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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 national milieu was 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.† 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.
[Footnote † : 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.* 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.
[Footnote * : Guyau's criticisms of Comte's "Religion of Humanity" in his L'Irreligion de l'Avenir are 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 his Etudes d'Histoire religieuse in 1857, and his Preface to the Nouvelles Etudes d'Histoire religieuse was 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 the rôle of 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 this Histoire des Origines du Christianisme that his Vie de Jésus appeared 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 his Leben Jesu.* 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?"
[Footnote * : 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 his Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse to 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 his Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse that "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 of libre-penseur on 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 his Nouvelles 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"* 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 believe all that he said."*
[Footnote * : 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.]
[Footnote * : Cf. Renan's Essay in Questions contemporaines on "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 but le bon Dieu to 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."† 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,‡ 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.
[Footnote † : Dialogues et Fragments philosophiques, p. ix.]
[Footnote ‡ : 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 his Examen 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, a deus 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."*
[Footnote * : Examen de Conscience philosophique, p. 412 of the volume Feuilles 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 God is Love, 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 his Souvenirs 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,* "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."
[Footnote * : L'Avenir de la Science, pp. 436, 437; Eng. trans., p. 410.]
"Supprimer Dieu, serait-ce amoindrir l'univers?"
asks Guyau in one of his Vers d'un Philosophe.'† 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 the ideal?"‡
[Footnote † : "Question," Vers d'un Philosophe, p. 65.]
[Footnote ‡ : 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."