7.Conclusion
The conclusion from all that has now been said is that religious knowledge is subject to the law of transformation which regulates all the manifestations of human life and thought.
As there is disproportion and disparity between the object of religion and its means of expression, it will always be possible and necessary to distinguish, in all its creations, between the form and the substance, the body and the soul. Religious symbolism will therefore always be very variablede facto, but subject,de jure, to new interpretations.
This variability, however, is not unlimited. It is necessarily confined within limits which, while not easy to define theoretically, are none the less precise and fixed; for the great religious creations are organisms, and every organism carries in itself, determined by its own nature, the exact capacity of its metamorphoses.
In every living organism, in fact, there is a principle of stability and a principle of movement. The identity of a human being persists through all the modifications, internal and external, which he undergoes. So with the language of a people; and so with every historical religion. Its fundamental and regulative principle is the relation it establishes between the soul and God. The form or external realisation of this principle depends, no doubt, on the race, the geographical environment, the historical period. It will vary therefore with these circumstances. But the religious type or organic principle remaining the same, this religion will appear the same throughout the incessant movement of its dogmas, rites, and symbols. This is the very condition of its life. Forms which cannot bend, symbols whose fresh and living interpretation is exhausted, a rigid body that no longer assimilates or eliminates any external element, represent a state of sterility and death, to be followed by a speedy dissolution.
Pious men are right in clinging obstinately to the stability of their principle of piety, but they ought to cling as tenaciously to the renewal of forms and ideas in their religion; for this is the only proof that their treasure has kept its value, and their religious principle its organising virtue. The life of a religion is measured by this power of adaptation and renovation. If Christianity is the universal and eternal religion, it is because its virtuality in this respect is infinite.
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Before I close, let me try to prevent two misunderstandings. In saying that in dogmas we must distinguish the religious substance and the intellectual form, I do not mean that we either can or ought to isolate them from each other, or that we can ever hope to have them separately. Piety is only conscious for us and discernible by others when incarnate in its expression or intellectual image. A religion without doctrine, a piety without thought, a feeling without expression, these are things essentially contradictory. It is as vain to wish to seize pure piety, as in philosophy it is to seek to define "the thing in itself." When we speak of the inward religious fact, then, of pious experience, we do not speak of a bare experience; we speak of a psychological phenomenon, of a precise and, consequently, formulated experience.
In the second place, for religious science, it is not a question of isolated experience, of the experience of a single individual. The material would be too precarious, and the field of observation too limited. The question refers to the individual life in its continuity, and to the life of the religious society considered in its historical development.
A social and universal as much and even more than it is an individual fact, it is in the social life of the species, in organised religious societies, in their institutions, their common worship, their liturgy, their rules of faith and discipline, that religion objectively realises its fundamental principle, manifests its inner soul, and develops all its power. It is only as a social manifestation that it can become an object of scientific study, and that it has need of explanation. Moreover, a religious life which remains hidden in the individual consciousness, which does not communicate itself, which does not create any spiritual solidarity, any fraternity of soul, is as if it were not; it is a mere film of feeling, an ephemeral poetic flower, which has no more effect on the individual himself than it has on the human race.
From these considerations springs a method. The dogmatic treatment of religious knowledge will have for its subject the tradition of the religious society as it is fixed, conserved, and developed in its historic monuments. It will consider that tradition from the symbolic point of view, as the objective revelation of the inner life of the Church, and of its piety. The tradition will then appear not as something dead and immutable, but as a power continuing in ourselves. To grasp this soul in its fruitful continuity and in the perpetual renewal of the external organism; to comprehend them in their living unity; to tell the story of the genesis of dogmas and their endless metamorphoses as a constant and necessary incarnation of the principle that is manifested in them; to follow this uninterrupted chain in history, and prolong it into our own life,—such is the method, at once critical and positive, conservative and progressive, firm in piety and always deferential to science, which critical symbolism enables us to apply to all religious creations.
The error of that form of religious knowledge calledOrthodoxyis that of forgetting the historically and psychologically conditioned character of all doctrines, and of desiring to raise into the absolute that which is born in time, and which must necessarily modify itself in order to live in time. Impotent to arrest the current of ideas and the movement of minds, it can only establish its rule by political measures, by regulations enacted and applied like civil laws—decisions of popes, bishops, or synods, trials for heresy, dogmatic tribunals. Orthodoxy has lost the sense of the symbolical character of Confessions of Faith, which, however, it still names symbols. Its misfortune and its failing is to be anti-historical.
The error ofRationalism, at once the brother and the enemy of orthodoxy, is of the same nature, but it is produced in an opposite sense. It does not lose sight of the imperfect and precarious character of traditional dogmas and symbols; it exaggerates it; but it loses sight of their specifically religious contents. Orthodoxy is mistaken as to the nature of the body of religion; rationalism as to the nature of its soul. Beneath the old traditional ideas it seeks for other ideas, moral or rational ideas, freer from sensible elements, and less contradictory, which it mistakes for the essence of religion. It replaces dogmas by other dogmas which it believes to be more simple, and which it regards as absolute truth. But in giving to religion a rational or doctrinal content, it empties it of its real content, of specific religious experience; it kills faith, which no longer having an object of its own, no longer has araison d'être. It has less liking than orthodoxy for symbolism and for religious creations; it is radically impossible for it to comprehend, and consequently to interpret, them. The chief vice and the misfortune of rationalism is to be anti-religious.
The theory ofCritical Symbolism, whose broad outlines we have traced, will bring us out of this old antithesis. It shows to us the kind of truth and the legitimacy possessed by symbolical ideas, without ignoring the psychological and historical determinism which rules their form and their appearance. It must not be imagined that, from this point of view, everything becomes fluid and inconstant in religion—that nothing in it can be fixed or permanent. In the progress of his life, man is destined to realise his spiritual nature, to attain to what St. Paul calls "the stature of Christ," in which the religious and moral ideal is realised. This moral stature is a reality, the highest of all realities. We tend towards it without ceasing, and the value of each moment of our inner life is measured by the progress that it marks towards that supreme end. For this inner life there is a norm which imposes itself on the consciousness with an imperative necessity, and, consequently, there may be religious symbols which are normal and normative in relation to others. These are the symbols which represent with perfect simplicity and fitness either this ideal end of the Christian life or some of the necessary moments through which the soul passes on the way to it. There are symbols, in a word, such as that of the Heavenly Father, the Kingdom of God, the New Birth, the Effusion of the Holy Spirit, so intimately bound up with our religious life, with its origin, its progress, or its end, which one cannot conceive as disappearing, so long as the spiritual life of humanity exists. All the exclusively religious words of Christ which bear directly on the consciousness are of this number. And it is of them that He was able to say without being contradicted by the ages: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away."
On the other hand, it is no less impossible to ignore the distinction we have made in symbol between substance and form. Now, this distinction opens the door to criticism. The most conservative of Christians confess that men may adhere to a doctrine without having appropriated its religious content; that they may be orthodox without being pious. They therefore make it the duty of every member of the Church to assimilate the contents of the symbol. But how can the duty of personal assimilation be imposed without the right arising to critically interpret the transmitted forms? Is it not a psychological necessity for each believer to bring his inner religious consciousness into harmony with his general culture? What if these syntheses and conciliations are necessarily unstable and precarious because of the constant development of life and knowledge? When a man is walking his equilibrium is destroyed and re-established at each step. It is the very condition of walking.
Symbolism, which thus makes peace in the individual, may also effect it in religious societies. In Catholicism the unity of the Church is only maintained by a central infallible authority and by political means. That authority creates peace by imposing silence. Dogmas only subsist because no one concerns himself with them. Can Protestant communities maintain their unity by the same method? The Catholic method ruins Protestant communities, inevitably, by causing schisms frequent in proportion as their life and thought become intense. The theory of symbolism offers them a more honourable issue. It permits them to combine veneration for traditional symbols with perfect independence of spirit by leaving to believers, on their own responsibility, the right to assimilate them and adapt them to their experiences. They will attach themselves to tradition with all the more sincerity and zeal as each one is able to find in it that of which his religious faith has need. It will be a help and not a yoke. Men will love it; they will defend it as the link between the generations, as a family heritage, as the place where souls of every race and age, and stage of scientific culture, meet and mingle and commune.
Before laying down the pen, I ought perhaps to reply to one or two objections.
The first reproach that has been addressed to me is contained in the words, "Naturalistic Evolutionism." A conception more or less materialistic of the universe is thus attributed to me, according to which, like Herbert Spencer, I should explain all things by the single law of evolution, and end sooner or later by reducing the laws of the moral world to the laws of the physical world, since I make of the first a simple transformation of the second. Need I say that this is the very opposite of my thought? It is true that I like to use the word evolution, and to consider all phenomena in their natural succession. But this is not a metaphysical doctrine; it is a process of study, a method which consists in these two essential rules: to observe each fact as it presents itself; and to observe it in its order,i.e.in the conditions in which it presents itself, because a fact only possesses its truth and value in that order and succession. On our planet, moral life emerges slowly and painfully out of organic life. Must we therefore conclude that there is no more in the one than in the other, and that they are of equal value? Certainly not. Both these series of phenomena must be placed in their relations and connections; but the method which makes them known to me gives me no more right to confound them than to separate them, to ignore their differences than to forget their analogies. It shows me, on the contrary, that there is advance,realprogress from the one to the other; that the first in date has its end in the second; that there is a sort of living and continuous creation, each stage and degree of which reveals new riches and new glories. This is so thoroughly the oasis of my religious philosophy that there would be more ground or, at all events, more excuse for accusing me of denying the reality of the world than the continuous action of the Divine Creator.
It is true that the one reproach has not saved me from the other. Both have been addressed to me by persons who have not taken the trouble to reconcile them. The accusation of Pantheism, contradictory as it may seem, has been added to that of Naturalistic Evolutionism. I have been made to appear the blind and docile disciple of an idealism more or less Hegelian, which would annihilate the reality of second causes in order to contemplate in the universe the flux and transformation of a first cause or substance, of which one might either say that it is everything or that it is nothing. But here, again, they lose sight of the character of the method that I follow. It leads me to discover in my consciousness the mysterious and real co-existence of a particular cause, which is myself, and of a universal cause, which is God. That, I repeat, is a mystery impenetrable to analysis, but undeniable by any man who examines himself and enters into the ultimate basis of his life. It is the mystery out of which religion springs by an invincible necessity. Now, as this mystery is posited by me at the very outset of my researches, and maintained to the end, how can they legitimately reproach me with sacrificing either of the two terms which constitute it to the other—the first effect of which would be to dissipate and make impossible my theory of the psychological origin of religion? "In me," said Charles Secretan, "lives some one greater than me"—a mysterious guest whose universal and eternal action I feel beneath the variable phenomena of my empirical activity, to Whom, when I am good, confiding, humble, brave, I always attribute my goodness, my faith, my courage, my humility, as to Him I attribute my whole life.
I cannot comprehend the co-existence of the finite and the infinite; but this duality is everywhere. I observe that in the physical as in the moral world there is, in each phenomenon, a latent force, a sort of potential energy, which raises it and urges it beyond itself. Nature is perpetually becoming, that is to say, in perpetual travail. It is not true that there is nothing new under the sun, and that the future must simply repeat the past. Creation is not yet completed. "My Father worketh hitherto," said Jesus. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." But the little that I perceive of the Divine work demonstrates to me that it is progressive, that it raises and enriches life at every step, and that this progress accounts exactly for the essential antinomies amid which my reason loses itself and my heart adores. To wish to reduce everything to unity is to turn the kingdom of life into the domain of death. For my part, I have long since renounced what is justly called "the philosophy of identity," that abstract dialectic which, throwing all things back to their point of logical departure, renders perfectly incomprehensible and superfluous the ephemeral development which they have in our consciousness and in history. The painful contradictions observed by Pascal in our moral life, and the insoluble antinomies in our thought unveiled by Kant, always seem to me to go nearer to the bottom of things than the ontological deductions of Plato, Spinoza, and Hegel.
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In this book I have hardly noted any but facts that have been verified in myself and by myself. It is true that I suppose that every reflective reader is capable of finding them and tracing them out in his own personal experience. Those who are able and wishful to re-read my book in themselves, and thus verify my analyses, may perhaps draw some profit from it. Those who read me otherwise will not only lose their time and pains—they will misunderstand at every step the meaning of my phrases and the direction of my ideas. Beneath my reasonings or my images they will put other ideas and other intentions than mine, and they may afterwards, with an apparent good conscience, deduce from them the most terrible consequences.... Philosophical language lends itself to all and permits all; and the mischief of it is that it would be useless to desire to prevent these quarrels. New explanations only give rise to new misunderstandings, and simply serve to perpetuate a dispute without interest and without fruit. We can only repeat the saying of the ancient sages of Arabia:Magna est veritas et prævalebit.
THE END