Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History

by Auguste Sabatier

To return to psychology. In all piety there is some positive manifestation of God. Otherwise, one might question the value of religious phenomena.

Three consequences follow: the revelation of God will be evident, interior, progressive.

It will be interior, because God, not having phenomenal existence, can only reveal Himself to spirit, and in the piety that He Himself inspires.

If revealers and prophets believed they heard the voice of God outside themselves they were the victims of a psychological illusion that analysis discerns and dissipates. The old theologian was right who said:

Nulla fides si non primum Deus ipse loquitur; Nulla que verba Dei nisi quæ in penetralibus audit Ipsa fides.[[1]] This interior revelation is only made, it is true, in connection with some external event of Nature or of History. If wonder is the beginning of philosophy it is also the commencement of piety. Religious emotion does not spring up by chance and unconditionally. But external signs are only revealers for those who know how to comprehend them, and who are able to interpret them in a religious sense. That is why the distinction sometimes made between the manifestation of God in things and divine inspiration in consciousness, between the sign or external miracle and the inward word, is of little worth except for pedagogic purposes. The manifestation of God in Nature or in History is always a matter of faith. It would only appear to be such in the light on the hearth of consciousness. Put out that inner light and everything speedily becomes obscure: "If the light that is in thee be darkness, there will be darkness round about thee," says Jesus. To the deaf man the universe is mute. The starry heavens which bent the pensive brows of Newton and of Kant before the majesty of God, said nothing to Laplace. Lit up within, the soul of Christ saw everywhere the signs of God. Caiaphas saw none. In the cross of Jesus, where St. Paul discerned the manifestation of the wisdom and the power of God, the Pharisees had only seen the crushing proof that this Messiah was a mere impostor.

[[1]] There is no faith save in the heart where God has first made Himself heard, and there are no divine words except those which faith hears in the inmost sanctuary of the soul.

This inward revelation will be also evident. The contrary would imply a contradiction. He who says revelation says the veil withdrawn, the light come. True, the word mystery is often on the lips of Jesus, and in the writings of the New Testament; but, when applied to the essence of the Gospel it never has the meaning which is given to it later in the language of theology. The mystery of which Jesus, Paul, and the Apostles speak is a revealed mystery, i.e. a mystery which has become evident to pure hearts and pious souls through the public preaching of it. The Gospel is not obscurity; it is daylight, and it is nonsense to demand a criterion of evangelical revelation other than itself, any other evidence, i.e., than its own truth, beauty, and efficiency.

Lastly, this revelation will be progressive. It will be developed with the progress of the moral and religious life which God begets and nourishes in the bosom of humanity. The word of God is not that of a poor human founder who formulates in abstract terms ideas which are but the pale shadows of things. It is essentially creative. It carries with it all the substance of being and all the potency of life. It realises that which it proclaims, and never manifests itself except by its works. When God wished to give the Decalogue to Israel, He did not write with His finger on tables of stone; He raised up Moses, and from the consciousness of Moses the Decalogue sprang. In order that we might have the Epistle to the Romans, there was no need to dictate it to the Apostle; God had only to create the powerful individuality of Saul of Tarsus, well knowing that when once the tree was made the fruit would follow in due course. The same with the Gospel; He did not drop it from the sky; He did not send it by an angel; He caused Jesus to be born from the very bosom of the human race, and Jesus gave us the Gospel that had blossomed in His inmost heart. Thus God reveals Himself in the great consciousnesses that His Spirit raises, fills, illumines one by one; they form a sacred theory through the ages and leave on history a track of light which brightens, broadens to the perfect day.

A new and graver problem here arises. This revelation, made in the depths of the human soul, remains individual and subjective. How will it become objective and concrete? How will it be made an educating, saving power? This problem would be insoluble if Leibniz was right, if human souls were independent monads, closed against and impenetrable to one another, if it had been necessary, in a word, to regard them as absolute entities, posited from the beginning by the Creator. But they are nothing of the kind. Social philosophy has sufficiently demonstrated that no individual exists either by himself or for himself alone. In each man it is humanity that is realised—that is to say, a moral life common to all. Moral goods are in essence universal. They do not exist, doubtless, apart from the consciousness of the individual; but no consciousness acquires them without acquiring them, in principle at least, for all others.

Whence comes that religious kinship of souls, that facility of communion between them, and that infinite extension and prolongation of one and the same inspiration, if not from the presence in each of the same indwelling God? Men are only divided by their external idols. In proportion as they plumb their being and descend into the depths of their spiritual nature, they discover the same altar, recite the same prayer, aspire to the same end. It is for this profound reason that individual revelations become universal. There are only prophets chosen of God because there is a general vocation and election of all men. If humanity were not potentially and in some degree an Immanuel (God with us), there would never have issued from its bosom Him who bore and revealed this blessed name. The religious experience He passed through, He passed through for us; the victory He won was for our advantage and is repeated indefinitely in every sincere soul that joins itself to Him to live His life. Thus the revelation of God given at one point and in one consciousness infallibly shines forth, perpetuates and multiplies itself. A vibration set up in a soul resounds in kindred souls. An illumined consciousness illuminates in turn. There are religious filiations, just as there are historical genealogies. Thus the inner revelation becomes consistent and objective in history; it forms a chain, a continuous tradition, and becoming incarnate in each human generation, remains not only the richest of heritages, but the most fecund of historical powers.