Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History

by Auguste Sabatier

Such is the first affirmation of the Christian consciousness. Here is the second.

This perfect relation between God and my soul, this supreme religious good, this kind of piety which constitutes my joy and strength, which enlightens, renovates, sustains my whole inner life, does not date from myself, and I well know that it is not my own virtue that has created it. Nor can I refer the origin of it to my parents, although I may perhaps have received it through them or through my teachers; nor to my Church, although I still remain its catechumen; for parents, teachers, churches, will acknowledge, with myself, that they have only transmitted that which they themselves received. Remounting thus the living chain of Christian experiences, I reach a first experience, a creative and inaugural experience, which has made possible and engendered all the rest. That experience was realised in the consciousness of Jesus Christ. I affirm, then, not only that Christ was the author of Christianity, but that the first germ of it was formed in His inner life, and that in that life, first of all, that divine revelation was made which, repeating and multiplying itself, has enlightened and quickened all mankind. Christianity is therefore not only the ideal, but an historical religion, inseparably connected not only with the maxims of morality and with the doctrines of Jesus, but with His person itself, and with the permanent action of the new spirit which animated Him, and which lives from generation to generation in His disciples.

These are the two affirmations, equally immediate and equally essential, of every Christian consciousness. Now, the whole theological problem is how to reconcile the two. How can that which is ideal and perfect be realised in history? How can that which is historical be held to be ideal and eternal? Does it not seem as if these attributes were contradictory and exclusive of each other, and that Christianity could not become an ideal religion without severing all its links with a particular history, or that if it would remain an historical religion it must renounce all pretensions to absolute perfection? On the other hand, these two attributes, are they not equally necessary to it? How can it subsist if it obeys the formal and summary logic which summons us to choose between them? Will it be anything more than a speculative philosophy if cut off from its historic tradition? Will it continue to inspire me with confidence, will it place me in security, if it ceases to appear to me to be the perfect and definitive religion?

Theology, from the beginning, has had no other task; at all events, it has had no task more arduous or pressing than that of reconciling these two data. There have always been two tendencies amongst theologians corresponding to two families of minds: the Idealist tendency—that of Origen and his emulators, which puts the emphasis en ideas and constructs a religious metaphysic or gnosis, which of necessity rationalises dogma, and for which history is but a temporary envelope, a sort of external and sensible illustration; and the Realist tendency, represented by the genius of Tertullian, which, obeying an opposite instinct, materialises ideas, gives an anthropomorphic body to everything, even to God, deifies phenomena, and changes contingent history into an eternal metaphysic. From these two tendencies, perpetual and parallel, have issued the two solutions given by Rationalism and by Orthodoxy to the problem as to the essence of Christianity.

The first finds that essence in a few simple truths of reason or of consciousness, which are of all time and all lands, and which impose themselves on every man by their own natural evidence. Jesus of Nazareth was the preacher and the martyr of these truths; but it is clear that His personality is no more essential to Christianity than that of Plato is to his philosophy. Only, mind, in thus severing itself from Christ the Christian Religion ceases to be positive and becomes an abstract and dead doctrine; it loses its religious pith and power.

Orthodoxy, whether Catholic or Protestant, avoids this reef but strikes upon another. In making of Christ the Second Person of the Eternal Trinity, the Son of the Father, consubstantial and equal, it removes Him from history and transports Him into metaphysics. But thus to deify history is also in a fashion to destroy it. The dogma annuls the limited, contingent, and human character of the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth. His life loses all reality. We have no longer a man before our eyes, although the Church, theoretically, maintains the humanity of Christ alongside His divinity. This fatally absorbs everything. We have only a deity walking in the midst of His contemporaries, hidden beneath a human figure. The traditional Christology has been so incurably Docetic that it has been practically impossible, from this point of view, to write a serious Life of Jesus without falling into the heresy at once modern and semi-pagan of Kenosis, the theory according to which the pre-existent and eternal deity commits suicide by incarnating Himself in order gradually to be re-born and find Himself God again at the end of His human life. Can this strait be crossed? Is there a passage between Scylla and Charybdis? Not so long as you cling to the intellectualist conception which forms the error common to both Rationalism and Orthodoxy, and ensures their final failure. If the essence of Christianity lies in the revelation of natural truths or supernatural dogmas, the problem is insoluble. All Apologetics will inevitably dash themselves to pieces against the insurmountable contradiction that they will soon encounter. Strauss's argumentation, which the philosophers do not cease to repeat, and which the theologians pretend not to hear, springs into one's mind. So far from weakening it, the historical studies of the past half century have only added sharpness to its edge. "The idea does not pour all its riches into a single individual. The Absolute does not descend into history. It is against all analogy that the fulness of perfection should be met with at the outset of any evolution whatsoever; those who place it at the origin of Christianity are victims of the same illusion as the ancients, who placed the Golden Age at the beginning of human history."

Before going further it may be convenient to estimate the strength and weakness of this famous dilemma, and to inquire how we may escape from it. The traditional theology succumbs to it. But this only proves that that theology needs reforming. Let us place ourselves at a different point of view, and examine for a moment the idea of perfection which serves as the premise to Strauss's reasoning. When he speaks of the total or plenary perfection which cannot be found in the first link of an historical chain, he doubtless means a quantitative perfection—that is to say, a complete collection of virtues, merits, and faculties the numerical addition of which makes the notion entire. Now, from this point of view, Strauss's observation is incontestable. Neither the perfection of science comprising all scientific discoveries, nor the perfection of civilisation embracing all the progress and all the forms of human life, are ever found or could be found at the beginning or at any given moment in the course of history. One individual, however great, could not exhaust the life or labour of the species so as to render evolution useless. But have you noticed that this idea of perfection is contradictory, and therefore chimerical? Under the category of quantity or of extension there could be no real perfection either for the individual or for the species. No sooner is anything that can be counted or measured conceived than the mind instantly conceives something greater. There is no such thing as perfect number. Here therefore it is needful to make an essential distinction. We must distinguish between the quantity and the quality, or rather, the intensity, of being. Now, between the degrees of both these things there is not the slightest relation, nor consequently any common measure. And that which is true in the one becomes false in the other. Take a cubic metre of stone, multiply it by a thousand or a million, you will still have the same stone—that is to say, there is not more true reality in a million cubic metres of stone than there is in one. But let a bit of moss spring up in a fissure in that stone; in that bit of living moss there is more being, or, if you will, being of a higher quality than that of a whole mass of rocks. Still, do not forget that it needed a germ to produce it, and that this germ was a sort of positive perfection in relation to all inorganic matter, whose last end is life. This is why we may boldly say that evolution is not the cause of anything; that no development ever gives more than what is hidden in the new germ which engenders it; that a hundred thousand imbeciles do not make a man of genius, and that if man descended from a monkey all the monkeys in creation put together do not make up one human consciousness. From this synthetic point of view, it will no longer seem contradictory, but natural, and in full accordance with the analogies of history, that we should meet in the person of the Founder of Christianity that perfect relation to God, that perfection of piety which every Christian still experiences within himself, and which he declares he has drawn from communion with Him.

Lastly, let us fortify ourselves, and finish this brief statement of this somewhat novel view with Pascal's pregnant words. There are, he says, three orders of greatness. From all bodies put together you could not extract one thought, if there were not first a mind to conceive it. From all thoughts you could not draw a single movement of charity, if there were not there a heart to produce and feel it So far from needing to manifest themselves by the same attributes, these various kinds of greatness are absolutely independent of each other and even incommensurable. That which makes one shine forth would diminish or obscure the others. Alexander came with a pomp which dazzled the eyes and astonished the imaginations of mere carnal men. Archimedes had no need of the pomp of Alexander in order to impress the minds of men; his greatness, purely intellectual, was of an altogether different order. And, so, the Christ did not come with the éclat of Alexander or Archimedes. His greatness is of another order still. It is in fact so different that neither the glory of the conqueror nor the potency of genius would add anything to it, and that it had need, the better to shine forth to all, to appear in lowliness and humiliation. Therefore He was humble, patient, gentle, holy towards God, merciful towards man, terrible to all the hosts of darkness. Without sin, without external goods, without the productions of science, He was in His own order. Oh, with what pomp, with what transcendent magnificence, did He appear to the eyes of the heart that discerns true wisdom!

2. The Christian Principle

We must therefore come to the religious consciousness of Jesus Christ as to the fountainhead from which the Christian stream has flowed. It is certain that we shall find in it the principle and essence of Christianity itself, for it would be too paradoxical to maintain that the Master alone was excluded from the benefit of the religion that He has bequeathed to all His disciples. No; we may affirm in all security that the principle of Christianity was at first the very principle of the consciousness of Christ. To determine the one will be to define the other.