Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History

by Auguste Sabatier

Let us therefore here set forth the radical opposition between the Catholic principle and the Protestant principle in order that we may thoroughly understand the internecine war that was henceforth to be waged between them. In vain will eminent men in both camps, with the most generous and conciliatory intentions, arise and endeavour to find some middle ground, and effect a pacific reunion of the two halves of Christendom. All compromises, all diplomatic negotiations, will fail, because each of the two principles can only subsist by the negation of the other. Having attained to salvation, to full communion with God, independently of and in collision with the authority and the discipline of the sacerdotal Church, how could Luther recognise them any longer as divine and submit to them with sincerity and confidence? The ancient edifice had been the more thoroughly ruined, inasmuch as it had become useless and had been replaced. The originality of Luther consisted in this: his religious enfranchisement sprang from his own piety, and he founded his freedom on his sense of sonship, on the sense he had of his quality and titles as a child and heir of God. How could such a consciousness submit itself to the yoke again without denying itself? Catholicism, on the other hand, cannot be less intransigeant. To recognise in any degree whatever that it is possible to a Christian to enjoy pardon and the sense of the divine fatherhood apart from its dogmas and its priesthood, would not this be to abdicate all its pretensions, and to transform itself to the point of destruction?

No doubt, in actual life, this opposition is attenuated by the fact that in all Catholicism there is a latent Protestantism, and in all Protestantism a latent Catholicism. Between Port-Royal and Geneva, between Bossuet and Leibniz, between Leo XIII. and the Anglican Church, the distance seems but little. It is an illusion. Like two electricities of the same name, no sooner do they come into contact than they repel each other and separate more widely than before. In Catholicism Christianity tends to realise itself as a theocratic institution; it becomes an external law, a supernatural power, which, from without, imposes itself on individuals and on peoples. In Protestantism, on the contrary, Christianity is brought back from the exterior to the interior; it plants itself in the soul as a principle of subjective inspiration which, acting organically on individual and social life, transforms it and elevates it progressively without denaturalising and doing violence to it. Protestant subjectivity becomes spontaneity and liberty, just as necessarily as Catholic objectivity becomes supernaturalism and clerical tyranny. The religious element is no longer separated from the moral element; it no longer asserts itself as a truth or a morality superior to human truth and human morality. The intensity of the religious life is no longer measured by the number or the fervour of pious works or ritual practices, but by the sincerity and elevation of the life of the spirit. All asceticism is radically suppressed. Science is set free along with conscience; the political life of the peoples, as well as the inner life of the Christian. Man escapes from tutelage, and in all departments comes into possession of himself, into the full and free development of his being, into his majority.

This subjective character of a religion strictly moral stamps itself with energy on all the specific doctrines of Protestantism. It would be superfluous to dwell upon the doctrine of justification by faith; its subjective character is evident. No doubt the term justification has a legal colour and awakens the idea of a tribunal. But it must not be forgotten that this tribunal is nothing but the inner court where man and God meet each other face to face, where man is accused by his own conscience, and where the sentence which absolves him is the inward witness of the Holy Spirit, heard by him alone.

The doctrine of the sovereign authority of Scripture in matters of faith might seem at first sight to set up an external authority. And it is very true that certain Protestants have often understood it in the Catholic sense, and have employed it to exercise some violence on their own conscience or on the conscience of their brethren. But they never succeed for long; they soon fall into a too flagrant contradiction. The authority of the Bible is never separated in Protestantism from the right of the individual to interpret it freely, and from the personal duty of assimilating the truths he discovers in it. What therefore are those Protestants doing who attempt to set up a confession of faith as absolute and obligatory truth but imposing on their brethren their own subjective interpretation, and, consequently, denying to others the right which they exercise themselves? Nor let it be forgotten, on the other hand, that the obligation laid on each Christian to read the Bible and draw from it his faith is a perpetual and fruitful appeal to the energy of thought and to the autonomy of the inner life. The authority of Scripture, so far from being a menace to Christian liberty, is its invincible rampart. Not only has the Protestant Christian in the name of the Bible triumphed over eighteen centuries of tradition, but it is the Bible, an appeal to the Bible ever better understood, which has saved Protestant theology from scholasticism, which has prevented it from congealing in a confession of faith, and which, leaving the principle of the Gospel in an ideal transcendence in relation to all its historical expressions or realisations, has maintained, and still maintains, the spirit of reform in the Churches of the Reformation.

The doctrines of grace and of predestination, which are at the centre of Calvinism, have no other meaning. Souls religiously inert see in these doctrines nothing but an abuse of blind power, a sort of divine fatum, breaking every spring in the human soul. Nothing appears to be more oppressive or more immoral. But this is only an appearance. There is really no predestination for irreligious souls. This doctrine is but the expression of the inner basis of all true piety, which is nothing if it is not the sense, the feeling, of the presence and the sovereign and continuous action of God in each soul and in all the universe. No other sentiment gives so much spring and vigour to the human will, nothing raises it to such a height or makes it so invincible to all assaults from within and without. "If God be for us, who can be against us?" etc. (Rom. viii. 31-39). How is it that the Calvinistic Puritans of New England were the founders of modern liberty, and the Jesuits, those admirable theorisers on freewill, the precursors of all the servitudes? It is with predestination as it is with religion itself. Conceived as exterior to the life of the soul, it gives birth, no doubt, to a crushing despotism; conceived as an inward inspiration, sustaining the initiative and even the liberty of the individual, it becomes, in the Christian soul, the source of a force which nothing can break or subdue.

But the point at which the antithesis between Protestantism and Catholicism becomes most patent is the doctrine of the natural priesthood of all Christians as opposed to that of the supernatural priesthood of a privileged clergy. The free and perpetual communion of believing souls with the Father is the foundation of the independence of each and of the fraternal equality of all. The tap-root of clericalism is cut. The individual is a priest before the interior altar of his conscience; the father is a priest in his household; the citizen, if so he wills, in the city.

The Catholic notion of dogma vanishes with all the rest. To speak of an immutable and infallible dogma, in Protestantism, is nonsense; that is to say, if we accept the dictionary definition of dogma—the promulgation by the Church of an absolute formula. The decision of a Church cannot have more authority than that Church itself. Now, no Protestant Church holds itself, or can hold itself without denying itself, to be infallible. How then could it communicate to its definitions an infallibility that it did not itself possess? Protestant confessions of faith are always conditioned in time, and can never be definitive; they are always revisable, consequently they are always liable to criticism and to reform. Thus ceases the solidification of traditional dogma. The old ice melts beneath the breath of knowledge and of piety. The river takes again its natural course, and evolution, under the control of a perpetual criticism, becomes the law of religious thought, as of all other human activities.

From these observations and analyses (necessarily abridged) the true nature of Protestantism will have become sufficiently clear. It is not a dogma set up in the face of another dogma, a Church in competition with a rival Church, a purified Catholicism opposed to a traditional Catholicism. It is more and better than a doctrine, it is a method; more and better than a better Church, it is a new form of piety; it is a different spirit, creating a new world and inaugurating for religious souls a new régime. It is equally evident that Protestantism cannot be imprisoned in any definitive form. It leads to variety of formulas, rites, and associations as necessarily as the Catholic principle leads to unity. No limit can be set to its development. Always interior, invisible, ideal, the religious principle that it represents accompanies the life and activity of the spirit into all the paths that man may pursue and in all the progress he may make. Nothing human is alien to it; nor is it alien to anything that is human. It solves the problem of liberty and authority as it is solved by free and ordered governments; it does not suppress either of the terms, but conciliates them by reducing authority to its pedagogic rôle, and by making the Christian spirit the soul and inner rule of liberty.

By very reason of its superiority, and of the conditions of general culture that it presupposes, this form of Christianity could only appear after all the others. The spirit can only become self-conscious by distinguishing itself from the body in which at first it seems as if diffused, and by opposing to it an energetic moral protest. "That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterwards that which is spiritual" (1 Cor. xv. 46. Cf. Gal. iv. 1-5). This divine plan, which the apostle discovered in the ancient history of humanity, is repeated in the history of Christianity. The Messianic form corresponds to infancy, to that brief, happy age in which the impatient imagination nourishes itself on dreams and illusions which the experience of life soon dissipates without killing or even enfeebling the immortal hope at the heart of it. The Catholic form, which succeeds it, endures longer and corresponds to the age of adolescence, in which education is painfully prosecuted, and it demands a strict external discipline and masters whose authority must not be questioned or discussed. It was in this way that Catholic discipline and authority conducted the slow, laborious education of the pagan and barbarian world up to the sixteenth century.

But a moment must arrive when the work of education had succeeded, when the leading strings essential to childhood began to be a bondage and a hindrance. The pedagogic mission of the Church, like that of the family itself, had its limit and its term in the very function it fulfilled. That function was to make adult Christians and free men, not men without rule, but Christians having in themselves, in their conscience and their inner life, the supreme rule of their thought and conduct. This new age of autonomy, of firm possession of self, and of internal self-government, is that which Protestantism represents, and it could only commence in modern times—that is to say, with that general movement which, since the end of the Middle Ages, is leading humanity to an ever completer enfranchisement, and rendering it more universally and more individually responsible for its destinies.