Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History

by Auguste Sabatier

It is not surprising therefore that religion, capable of creating in modern times those moral societies called "Churches," should, in all ages, have been the strongest bond of natural societies, primitive families, savage tribes, great empires, civilised peoples. The first stone of every hearth was a sacred stone. The first tombstone was a monument of piety, and burial is an essentially religious ceremony. Before they were regarded as protectors without, tribal gods were the internal bonds of the tribe itself. All the individuals of the tribe saw in the god a father and an ever present head, so that religion came to double by this moral kinship their blood relationship. In this matter the great civilisations do not differ from the rest. All have a religious soul that differentiates and explains them. It is not merely morals and philosophy that are affected by religion, but literature, art, politics, social economy, and in a general way the whole destiny of men. The secret of a race is hidden in its religion. It is there that the forces of life and resistance to the causes of dissolution are concentrated.... Let us enter with deep piety therefore on the history of religion on the earth.... That history is still in embryo. The comparative study of religions has arisen within our time; it is still at its beginnings.... The idea of religious progress is a great and luminous idea, but it is not possible to apply it to all the details of history. Progress has not taken place along a single or continuous line.... On four or five points the progress is undeniable; it must suffice to point them out and mark their direction in order that we may foresee the supreme end to which this faltering and laborious march is tending.

In religions there are differences of degree and differences of kind: the one mark in the scale of evolution the successive movements of the religious consciousness in time; the others express the diversity and simultaneity of religions in space. The first are explained by inequalities of moral development; the second by variety of races, climates, civilisations. Take, for example, the Hebrew tradition; follow it in broad outline, and you will note religious forms which give birth one to another and constitute an historical development—the religion of the ancient Beni-Israel, prophetism, rabbinical pharisaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism: there, in a continuous evolution, you have what may be called differences of degree. But, on the other hand, consider the Mongolian or Chinese religions, those of ancient Mexico, of India, Egypt, or Greece: you have differences of kind which you cannot classify in a single scale. And, as some of these peoples have disappeared, and others been arrested in their growth, and as they have never marched abreast, it is impossible to compare them or to put into one category the religious forms which their history presents. But some attempt must be made to trace them out.

2. Progress in the Outward Forms of Religion

In this universal religious evolution the progress that is most apparent because most outward is the enlargement of the form of religion itself, the movement, often interrupted but never stopped, from the narrowest particularism to the most human universalism.... It is characteristic of all religion to propagate itself: that is the implicit affirmation that it is made for all men. Even when it is abased to the level of a recipe and of a magical secret that is hidden with a jealous selfishness, or even from a ferocious patriotism, there is the avowal that it might be serviceable to others.... But we must see how this passage from the particular to the universal is effected.

The beginnings of religion are everywhere the same. The number of cults at first is almost endless, but they vary very little from each other. It is impossible to write the history of barbarous religions, and it is useless to enumerate them. Nothing is more monotonous than the descriptions that have been attempted of them. Their most characteristic feature is, that at first they are confined to the family. Religion at this stage is a matter of instinct, and instinctive matters are always uniform. In mental life, diversity only appears with reflection and consciousness.

To the domestic and tribal succeeds the national stage of religion. Political federations are formed, and the religious as well as the social consciousness of the people is enlarged. This phenomenon is seen in Greece in its most interesting form. The religion of Greece, as witness the Homeric poems, was a confederation of local cults and deities, just as Hellas was a federation of previously unconnected tribes.

The conquests of Alexander and the extension of the Roman Empire greatly enlarged the horizon of ancient thought. The philosophers in the time of Cicero and Seneca had already risen from the national idea to that of the human race. It must not be supposed, however, that the universal religion sprang from the philosophic or religious syncretism of the later ages of Graeco-Roman civilisation. The dissolution of the national religions had preceded that of political nationalities, and, so far from creating anything universal, the morbid curiosity of minds denuded of all national tradition abandoned itself to individual superstitions the most exotic and monstrous. Christianity was born, not in Greece, in the schools, nor in Rome, at the foot of the throne of the Cæsars, but in a race the narrowest, the most fanatical and intolerant that ever existed, and in the heart of a Son of Israel whom no extra-Palestinian influence seems ever to have reached.

Nowhere is a universal religion the fruit of an unconscious evolution, produced by the action of fatal and external laws. It presents itself everywhere as an individual creation, as the free and moral work of a few elect souls, in whom tradition by a profound crisis is purified and enlarged. This was the rôle of Confucius, of Buddha, of Socrates, of the prophets of Israel, of Mohammed in Arabia. All of them were reformers of the religion of their ancestors.... They did not discover the universal religion outside themselves, but in their consciousness and personal piety. Passing through their souls as through a filter, the traditional religion of their race was gradually clarified and freed from foreign or material elements, and it was found that, in the end, the new faith appeared the more human and universal as it had become more strictly religious, more inward, and more pure.... Not that all the ancient cults were capable of transformation or all the prophets equally inspired. Often the revelation would appear uncertain or incomplete. On only one point and in only one consciousness would it be seen to end in a clear and definitive conclusion. Progress implies selection. As we rise from one stage to another in the history of religious evolution we see the ranks enlightened and the number diminished of concurrent religions. At the lowest stage, the savage cults are almost innumerable. The great national or ethnic religions were much fewer. Only three are frankly universalist: Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity. And these three are universalist, if I may so say, in a very unequal degree.

Mohammedanism was far from being an original religion. The element which gives to it a higher moral and religious value came to it from Judaism and Christianity. Its monotheism, its horror of idolatry, the comparative purity of its ethics, have no other source, and, without paradox, it has been possible to represent it as an inferior form of Christianity accommodated to the needs and to the stature of semi-civilised Semitic peoples. But, alongside this Christian spiritualism it has conserved naturalistic elements, gross remnants of old Arab cults which, having made its fortune, perhaps, in its early days, now embarrass it and paralyse it. Moreover, in spite of its conquests, it has always remained an Oriental religion with Mecca as its centre and its head. If it would survive, it must reform itself; it must enter into the path of moral and intellectual progress, free itself from local superstitions, from its gross hopes, its hatred of the infidel, its doctrine of good works; in other words, it will have to cast off its old nature, and receive a new effusion of the Christian spirit. It can only become universal in so far as it approaches the moral principle of Christianity, in order, in the end, to become one with it.

Buddhism has a more profound originality, but it also is afflicted with an inward dualism which will ruin it. From the beginning there have been two Buddhisms: the one an esoteric philosophy for the use of sages convinced by experience of the vanity of all things, suffering from the essential evil of existence and aspiring to Nirvana. It is an unfruitful mysticism because it is Atheistic. The other is popular Buddhism, which sinks and dies into puerile superstitions and into the grossest polytheism. From which we may conclude that Buddhism only becomes universalist when it ceases to be a positive religion, and that where it still remains a religion it is anything but universalist.