Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History

by Auguste Sabatier

I turn to another thought of Pascal. "Piety," he says, "is God sensible to the heart." If so, it is evident that in all piety there is some positive manifestation of God. The ideas of religion and revelation are therefore correlative and religiously inseparable. Religion is simply the subjective revelation of God in man, and revelation is religion objective in God. It is the relation of subject and object, of effect and cause, organically united; it is one and the same psychological phenomenon, which can neither subsist nor be produced save by their conjunction. It is as impossible to isolate as it is to confound them.

I conceive therefore that revelation is as universal as religion itself, that it descends as low, goes as far, ascends as high, and accompanies it always. No form of piety is empty; no religion is absolutely false; no prayer is vain. Once more, revelation is in prayer and progresses with prayer. From a revelation obtained in a first prayer is born a purer prayer, and from this a higher revelation. Thus light grows with life, truth with piety. This makes it possible for me to enter into communion and sympathy with all sincerely religious souls, however simple and however crude or gross their worship and their faith; but if I can comprehend them, I cannot always speak their language or share their ideas. All religions are not equally good, nor are all prayers acceptable to my consciousness. To return to exploded superstitions or to beliefs now recognised to be illusory is as much a moral impossibility as it would be for a full-grown man to return to the puerilities of his childhood. Revelation therefore is not a communication once for all of immutable doctrines which only need to be held fast. The object of the revelation of God can only be God Himself, and if a definition must be given of it, it may be said to consist of the creation, the purification, and the progressive clearness of the consciousness of God in man,—in the individual and in the race.

From this point of view, I see very clearly that the revelation of God never needs to be proved to any one. The attempt would be as contradictory as it is superfluous. Two things are equally impossible: for an irreligious man to discover a divine revelation in a faith he does not share, or for a truly pious man not to find one in the religion he has espoused and which lives in his heart. With what, moreover, and how could it be proved that light shines except by forcing those who are asleep to awake and open their eyes? All serious Apologetics must insist as a necessary starting-point on the awakening and conversion of the soul.

Having always been religious, mankind has never been destitute of revelation, that is to say of witness more or less obscure, more or less correctly interpreted, of the presence in it and the action of God. But if men have always maintained some relation and some commerce with the deity, they have not always represented in the same manner the mode in which communications have been received from Him. The notion of revelation has progressed with the growth of mental enlightenment and with the nature of the piety. It is therefore necessary to criticise that notion and to see what it has now become for us. It is to this examination that I shall devote this second meditation. The idea of revelation has passed through three phases in the course of history: the mythological, the dogmatic, and the critical.

2. The Mythological Notion of Revelation

Among the faculties of man, the first to awaken in the mental life of the child and of the savage is the imagination. All literatures begin with chants, all histories with legends, and all religions with myths or symbols. Poetry always makes its appearance before prose. One can only see the effect of an inveterate rationalism in the promptitude with which men are scandalised at any attempt to point out in the Bible or around the cradle of Christianity legends and myths serving as sacred vehicles for the purest and sublimest religious revelations, as if the divine Spirit, in order to be intelligible to the simple and the ignorant, could not as well avail Himself of the fictions of poetry as of logical reasonings, of the chants of the angels at Bethlehem as of the rabbinical exegesis and argumentations of the Apostle Paul. A myth is false in appearance only. When the heart was pure and sincere the veils of fable always allowed the face of truth to shine through. And why so much disdain? Does not childhood run on into maturity and old age? What are our most abstract ideas but primitive metaphors which have been worn and thinned by usage and reflection?

It is none the less true, as St. Paul says, that in advancing in age we have left behind the speech and thought of infancy. The first men did not know how to distinguish between the substance and the form of their beliefs. This distinction has become easy to us. The most conservative minds can no longer read the stories or the monuments of the ancient religions without criticising and translating them.

The men of other times, timid and ingenuous as children, saw everywhere material signs by which they believed the will of the gods was manifested. They early formed the art of divination—an essentially religious art. It is found among all peoples, the ancient Hebrews not excepted. The thunder was to them the voice of God. They consulted Him by the Urim and Thummim, and by the sacred ephod. They did not doubt, any more than the Greeks, either the divine origin or the prophetic sense of dreams. Elsewhere they evoked the dead, they interrogated the flight of birds, they listened to the sound of the wind in the foliage of the oaks, or to the noise of waters in sonorous caverns. That was an external and, in some sort, physical conception of revelation, from which modern peoples have escaped, but with which all set out.

In the oldest traditions of Hebraism, God speaks to Adam, to Noah, to Abraham, to Moses, as one man speaks to another, by articulate sounds perceived by the ear. The sacred formula, Thus saith the Lord, serves as the uniform introduction to civil, political, and ritual, as well as to moral and religious, laws. Religion then embraced and regulated all the life. The great empires of antiquity all claim a divine origin. As to ancient legislations, there is not one that is not said to have come from heaven. The Egyptians refer theirs to the god Thoth or Hermes; Minos, in Crete, is said to have received his laws from Jupiter; Lycurgus, in Sparta, from Apollo; Zoroaster, in Persia, from Ahura Mazda; Numa Pompilius, at Rome, from the nymph Egeria. Moses does not stand alone. I am not here comparing the value of the things; I am simply pointing out the identity of the representations.

Nor was it only religious and political institutions that they referred to the will of the gods; they referred to it all kinds of decisions and enterprises; declarations of war, raids to make, the order of battle, the extermination of the vanquished, the sharing of the spoils, conditions of peace, expiations to be made; everything was done in obedience to supernatural orders the authenticity of which no one thought of discussing. In the same way, a divine inspiration explained the gift of predicting the future, the eloquence of orators, the sagacity of statesmen, the genius of great soldiers, the verve of poets, and even the skill of the more famous artisans. "Legends!" it is said. No doubt. But these legends are universal. Men speak everywhere the same language, because everywhere they think in the same fashion.