Jesus. Its methods are conservative, its discipline rigid and based on tradition and authority. Its system of salvation is excessively individualistic. It holds firmly to this pessimistic view of human nature, based on the doctrine of original sin, thus maintaining a creed which, in the hands of a devoted clergy, who are free from domestic ties, works as a powerful moral force upon the individual believer. His freedom of thought is restricted; he can neither read nor think what he likes, and the Church, having made the thirteenth-century doctrines of Aquinas its official philosophy, hurls anathema at ideas scientific, political, philosophical or theological which have appeared since. No half-measures are allowed: either one is a loyal Catholic or one is not a Catholic at all. In this relentlessly uncompromising attitude lies the main strength of Catholicism; herein also is contained its weakness, or at least that element which makes it manufacture its own greatest adversaries.While claiming to be the one Church of Jesus Christ, it does not by any means put him in the foreground of its religion. Its hierarchy of saints is rather a survival of polytheism; its worship of the Virgin and cult of theSacré Cœurissue often in a religious sentimentality and sensuality promoted by the denial of a more healthy outlet for instincts which are an essential part of human nature. Tribute, however, must be paid—high tribute—to the devotion of individuals, particularly to the work done by the religious orders of women, whose devotion the Church having won by its intense appeal to women keeps, consecrates and organises in a manner which no other Church has succeeded in doing. This is largely the secret of the vigorous life of the Church, for as a power of charity the Roman Church is remarkable and deserves respect. Her educational efforts, her missions, hospitals, her humbler clergy, and her orders which offer opportunity of service or of sanctuary to all types of human nature—these constitute Roman Catholicism in a truer manner than the diplomacy of the Jesuits or the councils of the Vatican. It is this pulsing human heart of hers which keeps her alive, not the rigid intellectual dogmatism and antiquated theology which she expounds, nor her loyalty to the established political order, which, siding with the rich and powerful, frequently gives to this professedly spiritual power a debasing taint of materialism.Against all this, and in vital opposition to this, we have the humanitarians who, rejecting the doctrine of corruption, believe that human instincts and human reason themselves make for goodness and for God. While Catholicism looks to the past, humanitarianism looks forward, believes in freedom and in progress, and regards the immanent Christ-spirit as working in mankind. Its gospel is one of love and brotherhood, a romantic doctrine issuing in love and pity for the oppressed and the sinful. In the collective consciousness of mankind it sees the incarnation, the growth of the immanent God. Therefore it claims that in democracy, socialism and world brotherhood lies the true Christianity. This, the humanitarians claim, is the true religious idealism—that which was preached by the Founder himself and which his Church has betrayed. The humanitarians make service to mankind the essence of religion, and regard themselves as more truly Christian than the Church.In those countries where Protestantism has a large following, the two doctrines of humanitarian optimism and of the orthodox pessimism regarding human nature are confused vaguely together. The English mind in particular is able to compromise and to blend the two conflicting philosophies in varying degrees; but in the French mind its clearer penetration and more logical acumen prevent this. The Frenchman is an idealist and tends to extremes, either that of whole-hearted devotion to a dominating Church or that of the abandonment of organised religion. In Protestantism he sees only a halfway house, built upon the first principles of criticism, and unwilling to pursue those principles to their conclusion—namely, the rejection of all organised Church religion, the adoption of perfect freedom for the individual in all matters of belief, a religion founded on freedom and on personal thought which alone is free.Such were the two dominant notes in religious thought in France at the opening of our period.Catholicism resisted the humanitarianism of 1848 and strengthened its power after thecoup d’état. The Church and the Vatican became more staunch in their opposition to all doctrines of modern thought. The French clergy profited by the alliance with the aristocracy, while religious orders, particularly the Jesuits, increased in number and in power. Veuillot proclaimed the virtues of Catholicism in his writings. Meanwhile the Pope’s temporal power decreased, but his spiritual power was increasing in extent and in intensity. Centralisation went on within the Church, and Rome (i.e., the Pope and the Vatican) became all-powerful.Just after the half-century opens the Pope (Pius IX.), in 1854, proclaimed his authority in announcing the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.[4]As France had heard the sentence,L’Etat, c’est moi, from the lips of one of its greatest monarchs, it now heard from another quarter a similar principle enunciated, L’Eglise, c’est moi. As democracy and freedom cried out against the one, they did so against the other. Undaunted, the Vatican continued in its absolutism, even although it must have seen that in some quarters revolt would be the result. Ten years later the Pope attacked the whole of modern thought, to which he was diametrically opposed, in his encyclicalQuanta Curaand in his famousSyllabus, which constituted a catalogue of the modern errors and heresies which he condemned. This famous challenge was quite clear and uncompromising in its attitude, concluding with a curse upon “him who should maintain that the Roman Pontiff can, and must, be reconciled and compromise with progress, liberalism and modern civilisation!” To the doctrine ofL’Eglise, c’est moihad now been added that ofLa Science, aussi, c’est moi. This was not all. In 1870 the dogma of Papal Infallibility was proclaimed. By a strange irony of history, however, this declaration of spiritual absolutism was followed by an entire loss of temporal power. The outbreak of the war in that same year between France and Prussia led to the hasty withdrawal of French troops from the Papal Domain and the Eternal City fell to the secular power of the Italian national army under Victor Emmanuel.[4]This new dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin must not, of course, be confused, as it often is by those outside the Catholic Church, with the quite different and more ancient proposition which asserts the Virgin Birth of Jesus.The defeat of France at the hands of Prussia in 1871 issued in a revival of religious sentiment, frequently seen in defeated nations. A special mission or crusade of national repentance gathered in large subscriptions which built the enormous Church of the Sacré Coeur overlooking Paris from the heights of Montmartre.[5][5]The anti-Catholic element, however, have had the audacity, and evidently the legal right, to place a statue to a man who, some centuries back, was burned at the stake for failing to salute a religious procession, in such a position immediately in front of this great church that the plan for the large staircase cannot be carried out.Seeking for religious consolation, the French people found a Catholicism which had become embittered and centralised for warfare upon liberal religion and humanitarianism. They found that the only organised religion they knew was dominated by the might of Rome and the powers of the clergy. These even wished France, demoralised as she was for the moment, to undertake the restoration of the Pope’s temporal power in Italy. Further, they were definitely in favour of monarchy: “the altar and the throne” were intimately associated in the ecclesiastical mind.It was the realisation of this which prompted Gambetta to cry out to the Third Republic with stern warning, “Clericalism is your enemy.” Thus began the political fight for which Rome had been strengthening herself. With the defeat of the clerical-monarchy party in 1877 the safety of the Republic was assured. From then until 1905 the Republic and the Church fought each other. Educational questions were bitterly contested (1880). The power of the Jesuits, especially, was regarded as a constant menace to the State. The Dreyfus affair (1894- 1899) did not improve relations, with its intense anti-semitism and anti-clericalism. The battle was only concluded by the legislation of Waldeck-Rousseau in 1901 and Combes in 1903, expelling religious orders. Combes himself had studied for the priesthood and was violently anti-clerical. The culmination came in the Separation Law of 1905 carried by Briand, in the Pope’s protest against this, followed by the Republic’s confiscation of much Church property, a step which might have been avoided if the French Catholics had been allowed to have their way in an arrangement with the State regarding their churches. This was prevented by the severance of diplomatic relations between France and the Vatican and by the Pope’s disagreement with the French Catholics whose wishes he ignored in his policy of definite hostility to the French Government.[6][6]Relations with the Vatican, which were seen to be desirable during the Great European War, have since been resumed (in 1921) by the Republic.During our period a popular semi-nationalist and semi-religious cult of Jeanne d’Arc, “the Maid of Orleans,” appeared in France. The clergy expressly encouraged this, with the definite object of enlisting sentiments of nationality and patriotism on the side of the Church. Ecclesiastical diplomacy at headquarters quickly realised the use which might be made of this patriotic figure whom, centuries before, the Church had thought fit to burn as a witch. The Vatican saw a possibility of blending French patriotism with devotion to Catholicism and thus possibly strengthening, in the eyes of the populace at least, the waning cause of the Church.The adoration of Jeanne d’Arc was approved as early as 1894, but when the Church found itself in a worse plight with its relation to the State, it made preparations in 1903 for her enrolment among the saints.[7]She was honoured the following year with the title of “Venerable,” but in 1908, after the break of Church and State, she was accorded the full status of a saint, and her statue, symbolic of patriotism militant, stands in most French churches as conspicuous often as that of the Virgin, who, in curious contrast, fondles the young child, and expresses the supreme loveliness of motherhood.[8]The cult of Jeanne d’Arc flourished particularly in 1914 on the sentiments of patriotism, militarism and religiosity then current. This was natural because it is for these very sentiments that she stands as a symbol. She is evidently a worthy goddess whose worship is worth while, for we are assured that it was throughherbeneficent efforts that the German Army retired from Paris in 1914 and again in 1918. The saintly maid of Orleans reappeared and beat them back! Such is the power of the “culte” which the Church eagerly fosters. The Sacré Coeur also has its patriotic and military uses, figuring as it did as an emblem on some regimental flags on the battlefield. Meanwhile, the celebrations of Napoleon’s centenary (1921) give rise to the conjecture that he, too, will in time rank with Joan of Arc as a saint. His canonisation would achieve absolutely that union of patriotic and religious sentimentality to which the Church in France directs its activities.[7]t is interesting to observe the literature on Jeanne d’Arc published at this time: Anatole France,Vie de Jeanne d’Arc(2 vols., 1908); Durand,Jeanne d’Arc et l’Eglise(1908). These are noteworthy, also Andrew Lang’s work,The Maid of Orleans(also 1908).[8]Herein, undoubtedly, lies the strong appeal of the Church to women.The vast majority of the 39,000,000 French people are at least nominally Catholic, even if only from courtesy or from a utilitarian point of view. Only about one in sixty of the population are Protestant. Although among cultured conservatives there is a real devotion to the Church, the creed of France is in general something far more broad and human than Catholicism, in spite of the tremendously human qualities which that Church possesses. The creed of France is summed up better in art, nature, beauty, music, science,la patrie, humanity, in the worship of life itself.[9][9]Those who desire to study the religious psychology of France during our period cannot find a better revelation than that given in the wonderful novel by Roger Martin du Card, entitled Jean Barois.IIt was against such a background of ecclesiastical and political affairs that the play of ideas upon religion went on. Such was the environment, the tradition which surrounded our thinkers, and we may very firmly claim that only by a recognition that their religious and nationalmilieuwas of such a type as we have outlined, can the real significance of their religious thought be understood. Only when we have grasped the essential attitude of authority and tradition of the Roman Church, its ruthless attitude to modern thought of all kinds, can we understand the religious attitude of men like Renan, Renouvier and Guyau.We are also enabled to see why the appeal of the Saint-Simonist group could present itself as a religious and, indeed, Christian appeal outside the Church. It enables us to understand why Cousin’s spiritualism pleased neither the Catholics nor their opponents, and to realise why the “Religion of Humanity,” which Auguste Comte inaugurated, made so little appeal.[10]This has been well styled an “inverted Catholicism,” since it endeavours to preserve the ritual of that religion and to embody the doctrines of humanitarianism. Naturally enough it drew upon itself the scorn of both these groups. The Catholic saw in it only blasphemy: the humanitarian saw no way in which it might further his ends.[10]Littré, his disciple, as we have already noted, rejected this part of his master’s teaching. Littré was opposed by Robinet, who laid the stress upon the “Religion of Humanity” as the crown of Comte’s work.Comte’s attempt to base his new religion upon Catholicism was quite deliberate, for he strove to introduce analogies with “everything great and deep which the Catholic system of the Middle Ages effected or even projected.” He offered a new and fantastic trinity, compiled a calendar of renowned historical personalities, to replace that of unknown saints. He proclaimed “positive dogmas “and aspired to all the authority and infallibility of the Roman Pontiff, supported by a trained clergy, whose word should be law. Curiously enough he, too, had his anathemas, in that he had days set apart for the solemn cursing of the great enemies of the human race, such as Napoleon. It was indeed a reversed Catholicism, offering a fairly good caricature of the methods of the Roman Church, and it was equally obnoxious in its tyrannical attitude.[11]While it professed to express humanity and love as its central ideas it proceeded to outline a method which is the utter negation of these. Comte made the great mistake of not realising that loyalty to these ideals must involve spiritual freedom, and that the religion of humanity must be a collective inspiration of free individuals, who will in love and fellowship tolerate differences upon metaphysical questions. Uniformity can only be mischievous.[11]Guyau’s criticisms of Comte’s “Religion of Humanity” in hisL’Irreligion de l’Avenirare interesting. “The marriage of positive science and blind sentiment cannot produce religion” (p. 314; Eng. trans., p. 366). “Comtism, which consists of the rites of religion and nothing else, is an attempt to maintain life in the body after the departure of the soul” (p. 307; Eng. trans., p. 359).It was because he grasped this vital point that Renan’s discussion of the religious question is so instructive. For him, religion is essentially an affair of personal taste. Here we have another indication of the clear way in which Renan was able to discern the tendencies of his time. He published hisEtudes d’Histoire religieusein 1857, and his Preface to theNouvelles Etudes d’Histoire religieusewas written in 1884. He claims there that freedom is essential to religion, and that it is absolutely necessary that the State should have no power whatever over it. Religion is as personal and private a matter as taste in literature or art. There should be no State laws, he claims, relating to religion at all, any more than dress is prescribed for citizens by law. He well points out that only a State which is strictly neutral in religion can ever be absolutely free from playing therôleof persecutor. The favouring of one sect will entail some persecution or hardship upon others. Further, he sees the iniquity of taxing the community to pay the expenses of clergy to whose teachings they may object, or whose doctrines are not theirs. Freedom, Renan believed, would claim its own in the near future and, denouncing the Concordat, he prophesied the abolition of the State Church.The worst type of organisation Renan holds to be the theocratic state, like Islam, or the ancient Pontifical State in which dogma reigns supreme. He condemns also the State whose religion is based upon the profession of a majority of its citizens. There should be, as Spinoza was wont to style it, “liberty of philosophising.” The days of the dominance of dogma are passing, in many quarters gone by already, “Religion has become for once and all a matter of personal taste.”Renan himself was deeply religious in mind. He was never an atheist and did not care for the term “free-thinker” because of its implied associations with the irreligion of the previous century. He stands out, however, not only in our period of French thought, but in the world development of the century as one of the greatest masters of religious criticism. His historical work is important, and he possessed a knowledge and equipment for that task. His distinguished Semitic scholarship led to his obtaining the chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France, and enabled him to write his Histories, one of the Jews and one of Christianity.It was as a volume of thisHistoire des Origines du Christianismethat hisVie de Jésusappeared in 1863. This life of the Founder of Christianity produced a profound stir in the camps of religious orthodoxy, and drew upon its author severe criticisms. Apart from the particular views set forth in that volume, we must remember that the very fact of his writing upon “a sacred subject,” which was looked upon as a close preserve, reserved for the theologians or churchmen alone, was deemed at that time an original and daring feat in France.His particular views, which created at the time such scandal, were akin to those of Baur and the Tubingen School, which Strauss (Renan’s contemporary) had already set forth in hisLeben Jesu.[12]Briefly, they may be expressed as the rejection of the supernatural. Herein is seen the scientific or “positive” influence at work upon the dogmas of the Christian religion, a tendency which culminated in “Modernism” within the Church, only to be condemned violently by the Pope in 1907. It was this temper, produced by the study of documents, by criticism and historical research which put Renan out of the Catholic Church. His rational mind could not accept the dogmas laid down. Lamennais (who was conservative and orthodox in his theology, and possessed no taint of “modernism” in the technical sense) had declared that the starting-point should be faith and not reason. Renan aptly asks in reply to this, “and what is to be the test, in the last resort, of the claims of faith is not reason?”[12]Written in 1835. Littré issued a French translation in 1839, a year previous to the appearance of the English version by George Eliot. Strauss’s life covers 1808-1874.In Renan we find a good illustration of the working of the spirit of modern thought upon a religious mind. Being a sincere and penetrating intellect he could not, like so many people, learned folk among them, keep his religious ideas and his reason in separate watertight compartments. This kind of people Renan likens in hisSouvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesseto mother-o’-pearl shells of Francois de Sales “which are able to live in the sea without tasting a drop of salt water.” Yet he realises the comfort of such an attitude. “I see around me,” he continues, “men of pure and simple lives whom Christianity has had the power to make virtuous and happy. . . . But I have noticed that none of them have the critical faculty, for which let them bless God!” He well realises the contentment which, springing sometimes from a dullness of mind or lack of sensitiveness, excludes all doubt and all problems.In Catholicism he sees a bar of iron which will not reason or bend. “I can only return to it by amputation of my faculties, by definitely stigmatising my reason and condemning it to perpetual silence.” Writing of his exit from the Seminary of Saint Sulpice, where he was trained for the priesthood, he remarks in hisSouvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunessethat “there were times when I was sorry that I was not a Protestant, so that I might be a philosopher without ceasing to be a Christian.” For Renan, as for so many minds in modern France, severance from the Roman Church is equivalent to severance from Christianity as an organised religion. The practical dilemma is presented of unquestioning obedience to an infallible Church on the one hand, or the attitude oflibre-penseuron the other. There are not the accommodating varieties of the Protestant presentation of the Christian religion. Renan’s spiritual pilgrimage is but an example of many. In a measure this condition of affairs is a source of strength to the Roman Church for, since a break with it so often means a break with Christianity or indeed with all definite religion, only the bolder and stronger thinkers make the break which their intellect makes imperative. The mass of the people, however dissatisfied they may be with the Church, nevertheless accept it, for they see no alternative but the opposite extreme. No half-way house of non-conformity presents itself as a rule.Yet, as we have insisted, Renan had an essentially religious view of the universe, and he expressly claimed that his break with the Church and his criticism of her were due to a devotion to pure religion, and he even adds, to a loyalty to the spirit of her Founder. Although, as he remarks in hisNouvelles Etudes religieuses, it is true that the most modest education tends to destroy the belief in the superstitious elements in religion, it is none the less true that the very highest culture can never destroy religion in the highest sense. “Dogmas pass, but piety is eternal.” The external trappings of religion have suffered by the growth of the modern sciences of nature and of historical criticism. The mind of cultivated persons does not now present the same attitude to evidence in regard to religious doctrines which were once accepted without question. The sources of the origins of the Christian religion are themselves questionable. This, Renan says, must not discourage the believers in true religion, for that is not the kind of foundation upon which religion reposes. Dogmas in the past gave rise to divisions and quarrels, only by feeling can religious persons be united in fellowship. The most prophetic words of Jesus were, Renan points out, those in which he indicated a time when men “would not worship God in this mountain nor in Jerusalem, but when the true worshippers would worship in spirit and in truth.” It was precisely this spirit which Renan admired in Jesus, whom he considered more of a philosopher than the Church, and he reminds the “Christians”[13]who railed against him as an unbeliever that Jesus had had much more influence upon him than they gave him credit for, and, more particularly, that his break with the Church was due to loyalty to Jesus. By such loyalty Renan meant not a blind worship, but a reverence which endeavoured to appreciate and follow the ideals for which Jesus himself stood. It did not involve slavish acceptance of all he said, even if that were intelligible, and clear, which it is not. “To be a Platonist,” remarks Renan, “I need not adore Plato, or believeallthat he said.”[14][13]Renan complains of the ignorance of the clergy of Rome regarding his own work, which they did not understand because they had not read it, merely relying on the Press and other sources for false and biassed accounts.[14]Cf.Renan’s Essay inQuestions contemporaineson “L’Avenir religieux des Sociétés modernes.”Renan is in agreement with the central ideas of Jesus’ own faith, and he rightly regards him as one of the greatest contributors to the world’s religious thought. Renan’s religion is free from supernaturalism and dogma. He believes in infinite Goodness or Providence, but he despises the vulgar and crude conceptions of God which so mar a truly religious outlook. He points out how prayer, in the sense of a request to Heaven for a particular object, is becoming recognised as foolish. ‘As a “meditation,” an interview with one’s own conscience, it has a deeply religious value. The vulgar idea of prayer reposes on an immoral conception of God. Renan rightly sees the central importance for religion of possessing a sane view of the divinity, not one which belongs to primitive tribal wargods and weather-gods. He aptly says, in this connection, that the one who was defeated in 1871 was not only France butle bon Dieuto which she in vain appealed. In his place was to be found, remarks Renan with a little sarcasm, “only a Lord God of Hosts who was unmoved by the moral ‘délicatesse’ of the Uhlans and the incontestable excellence of the Prussian shells.”[15]He rightly points to the immoral use made of the divinity by pious folk whose whole religion is utilitarian and materialistic. They do good only in order to get to heaven or escape hell,[16]and believe in God because it is necessary for them to have a confidant and sonsoler, to whom they may cry in time of trouble, and to whose will they may resignedly impute the evil chastisement which their own errors have brought upon them individually or collectively. But, he rightly claims, it is only where utilitarian calculations and self-interest end, that religion begins with the sense of the Infinite and of the Ideal Goodness and Beauty and Love.[15]Dialogues et Fragments philosophiques, p. ix.[16]One pious individual thought to convert Renan himself by writing him every month, quite briefly, to this effect “There is a hell.”He endeavours in hisExamen de Conscience philosophique(1888) to sum up his attitude upon this question. There he affirms that it is beyond dispute or doubt that we have no evidence whatever of the action in the universe of one or of several wills superior to that of man. The actual state of this universe gives no sign of any external intervention, and we know nothing of its beginning. No beneficent interfering power, adeus ex machinâ, corrects or directs the operation of blind forces, enlightens man or improves his lot. No God appears miraculously to prevent evils, to crush disease, stop wars, or save his children from peril. No end or purpose is visible to us. God in the popular sense, living and acting as a Divine Providence, is not to be seen in our universe. The question is, however, whether this universe of ours is the totality of existence. Doubt comes into play here, and if our universe is not this totality, then God, although absent from his world, might still exist outside it. Our finite world is little in relation to the Infinite, it is a mere speck in the universe we know, and its duration to a divine Being might be only a day.The Infinite, continues Renan, surrounds our finite world above and below. It stretches on the one hand to the infinitely large concourse of worlds and systems, and, on the other, to the infinitely little as atoms, microbes and the germs by which human life itself is passed on from one generation to another. The prospect of the world we know involves logically and fatally, says Renan, atheism. But this atheism, he adds, may be due to the fact that we cannot see far enough. Our universe is a phenomenon which has had a beginning and will have an end. That which has had no beginning and will have no end is the Absolute All, or God. Metaphysics has always been a science proceeding upon this assumption, “Something exists, therefore something has existed from all eternity.” which is akin to the scientific principle, “No effect with- out a cause.”[17][17]Examen de Conscience philosophique, p. 412 of the volumeFeuilles détachées.We must not allow ourselves to be misled too far by the constructions or inductions about the uniformity and immutability of the laws of nature. “A God may reveal himself, perhaps, one day.” The infinite may dispose of our finite world, use it for its own ends. The expression, “Nature and its author,” may not be so absurd as some seem to think it. It is true that our experience presents no reason for forming such an hypothesis, but we must keep our sense of the infinite. “Everything is possible, even God,” and Renan adds, “If God exists, he must be good, and he will finish by being just.” It is as foolish to deny as to assert his existence in a dogmatic and thoughtless manner. It is upon this sense of the infinite and upon the ideals of Goodness, Beauty and Love that true faith or piety reposes.Love, declares Renan, is one of the principal revelations of the divine, and he laments the neglect of it by philosophy. It runs in a certain sense through all living beings, and in man has been the school of gentleness and courtesy—nay more, of morals and of religion. Love, understood in the high sense, is a sacred, religious thing, or rather is a part of religion itself. In a tone which recalls that of the New Testament and Tolstoi, Renan beseeches us to remember that GodisLove, and that where Love is there God is. In loving, man is at his best; he goes out of himself and feels himself in contact with the infinite. The very act of love is veritably sacred and divine, the union of body and soul with another is a holy communion with the infinite. He remarks in hisSouvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse, doubtless remembering the simple purity and piety of his mother and sister, that when reflection has brought us to doubt, and even to a scepticism regarding goodness, then the spontaneous affirmation of goodness and beauty which exists in a noble and virtuous woman saves us from cynicism and restores us to communication with the eternal spring in which God reflects himself. Love, which Renan with reason laments as having been neglected on its most serious side and looked upon as mere sentimentality, offers the highest proof of God. In it lies our umbilical link with nature, but at the same time our communion with the infinite. He recalls some of Browning’s views in his attitude to love as a redeeming power. The most wretched criminal still has something good in him, a divine spark, if he be capable of loving.It is the spirit of love and goodness which Renan admires in the simple faith of those separated far from him in their theological ideas. “God forbid,” he says,[18]“that I should speak slightingly of those who, devoid of the critical sense, and impelled by very pure and powerful religious motives, are attached to one or other of the great established systems of faith. I love the simple faith of the peasant, the serious conviction of the priest.”[18]L’Avenir de la Science, pp. 436, 437; Eng. trans., p. 410.“Supprimer Dieu, serait-ce amoindrir l’univers?”asks Guyau in one of hisVers d’un Philosophe.’[19]Renan observes that if we tell the simple to live by aspiration after truth and beauty, these words would have no meaning for them. “Tell them to love God, not to offend God, they will understand you perfectly. God, Providence, soul, good old words, rather heavy, but expressive and respectable which science will explain, but will never replace with advantage. What is God for humanity if not the category of theideal?”[20][19]“Question,” Vers d’un Philosophe, p. 65.[20]L’Avenir de la Science,” p. 476; Eng. trans., p. 445.This is the point upon which Vacherot insisted in his treatment of religion. He claimed that the conception of God arises in the human consciousness from a combination of two separate ideas. The first is the notion of the Infinite which Science itself approves, the second the notion of perfection which Science is unable to show us anywhere unless it be found in the human consciousness and its thoughts, where it abides as the magnetic force ever drawing us onward and acts at the same time as a dynamic, giving power to every progressive movement, being “the Ideal” in the mind and heart of man.Similar was the doctrine of Taine, who saw in Reason the ideal which would produce in mankind a new religion, which would be that of Science and Philosophy demanding from art forms of expression in harmony with themselves. This religion would be free in doctrine. Taine himself looked upon religion as “a metaphysical poem accompanied by belief,” and he approached to the conception of Spinoza of a contemplation which may well be called an “intellectual love of God.”IILike Renan, Renouvier was keenly interested in religion and its problems; he was also a keen opponent of the Roman Catholic Church and faith, against which he brought his influence into play in two ways—by hisnéo-criticismeas expressed in his written volumes and by his energetic editing of the two periodicalsLa Critique philosophiqueandLa Critique religieuse.In undertaking the publication of these periodicals Renouvier’s confessed aim was that of a definite propaganda. While the Roman Church profited by the feelings of disappointment and demoralisation which followed the Franco-Prussian War, and strove to shepherd wavering souls again into its fold, to find there a peace which evidently the world could not give, Renouvier (together with his friend Pillon) endeavoured to rally his countrymen by urging the importance, and, if possible, the acceptance of his own political and religious convictions arising out of his philosophy. TheCritique philosophiqueappeared weekly from its commencement in 1872 until 1884, thereafter as a monthly until 1889. Among its contributors, whose names are of religious significance, were A. Sabatier, L. Dauriac, R. Allier[21]and William James.[21]Now Dean of the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Paris.Renouvier’s great enthusiasm for his periodical is the main feature of this period of his life, although, owing to his tremendous energy, it does not seem to have interfered with the publication of his more permanent works. The political and general policy of this journal may be summed up in a sentence from the last year’s issue,[22]where we find Renouvier remarking that it had been his aim throughout “to uphold strictly republican principles and to fight all that savoured of Caesar, or imperialism.” The declared foe of monarchy in politics, he was equally the declared foe of the Pope in the religious realm. His attitude was one of very marked hostility to the power of the Vatican, which he realised to be increasing within the Roman Church, and one of keen opposition to the general power of that Church and her clergy in France. Renouvier’s paper was quite definitely and aggressively anti-Catholic. He urged all Catholic readers of his paper who professed loyalty to the Republic to quit the Roman Church and to affiliate themselves to the Protestant body.[22]La Critique philosophique, 1889, tome ii., p. 403.It was with this precise object in view that, in 1878, he added to hisCritique philosophiquea supplement which he entitledLa Critique religieuse, a quarterly intended purely for propaganda purposes. “Criticism,” he had said, “is in philosophy what Protestantism is in religion.”[23]As certitude is, according to Renouvier’s doctrines, the fruit of intelligence, heart and will, it can never be obtained by the coercion of authority or by obedience such as the Roman Church demands. He appealed to the testimony of history, as a witness to the conflict between authority and the individual conscience. Jesus, whom the Church adores, was himself a superb example of such revolt. History, however, shows us, says Renouvier, the gradual decay of authority in such matters. Thought, if it is really to be thought in its sincerity, must be free. This Renouvier realised, and in this freedom he saw the characteristic of the future development of religion, and shows himself, in this connection, in substantial agreement with Renan and Guyau.[23]Ibid., 1873, pp. 145-146.Renouvier’s interest in theology and religion, and in the theological implications of all philosophical thought, was not due merely to a purely speculative impulse, but to a very practical desire to initiate a rational restatement of religious conceptions, which he considered to be an urgent need of his time. He lamented the influence of the Roman Church over the minds of the youth of his country, and realised the vital importance of the controversy between Church and State regarding secular education. Renouvier was a keen supporter of the secular schools (écoles laïques). In 1879, when the educational controversy was at its height, he issued a little book on ethics for these institutions (Petit Traité de Morale pour les Ecoles laïques), which was republished in an enlarged form in 1882, when the secular party, ably led by Jules Ferry, triumphed in the establishment of compulsory, free, secular education. That great achievement, however, did not solve all the difficulties presented by the Church in its educational attitude, and even now the influence of clericalism is dreaded.Renouvier realised all the dangers, but he was forced also to realise that his enthusiastic and energetic campaign against the power of the Church had failed to achieve what he had desired. He complained of receiving insufficient support from quarters where he might well have expected it. His failure is a fairly conclusive proof that Protestantism has no future in France: it is a stubborn survival, rather than a growing influence. With the decline in the power and appeal of the Roman Catholic Church will come the decline of religion of a dogmatic and organised kind. Renouvier probably had an influence in hastening the day of the official severance of Church and State, an event which he did not live long enough to see.[24][24]It occurred, however, only two years after his death.Having become somewhat discouraged, Renouvier stopped the publication of his religious quarterly in 1885 and made theCritique philosophiquea monthly instead of a weekly Journal. It ceased in 1889, but the following year Renouvier’s friend, Pillon, began a new periodical, which bore the same name as the one which had ceased with the outbreak of the war in 1870. This wasL’Année philosophique, to which Renouvier contributed articles from time to time on religious topics.Some writers are of the opinion that Renouvier’s attacks on the Roman Catholic Church and faith, so far from strengthening the Protestant party in France, tended rather to increase the hostility to the Christian religion generally or, indeed, to any religious view of the universe.Renouvier’s own statements in his philosophy, in so far as these concern religion and theology, are in harmony with his rejection of the Absolute in philosophy and the Absolute in politics. His criticism of the idea of God, the central point in any philosophy of religion, is in terms similar to his critique of the worship of the Absolute or the deification of the State.In dealing with the question of a “Total Synthesis” Renouvier indicated his objections to the metaphysical doctrine of an Absolute, which is diametrically opposed to his general doctrine of relativity. He is violently in conflict with all religious conceptions which savour of this Absolute or have a pantheistic emphasis, which would diminish the value and significance of relativity and of personality. The “All-in-All” conception of God, which represents the pantheistic elements in many theologies and religions, both Christian and other, is not really a consciousness, he shows, for consciousness itself implies a relation, a union of the self and non-self. In such a conception actor, play and theatre all blend into one, God alone is real, and he is unconscious, for there is, according to this hypothesis, nothing outside himself which he can know. Renouvier realises that he is faced with the ancient problem of the One and the Many, with the alternative of unity or plurality. With his usual logical decisiveness Renouvier posits plurality. He does not attempt to reconcile the two opposites, and he deals with the problem in the manner in which he faced the antinomies of Kant. Both cannot be true, and the enemy of pantheism and absolutism acclaims pluralism, both for logical reasons and in order to safeguard the significance of personality. In particular he directly criticises the philosophy of Spinoza in which he sees the supreme statement of this philosophy of the eternal, the perfect, necessary, unchanging One, who is the same yesterday, to-day and forever. He admits that the idea of law or a system of laws leads to the introduction of something approaching the hypothesis of unity, but he is careful to show by his doctrine of freedom and personality that this is only a limited unity and that, considered even from a scientific standpoint, a Total Synthesis, which is the logical outcome of such an hypothesis, is ultimately untenable. He overthrows the idols of Spinoza and Hegel. Such absolutes, infinite and eternal, whether described as an infinite love which loves itself or a thought thinking thought, are nothing more to Renouvier than vain words, which it is absurd to offer as “The Living God.”Against these metaphysical erections Renouvier opposes his doctrines of freedom, of personality, relativity and pluralism. He offers in contrast the conception of God as a Person, not an Absolute, but relative, not infinite, but finite, limited by man’s freedom and by contingency in the world of creatures. God, in his view, is not a Being who is omnipotent, or omniscient. He is a Person of whom man is a type, certainly a degraded type, but man is made in the image of the divine personality. Our notion of God, Renouvier reminds us, must be consistent with the doctrine of freedom, hence we must conceive of him not merely as a creator of creatures or subjects, but of creative power itself in those creatures. The relation of God to man is more complex than that of simple “creation” as this word is usually comprehended, “It is a creation of creation,” says Renouvier,[25]a remark which is parallel to the view expressed by Bergson, to the effect that, we must conceive of God as a “creator of creators.”[26]The existence of this Creative Person must be conceived, Renouvier insists, as indissolubly bound up with his work, and it is unintelligible otherwise. That work is one of creation and not emanation—it involves more than mere power and transcendence. God is immanent in the universe.[25]Psychologie ralionnelle, vol. 2, p. 104.[26]In his address to the Edinburgh Philosophical Society, 1914.Theology has wavered between the two views—that of absolute transcendence and omnipotence and that of immanence based on freedom and limitation. In the first, every single thing depends upon the operation of God, whose Providence rules all. This is pure determinism of a theological character. In the other view man’s free personality is recognised; part of the creation is looked upon as partaking of freedom and contingency, therefore the divinity is conceived as limited and finite.Renouvier insists that this view of God as finite is the only tenable one, for it is the only one which gives a rational and moral explanation of evil. In the first view God is responsible for all things, evil included, and man is therefore much superior to him from a moral standpoint. The idea of God must be ethically acceptable, and it is unfortunate that this idea, so central to religion, is the least susceptible to modification in harmony with man’s ethical development. We already have noticed Guyau’s stress upon this point in our discussion of ethics. Our conception of God must, Renouvier claims, be the affirmation of our highest category, Personality, and must express the best ethical ideals of mankind. Society suffers for its immoral and primitive view of God, which gives to its religion a barbarous character which is disgraceful and revolting to finer or more thoughtful minds.It is true that the acceptance of the second view, which carries with it the complete rejection of the ideas of omnipotence and omniscience, modifies profoundly many of the old and primitive views of God. Renouvier recognises this, and wishes his readers also to grasp this point, for only so is religion to be brought forward in a development harmonious with the growth of man’s mind in other spheres. Man should not profess the results of elaborate culture in science while he professes at the same time doctrines of God which are not above those of a savage or primitive people. This is the chief mischief which the influence of the Hebrew writings of the Old Testament has had upon the Christian religion. The moral conscience now demands their rejection, for to those who value religion they can only appear as being of pure blasphemy. God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, consequently many things must be unknown to him until they happen. Foreknowledge and predetermination on his part are impossible, according to Renouvier. God is not to be conceived as a consciousness enveloping the entire universe, past, present and future, in a total synthesis. Such a belief is mischievous to humanity because of its fatalism, in spite of the comfortable consolation it offers to pious souls. Moreover, it presents the absurd view of God working often against himself.The idea of God, Renouvier shows, arises out of the discussions of the nature of the universal laws of the universe and from the progress of personalities. The plausible conceptions of God based on causality and on “necessary essence” have not survived the onslaughts of Criticism. The personality of God seems to us, says Renouvier, indicated as the conclusion and the almost necessary culmination of the consideration of the probabilities laid down by the practical reason or moral law. The primary, though not primitive, evidence for the existence of God is contained in, and results from, the generalisation of the idea of “ends” in the universe. We must not go bevond phenomena or seek evidence in some fictitious sphere outside of our experience. In its most general and abstract sense the idea of God arises from the conception of moral order, immortality, or the accord of happiness and goodness. We cannot deny the existence of a morality in the order and movements of the world, a physical sanction to the moral laws of virtue and of progress, an external reality of good, a supremacy of good, a witness of the Good itself. Renouvier does not think that any man, having sufficiently developed his thought, would refuse to give the name God to the object of this supreme conception, which at first may seem abstract because it is not in any way crude, many of its intrinsic elements remaining undetermined in face of our ignorance, but which, nevertheless, or just for that very reason, is essentially practical and moral, representing the most notable fact of all those included in our belief. This method of approaching the problem of God is, he thinks, both simple and grand. It is a noble contrast to the scholastic edifice built up on the metaphysical perfection of being, called the Absolute. In this conception all attributes of personality are replaced by an accumulation of metaphysical properties, contradictory in themselves and quite incompatible with one another. This Absolute is a pure chimerical abstraction; its pure being and pure essence are equivalent to pure nothing or pure nonsense.The fetish of pure substance, substantial cause, absolute being, whatever it be called, is vicious at all times, but particularly when we are dealing with the fundamental problems of science. It would be advisable here that the only method of investigation be that of atheism, for scientific investigation should not be tainted by any prejudices or preconceived ideas upon the nature of the divinity.What really is Atheism? The answer to this query, says Renouvier, is clear. The idea of God is essentially a product of the moral law or conscience. An atheist is, strictly speaking, one who does not admit the reality of this moral order of ends and of persons as valuable in themselves. Verily, he himself may personally lead a much more upright life than the loud champions of theism, but he denies the general moral order, which is God. With the epithet of atheist as commonly used for those who merelv have a conception of God which differs from the orthodox view, we are not here concerned. That may be dismissed as a misuse of the word due to religious bigotry. The fruits of true atheism are materialism, pantheism and fatalism. Indeed any doctrine, even a theological doctrine, which debases and destroys the inherent value of the human consciousness and personality, is rightly to be regarded, whatever it maysayabout God, however it may repeat his name (and two of these doctrines are very fond of this repetition, but this must not blind us to the real issue)—that doctrine is atheistic. The most resolute materialists, the most high-minded worshippers of Providence and the great philosophers of the Absolute, find themselves united here in atheism. God is not a mere totality of laws operating in the universe. Such a theism is but a form of real atheism. We must, insists Renouvier, abandon views of this type, with all that savours of an Absolute, a Perfect Infinite, and affirm our belief in the existence of an order of Goodness which gives value to human personality and assures ultimate victory to Justice. This is to believe in God. We arrive at this belief rationally and after consideration of the world and of the moral law of persons. Through these we come to God. We do not begin with him and pretend to deduce these from his nature by some incomprehensiblea prioripropositions. The methods of the old dogmatic theology are reversed. Instead of beginning with a Being of whom we know nothing and can obviously deduce nothing, let us proceed inductively, and by careful consideration of the revelation we have before us in the world and in humanity let us build up our idea of God.Renouvier is anxious that we should examine the data upon which we may found “rational hypotheses” as to the nature of God. The Critical Philosophy has upset the demonstrations of the existence of God, which were based upon causality and upon necessary existence (the cosmological and ontological proofs). Neo-criticism not only establishes the existence of God as a rational hypothesis, but “this point of view of the divine problem is the most favourable to the notion of the personality of God. The personality of God seems to us to be indicated as the looked-for conclusion and almost necessary consummation of the probabilities of practical reason.”[27][27]Psychologie rationnelle, vol. 2, p. 300.The admission of ends, of finality, or purpose in the universe is frequently given as involving a supreme consciousness embracing this teleology. Also it is argued that Good could not exist in its generality save in an external consciousness—that is, a divine mind. By recalling the objections to a total synthesis of phenomena, Renouvier refutes both these arguments which rest upon erroneous methods in ontology and in theology. The explanation of the world by God, as in the cosmological argument, is fanciful, while the ontological argument leads us to erect an unintelligible and illogical absolute. Renouvier regards God as existing as a general consciousness corresponding to the generality of ends which man himself finds before him, finite, limited in power and in knowledge. But in avowing this God, Renouvier points him out to us as the first of all beings, a being like them, not an absolute, but a personality, possessing (and this is important) the perfection of morality, goodness and justice. He is the supreme personality in action, and as a perfect person he respects the personality of others and operates on our world only in the degree which the freedom and individuality of persons who are not himself can permit him, and within the limits of the general laws under which he represents to himself his own enveloped existence. This is the hypothesis of unity rendered intelligible, and as such Renouvier claims that it bridges in a marvellous manner the gap always deemed to exist between monotheism and polytheism—the two great currents of religious thought in humanity. The monotheists have appeared intolerant and fanatical in their religion and in their deity (not in so far as it was manifest in the thoughts of the simple, who professed a faith of the heart, but as shown in the ambitious theology of books and of schools), bearing on their banner the signs of a jealous deity, wishing no other gods but himself, declaring to his awed worshippers: “I am that I am; have no other gods but me!” On the other hand, the polytheistic peoples have been worshippers of beauty and goodness in all things, and where they saw these things they created a deity. They were more concerned with the immortality of good souls than the eternal existence of one supreme being; they were free-thinkers, creators of beauty and seekers after truth, and believers in freedom. The humanism of Greece stands in contrast to the idolatrous theocracy of the Hebrews.The unity of God previously mentioned does not exclude the possibility of a plurality of divine persons. God the one would be the first and foremost,rex hominum deorumque. Some there may be that rise through saintliness to divinity, Sons of God, persons surpassing man in intelligence, power and morality. To take sides in this matter is equivalent to professing a particular religion. We must avoid the absolutist spirit in religion no less than in philosophy. By this Renouvier means that brutal fanaticism which prohibits the Gods of other people by passion and hatred, which aims at establishing and imposing its own God (which is, after all, but its own idea of God) as the imperialist plants his flag, his kind and his customs in new territory, in the spirit of war and conquest. Such a “holy war” is an outrage, based not upon real religion, but on intolerant fanaticism in which freedom and the inherent rights of personality to construct its own particular faith are denied.Renouvier finds a parallelism between the worship of the State in politics and of the One God in religion. The systems in which unity or plurality of divine personality appears differ from one another in the same way in which monarchal and republican ideas differ. Monarchy in religion offers the same obstacles to progress as it has done in politics. It involves a parallel enslavement of one’s entire self and goods, a conscription which is hateful to freedom and detrimental to personality. To this supreme and regal Providence all is due; it alone in any real sense exists. Persons are shadows, of no reality, serfs less than the dust, to whom a miserable dole is given called grace, for which prayer and sacrifice are to be unceasingly made or chastisements from the Almighty will follow. This notion is the product of monarchy in politics, and with monarchy it will perish. The two are bound up, for “by the grace of God” we are told monarchs hold their thrones, by his favour their sceptre sways and their battalions move on to victory. This monarchal God, this King of kings and Lord of hosts, ruler of heaven and earth, is the last refuge of monarchs on the earth. Confidence in both has been shaken, and both, Renouvier asserts, will disappear and give place to a real democracy, not only to republics on earth, but to the conception of the whole universe as a republic. Men raise up saints and intercessors to bridge the gulf between the divine Monarch and his slaves. They conceive angels as doing his work in heaven; they tolerate priests to bring down grace to them here and now. The doctrine of unity thus gives rise to fanatical religious devotion or philosophical belief in the absolute, which stifles religion and perishes in its own turn. The doctrine of immortality, based on the belief in the value of human personality, leads us away from monarchy to a republic of free spirits. A democratic religion in this sense will display human nature raised to its highest dignity by virtue of an energetic affirmation of personal liberty, tolerance, mutual respect and liberty of faith—a free religion without priests or clericalism, not in conflict with science and philosophy, but encouraging these pursuits and in turn encouraged by them.[28][28]The fullest treatment of this is the large section in the conclusion to thePhilosophie analytique de l’Histoire(tome iv.).Cf. also the discussion of the influence of religious beliefs on societies in the last chapter ofLa Nouvelle Monadologie.
It is outside our purpose to embark upon discussions of the religious problem in France, in so far as this became a problem of politics. Our intention is rather to examine the inner core of religious thought, the philosophy of religion, which forms an appropriate final chapter to our history of the development of ideas.
Yet, although our discussion bears mainly upon the general attitude to religion, upon the development of central religious ideas such as the idea of God, and upon the place of religion in the future—that is to say, upon the philosophy of religion—it is practically impossible to understand the religious attitude of our thinkers without a brief notice of the religious situation in France during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In our Introduction we briefly called attention to the attempt of the Traditionalists after the Revolution to recall their countrymen to the Christian faith as presented in and by the Roman Catholic Church. The efforts made by De Bonald, De Maistre, Chateaubriand, Lamennais and Lacordaire did not succeed as they had hoped, but, nevertheless, a considerable current of loyalty to the Church and the Catholic religion set in. Much of this loyalty was bound up with sentimental affection for a monarchy, and arose partly from anti-revolutionary sentiments.[1]It cannot, however, be entirely explained by these political feelings. There was the expression of a deeper and more spiritual reaction directed against the materialistic and sceptical teachings of the eighteenth century. Man’s heart craved comfort, consolation and warmth. It had been starved in the previous century, and revolution and war had only added to the cup of bitterness. Thus there came an epoch of Romanticism in religion of which the sentimental and assumed orthodoxy of Chateaubriand was a sign of the times. HisGénie du Christianismemay now appear to us full of sentimentality, but it was welcomed at the time, since it expressed at least some of those aspirations which had for long been denied an expression. It was this which marked the great difference between the two centuries in France. The eighteenth was mainly concerned with scoffing at religion. Its rationalism was that of Voltaire. In the first half of the nineteenth century the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. Romanticism, in poetry, in literature, in philosophy and in religion wasà la mode, and it led frequently to sentimentality or morbidity. Lamartine, Victor Hugo and De Vigny professed the Catholic faith for many years. We may note, and this is important, that in France the only form of Christianity which holds any sway over the people in general is the Roman Catholic faith. Outside the Roman Church there is no religious organisation which is of much account. This explains why it is so rare to find a thinker who owns allegiance to any Church or religion, and yet it would be wrong to deem them irreligious. There is novia mediabetween Catholicism and free personal thought. This was a point which Renan quite keenly felt, and of which his own spiritual pilgrimage, which took him out of the bounds of the Church of his youth, is a fine illustration. Many of France’s noblest sons have been brought up in the religious atmosphere of the Church and owe much of their education to her, and Rome believes in education. The control of education has been throughout the century a problem severely contested by Church and State. More important for our purpose than the details of the quarrels of Church and State is the intellectual condition of the Church itself.
[1]De Maistre regarded the Revolution as an infliction specially bestowed upon France for her national neglect of religion—his religion, of course. The same crude, misleading, and vicious arguments have since been put forward by the theologians in their efforts to push the cause of the Church with the people. This was very noticeable both in the war of 1870 and that of 1914. In each case it was argued that the war was a punishment from God for France’s frivolity and neglect of the Church. In 1914, in addition, it was deemed a direct divine reply to “Disestablishment.”
This reveals a striking vitality, a vigour and initiative at war with the central powers of the Vatican, a seething unrest which uniformity and authority find annoying. How strong the power of the central authority was, the affair of the Concordat had shown, when forty bishops were deposed for non-acceptance of the arrangement between Napoleon and the Pope.[2]Stronger still was the iron hand of the Pope over intellectual freedom.
[2]The Revolution had separated Church and State and suppressed clerical privilege by the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy” enactment of 1790. Napoleon, alive to the patriotic value of a State Church, repealed this law and declared the divorce of Church and State to be null and void. His negotiations with the Pope (Pius VII.) resulted, in 1801, in the arrangement known as theConcordat, by which the Roman Catholic Church was again made the established national Church, its clergy became civil servants paid by the State, and its worship became a branch of public administration.
Lamennais was not a “modernist,” as this term is now understood, for his theology was orthodox. His fight with the Vatican was for freedom in the relations of the Church to society. He pleaded in hisEssai sur L’indifference en Matière de Religionfor the Church to accept the principle of freedom, to leave the cherished fondling of the royalist cause, and to present to the world the principles of a Christian democracy. Lamennais and other liberal-minded men desired the separation of Church and State, and were tolerant of those who were not Catholic. They claimed, along with their own “right to believe,” that of others “not to believe.” His was a liberal Catholicism, but its proposals frightened his co-religionists, and drew upon him in 1832 an encyclical letter (Mirari vos) from the Vatican. The Pope denounced liberalism absolutely as an absurd and an erroneous doctrine, a piece of folly sprung from the “fetid source of indifferentism.” Lamennais found he could not argue, as Renan himself later put it, “with a bar of iron.” It was the reactionary De Maistre, with his principle of papal authority,[3]and not Lamennais, whom the Vatican, naturally enough, chose to favour, or rather to follow.
[3]As stated inDu Pape, 1819.
Thus Lamennais found himself, by an almost natural and inevitable process, outside the Church, and this in spite of the fact that his theology was orthodox. He endeavoured to present his case in his paperL’Avenirand in an influential brochure,The Words of a Believer, which left its mark upon Hugo, Michelet, Lamartine, and George Sand. His views blended with the current of humanitarian and democratic doctrines which developed from the Saint-Simonists, Pierre Leroux and similar thinkers. We have already noted that these social reformers held to their beliefs with the conviction that in them and not in the Roman Church lay salvation.
This brings us to a crucial point which is the clue to much of the subsequent thought upon religion. This is the profound and seemingly irreconcilable difference between these two conceptions of religion.
The orthodox Catholic faith believes in a supernatural revelation, and is firmly convinced that man is inherently vile and corrupt, born in sin from which he cannot be redeemed, save by the mystical operations of divine grace, working only through the holy sacraments and clergy of the one true Church, to whom all power was given, according to its view, by the historic Jesus. Its methods are conservative, its discipline rigid and based on tradition and authority. Its system of salvation is excessively individualistic. It holds firmly to this pessimistic view of human nature, based on the doctrine of original sin, thus maintaining a creed which, in the hands of a devoted clergy, who are free from domestic ties, works as a powerful moral force upon the individual believer. His freedom of thought is restricted; he can neither read nor think what he likes, and the Church, having made the thirteenth-century doctrines of Aquinas its official philosophy, hurls anathema at ideas scientific, political, philosophical or theological which have appeared since. No half-measures are allowed: either one is a loyal Catholic or one is not a Catholic at all. In this relentlessly uncompromising attitude lies the main strength of Catholicism; herein also is contained its weakness, or at least that element which makes it manufacture its own greatest adversaries.
While claiming to be the one Church of Jesus Christ, it does not by any means put him in the foreground of its religion. Its hierarchy of saints is rather a survival of polytheism; its worship of the Virgin and cult of theSacré Cœurissue often in a religious sentimentality and sensuality promoted by the denial of a more healthy outlet for instincts which are an essential part of human nature. Tribute, however, must be paid—high tribute—to the devotion of individuals, particularly to the work done by the religious orders of women, whose devotion the Church having won by its intense appeal to women keeps, consecrates and organises in a manner which no other Church has succeeded in doing. This is largely the secret of the vigorous life of the Church, for as a power of charity the Roman Church is remarkable and deserves respect. Her educational efforts, her missions, hospitals, her humbler clergy, and her orders which offer opportunity of service or of sanctuary to all types of human nature—these constitute Roman Catholicism in a truer manner than the diplomacy of the Jesuits or the councils of the Vatican. It is this pulsing human heart of hers which keeps her alive, not the rigid intellectual dogmatism and antiquated theology which she expounds, nor her loyalty to the established political order, which, siding with the rich and powerful, frequently gives to this professedly spiritual power a debasing taint of materialism.
Against all this, and in vital opposition to this, we have the humanitarians who, rejecting the doctrine of corruption, believe that human instincts and human reason themselves make for goodness and for God. While Catholicism looks to the past, humanitarianism looks forward, believes in freedom and in progress, and regards the immanent Christ-spirit as working in mankind. Its gospel is one of love and brotherhood, a romantic doctrine issuing in love and pity for the oppressed and the sinful. In the collective consciousness of mankind it sees the incarnation, the growth of the immanent God. Therefore it claims that in democracy, socialism and world brotherhood lies the true Christianity. This, the humanitarians claim, is the true religious idealism—that which was preached by the Founder himself and which his Church has betrayed. The humanitarians make service to mankind the essence of religion, and regard themselves as more truly Christian than the Church.
In those countries where Protestantism has a large following, the two doctrines of humanitarian optimism and of the orthodox pessimism regarding human nature are confused vaguely together. The English mind in particular is able to compromise and to blend the two conflicting philosophies in varying degrees; but in the French mind its clearer penetration and more logical acumen prevent this. The Frenchman is an idealist and tends to extremes, either that of whole-hearted devotion to a dominating Church or that of the abandonment of organised religion. In Protestantism he sees only a halfway house, built upon the first principles of criticism, and unwilling to pursue those principles to their conclusion—namely, the rejection of all organised Church religion, the adoption of perfect freedom for the individual in all matters of belief, a religion founded on freedom and on personal thought which alone is free.
Such were the two dominant notes in religious thought in France at the opening of our period.
Catholicism resisted the humanitarianism of 1848 and strengthened its power after thecoup d’état. The Church and the Vatican became more staunch in their opposition to all doctrines of modern thought. The French clergy profited by the alliance with the aristocracy, while religious orders, particularly the Jesuits, increased in number and in power. Veuillot proclaimed the virtues of Catholicism in his writings. Meanwhile the Pope’s temporal power decreased, but his spiritual power was increasing in extent and in intensity. Centralisation went on within the Church, and Rome (i.e., the Pope and the Vatican) became all-powerful.
Just after the half-century opens the Pope (Pius IX.), in 1854, proclaimed his authority in announcing the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.[4]As France had heard the sentence,L’Etat, c’est moi, from the lips of one of its greatest monarchs, it now heard from another quarter a similar principle enunciated, L’Eglise, c’est moi. As democracy and freedom cried out against the one, they did so against the other. Undaunted, the Vatican continued in its absolutism, even although it must have seen that in some quarters revolt would be the result. Ten years later the Pope attacked the whole of modern thought, to which he was diametrically opposed, in his encyclicalQuanta Curaand in his famousSyllabus, which constituted a catalogue of the modern errors and heresies which he condemned. This famous challenge was quite clear and uncompromising in its attitude, concluding with a curse upon “him who should maintain that the Roman Pontiff can, and must, be reconciled and compromise with progress, liberalism and modern civilisation!” To the doctrine ofL’Eglise, c’est moihad now been added that ofLa Science, aussi, c’est moi. This was not all. In 1870 the dogma of Papal Infallibility was proclaimed. By a strange irony of history, however, this declaration of spiritual absolutism was followed by an entire loss of temporal power. The outbreak of the war in that same year between France and Prussia led to the hasty withdrawal of French troops from the Papal Domain and the Eternal City fell to the secular power of the Italian national army under Victor Emmanuel.
[4]This new dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin must not, of course, be confused, as it often is by those outside the Catholic Church, with the quite different and more ancient proposition which asserts the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
The defeat of France at the hands of Prussia in 1871 issued in a revival of religious sentiment, frequently seen in defeated nations. A special mission or crusade of national repentance gathered in large subscriptions which built the enormous Church of the Sacré Coeur overlooking Paris from the heights of Montmartre.[5]
[5]The anti-Catholic element, however, have had the audacity, and evidently the legal right, to place a statue to a man who, some centuries back, was burned at the stake for failing to salute a religious procession, in such a position immediately in front of this great church that the plan for the large staircase cannot be carried out.
Seeking for religious consolation, the French people found a Catholicism which had become embittered and centralised for warfare upon liberal religion and humanitarianism. They found that the only organised religion they knew was dominated by the might of Rome and the powers of the clergy. These even wished France, demoralised as she was for the moment, to undertake the restoration of the Pope’s temporal power in Italy. Further, they were definitely in favour of monarchy: “the altar and the throne” were intimately associated in the ecclesiastical mind.
It was the realisation of this which prompted Gambetta to cry out to the Third Republic with stern warning, “Clericalism is your enemy.” Thus began the political fight for which Rome had been strengthening herself. With the defeat of the clerical-monarchy party in 1877 the safety of the Republic was assured. From then until 1905 the Republic and the Church fought each other. Educational questions were bitterly contested (1880). The power of the Jesuits, especially, was regarded as a constant menace to the State. The Dreyfus affair (1894- 1899) did not improve relations, with its intense anti-semitism and anti-clericalism. The battle was only concluded by the legislation of Waldeck-Rousseau in 1901 and Combes in 1903, expelling religious orders. Combes himself had studied for the priesthood and was violently anti-clerical. The culmination came in the Separation Law of 1905 carried by Briand, in the Pope’s protest against this, followed by the Republic’s confiscation of much Church property, a step which might have been avoided if the French Catholics had been allowed to have their way in an arrangement with the State regarding their churches. This was prevented by the severance of diplomatic relations between France and the Vatican and by the Pope’s disagreement with the French Catholics whose wishes he ignored in his policy of definite hostility to the French Government.[6]
[6]Relations with the Vatican, which were seen to be desirable during the Great European War, have since been resumed (in 1921) by the Republic.
During our period a popular semi-nationalist and semi-religious cult of Jeanne d’Arc, “the Maid of Orleans,” appeared in France. The clergy expressly encouraged this, with the definite object of enlisting sentiments of nationality and patriotism on the side of the Church. Ecclesiastical diplomacy at headquarters quickly realised the use which might be made of this patriotic figure whom, centuries before, the Church had thought fit to burn as a witch. The Vatican saw a possibility of blending French patriotism with devotion to Catholicism and thus possibly strengthening, in the eyes of the populace at least, the waning cause of the Church.
The adoration of Jeanne d’Arc was approved as early as 1894, but when the Church found itself in a worse plight with its relation to the State, it made preparations in 1903 for her enrolment among the saints.[7]She was honoured the following year with the title of “Venerable,” but in 1908, after the break of Church and State, she was accorded the full status of a saint, and her statue, symbolic of patriotism militant, stands in most French churches as conspicuous often as that of the Virgin, who, in curious contrast, fondles the young child, and expresses the supreme loveliness of motherhood.[8]The cult of Jeanne d’Arc flourished particularly in 1914 on the sentiments of patriotism, militarism and religiosity then current. This was natural because it is for these very sentiments that she stands as a symbol. She is evidently a worthy goddess whose worship is worth while, for we are assured that it was throughherbeneficent efforts that the German Army retired from Paris in 1914 and again in 1918. The saintly maid of Orleans reappeared and beat them back! Such is the power of the “culte” which the Church eagerly fosters. The Sacré Coeur also has its patriotic and military uses, figuring as it did as an emblem on some regimental flags on the battlefield. Meanwhile, the celebrations of Napoleon’s centenary (1921) give rise to the conjecture that he, too, will in time rank with Joan of Arc as a saint. His canonisation would achieve absolutely that union of patriotic and religious sentimentality to which the Church in France directs its activities.
[7]t is interesting to observe the literature on Jeanne d’Arc published at this time: Anatole France,Vie de Jeanne d’Arc(2 vols., 1908); Durand,Jeanne d’Arc et l’Eglise(1908). These are noteworthy, also Andrew Lang’s work,The Maid of Orleans(also 1908).
[8]Herein, undoubtedly, lies the strong appeal of the Church to women.
The vast majority of the 39,000,000 French people are at least nominally Catholic, even if only from courtesy or from a utilitarian point of view. Only about one in sixty of the population are Protestant. Although among cultured conservatives there is a real devotion to the Church, the creed of France is in general something far more broad and human than Catholicism, in spite of the tremendously human qualities which that Church possesses. The creed of France is summed up better in art, nature, beauty, music, science,la patrie, humanity, in the worship of life itself.[9]
[9]Those who desire to study the religious psychology of France during our period cannot find a better revelation than that given in the wonderful novel by Roger Martin du Card, entitled Jean Barois.
It was against such a background of ecclesiastical and political affairs that the play of ideas upon religion went on. Such was the environment, the tradition which surrounded our thinkers, and we may very firmly claim that only by a recognition that their religious and nationalmilieuwas of such a type as we have outlined, can the real significance of their religious thought be understood. Only when we have grasped the essential attitude of authority and tradition of the Roman Church, its ruthless attitude to modern thought of all kinds, can we understand the religious attitude of men like Renan, Renouvier and Guyau.
We are also enabled to see why the appeal of the Saint-Simonist group could present itself as a religious and, indeed, Christian appeal outside the Church. It enables us to understand why Cousin’s spiritualism pleased neither the Catholics nor their opponents, and to realise why the “Religion of Humanity,” which Auguste Comte inaugurated, made so little appeal.[10]This has been well styled an “inverted Catholicism,” since it endeavours to preserve the ritual of that religion and to embody the doctrines of humanitarianism. Naturally enough it drew upon itself the scorn of both these groups. The Catholic saw in it only blasphemy: the humanitarian saw no way in which it might further his ends.
[10]Littré, his disciple, as we have already noted, rejected this part of his master’s teaching. Littré was opposed by Robinet, who laid the stress upon the “Religion of Humanity” as the crown of Comte’s work.
Comte’s attempt to base his new religion upon Catholicism was quite deliberate, for he strove to introduce analogies with “everything great and deep which the Catholic system of the Middle Ages effected or even projected.” He offered a new and fantastic trinity, compiled a calendar of renowned historical personalities, to replace that of unknown saints. He proclaimed “positive dogmas “and aspired to all the authority and infallibility of the Roman Pontiff, supported by a trained clergy, whose word should be law. Curiously enough he, too, had his anathemas, in that he had days set apart for the solemn cursing of the great enemies of the human race, such as Napoleon. It was indeed a reversed Catholicism, offering a fairly good caricature of the methods of the Roman Church, and it was equally obnoxious in its tyrannical attitude.[11]While it professed to express humanity and love as its central ideas it proceeded to outline a method which is the utter negation of these. Comte made the great mistake of not realising that loyalty to these ideals must involve spiritual freedom, and that the religion of humanity must be a collective inspiration of free individuals, who will in love and fellowship tolerate differences upon metaphysical questions. Uniformity can only be mischievous.
[11]Guyau’s criticisms of Comte’s “Religion of Humanity” in hisL’Irreligion de l’Avenirare interesting. “The marriage of positive science and blind sentiment cannot produce religion” (p. 314; Eng. trans., p. 366). “Comtism, which consists of the rites of religion and nothing else, is an attempt to maintain life in the body after the departure of the soul” (p. 307; Eng. trans., p. 359).
It was because he grasped this vital point that Renan’s discussion of the religious question is so instructive. For him, religion is essentially an affair of personal taste. Here we have another indication of the clear way in which Renan was able to discern the tendencies of his time. He published hisEtudes d’Histoire religieusein 1857, and his Preface to theNouvelles Etudes d’Histoire religieusewas written in 1884. He claims there that freedom is essential to religion, and that it is absolutely necessary that the State should have no power whatever over it. Religion is as personal and private a matter as taste in literature or art. There should be no State laws, he claims, relating to religion at all, any more than dress is prescribed for citizens by law. He well points out that only a State which is strictly neutral in religion can ever be absolutely free from playing therôleof persecutor. The favouring of one sect will entail some persecution or hardship upon others. Further, he sees the iniquity of taxing the community to pay the expenses of clergy to whose teachings they may object, or whose doctrines are not theirs. Freedom, Renan believed, would claim its own in the near future and, denouncing the Concordat, he prophesied the abolition of the State Church.
The worst type of organisation Renan holds to be the theocratic state, like Islam, or the ancient Pontifical State in which dogma reigns supreme. He condemns also the State whose religion is based upon the profession of a majority of its citizens. There should be, as Spinoza was wont to style it, “liberty of philosophising.” The days of the dominance of dogma are passing, in many quarters gone by already, “Religion has become for once and all a matter of personal taste.”
Renan himself was deeply religious in mind. He was never an atheist and did not care for the term “free-thinker” because of its implied associations with the irreligion of the previous century. He stands out, however, not only in our period of French thought, but in the world development of the century as one of the greatest masters of religious criticism. His historical work is important, and he possessed a knowledge and equipment for that task. His distinguished Semitic scholarship led to his obtaining the chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France, and enabled him to write his Histories, one of the Jews and one of Christianity.
It was as a volume of thisHistoire des Origines du Christianismethat hisVie de Jésusappeared in 1863. This life of the Founder of Christianity produced a profound stir in the camps of religious orthodoxy, and drew upon its author severe criticisms. Apart from the particular views set forth in that volume, we must remember that the very fact of his writing upon “a sacred subject,” which was looked upon as a close preserve, reserved for the theologians or churchmen alone, was deemed at that time an original and daring feat in France.
His particular views, which created at the time such scandal, were akin to those of Baur and the Tubingen School, which Strauss (Renan’s contemporary) had already set forth in hisLeben Jesu.[12]Briefly, they may be expressed as the rejection of the supernatural. Herein is seen the scientific or “positive” influence at work upon the dogmas of the Christian religion, a tendency which culminated in “Modernism” within the Church, only to be condemned violently by the Pope in 1907. It was this temper, produced by the study of documents, by criticism and historical research which put Renan out of the Catholic Church. His rational mind could not accept the dogmas laid down. Lamennais (who was conservative and orthodox in his theology, and possessed no taint of “modernism” in the technical sense) had declared that the starting-point should be faith and not reason. Renan aptly asks in reply to this, “and what is to be the test, in the last resort, of the claims of faith is not reason?”
[12]Written in 1835. Littré issued a French translation in 1839, a year previous to the appearance of the English version by George Eliot. Strauss’s life covers 1808-1874.
In Renan we find a good illustration of the working of the spirit of modern thought upon a religious mind. Being a sincere and penetrating intellect he could not, like so many people, learned folk among them, keep his religious ideas and his reason in separate watertight compartments. This kind of people Renan likens in hisSouvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesseto mother-o’-pearl shells of Francois de Sales “which are able to live in the sea without tasting a drop of salt water.” Yet he realises the comfort of such an attitude. “I see around me,” he continues, “men of pure and simple lives whom Christianity has had the power to make virtuous and happy. . . . But I have noticed that none of them have the critical faculty, for which let them bless God!” He well realises the contentment which, springing sometimes from a dullness of mind or lack of sensitiveness, excludes all doubt and all problems.
In Catholicism he sees a bar of iron which will not reason or bend. “I can only return to it by amputation of my faculties, by definitely stigmatising my reason and condemning it to perpetual silence.” Writing of his exit from the Seminary of Saint Sulpice, where he was trained for the priesthood, he remarks in hisSouvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunessethat “there were times when I was sorry that I was not a Protestant, so that I might be a philosopher without ceasing to be a Christian.” For Renan, as for so many minds in modern France, severance from the Roman Church is equivalent to severance from Christianity as an organised religion. The practical dilemma is presented of unquestioning obedience to an infallible Church on the one hand, or the attitude oflibre-penseuron the other. There are not the accommodating varieties of the Protestant presentation of the Christian religion. Renan’s spiritual pilgrimage is but an example of many. In a measure this condition of affairs is a source of strength to the Roman Church for, since a break with it so often means a break with Christianity or indeed with all definite religion, only the bolder and stronger thinkers make the break which their intellect makes imperative. The mass of the people, however dissatisfied they may be with the Church, nevertheless accept it, for they see no alternative but the opposite extreme. No half-way house of non-conformity presents itself as a rule.
Yet, as we have insisted, Renan had an essentially religious view of the universe, and he expressly claimed that his break with the Church and his criticism of her were due to a devotion to pure religion, and he even adds, to a loyalty to the spirit of her Founder. Although, as he remarks in hisNouvelles Etudes religieuses, it is true that the most modest education tends to destroy the belief in the superstitious elements in religion, it is none the less true that the very highest culture can never destroy religion in the highest sense. “Dogmas pass, but piety is eternal.” The external trappings of religion have suffered by the growth of the modern sciences of nature and of historical criticism. The mind of cultivated persons does not now present the same attitude to evidence in regard to religious doctrines which were once accepted without question. The sources of the origins of the Christian religion are themselves questionable. This, Renan says, must not discourage the believers in true religion, for that is not the kind of foundation upon which religion reposes. Dogmas in the past gave rise to divisions and quarrels, only by feeling can religious persons be united in fellowship. The most prophetic words of Jesus were, Renan points out, those in which he indicated a time when men “would not worship God in this mountain nor in Jerusalem, but when the true worshippers would worship in spirit and in truth.” It was precisely this spirit which Renan admired in Jesus, whom he considered more of a philosopher than the Church, and he reminds the “Christians”[13]who railed against him as an unbeliever that Jesus had had much more influence upon him than they gave him credit for, and, more particularly, that his break with the Church was due to loyalty to Jesus. By such loyalty Renan meant not a blind worship, but a reverence which endeavoured to appreciate and follow the ideals for which Jesus himself stood. It did not involve slavish acceptance of all he said, even if that were intelligible, and clear, which it is not. “To be a Platonist,” remarks Renan, “I need not adore Plato, or believeallthat he said.”[14]
[13]Renan complains of the ignorance of the clergy of Rome regarding his own work, which they did not understand because they had not read it, merely relying on the Press and other sources for false and biassed accounts.
[14]Cf.Renan’s Essay inQuestions contemporaineson “L’Avenir religieux des Sociétés modernes.”
Renan is in agreement with the central ideas of Jesus’ own faith, and he rightly regards him as one of the greatest contributors to the world’s religious thought. Renan’s religion is free from supernaturalism and dogma. He believes in infinite Goodness or Providence, but he despises the vulgar and crude conceptions of God which so mar a truly religious outlook. He points out how prayer, in the sense of a request to Heaven for a particular object, is becoming recognised as foolish. ‘As a “meditation,” an interview with one’s own conscience, it has a deeply religious value. The vulgar idea of prayer reposes on an immoral conception of God. Renan rightly sees the central importance for religion of possessing a sane view of the divinity, not one which belongs to primitive tribal wargods and weather-gods. He aptly says, in this connection, that the one who was defeated in 1871 was not only France butle bon Dieuto which she in vain appealed. In his place was to be found, remarks Renan with a little sarcasm, “only a Lord God of Hosts who was unmoved by the moral ‘délicatesse’ of the Uhlans and the incontestable excellence of the Prussian shells.”[15]He rightly points to the immoral use made of the divinity by pious folk whose whole religion is utilitarian and materialistic. They do good only in order to get to heaven or escape hell,[16]and believe in God because it is necessary for them to have a confidant and sonsoler, to whom they may cry in time of trouble, and to whose will they may resignedly impute the evil chastisement which their own errors have brought upon them individually or collectively. But, he rightly claims, it is only where utilitarian calculations and self-interest end, that religion begins with the sense of the Infinite and of the Ideal Goodness and Beauty and Love.
[15]Dialogues et Fragments philosophiques, p. ix.
[16]One pious individual thought to convert Renan himself by writing him every month, quite briefly, to this effect “There is a hell.”
He endeavours in hisExamen de Conscience philosophique(1888) to sum up his attitude upon this question. There he affirms that it is beyond dispute or doubt that we have no evidence whatever of the action in the universe of one or of several wills superior to that of man. The actual state of this universe gives no sign of any external intervention, and we know nothing of its beginning. No beneficent interfering power, adeus ex machinâ, corrects or directs the operation of blind forces, enlightens man or improves his lot. No God appears miraculously to prevent evils, to crush disease, stop wars, or save his children from peril. No end or purpose is visible to us. God in the popular sense, living and acting as a Divine Providence, is not to be seen in our universe. The question is, however, whether this universe of ours is the totality of existence. Doubt comes into play here, and if our universe is not this totality, then God, although absent from his world, might still exist outside it. Our finite world is little in relation to the Infinite, it is a mere speck in the universe we know, and its duration to a divine Being might be only a day.
The Infinite, continues Renan, surrounds our finite world above and below. It stretches on the one hand to the infinitely large concourse of worlds and systems, and, on the other, to the infinitely little as atoms, microbes and the germs by which human life itself is passed on from one generation to another. The prospect of the world we know involves logically and fatally, says Renan, atheism. But this atheism, he adds, may be due to the fact that we cannot see far enough. Our universe is a phenomenon which has had a beginning and will have an end. That which has had no beginning and will have no end is the Absolute All, or God. Metaphysics has always been a science proceeding upon this assumption, “Something exists, therefore something has existed from all eternity.” which is akin to the scientific principle, “No effect with- out a cause.”[17]
[17]Examen de Conscience philosophique, p. 412 of the volumeFeuilles détachées.
We must not allow ourselves to be misled too far by the constructions or inductions about the uniformity and immutability of the laws of nature. “A God may reveal himself, perhaps, one day.” The infinite may dispose of our finite world, use it for its own ends. The expression, “Nature and its author,” may not be so absurd as some seem to think it. It is true that our experience presents no reason for forming such an hypothesis, but we must keep our sense of the infinite. “Everything is possible, even God,” and Renan adds, “If God exists, he must be good, and he will finish by being just.” It is as foolish to deny as to assert his existence in a dogmatic and thoughtless manner. It is upon this sense of the infinite and upon the ideals of Goodness, Beauty and Love that true faith or piety reposes.
Love, declares Renan, is one of the principal revelations of the divine, and he laments the neglect of it by philosophy. It runs in a certain sense through all living beings, and in man has been the school of gentleness and courtesy—nay more, of morals and of religion. Love, understood in the high sense, is a sacred, religious thing, or rather is a part of religion itself. In a tone which recalls that of the New Testament and Tolstoi, Renan beseeches us to remember that GodisLove, and that where Love is there God is. In loving, man is at his best; he goes out of himself and feels himself in contact with the infinite. The very act of love is veritably sacred and divine, the union of body and soul with another is a holy communion with the infinite. He remarks in hisSouvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse, doubtless remembering the simple purity and piety of his mother and sister, that when reflection has brought us to doubt, and even to a scepticism regarding goodness, then the spontaneous affirmation of goodness and beauty which exists in a noble and virtuous woman saves us from cynicism and restores us to communication with the eternal spring in which God reflects himself. Love, which Renan with reason laments as having been neglected on its most serious side and looked upon as mere sentimentality, offers the highest proof of God. In it lies our umbilical link with nature, but at the same time our communion with the infinite. He recalls some of Browning’s views in his attitude to love as a redeeming power. The most wretched criminal still has something good in him, a divine spark, if he be capable of loving.
It is the spirit of love and goodness which Renan admires in the simple faith of those separated far from him in their theological ideas. “God forbid,” he says,[18]“that I should speak slightingly of those who, devoid of the critical sense, and impelled by very pure and powerful religious motives, are attached to one or other of the great established systems of faith. I love the simple faith of the peasant, the serious conviction of the priest.”
[18]L’Avenir de la Science, pp. 436, 437; Eng. trans., p. 410.
“Supprimer Dieu, serait-ce amoindrir l’univers?”
asks Guyau in one of hisVers d’un Philosophe.’[19]Renan observes that if we tell the simple to live by aspiration after truth and beauty, these words would have no meaning for them. “Tell them to love God, not to offend God, they will understand you perfectly. God, Providence, soul, good old words, rather heavy, but expressive and respectable which science will explain, but will never replace with advantage. What is God for humanity if not the category of theideal?”[20]
[19]“Question,” Vers d’un Philosophe, p. 65.
[20]L’Avenir de la Science,” p. 476; Eng. trans., p. 445.
This is the point upon which Vacherot insisted in his treatment of religion. He claimed that the conception of God arises in the human consciousness from a combination of two separate ideas. The first is the notion of the Infinite which Science itself approves, the second the notion of perfection which Science is unable to show us anywhere unless it be found in the human consciousness and its thoughts, where it abides as the magnetic force ever drawing us onward and acts at the same time as a dynamic, giving power to every progressive movement, being “the Ideal” in the mind and heart of man.
Similar was the doctrine of Taine, who saw in Reason the ideal which would produce in mankind a new religion, which would be that of Science and Philosophy demanding from art forms of expression in harmony with themselves. This religion would be free in doctrine. Taine himself looked upon religion as “a metaphysical poem accompanied by belief,” and he approached to the conception of Spinoza of a contemplation which may well be called an “intellectual love of God.”
Like Renan, Renouvier was keenly interested in religion and its problems; he was also a keen opponent of the Roman Catholic Church and faith, against which he brought his influence into play in two ways—by hisnéo-criticismeas expressed in his written volumes and by his energetic editing of the two periodicalsLa Critique philosophiqueandLa Critique religieuse.
In undertaking the publication of these periodicals Renouvier’s confessed aim was that of a definite propaganda. While the Roman Church profited by the feelings of disappointment and demoralisation which followed the Franco-Prussian War, and strove to shepherd wavering souls again into its fold, to find there a peace which evidently the world could not give, Renouvier (together with his friend Pillon) endeavoured to rally his countrymen by urging the importance, and, if possible, the acceptance of his own political and religious convictions arising out of his philosophy. TheCritique philosophiqueappeared weekly from its commencement in 1872 until 1884, thereafter as a monthly until 1889. Among its contributors, whose names are of religious significance, were A. Sabatier, L. Dauriac, R. Allier[21]and William James.
[21]Now Dean of the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Paris.
Renouvier’s great enthusiasm for his periodical is the main feature of this period of his life, although, owing to his tremendous energy, it does not seem to have interfered with the publication of his more permanent works. The political and general policy of this journal may be summed up in a sentence from the last year’s issue,[22]where we find Renouvier remarking that it had been his aim throughout “to uphold strictly republican principles and to fight all that savoured of Caesar, or imperialism.” The declared foe of monarchy in politics, he was equally the declared foe of the Pope in the religious realm. His attitude was one of very marked hostility to the power of the Vatican, which he realised to be increasing within the Roman Church, and one of keen opposition to the general power of that Church and her clergy in France. Renouvier’s paper was quite definitely and aggressively anti-Catholic. He urged all Catholic readers of his paper who professed loyalty to the Republic to quit the Roman Church and to affiliate themselves to the Protestant body.
[22]La Critique philosophique, 1889, tome ii., p. 403.
It was with this precise object in view that, in 1878, he added to hisCritique philosophiquea supplement which he entitledLa Critique religieuse, a quarterly intended purely for propaganda purposes. “Criticism,” he had said, “is in philosophy what Protestantism is in religion.”[23]As certitude is, according to Renouvier’s doctrines, the fruit of intelligence, heart and will, it can never be obtained by the coercion of authority or by obedience such as the Roman Church demands. He appealed to the testimony of history, as a witness to the conflict between authority and the individual conscience. Jesus, whom the Church adores, was himself a superb example of such revolt. History, however, shows us, says Renouvier, the gradual decay of authority in such matters. Thought, if it is really to be thought in its sincerity, must be free. This Renouvier realised, and in this freedom he saw the characteristic of the future development of religion, and shows himself, in this connection, in substantial agreement with Renan and Guyau.
[23]Ibid., 1873, pp. 145-146.
Renouvier’s interest in theology and religion, and in the theological implications of all philosophical thought, was not due merely to a purely speculative impulse, but to a very practical desire to initiate a rational restatement of religious conceptions, which he considered to be an urgent need of his time. He lamented the influence of the Roman Church over the minds of the youth of his country, and realised the vital importance of the controversy between Church and State regarding secular education. Renouvier was a keen supporter of the secular schools (écoles laïques). In 1879, when the educational controversy was at its height, he issued a little book on ethics for these institutions (Petit Traité de Morale pour les Ecoles laïques), which was republished in an enlarged form in 1882, when the secular party, ably led by Jules Ferry, triumphed in the establishment of compulsory, free, secular education. That great achievement, however, did not solve all the difficulties presented by the Church in its educational attitude, and even now the influence of clericalism is dreaded.
Renouvier realised all the dangers, but he was forced also to realise that his enthusiastic and energetic campaign against the power of the Church had failed to achieve what he had desired. He complained of receiving insufficient support from quarters where he might well have expected it. His failure is a fairly conclusive proof that Protestantism has no future in France: it is a stubborn survival, rather than a growing influence. With the decline in the power and appeal of the Roman Catholic Church will come the decline of religion of a dogmatic and organised kind. Renouvier probably had an influence in hastening the day of the official severance of Church and State, an event which he did not live long enough to see.[24]
[24]It occurred, however, only two years after his death.
Having become somewhat discouraged, Renouvier stopped the publication of his religious quarterly in 1885 and made theCritique philosophiquea monthly instead of a weekly Journal. It ceased in 1889, but the following year Renouvier’s friend, Pillon, began a new periodical, which bore the same name as the one which had ceased with the outbreak of the war in 1870. This wasL’Année philosophique, to which Renouvier contributed articles from time to time on religious topics.
Some writers are of the opinion that Renouvier’s attacks on the Roman Catholic Church and faith, so far from strengthening the Protestant party in France, tended rather to increase the hostility to the Christian religion generally or, indeed, to any religious view of the universe.
Renouvier’s own statements in his philosophy, in so far as these concern religion and theology, are in harmony with his rejection of the Absolute in philosophy and the Absolute in politics. His criticism of the idea of God, the central point in any philosophy of religion, is in terms similar to his critique of the worship of the Absolute or the deification of the State.
In dealing with the question of a “Total Synthesis” Renouvier indicated his objections to the metaphysical doctrine of an Absolute, which is diametrically opposed to his general doctrine of relativity. He is violently in conflict with all religious conceptions which savour of this Absolute or have a pantheistic emphasis, which would diminish the value and significance of relativity and of personality. The “All-in-All” conception of God, which represents the pantheistic elements in many theologies and religions, both Christian and other, is not really a consciousness, he shows, for consciousness itself implies a relation, a union of the self and non-self. In such a conception actor, play and theatre all blend into one, God alone is real, and he is unconscious, for there is, according to this hypothesis, nothing outside himself which he can know. Renouvier realises that he is faced with the ancient problem of the One and the Many, with the alternative of unity or plurality. With his usual logical decisiveness Renouvier posits plurality. He does not attempt to reconcile the two opposites, and he deals with the problem in the manner in which he faced the antinomies of Kant. Both cannot be true, and the enemy of pantheism and absolutism acclaims pluralism, both for logical reasons and in order to safeguard the significance of personality. In particular he directly criticises the philosophy of Spinoza in which he sees the supreme statement of this philosophy of the eternal, the perfect, necessary, unchanging One, who is the same yesterday, to-day and forever. He admits that the idea of law or a system of laws leads to the introduction of something approaching the hypothesis of unity, but he is careful to show by his doctrine of freedom and personality that this is only a limited unity and that, considered even from a scientific standpoint, a Total Synthesis, which is the logical outcome of such an hypothesis, is ultimately untenable. He overthrows the idols of Spinoza and Hegel. Such absolutes, infinite and eternal, whether described as an infinite love which loves itself or a thought thinking thought, are nothing more to Renouvier than vain words, which it is absurd to offer as “The Living God.”
Against these metaphysical erections Renouvier opposes his doctrines of freedom, of personality, relativity and pluralism. He offers in contrast the conception of God as a Person, not an Absolute, but relative, not infinite, but finite, limited by man’s freedom and by contingency in the world of creatures. God, in his view, is not a Being who is omnipotent, or omniscient. He is a Person of whom man is a type, certainly a degraded type, but man is made in the image of the divine personality. Our notion of God, Renouvier reminds us, must be consistent with the doctrine of freedom, hence we must conceive of him not merely as a creator of creatures or subjects, but of creative power itself in those creatures. The relation of God to man is more complex than that of simple “creation” as this word is usually comprehended, “It is a creation of creation,” says Renouvier,[25]a remark which is parallel to the view expressed by Bergson, to the effect that, we must conceive of God as a “creator of creators.”[26]The existence of this Creative Person must be conceived, Renouvier insists, as indissolubly bound up with his work, and it is unintelligible otherwise. That work is one of creation and not emanation—it involves more than mere power and transcendence. God is immanent in the universe.
[25]Psychologie ralionnelle, vol. 2, p. 104.
[26]In his address to the Edinburgh Philosophical Society, 1914.
Theology has wavered between the two views—that of absolute transcendence and omnipotence and that of immanence based on freedom and limitation. In the first, every single thing depends upon the operation of God, whose Providence rules all. This is pure determinism of a theological character. In the other view man’s free personality is recognised; part of the creation is looked upon as partaking of freedom and contingency, therefore the divinity is conceived as limited and finite.
Renouvier insists that this view of God as finite is the only tenable one, for it is the only one which gives a rational and moral explanation of evil. In the first view God is responsible for all things, evil included, and man is therefore much superior to him from a moral standpoint. The idea of God must be ethically acceptable, and it is unfortunate that this idea, so central to religion, is the least susceptible to modification in harmony with man’s ethical development. We already have noticed Guyau’s stress upon this point in our discussion of ethics. Our conception of God must, Renouvier claims, be the affirmation of our highest category, Personality, and must express the best ethical ideals of mankind. Society suffers for its immoral and primitive view of God, which gives to its religion a barbarous character which is disgraceful and revolting to finer or more thoughtful minds.
It is true that the acceptance of the second view, which carries with it the complete rejection of the ideas of omnipotence and omniscience, modifies profoundly many of the old and primitive views of God. Renouvier recognises this, and wishes his readers also to grasp this point, for only so is religion to be brought forward in a development harmonious with the growth of man’s mind in other spheres. Man should not profess the results of elaborate culture in science while he professes at the same time doctrines of God which are not above those of a savage or primitive people. This is the chief mischief which the influence of the Hebrew writings of the Old Testament has had upon the Christian religion. The moral conscience now demands their rejection, for to those who value religion they can only appear as being of pure blasphemy. God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, consequently many things must be unknown to him until they happen. Foreknowledge and predetermination on his part are impossible, according to Renouvier. God is not to be conceived as a consciousness enveloping the entire universe, past, present and future, in a total synthesis. Such a belief is mischievous to humanity because of its fatalism, in spite of the comfortable consolation it offers to pious souls. Moreover, it presents the absurd view of God working often against himself.
The idea of God, Renouvier shows, arises out of the discussions of the nature of the universal laws of the universe and from the progress of personalities. The plausible conceptions of God based on causality and on “necessary essence” have not survived the onslaughts of Criticism. The personality of God seems to us, says Renouvier, indicated as the conclusion and the almost necessary culmination of the consideration of the probabilities laid down by the practical reason or moral law. The primary, though not primitive, evidence for the existence of God is contained in, and results from, the generalisation of the idea of “ends” in the universe. We must not go bevond phenomena or seek evidence in some fictitious sphere outside of our experience. In its most general and abstract sense the idea of God arises from the conception of moral order, immortality, or the accord of happiness and goodness. We cannot deny the existence of a morality in the order and movements of the world, a physical sanction to the moral laws of virtue and of progress, an external reality of good, a supremacy of good, a witness of the Good itself. Renouvier does not think that any man, having sufficiently developed his thought, would refuse to give the name God to the object of this supreme conception, which at first may seem abstract because it is not in any way crude, many of its intrinsic elements remaining undetermined in face of our ignorance, but which, nevertheless, or just for that very reason, is essentially practical and moral, representing the most notable fact of all those included in our belief. This method of approaching the problem of God is, he thinks, both simple and grand. It is a noble contrast to the scholastic edifice built up on the metaphysical perfection of being, called the Absolute. In this conception all attributes of personality are replaced by an accumulation of metaphysical properties, contradictory in themselves and quite incompatible with one another. This Absolute is a pure chimerical abstraction; its pure being and pure essence are equivalent to pure nothing or pure nonsense.
The fetish of pure substance, substantial cause, absolute being, whatever it be called, is vicious at all times, but particularly when we are dealing with the fundamental problems of science. It would be advisable here that the only method of investigation be that of atheism, for scientific investigation should not be tainted by any prejudices or preconceived ideas upon the nature of the divinity.
What really is Atheism? The answer to this query, says Renouvier, is clear. The idea of God is essentially a product of the moral law or conscience. An atheist is, strictly speaking, one who does not admit the reality of this moral order of ends and of persons as valuable in themselves. Verily, he himself may personally lead a much more upright life than the loud champions of theism, but he denies the general moral order, which is God. With the epithet of atheist as commonly used for those who merelv have a conception of God which differs from the orthodox view, we are not here concerned. That may be dismissed as a misuse of the word due to religious bigotry. The fruits of true atheism are materialism, pantheism and fatalism. Indeed any doctrine, even a theological doctrine, which debases and destroys the inherent value of the human consciousness and personality, is rightly to be regarded, whatever it maysayabout God, however it may repeat his name (and two of these doctrines are very fond of this repetition, but this must not blind us to the real issue)—that doctrine is atheistic. The most resolute materialists, the most high-minded worshippers of Providence and the great philosophers of the Absolute, find themselves united here in atheism. God is not a mere totality of laws operating in the universe. Such a theism is but a form of real atheism. We must, insists Renouvier, abandon views of this type, with all that savours of an Absolute, a Perfect Infinite, and affirm our belief in the existence of an order of Goodness which gives value to human personality and assures ultimate victory to Justice. This is to believe in God. We arrive at this belief rationally and after consideration of the world and of the moral law of persons. Through these we come to God. We do not begin with him and pretend to deduce these from his nature by some incomprehensiblea prioripropositions. The methods of the old dogmatic theology are reversed. Instead of beginning with a Being of whom we know nothing and can obviously deduce nothing, let us proceed inductively, and by careful consideration of the revelation we have before us in the world and in humanity let us build up our idea of God.
Renouvier is anxious that we should examine the data upon which we may found “rational hypotheses” as to the nature of God. The Critical Philosophy has upset the demonstrations of the existence of God, which were based upon causality and upon necessary existence (the cosmological and ontological proofs). Neo-criticism not only establishes the existence of God as a rational hypothesis, but “this point of view of the divine problem is the most favourable to the notion of the personality of God. The personality of God seems to us to be indicated as the looked-for conclusion and almost necessary consummation of the probabilities of practical reason.”[27]
[27]Psychologie rationnelle, vol. 2, p. 300.
The admission of ends, of finality, or purpose in the universe is frequently given as involving a supreme consciousness embracing this teleology. Also it is argued that Good could not exist in its generality save in an external consciousness—that is, a divine mind. By recalling the objections to a total synthesis of phenomena, Renouvier refutes both these arguments which rest upon erroneous methods in ontology and in theology. The explanation of the world by God, as in the cosmological argument, is fanciful, while the ontological argument leads us to erect an unintelligible and illogical absolute. Renouvier regards God as existing as a general consciousness corresponding to the generality of ends which man himself finds before him, finite, limited in power and in knowledge. But in avowing this God, Renouvier points him out to us as the first of all beings, a being like them, not an absolute, but a personality, possessing (and this is important) the perfection of morality, goodness and justice. He is the supreme personality in action, and as a perfect person he respects the personality of others and operates on our world only in the degree which the freedom and individuality of persons who are not himself can permit him, and within the limits of the general laws under which he represents to himself his own enveloped existence. This is the hypothesis of unity rendered intelligible, and as such Renouvier claims that it bridges in a marvellous manner the gap always deemed to exist between monotheism and polytheism—the two great currents of religious thought in humanity. The monotheists have appeared intolerant and fanatical in their religion and in their deity (not in so far as it was manifest in the thoughts of the simple, who professed a faith of the heart, but as shown in the ambitious theology of books and of schools), bearing on their banner the signs of a jealous deity, wishing no other gods but himself, declaring to his awed worshippers: “I am that I am; have no other gods but me!” On the other hand, the polytheistic peoples have been worshippers of beauty and goodness in all things, and where they saw these things they created a deity. They were more concerned with the immortality of good souls than the eternal existence of one supreme being; they were free-thinkers, creators of beauty and seekers after truth, and believers in freedom. The humanism of Greece stands in contrast to the idolatrous theocracy of the Hebrews.
The unity of God previously mentioned does not exclude the possibility of a plurality of divine persons. God the one would be the first and foremost,rex hominum deorumque. Some there may be that rise through saintliness to divinity, Sons of God, persons surpassing man in intelligence, power and morality. To take sides in this matter is equivalent to professing a particular religion. We must avoid the absolutist spirit in religion no less than in philosophy. By this Renouvier means that brutal fanaticism which prohibits the Gods of other people by passion and hatred, which aims at establishing and imposing its own God (which is, after all, but its own idea of God) as the imperialist plants his flag, his kind and his customs in new territory, in the spirit of war and conquest. Such a “holy war” is an outrage, based not upon real religion, but on intolerant fanaticism in which freedom and the inherent rights of personality to construct its own particular faith are denied.
Renouvier finds a parallelism between the worship of the State in politics and of the One God in religion. The systems in which unity or plurality of divine personality appears differ from one another in the same way in which monarchal and republican ideas differ. Monarchy in religion offers the same obstacles to progress as it has done in politics. It involves a parallel enslavement of one’s entire self and goods, a conscription which is hateful to freedom and detrimental to personality. To this supreme and regal Providence all is due; it alone in any real sense exists. Persons are shadows, of no reality, serfs less than the dust, to whom a miserable dole is given called grace, for which prayer and sacrifice are to be unceasingly made or chastisements from the Almighty will follow. This notion is the product of monarchy in politics, and with monarchy it will perish. The two are bound up, for “by the grace of God” we are told monarchs hold their thrones, by his favour their sceptre sways and their battalions move on to victory. This monarchal God, this King of kings and Lord of hosts, ruler of heaven and earth, is the last refuge of monarchs on the earth. Confidence in both has been shaken, and both, Renouvier asserts, will disappear and give place to a real democracy, not only to republics on earth, but to the conception of the whole universe as a republic. Men raise up saints and intercessors to bridge the gulf between the divine Monarch and his slaves. They conceive angels as doing his work in heaven; they tolerate priests to bring down grace to them here and now. The doctrine of unity thus gives rise to fanatical religious devotion or philosophical belief in the absolute, which stifles religion and perishes in its own turn. The doctrine of immortality, based on the belief in the value of human personality, leads us away from monarchy to a republic of free spirits. A democratic religion in this sense will display human nature raised to its highest dignity by virtue of an energetic affirmation of personal liberty, tolerance, mutual respect and liberty of faith—a free religion without priests or clericalism, not in conflict with science and philosophy, but encouraging these pursuits and in turn encouraged by them.[28]
[28]The fullest treatment of this is the large section in the conclusion to thePhilosophie analytique de l’Histoire(tome iv.).Cf. also the discussion of the influence of religious beliefs on societies in the last chapter ofLa Nouvelle Monadologie.