3.The Two Orders of Knowledge
... The ego can only be conscious of itself and of its modifications. That which does not touch it in any way remains unknown. Now, the modifications of the ego may be reduced to two groups. The one comes to it from without, representing the action of things upon it; these are sensations. The other springs up within, representing the action of the ego on things, its spontaneous energy, its volitions, and its acts. Thence come the two constituent elements of every consciousness, the distinction between object and subject, the ego and the non-ego, thought and the object of thought. We callobjectiveevery idea or quality that it is possible to refer to the object alone, independently of the action or disposition of the subject. We callsubjectiveall knowledge implying identity of subject and object, all discipline bearing on the rules of the spontaneous activity of the ego, since without that activity the rules which should direct it would not exist. In the first case we are conscious of a distinction and even of a radical opposition between the object and the subject of knowledge; in the second, we are conscious of their fundamental identity in this sense, that the thinking and willing subject presents itself to itself as an object of thought and study. In order that the two orders of knowledge, engendered by this duality of origin, may be brought into logical unity, it is necessary either that the subject should enter into the object, that the ego should be absorbed by the non-ego, so that the laws of the non-ego should become the laws of the ego—and that would be materialism; or that the object should enter into the subject so that the laws of the subject should become the law of things—and that would be idealism. Outside these two systems, equally violent and absolute, the two orders of knowledge are irreducible, because in us the consciousness of the ego and the consciousness of the world are at present in conflict. Morality is neither reconciled to science, nor science to morality. In theirrapprochement, progressive to infinity, a hiatus always subsists.
One would be greatly deceived if he reduced this difference to the ordinary opposition between the physical and the spiritual, between external and internal phenomena. Sensation, the foundation and the starting point of the objective order of knowledge, is just as internal as volition. On the other hand, man is a part of what we call Nature; and, as such, he is the theatre of a crowd of internal and external phenomena which, so far as that is possible, should be observed, described, explained, by the principle of causality, like all the other phenomena of the physical order. For example, the mechanism of memory and that of logic, the correlation between mental activities and the physiological modifications of the cerebro-spinal system, the laws of association of ideas, the stable forms of the human understanding, all that psychology that is now called "scientific psychology," rightfully enters into the domain of the sciences of Nature. It is a province that may be explored like all the others. The psychological observations made in it are objective not less than those of physiology, for the reason that the phenomena that are observed, while occurring in the ego, are nevertheless produced in it without the voluntary intervention of the ego, and even without its express consent. Moreover, they do not imply or provoke on the part of the ego any moral judgment properly so called.
On the other hand, take the sciences of Nature which deal with the objects most widely removed from man, with astronomy or geology,e.g.; no longer consider the bare external results; consider rather that spiritual force which we call thought, and which has the virtue of producing these sciences; what are they but the external revelation of the creative and organising energy of the thinking subject, the revelation of spirit to spirit? The work, seen from this subjective side, serves simply to set forth the worth of the worker. You speak then of the ordinary savant or of the intellectual genius, of the good or bad scientific workman. The philosophy of science becomes a necessarily subjective discipline. "Science," in fact, is simply an abstraction. In the reality there are only minds more or less ignorant, conscious, at each step, of their strength and of their impotence, of their defeats and victories,—minds condemned to a perpetual effort to struggle out of the night from which they slowly mount. When you think of this most disinterested side of the scientific life you ask yourself what is the basis, in the last resort, of this confidence of mind in itself—the foundation of all the rest. You see clearly that this activity of pure intellect demands, like all other human activity, attention, forgetfulness of self, a heroism, in short, going to the point of contempt of common enjoyments, and of the sacrifice of life itself. You have then left the domain of the sciences of Nature and have entered the realms of spirit, and there rise around you the problems which form the object of the moral disciplines.
Such is the intimate complexity of the two orders of knowledge that a persevering reflection discovers them to be everywhere mingled, and it is with difficulty that they are disentangled. All knowledge is an aggregate (ensemble) of judgments; but the judgments which constitute physical knowledge and those that constitute moral science are not of the same nature. The first are judgments ofexistence, bearing solely on the causality, the succession, the distribution of phenomena,i.e.on the relations of objects to each other, apart from the subject. The basis on which they rest is sensation, and, as sensation has for necessary forms time and space, time and space will also be the forms and limits of these judgments. Forming homogeneous quantities, time and space give the notion of figure and of number, so that mathematics is the foundation and the necessary framework of all the physical sciences. They rise above this abstract science of the forms of sensibility in the order of their complexity, and form a hierarchy from rational mechanics to sociology, of which Comte and so many others vainly endeavour to make a simple social mechanics. The destiny of this universal objective science is to progress for ever without ever being completed; for it is of the same nature as number—that is to say, essentially indefinite and imperfect. It not only finds an inexhaustible subject of study in the external world; it encounters a mystery impenetrable to its methods and analyses in the very subject that creates it, and which, in creating it, remains outside the mechanism it sets in motion.
In fact, when the thinking subject considers itself, or considers things in relation to itself, it brings to bear upon itself and them a second series of judgments of an altogether different character. It estimates them and it estimates itself according to anormwhich is in itself. It declares them to be good or bad, beautiful or ugly, rich or poor in life, harmonious or discordant. In other words, it is no longer the idea of number—it is the category ofthe goodwhich becomes the necessary form of these new judgments, which, for this reason, are called judgments ofestimationor of dignity, and it is clear that between these two kinds of judgments there is no common measure. They can no more encounter each other than two balls rolled on different planes.
Will it be said that the judgments founded on the concept ofthe goodare insignificant and worthless because neither man nor the good of man can be the measure of things? If this remark is useful for abating human pride and preventing childish illusions, it does not efface the primordial distinction between good and evil inherent to the human mind, nor would one wish to deduce from it the vanity of all morality, and the equal worth of all the manifestations of life. The proof, moreover, that the rule ofthe goodis above man is that it judges and condemns him pitilessly; it is that consciousness, independently of the painful or agreeable sensations that it receives from things, establishes between them a fitness (convenance), a hierarchy, and constitutes the harmonious unity of the universe itself in the supreme idea of the sovereign good. If the legitimacy of the confidence which the conscience has in its rule is to be contested, I do not see why we should not contest that of the confidence of pure thought in itself. Then everything crumbles to pieces, both science and conscience, in the same abyss.
In reality, the good, the beautiful, the relations of fitness and of harmony, are so many principles of knowledge, which progress, like physical knowledge, by the culture of the mind. The form of the moral judgments is universal, and identical in every man; it is this form alone which constitutes man as a moral being; but the contents of this form vary unceasingly in history, according to times and places. Everywhere and always man has sought the good, but he has not always placed it in the same things; he has formed different ideas of it, and these ideas have become more and more noble and pure in proportion as his life itself has been ennobled and purified. That is why there is a history of morality, of religion, of æsthetics, as there is a history of the natural sciences, although progress in these two classes has been of an opposite nature and accomplished according to different laws. However this may be, we may conclude that if mathematics, by the concept of number, the abstract form of sensation, is the mould and framework of the sciences of Nature, ethics, bythe categorical imperative, the abstract form of the activity of spirit, is the foundation of the moral sciences, which are as diverse as the various activities of the ego, each having special rules and criteria, no doubt, but always falling under the common form of obligation.
Distinct and often in conflict, these two orders of knowledge are none the lesssolidaire; they are always developed by their action the one upon the other, and tend to a higher unity, the need for which gives rise to attempts, renewed from age to age, at a metaphysical synthesis. If you take the disciplines as taught in the schools to-day, you will find that they are almost all mixed sciences such as history, social economy, politics, philosophy, etc. So soon as the savant rises above the simple description of phenomena, and wishes to organise his cosmos by formulating the unity and harmony of it, he necessarily borrows this principle of organisation and of harmony from the experience of his subjective life. On the contrary, religion, art, morality, can only be realised in the conditions prescribed to them by science properly so called, and the last problem always propounded to human thought at each stage of its development is the conciliation of themoral ideaacquired by the exercise of the will, and thescientific ideafurnished by its experience of the world.
There is no question, then, of separating the two orders of knowledge, but of referring each of them to its true source, and preventing a confusion which, mixing everything up, renders everything uncertain. It is impossible in good psychology to trace to one centre the divergent manifestations of our spiritual life, and to drive the moral into the physical or the physical into the moral. Our spiritual life is like an ellipse with two centres of light: on the one side, the centre ofreceptive life, where all the sensations received are elaborated into phenomenal knowledge; on the other, the centre ofactive life, at which are concentrated all the revelations of the mind's own inner energy. The line of the ellipse described by the relation and the distance of these two centres is the approximate but never perfect synthesis of the two kinds of data which thus arrive in consciousness. He who does not distinguish these two centres, and transforms the ellipse into a circumference with equal rays and an unique centre, necessarily remains in chaos and old night.
From these general considerations is naturally deduced the specific character of religious knowledge, its inward nature and its range.
4.The Subjectivity of Religious Knowledge
The first contrast that we have seen to arise between the knowledge of Nature and religious knowledge is that the first isobjective, and that the second can never pass out ofsubjectivity. This does not mean that the second is less certain, but that it is of another order, and is produced in another way and with other characteristics.
In one sense, the knowledge of Nature is subjective, for it depends on our mental constitution, and on the laws of our knowing faculty. But religious and moral knowledge is subjective in a different manner and for a deeper reason. The object of scientific knowledge is always outside the ego, and it is in knowing it as an object outside the ego that the objectivity of that knowledge consists. But the object of religious or moral knowledge—God, the Good, the Beautiful—these are not phenomena that may be grasped outside the ego and independently of it. God only reveals Himself in and by piety; the Good, in the consciousness of the good man; the Beautiful, in the creative activity of the artist. This is only saying that the object of these kinds of knowledge is immanent in the subject himself, and only reveals itself by the personal activity of that subject. Absolutely eliminate the religious and moral subject, or rather take from him all personal activity, and you suppress, for him, the object of morality and religion.
Let us take up again that striking antithesis of the two orders of knowledge. What is at once the basis and the sign of the objectivity of the natural sciences?
One may theoretically ask whether the world of science, the world thatappearsto us, is exactly the real world, existing outside of us. It is thus that in the philosophy of Kant the famous question as tothe thing in itselfis stated. But it is equally certain that in the name of that philosophy this question ought logically to be discarded. One is astonished that the author of theCritique of Pure Reasondid not immediately close that door opened to scientific scepticism. After his critique, in fact, it is evident that that substratum which some are forced to imagine as a support to phenomena—that the indeterminate and indeterminable substance that they represent beneath the forms and qualities of things,—is both a non-being and nonsense.Das Ding an sich ist ein Unding. (The thing in itself is an unthing.) It is a remnant of ancient metaphysics which ought to be eliminated from modern philosophy. In allowing it to introduce itself into our theory of knowledge, it overturns it as would a heterogeneous element. He that persists in distinguishing between the thing in itself and the phenomenal thing will never be able to give an account of the objectivity of the sciences of Nature, and of the kind of certitude that belongs to them.
That which appears to us from without is not doubtless all the reality of the world; but it is a real world. By his calculations, Leverrier came first to suspect the existence of a large planet as yet unperceived; then he came to measure its volume, to trace its orbit, and finally to mark its place at a given time. He said to his brother astronomers: "Look there!" and the planet appeared at the end of their telescopes.
How explain, moreover, without this reality of science, the power that science gives to man over Nature? His power, is it not always exactly in proportion to his knowledge?
In what then does this objectivity of science consist if it is not founded on the pretended knowledge of the thing in itself? In the necessary link that scientific thought establishes between phenomena. This necessity does not come from experience, for it is something ideal, which our mind adds to all experience. But, as we can only think according to these necessary laws, we necessarily objectivise in all scientific study. We thus affirm, of necessity, the fundamental unity of the laws of thought and the laws of phenomena. Experience always confirms this immediate affirmation. Now this necessity, it is objectivity itself; it is the only noumenon that we are authorised to seek behind phenomena in Nature, and behind the manifestations of pure reason in spirit.
The first effect of this objective necessity is to eliminate from the work of science the feelings and the subjective will of the ego. A thinking and acting subject is no doubt necessary in making science; but the characteristic of science is to see what it studies apart from the subject, apart even from the psychical phenomena that it observes in the ego itself. Posited outside the ego, the laws that it promulgates appear to us therefore independent of it. This elimination of the subject from the conclusions of science thus becomes the sign and the measure of their objectivity. Where the elimination is complete, as in astronomy and physics, the objectivity is entire. On the contrary, history,e.g.where the elimination can never be absolute, always tends towards objectivity, but never reaches it.
It is altogether otherwise with religious knowledge. With it we enter at once into the subjective order—that is to say, into an order of psychological facts, of determinations and internal dispositions of the subject itself, the succession of which constitutes his personal life. To eliminate the ego would not here be possible; for this would be both to eliminate the materials and to dry up the living spring of knowledge. An ancient illusion pretended that we know God, as we know the phenomena of Nature, and that the religious life springs from that objective knowledge as by a sort of practical application. The very opposite is true. God is not a phenomenon that we may observe apart from ourselves, or a truth demonstrable by logical reasoning. He who does not feel Him inside his heart will never find Him outside. The object of religious knowledge only reveals itself in the subject, by the religious phenomena themselves. It is with the religious consciousness as with the moral consciousness. In this the subject feels obliged, and this obligation itself constitutes the revelation of the moral object which obliges us. There is no good known outside that. The same in religion: we never become conscious of our piety without—at the same time that we feel religiously moved—perceiving, more or less obscurely, in that very emotion the object and the cause of religion,i.e.God.
Observe the natural and spontaneous movement of piety: a soul feels itself to be trusting, that it is established in peace and light; is it strong, humble, resigned, obedient? It immediately attributes its strength, its faith, its humility, its obedience, to the action of the Divine Spirit within itself. Anne Doubourg, dying at the stake, prayed thus: "O God, Do not abandon me lest I should fall off from Thee." The prophet of Israel said: "Turn me, O Lord, and I shall be turned." And the father in the Gospels cried: "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief." To feel thus in our personal and empirical activity the action and the presence of the Spirit of God within our own spirit, is the mystery, but it is also the source, of religion.
It will be seen how much religious knowledge and the science of Nature differ by their very origin. The one is the theory of the receptive and logical life of the ego; the other is the theory of its active and spontaneous life. As both the receptive and the active life are one, however, the two orders of knowledge are neither isolated nor independent. But they must never be confounded. Their results will always remain heterogeneous; they are not of the same order, and cannot supply the place of each other. If you were to admit,e.g., that philosophers may succeed (as they have often been believed to do) in establishing a veritable objective science of God, and if they were thus to know God in Himself and apart from the religious ego, that scientific knowledge of God, even if it were possible, would not be religious knowledge; for to know God religiously is to know Him in His relation to us—that is to say, in our consciousness, in so far as He is present in it and determines it towards piety. This is the sense in which it is permissible to maintain that religion is as independent of metaphysics as it is of cosmology. It is the same with the knowledge of the world. To know the world as an astronomer or a physicist is not to know it religiously. To know it religiously is, while taking it as it is, and in no wise contradicting the scientific laws according to which it is governed, to determine its value in relation to the life of spirit; it is to estimate it according as it is a means, a hindrance, or a menace, to the progress of that life. In the same way, to know ourselves religiously is not to construct scientific psychology; but that psychology being once constructed, and properly constructed, it is to realise ourselves in our relation both to God and to the world, forcing ourselves to surmount the contradictions from which we suffer, in order that we may attain to unity and peace of mind. Thus, not only can religious knowledge never cast off its subjective character; it is in reality nothing but that very subjectivity of piety considered in its action and in its legitimate development.
The inner nature of these two orders of knowledge having been defined, it becomes evident that each of them is valid in its own domain, and that they cannot legitimately encroach upon each other. To try to establish by religious faith the reality of any phenomenon whatsoever, of which experimental science or intellectual criticism are the sole judges; or to wish to formulate by means of objective science a moral judgment which springs from the subjective consciousness—these are two equivalent encroachments and abuses. Experimental science has the right to forbid the religious consciousness to do violence to it; but the religious consciousness has an equal right to restrict science to its true limits. We must prevent confusion if we would put an end to the conflicts between them. To enclose God in any phenomenal form is, properly speaking, superstition oridolatry; to confine or dissipate the soul in external phenomenism, and to deny the seriousness and value of its religious and moral activity, isinfidelity, properly so called.
Truths of the religious and moral order are known by a subjective act of what Pascal callsthe heart. Science can know nothing about them, for they are not in its order. In the same way the phenomena of Nature are only known and measured by observation and calculation. Neither the heart nor religious faith can decide with respect to them. Each order has its certitude. We must not say that in the one the certitude is greater than in the other. Science is not more sure of its object than moral or religious faith is of its own; but it is sure in a different way. Scientific certitude has at its basis intellectual evidence. Religious certitude has for its foundation the feeling of subjective life, or moral evidence. The first gives satisfaction to the intellect; the second gives to the whole soul the sense of order re-established, of health regained, of force and peace. It is the happy feeling of deliverance, the inward assurance of "salvation."
It is not surprising, lastly, that these two kinds of knowledge or of certitude should spring up and propagate themselves by different means. Objective science transmits itself by objective demonstration. The subjective life of the savant has nothing to do with it. To convince us of the reality of his discoveries, an astronomer does not need to be a good man. On the contrary, a fundamentally immoral man will always be a detestable professor of ethics. Religion is only propagated by religious men. It may also be added that, in religious knowledge, the intellectual demonstration or the idea has no value except in so far as it serves as the expression and the vehicle of the personal life of the subject. This is the secret and the mystery of eloquence. Thesi vis me flere, dolendum, is true in all the moral disciplines, as much and more than in æsthetics. One gains nothing by attempting to demonstrate objectively the existence of God. That demonstration is ineffective towards those who have no piety; for those who have, it is superfluous. The true religious propaganda is effected by inward contagion.Ex vivo vivus nascitur. Accuracy in theology is much less important in religion than warmth of piety. Pitiful arguments have in all ages been followed by admirable conversions. Those who are scandalised at this have not yet penetrated into the essence of religious faith.
For want of this clear and frank separation between our two orders of knowledge, one sees, on the one hand, philosophers pretending to transform ethics and philosophy into objective science, and, on the other, savants naïvely giving forth their objective science as a metaphysic and as a solution of the enigma of life. Two illusions, in whose train everything is mixed up and founded. Objective ethics are everything you could wish—except ethics. You might as well speak of a round square. When an objective science transforms itself into metaphysics, it ceases to be science and becomes subjective philosophy. This goes without saying.
And yet, in distinguishing the two orders we must not isolate them, nor above all must we lose sight of their solidarity, their close connection, and correspondence. The subject is one, and has a clear consciousness of his unity; that is why he always tends towards a synthesis. Phenomenal science cannot complete itself without borrowing from the subjective consciousness of the ego the ideas of unity, of plan, and of harmony. On the other hand, the moral and religious consciousness, in order to express itself, needs to borrow from phenomenal science the data which it uses, and, consequently, it should always avoid contradicting them. Thus we tend towards the synthetic harmony of a continuous effort and of an indefectible faith; but we discard none the less resolutely the philosophy of logical unity. We obstinately refuse to admit that the subjective order can ever be deduced, by way of consequence and application, from the objective order of knowledge: that is the error of materialistic Pantheism; and,vice versâ, that the objective order of phenomenal science can or ought to be deduced from the religious or moral order: that is the opposite error of all the dogmatisms. The mental cannot be simply reduced to the physical, or the physical entirely to the mental. We must respect the fruitful antinomies of life from which the necessary progress springs. The tendency towards harmony is there, not the harmony itself. This is the reward promised, the aim proposed, to effort. Our philosophy ought to regard the spiritual life in its becoming—that is to say, in its growth and in its conflicts, without wishing, like all idealist and materialist speculations, to make of the actual and transient moment the eternal metaphysical reality.
5.Teleology
Subjective in essence and origin, religious knowledge isteleologicalin its procedure, and this second characteristic springs from the first.
Teleology is the form of all organic life and of all conscious activity. Now, what is moral knowledge but the theory of the conscious life of spirit?
Without the principle of causation, phenomena, in science, would not be connected; without the idea of end, or principle of direction, biological and psychical facts could not be organised—that is to say, hierarchised.
Mechanism and teleology: these then are the two new terms for the antithesis formed by the knowledge of Nature and religious knowledge. But it is a prejudice to believe that the one form of explanation excludes the other or renders it superfluous. We have examples to the contrary not only in the machines constructed by man, but also in all living organisms, in which, according to Claude Bernard, thedirective ideaof life is realised in an absolute determinism.
The mechanical explanation of phenomena and the determinism of science only become exclusive of teleology when they are transformed into metaphysical materialism—that is to say, when it is affirmed,à priori, and by a subjective act, that there is nothing in the universe but matter and the movements of matter. But then, it is clear that materialism, which believes itself to be scientific, becomes a philosophy, and like all other philosophies it falls under the jurisdiction not only of the objective science of the world, but of the consciousness of the ego.
The ideas of cause and end spring from one and the same source. The idea of cause awakens in us because the ego, as soon as it knows itself, has the clear sense of being the author of its acts; it has this sense by that of the very effort that it has made. But, at the same time, it knows that it made that effort with a view to an end which attracted it. Cause and end, therefore, are the two aspects of the same conscious act. The one is the backward glance of the consciousness; the other is its forward look. As we only know the world by reflecting it in the mirror of our consciousness, it follows that the two categories of cause and end impose themselves on our understanding with an equal necessity.
There is another consequence of this psychological observation. The consciousness of the ego is one; neither the idea of cause nor the idea of end, by itself, would suffice to explain the whole universe to me. It is easy to see at a glance that the objective science of phenomena is not and never can be completed. The chain into which it introduces each particular phenomenon as a new link is indefinitely lengthened by scientific progress, in time and space, but without the power to hang on anywhere. Outside space and time, the principle of causation only engenders insoluble antinomies. Besides, to explain one phenomenon by another is to explain it by a cause which itself needs explanation. The mechanical reason of things is therefore never a sufficient reason. It is an indefinite series of insufficient particular reasons. The network of science, however fine and firm it be, does not cover, and cannot cover all reality. The Cosmos that science builds is like the globe; it floats in immensity. "Where, O Lord, goes the earth through the heavens?"
To this question teleology alone responds. But every teleological affirmation respecting the universe is a religious affirmation. Science, studying only accomplished facts, never establishes anything but phenomena and their antecedent or concomitant conditions. Once the phenomenon is integrated in the causal series, the task of science is accomplished. To ask it to go further is to ask it to go beyond its limits and to denaturalise itself. You can only put teleology into the universe by affirming the sovereignty of spirit. To say that there is reason, that there is thought, in things—that they move towards an end or realise an order, a harmony, a good: this is to say that matter is subordinate to spirit. Now, to affirm this sovereignty of spirit is to commit that act of initial religious faith of which I spoke at the beginning; it is to feel in one's self and in the world something besides matter, the mysterious energy of spirit. This act of faith—legitimate because inevitable—belongs to the subjective order of religious life, not to the objective order of science. Teleology and the theory of final causes have been compromised because their specific character has been mistaken; they have sometimes been assimilated to, and sometimes substituted for, mechanical causes in the explanation of phenomena. For an unknown scientific explanation has been substituted an appeal to a supernatural intention or volition of God. The savants rightly protested against this. God, who is the final reason of everything, is the scientific explanation of nothing. The object of science is to search for second causes; where these do not appear there is no science. It is faith which replaces it. To say that God created the world, or that the world tends toward the sovereign good, is not to advance positive science a single step. On the other hand, to explain the phenomena of rain, or thunder, or the fall of bodies, is to dissipate some mythological conceptions; but it is not to suppress the religious affirmation of spirit that the mechanism of the universe has an end, and that the laws of gravitation and the material forces serve some purpose of which they are ignorant, and which is of more value than themselves.
Between the discoveries of science and the postulates of the religious and moral life there is always necessarily formed a synthesis which is destroyed at each step, but which rises again higher and larger than before. Mechanism itself, in order to be intelligible, calls for teleology. The text of the material world awaits the interpretation that spirit gives of it. By its discoveries positive science establishes the text. Without this rigorous establishment of the text, the exegesis of consciousness remains a phantasy. But, without that exegesis, the text itself signifies nothing; it is almost as if it did not exist.
There is another reason, a practical reason, which makes of teleology the very essence of the religious consciousness. We must never lose sight of the fact that what we seek in and by religion is the key to the enigma of life. The enigma of the universe only torments us, at the religious point of view, because we believe that in this is the secret of that. We are embarked in the vessel, and we see clearly enough that our destiny depends upon its own. That is why religious faith, perfectly indifferent to the architecture and to the ways and means of the construction of the vessel, regards above all the direction in which the sails are set, and seeks to discover the route which is being followed. Has it a compass? And is there some one at the helm?
In other words, the religious instinct is the pressing need that spirit has to guarantee itself against the perpetual menaces of Nature. Faith judges everything from the point of view of the sovereign good, and the sovereign good, for spirit, can only be the final and complete expansion of the life of the spirit. Therefore, in every religious notion there will never, at bottom, be anything but a teleological judgment. It is not the essence of things—it is their reciprocal value and their hierarchy which interest religious faith. In the religious notion of God it is not the metaphysical nature—it is the will of God in regard to men—which is of most concern; and in the religious notion of the world it is not the mechanical cause of phenomena—it is to know which way the world is going, and whether it has any other end to serve than as the theatre and the organ of spirit. What does faith itself desire to say when it defines God as the Eternal and Almighty Spirit, except that man needs to affirm that his own individual spirit does not depend on any but a spiritual power like himself? It is true that to determine this final cause of the world is also to determine its first cause. It is the same thing in other terms; and indeed it is to make metaphysics in the etymological sense of the word. The important point is to know that this decisive step beyond the chain of visible phenomena, whether it be taken by the philosopher or the theologian, is always an act of subjective life, an affirmation of spirit, an act of faith, and not a demonstration of science.
6.Symbolism
Thirdly, and lastly, religious knowledge issymbolical. All the notions it forms and organises, from the first metaphor created by religious feeling to the most abstract theological speculation, are necessarily inadequate to their object. They are never equivalent, as in the case of the exact sciences.
The reason is easy to discover. The object of religion is transcendent; it is not a phenomenon. Now, in order to express that object, our imagination has nothing at its disposal but phenomenal images, and our understanding, logical categories, which do not go beyond space and time. Religious knowledge is therefore obliged to express the invisible by the visible, the eternal by the temporary, spiritual realities by sensible images. It can only speak in parables. The theory of religious knowledge requires for its completion a theory of symbols and symbolism.
What is a symbol? To express the invisible and spiritual by the sensible and material—such is its principal characteristic and its essential function. It is a living organism, in which we must distinguish between appearance and substance. It is a soul in a body. The body is the manifestation of the soul, although it is not like it; it makes the soul active and present. The most perfect example of symbolism, in this respect, is found in language and writing—two incarnations of thought. Neither the characters formed by my pen, nor the sound made by the air in my larynx, have a positive resemblance to my thought. But these letters and sounds become signs to those who have the key to them. They express the intangible thought; they make it present and living in the minds of those who read or hear.
This is still truer of the creations of art. They also are mere symbols. Art might be defined as the effort to enshrine the ideal in the real, and by a material form to express the inexpressible. This is clearly taught by the wordpoesy, which means creation. The works of great artists really live; for they have a soul, a rich and intense life, which the material form at once conceals and reveals. From architecture to music there is not an art that is not symbolical. Ethics, religion, all the disciplines relating to the subjective life of spirit, have only this means of expression. It is their peculiarity to become exterior and objective, and to dominate the external things that science studies. Symbols, much better than science, attest the victory and the royalty of spirit. If science reveals Nature, symbols make of Nature, of its transformations and its laws, the glorified image of the inner life of spirit.
Born in the artist's soul, of the subjective activity of his ego, the symbol addresses itself much less to the pure intellect than to the inner life and to the emotions of those who contemplate it. It awakes and sets in motion the subjective activity of the ego; it has produced its whole effect when it has produced in us the emotions, the transport, the enthusiasm, the faith, that the poet himself experienced in engendering it. Such is the source and the explanation of "the magic of art," of eloquence, of religious inspiration. All the creators of living symbols pour their soul into our soul, their life into our life. They subjugate and ravish us. By symbols, much better than by scientific notions, the community and fraternity of spirits is realised, and the fusion of souls into a collective consciousness effected; a consciousness which includes all individual minds and tunes them into harmony; the consciousness of a nation, of a church, of humanity. It is not science that rules the world—it is symbols.
Inferior to the exact ideas of science in logical clearness, symbolic forms are superior to them in power and reach. Science is forcibly arrested at the surface of things, at the appearances continually arising in the universe. In it is found neither the principle of energy, nor, consequently, the secret of life, or the key to our destiny. You seek the meaning and the end of your action; you ask for some sufficient reason for living; do you not feel that it is contradictory to address yourself to the science of phenomena, seeing that, from the strictly scientific point of view, phenomena have not in themselves their ownraison d'être? That which you seek is beyond phenomena, and it is symbols alone that can, not make you comprehend it, but reveal it to you.
Since Nature may become and does become, in art and in religion, the constant symbol of the inner life of spirit and of its normal development,—since it is susceptible of this perpetual and glorious transfiguration by spirit,—it is impossible not to admit the inner correspondence of the laws of Nature and the laws of conscious life, and to believe in their deep unity. It is, in fact, secret and powerful analogies which rule and inspire symbolical creations. Art and religion are more than conventions; they are revelations of that which is hidden at once in spirit and in Nature, of the principle of Being itself, of the absolute energy which is manifested, parallelly, in the unfolding of the physical universe and of the moral universe. All things cover some mystery; phenomena are simply veils. That is why, by their very destination, they become symbols.
The idea of symbol and the idea of mystery are correlative. Who says symbol says at the same time occultation and revelation. In becoming present and even sensible, the living verity still remains veiled. The same image that reveals it to the heart remains for the intellect an impassable barrier. One may say of it what the poet says of the sense of the infinite, for, at bottom, it is the same thing. "We are restless because we see it but can never comprehend it."
This inquietude is soothed by a clear knowledge of the cause from which it springs. Symbols are the only language suited to religion. We need to know that which we adore; for no one adores that of which he has no perception; but it is not less necessary that we should not comprehend it, for one does not adore that which he comprehends too clearly, because to comprehend is to dominate. Such is the twofold and contradictory condition of piety, to which symbols seem to be made expressly in order to respond. Piety has never had any other language.
In considerations of this kind might be found the explanation of the bond which in the beginning unites religion and art. But we must confine ourselves to our special topic, and proceed to inquire what it is that constitutes the life and power of religious symbols.
It would be an illusion to believe that a religious symbol represents God in Himself, and that its value, therefore, depends on the exactitude with which it represents Him. The true content of the symbol is entirely subjective: it is the conscious relation of the subject to God, or rather, it is the way he feels himself affected by God. Thus when the Psalmist exclaims: "The Lord is my rock"; or "God is a devouring fire"; when the Christ teaches us to say, "Our Father,"—these are not scientific, and in this case metaphysical, definitions of God. What these images simply translate is the relation of absolute confidence, of awe, of filial love, which, by His mysterious action, the Spirit of God creates in revealing Himself in the spirit of man. From these divers feelings spring spontaneously the strong and simple images which translate them, and which, if these subjective experiences are eliminated, have no content and no truth.
From this point of view we may see in what religious inspiration psychologically consists. Neither its aim nor its effect is to communicate to men exact, objective, ready-made ideas on that which by its nature is unknowable under the scientific mode; but it consists in an enrichment and exaltation of the inner life of its subject; it sets in motion his inward religious activity, since it is in that that God reveals Himself; it excites new feelings, constituting new concrete relations of God to man, and by the fact of this creative activity it spontaneously engenders new images and new symbols, of which the real content is precisely this revelation of the God-spirit in the inner life of the spirit of man.
The greatest initiators in the religious order have been the greatest creators of symbols. Prophecy, in the Biblical sense of the word, has never given divine revelation except in the form of images. And whence spring these images but from the exaltation of the religious life of the prophet which spontaneously expresses itself without? Every other conception of inspiration is anti-psychological.
To the question, Whence come the life and power of symbols? we reply: From the primitive organic unity of the sentiment of piety, and of the image which translates it first to consciousness. It is the organic unity of soul and body. The greater the creative force that engenders the symbol, the stronger is this unity. It constitutes its truth because it constitutes its life. For a symbol, to be living it suffices that it should be sincere, that the feeling should not be separate from the image, nor the image from the feeling. To this cry of confidence in God, "The Lord is my rock," there is no objection, so long as this confidence is really felt, although a rock is a very poor image of God. It follows that the value of a symbol must not be measured by the nature of the image employed, but by the moral value, in the scale of feeling, of the relation in which it places us to God. It is the moral value of this relation which alone makes the intrinsic value of a religion, and which permits us to assign to it its true place in the development of humanity.
The time comes, however, when the image detaches itself from the feeling that produced it, and when it fixes itself as such in the memory. In considering it in itself, reflection transforms the image into an idea more or less abstract, and takes this idea for a representation of the object of religion. But then arises the original discrepancy that we noted at the outset between the object of religion, which is transcendent, and the nature of the phenomenal image by which we attempt to represent it. Hence there is a latent contradiction in every symbolic idea. To get rid of this contradiction the understanding is obliged to eliminate from these ideas the sensible element which remains in them and renders them inadequate to their object.
By progressive generalisation and abstraction, reasoning attenuates the primitive metaphor; it wears it down as on a grindstone. But, when the metaphorical element has disappeared, the notion itself vanishes in so far as it is a positive notion. There are mysterious lamps which only burn under an alabaster globe. You may thin away the solid envelope to make it more transparent. But mind you do not break it; for the flame inside will then go out and leave you in the dark.
So with all our general ideas of the object of religion. When every metaphorical element is eliminated from them, they become simply negative, contradictory, and lose all real content. Such are our pure ideas of the infinite and the absolute. If you would give them a positive character, you must put into them some element of positive experience. This is what is done when it is said that God is the ultimate energy of things, that He is the creative cause of everything, that He is Justice, that He is Spirit, a Judge, a Father.
Born of the primitive symbols of religion, all our religious ideas will therefore necessarily keep their symbolical character to the end. As is the seed, so is the plant. Dogmatics itself will never be for the religious soul anything but a higher symbolism—that is to say, a form which, without the inward presence of active and living faith, would be worthless. If dogmas may sustain and produce faith, it is still more true that, at the outset, it is faith which produces dogmas and afterwards revives them.
Many good men withstand these conclusions from a rigorous analysis of religious knowledge and of its psychological genesis. Supposing you are right, they say, and that the mental constitution of our spiritual nature confines religious thought to symbolic forms, cannot a supernatural revelation enable us to pass beyond these limits and bring to us religious ideas adequate to their object, and consequently of a pure and absolute truth? This seems to us a very strange desire—that a revelation of God should be effected apart from the conditions of knowledge—that is to say, apart from the forms under which alone it can be accessible to us. Do they not see that the very idea of revelation soon becomes contradictory? If God wished to make us a gift that we could receive, must He not have suited the form of it to that of our mind? Must He not have availed Himself of our ideas and of our language in order to explain to us the nature of His benefits? Now, it is certain that our ideas, as soon as they are transported outside space and time, contradict and destroy themselves, and that we are reduced to the necessity of conceiving and expressing things invisible and eternal by images actual and terrestrial. If God, in speaking to us of His mysteries, used other than these human means, we should not understand Him at all, so that the revelation would no longer be a revelation. And is it not for this reason that when God has desired to reveal Himself to men He has never employed any but men as His organs, and that He whom we name His Son never spoke except in images and parables of the things of the kingdom of God?
No one in fact was fonder and more intelligently fond of this symbolical form than the Christ; He never wished to employ any other. This preference did not arise, as is supposed, merely from the fact that He found it a happy means of popularity to adapt Himself to all minds. He also knew that no language was more natural or more conformed to the moral exigencies of piety. He saw in it an institution ordained by God Himself. And it is the truth. The Parable addresses itself, not to the pure understanding, but to the active faculty of the ego, to "the heart." It appeals to our subjective life; it awakens the religious need before satisfying it. The soul which hears it meditates, and experiences the living content that it contains. On the contrary, the soul that is inert and dead finds nothing in the symbol and receives nothing from it even theoretically, so that it is literally true that the symbolic form, a shining revelation unto some, remains a dull and empty letter for others. It is from this point of view alone that it is possible to understand that other saying of Jesus, so paradoxical to common sense, so rich and just to the eyes of experience and of faith: "To him that hath shall be given; from him that hath not shall be taken away that which he hath." The gift of God comes only to the felt need and the active desire of man.