MORALITY AND RELIGION
But this internal fear, shame or moral consciousness is aroused in man by religion. The fear is the fear of God, the shame is abasement before his face. Primitive man wanders over the earth alone, wild, fierce, without articulate speech, without a permanent mate, at the mercy of his unbridled and violent passions, a "brute" rather than a man. What can restrain him? what can rescue him from at last destroying himself? Wise men cannot direct him, for we cannot say whence or how they can reach him. The intervention of God cannot save him: God has withdrawn himself to his chosen people, and has no dealings with the rest of mankind, the Gentiles. But this "brute" is still a man: God, while abandoning him, has left a spark of his own essence at the bottom of his heart. See! the sky lightens: the wild creature stands awestruck and afraid: in his mind arises the shadowy idea of something greater than he, something divine. So he conceives or rather imagines a first God, a Sky-god, a thundering Jupiter: and to this deity he turns to appease his wrath or invoke his aid. But in order to conciliate him and secure his help, he must shape his own life conformably to his purpose: he must humble himself before his God, overcome his own pride and arrogance, abstain from certain actions and perform others. Thus the conception of a deity lends power to that peculiar possession of the human will, the attempt, that is, the liberty, to control the movements communicated to the mind by the body and to annul or to redirect them simultaneously. With these acts of self-control, with freedom, morality comes into existence: the fear of God has laid the foundations of human life. Altars arise all over the earth: the caves of her mountains, whither the man now bears the woman, ashamed as he is of gratifying his desires before the face of the sky, which is the face of God, preside at the first marriage-rites and shelter the first families: her bosom opens to receive the sacred trust of the bodies of the dead. The first and fundamental ethical institutions—worship, wedlock and burial—have arisen.
This social and ethical power of the idea of God appears again in the course of subsequent history: since when nations have relapsed into savagery through warfare, and human laws have no more power over them, religion is the only means of subduing them. It reappears again in the individual development of human life: children indeed cannot learn piety except through the fear of some deity; and when all natural help fails him man requires a superior being to save him, and this being is God. All nations believe in a divine providence: tribes living in a society without any consciousness of God, for instance in some parts of Brazil, among the Kafirs, and in the Antilles, are travellers' tales, an attempt to increase the sale of their books by the narration of portents.
If this is so,—and doubtless it is—then no doctrine can be more foolish than that which claims to conceive a morality and civilisation without religion. Just as no well-established physical science is possible without the guidance of abstract mathematical truth, so no knowledge of morality can arise except together with abstract metaphysical truths, without, that is, the idea of God. When the religious consciousness is extinguished or obscured the conception of society and the state is extinguished or obscured with it. Jews, Christians, Gentiles and Mahommedans possess this conception because all alike believe in some deity, whether as an infinite free spirit, or as several gods consisting of mind and body, or as one single God, an infinite free spirit in an infinite body. The Epicureans did not possess such a conception, attributing to God as they did body alone, and chance together with body: nor did the Stoics, who made him subject to fate. And Cicero made the admirable remark to the Epicurean Atticus, that he could not discuss laws with him unless he first granted the existence of the divine providence. Hobbes, who revived Epicureanism, and Spinoza, who revived Stoicism, as we have seen entirely failed to understand the nature of society and the state. One must consort with primitive man, stupid, hirsute, unclean and dishevelled, to refute those learned authors of "desiccated literature," with Peter Bayle at their head, who maintain that human society can and indeed does live without religion.
The absence of the idea of God supplied the chief argument in Vico's criticism of Grotius and Puffendorf, two of these authors whom he held in great honour as "princes" of the school of natural rights. Neither of these writers, he says, lays down the principle of divine providence as primary and essential. Grotius does not expressly deny it: but on account of his very attachment to truth, he endeavours to exclude it, and asserts that his system will stand even if all knowledge of God be removed. Hence Vico accuses him of Socinianism, since he makes human innocence consist in the simplicity of human nature. Puffendorf is still worse: he seems to ignore providential direction, and begins with the scandalously Epicurean supposition that man is thrown into this world with no help or attention from God, without even that spark within his heart which is destined to grow into the flame of morality: and having been reproved for this, he tries to justify himself in a special essay, but does not succeed in discovering the true principle on which alone society can be explained.
Now why, in face of all these energetic declarations and arguments of Vico's on the necessity of religion to morality, did we say above that the only point of real resemblance between him and Grotius, Puffendorf and the natural-right school generally was his purely immanental conception of ethics? Because, if we examine the point closely, Vico is not in opposition to the method of that school. Like them, in constructing his science of human society he excludes with Grotius all idea of God, and with Puffendorf considers man as without help or attention from God, excluding him, that is, from revealed religion and its God. As for these two writers, so for Vico the subject under consideration is natural rights, not supernatural: the law of the Gentiles, not of the chosen people: the law which arises of itself among the caves, not that which comes down from Sinai. Vico's opposition, which he expresses with his accustomed confusion and obscurity, turns not upon assertions like these, but upon the actual conception of religion. In one word, the religion of which he speaks is not the same as that of which Grotius and Puffendorf spoke, or rather did not speak.
Religion, as we have already seen, means for Vico not necessarily revelation, but conception of reality: either that which expresses itself as it does in the period of fully developed mind in the form of intelligible metaphysic, which passes from the thought of God to explain logic by its reasoning and to condescend to purify the human heart by morality: or that which takes concrete shape, as it does in the earliest stage of humanity, in the form of poetical metaphysics. One may easily ignore revealed religion when inquiring into the foundations of morality: but how can one ever ignore this natural religion, identical as it is with knowledge of the truth? Plutarch, discussing the primitive religions of terror, asks the question whether it would not have been better, instead of worshipping the gods in so impious a manner, that there should be no religion at all: but he forgot that from these cruel superstitions brilliant civilisations developed, and no civilisation could ever have grown from atheism. Without a religion, whether gentle or fierce, rational or fantastic, to give the idea, more or less clearly defined, more or less elevated, of something superior to the individual and uniting all individuals, the moral will would have no object for its volition.
At this point we see the meaning of what we have described as the second, practical or ethical, signification of the word "religion" in Vico. In this signification, Vico justifies and vindicates the impious saying that "fear creates the gods": he even places the source of religion in the longing for eternal life which man feels when stirred by a universal sense of immortality hidden in the depths of the mind. In this second signification, religion is a practical fact, indeed it is morality itself, as in the first meaning it was truth itself.
If the meaning of religion for Vico, either as the condition of morality, in the first sense of the word, or as synonymous with it, in the second, is once understood, it is clear that when he condemned Grotius and Puffendorf for their omission of this most important concept, he was substantially doing nothing but clenching his criticism of the insipid moralising and the concealed utilitarianism of these two thinkers. On other occasions also he resorted to the valuable weapon of the concept of religion, with the same end in view. Because if he sometimes credited philosophy with the task of assisting mankind by raising and directing fallen human nature, at other times he decided that philosophy is rather adapted to reasoning, and that the moral philosophers with the greatest powers of reasoning are of value only to stimulate the senses by their eloquence to perform the duties of virtue, while religion alone has the power of making men act virtuously. Then in the empirical science corresponding to this part of the philosophy of mind, Vico turns religion (or poetical metaphysic) and philosophy into two historical epochs, making the former characteristic of the barbaric period and the latter of the civilised. He maintains, as he is clearly bound to do, that religion is the sole foundation of all civilisation and of philosophy itself, and rejects Polybius's saying that if there had been philosophers in the world religion would have been unnecessary. How could philosophy have arisen, he objects, had not states, that is, civilisation, arisen first? and how could states have arisen without the aid of religion? Thus the saying ought to be reversed: without religion there is no philosophy. It was religion, it was the divine providence that tamed the sons of Polyphemus and reduced them to the humanity of Aristides and Socrates, of Laelius and Scipio Africanus.
The conception again of the "state of nature," which served in the treatises of the school of natural rights as an hypothesis and a means of exposition with a view either to developing the argument independently of mystical theology without evoking too many protests, or to conveying implicitly their utilitarian theories, acquired in Vico's hands a new function and a new content. A perfectly honest Catholic, having satisfied his conscience by separating revealed from human religion, he was in a position to assume the state of nature as a literal and actual reality. It is an ideal reality, in so far as it represents in the dialectic of the practical consciousness a moment necessary for the genesis of reality, the pre-moral moment: a historical and empirical reality, as the approximately actual condition of those periods of anarchy and disturbance which precede the rise of civilisations or follow upon their fall. The natural-right school acquiesced more or less in the traditional doctrine of the church, namely that the Gentiles, in the dispersion following on the confusion of Babel, had taken away with them a residuum of revealed religion, a vague memory of the true God, and that hence arose the possibility of social life and of false gods, shadows of the true God: and thus the "state of nature" had been put forward in their system as something abstract and unreal. Vico worked out strictly the distinction between Jews and Gentiles, and conceived the state of nature as devoid of any help coming from previous revelation: as a state in which man stood alone, so to speak, face to face with his own chaotic and turbulent passions. It was a state actually without morality, but—in contradistinction to the utilitarian hypothesis—pregnant with moral requirements, and was transcended by this implicit character becoming explicit. But this transcendence was brought about naturally, not by means of divine grace: the true divine grace is human nature itself, shared by Gentiles no less than Jews, all equally illuminated by a divine light.
Man's will is free, weak though it is, to make his passions into virtues; and in his struggle towards virtue he is helped in a natural manner by God through providence. Certainly Vico did not intend to deny the efficacy of direct and personal divine grace as well: but following his usual method he separates the latter from the natural operation of providence, which is the only question of importance for him and the only one he considers. So far as concerns the controversies on grace, he always likes to maintain a middle position between two extremes represented typically, according to him, by Pelagianism and Calvinism: and ever since as a young man he studied the works of Richard, the theologian of the Sorbonne, he had accepted his demonstration of the superiority of the Augustinian doctrine, just because it was intermediate between these extremes. A moderate doctrine of this kind seemed to him, as he says, to provide a suitable foundation for a principle of the natural rights of nations which should explain the origin of Roman and other Gentile law, while at the same time remaining in agreement with the Catholic religion. He was inclined to admit that there was a privileged nation, namely the Jewish; and that in the struggle against the passions the Christian had an advantage over the non-Christian, because in cases where natural grace failed he might be helped by supernatural. But, in a word, miracles are miracles, and the New Science is not a science of the miraculous.
That it is not, is proved by Vico's criticism on the third of the "principles" of natural rights, against John Selden, a famous man in his day though forgotten later, and author of De iure naturali et gentium iuxta disciplinant Hebraeorum (1640). Selden disagreed with Grotius, in this as in certain other questions, in not denying, and even in exalting, the value of religion: he conceived moral and civil life impossible for mankind except through revelation. This revelation, made by God to the Jewish people, passed from them according to Selden by several channels to the Gentiles: Pythagoras for instance had learnt from Ezekiel; Aristotle, at the time of the campaigns of Alexander in Asia, formed a friendship with Simon the Just; Numa Pompilius acquired some knowledge of the Bible and the prophets. This was enough to reassure any believer who had been frightened away from the works of the natural-right school by their heterodox tendencies. But Vico will have none of this ultra-religious system. If Grotius ignored providence and Puffendorf denied it, Selden was wrong, said Vico, in supplying it, making it a deus ex machina, without explaining it by the essential character of the human mind. It was a system not only unphilosophical but incompatible with sacred history, which admits to a certain extent even in the case of the Jews a natural, not revealed, law: and it was only because, during the captivity in Egypt, they lost sight of this that the direct intervention of God with the laws given to Moses took place. Nor did the theory agree, as to the alleged dissemination of Jewish knowledge and laws among the Gentiles, with the words of the Jew Josephus and of Lactantius; and in general, it was unsupported by even the smallest documentary evidence. Vico's conclusion therefore remains unaltered. The Jews enjoyed in addition the extraordinary aid of the true God: but the other nations attained civilisation solely through the ordinary light of providence.
Whether or no Vico quoted and interpreted Grotius and Puffendorf accurately is for us a question of small importance. His exposition and estimate of other philosophers matter less than his own doctrines, whatever their historical relations, which, to tell the truth, are many in number. Nevertheless it will be as well to indicate briefly, as regards the difficulties which may arise upon this point, the answer which we think plausible. Any one who after reading Vico's censures opened the De iure belli et pacis and found that Grotius explicitly includes among his three fundamental principles, with reason and the social nature, the divine will, and that this ignoring of God amounts to little more than a mere phrase laying emphasis on the power of the social nature and reason, which would take effect "even if we were to grant that God does not exist" (etiamsi dar emus non esse Deum) or that he does not care for human affairs, "which cannot be granted without the grossest impiety" (quod sine summo scelere dari nequit): any one who opened Puffendorf and read a most solemn denunciation of the Grotian hypothesis as impious and absurd, and a declaration that natural laws would remain hanging in the air devoid of force apart from the will of God as legislator; any one who read these words might be led to accuse Vico of negligence or even of insincerity in his criticisms of his predecessors. But in truth Vico did not know what to make of a God set side by side with other sources of morality, or set above them as a superfluous source for the sources: he, searching for God as he did in the heart of man, saw and felt the gulf fixed between him and those who no longer had him in their hearts and barely kept him on their lips through habit or prudence. A more subtle question would be to ask why,—if Vico agreed with the natural-right school in ignoring revelation, and if he instead of rejecting it deepened their superficial immanental doctrine,—why he put himself forward as their implacable enemy and persisted in boasting loudly before prelates and pontiffs of having formulated a system of natural rights different from that of the three Protestant authors and adapted to the Roman church. The supposition that he acted thus through politic caution might be advanced if instead of Vico we were dealing with, for instance, a passionate and powerful but deceitful friar like Tommaso Campanella: but the spotless character of Vico entirely precludes it, and we can only suppose that, lacking as his ideas always were in clarity, on this occasion he indulged his tendency to confusion and nourished his illusions, to the extent of conferring upon himself the flattering style and title of Defensor Ecclesiae at the very moment when he was destroying the religion of the church by means of the religion of humanity.