Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History

by Auguste Sabatier

It should also be noted that, in the theology of the prophets, the object of Jehovah's love is not the individual as a moral being, but the chosen people. Only the nation counts in the eyes of the Eternal. In its deliverance and triumph the citizens find salvation.... There is something great and thrilling in this Messianic doctrine. It elevated the soul of a people and of a religion to the point of the sublime. It is something to have given hope to a defeated people and a dying world. In this doctrine also we may note this admirable trait: this national triumph is identified with the advent of righteousness to all the earth. Nor have the hopes of Israel been belied. The dream of the prophets was realised in ways of which they did not think, but in a manner not less marvellous. The descendants of Japhet lodge to-day beneath the tents of the children of Shem, and our eyes may see the day approaching when the ancient promise made to Abraham and his seed shall be fulfilled, and all the families of the earth be blessed in Him.

Between the religion of the prophets and the religion of Jesus, however, there is one more barrier to be broken down. In the "Kingdom of God," the idea of the nation must give place to the idea of humanity. The universal God must be represented as the immanent God, as present in every human soul. His seat and temple could not be in Jerusalem or in Palestine; it could only be in pure and humble hearts. A supreme crisis was necessary. The Hebrew nation must perish in order to free the human conscience from its Jewish yoke. A divine flower had been formed in the heart of Prophetism; but it would have been a barren ornament, had there not been deposited in its calix a living and a fruitful germ. The transformation of the piety of the prophets into a purely moral creation and a Covenant really new with God, this was the work of Jesus Christ. That is why Jesus is "He that should come," He whom the prophets half unconsciously desired, He in whom, to the profit of all mankind, was completed the religious development of Israel. Its whole history ends in Jesus. Apart from Him the inspiration of the prophets dies into rabbinical Talmudism or wanders into the vagaries and delirium of the apocalypses. After giving birth to the Gospel, Judaism dries up and withers like a tree that has borne its fruit and whose season is past.

CHAPTER II

THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

1. The Problem

We come at last to Christianity. What is its principle or essence? This question must be answered or we cannot judge of it aright.

Now, during the eighteen centuries of its history, Christianity has taken so many and such various forms, it has received so many developments in every sense, it has become a thing so rich and luxuriant, that it is far from easy to discover beneath this thick growth of institutions, dogmas, ceremonies, and devotions the tap-root of the tree from which it all has sprung, and from which it still derives its nutriment. It would be next to useless to interrogate the Churches. They would each answer according to their official theologies and Confessions of Faith. This, they would say, is the essence of Christianity. The Catholics would say it is the institution and infallible authority of the Church, because everything rests on this first foundation, and because no one can be in Christian truth who is outside the Church. The Protestants would not be agreed: one would propose the dogma of Justification by Faith; another the authority of Scripture; a third the metaphysical divinity and the eternal pre-existence of Jesus Christ, under the pretext that they could not conceive the possibility of the subsistence of Christianity without these dogmas. In entering on this examination we enter on an interminable dispute.

The problem, happily, is simplified for the historian and the psychologist. In asking what is the principle of Christianity, what do we wish to know? Simply what it is that makes a Christian a Christian. We desire to ascertain what is the inward element, present in the soul, which compensates, at need, for the absence or defect of all the rest, and which, being wanting, cannot be supplied or compensated for by anything else. In short, we want to get at the religious experience which determines and marks out the consciousness of all Christians, which makes them members of one moral family, and which makes them to be recognised as such in spite of differences of times and place, of language and of culture, of rites and even of beliefs. To seize this common feature there is no need of polemics; all we need is a little history and psychology.

In history, Christianity offers itself to us as the term and crown of the religious evolution of humanity. In the consciousness of the Christian it is something more; it there reveals itself as the perfect religion. How must we understand this perfection? Is it the perfection of a complete system of supernatural knowledge, of a religious science which would have been strange to former generations, and which was shared by Christians alone? In no wise. If there are enlightened Christians, there are many who are very ignorant. And yet they are all Christians by one and the same principle, which is entirely independent of degrees of culture. No Christian will maintain that his knowledge is perfect. They all agree with St. Paul that at present it is very imperfect. We see divine things dimly. What, then, do they affirm who say with so much assurance that Christianity is the perfect religion? They affirm that, religion not being an idea but a relation to God, the perfect religion is the perfect realisation of their relation to God and of God's relation to them. And this is not, on their part, a theoretical speculation; it is the immediate and practical result of their inward experience. They feel that their religious need is entirely satisfied, that God has entered with them, and they with Him, into a relation so intimate and so happy that, in the matter of practical religion, not only can they imagine nothing, but that they can desire nothing above it or beyond. They simply set themselves to realise more fully and more effectually in themselves this supreme relation, this piety whose principle is immanent to themselves; they know that in it they have the germ of perfect spiritual development and eternal life. This is why they affirm without the slightest doubt that Christianity is the ideal and perfect religion, the definitive religion of humanity.