Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History

by Auguste Sabatier

"One day, the monk Sarapion, a man of deep piety and ardent zeal, was told by the priest Paphnutius and the deacon Photinus that God, in whose image man had been created, was a purely spiritual being, without body, without external figure, without sensible organs. Serapion was convinced by the ascendancy of Catholic tradition and by the arguments that had been employed. The assistants rose to render thanks to God for having rescued so holy a man from the wicked heresy of the anthropomorphists. But, in the midst of their devotions, the unhappy old man, feeling the image of the God to whom he had been accustomed to pray vanishing from his heart, was deeply moved, and bursting into sobs and tears, he threw himself upon the ground, and cried out: 'Woe is me! Unhappy man! They have taken away my God. I have no one now to cling to and invoke.'"[[2]]

[[2]] J. Cassanius, abb. Massil.: Collatio, X. c. III.

Touching image of our own experience and of the experience of humanity! We are always making to ourselves some idol or other. It is very difficult for us to realise that God is spirit: we attach ourselves therefore to some fetish of human fabrication. And then, when science comes and takes it away from us, we are troubled and perplexed, as if they had taken from us God Himself. The study of dogmas and their evolution, were it wider spread, would relieve us of our illusions and calm our inquietude. It would teach us that our religious life depends on our faith alone, and that the God Who is its source and end is independent of all theory or representation, because He is infinitely above all human conceptions, and because, in order never to be separated from Him, it suffices that we worship Him in spirit and in truth.

CHAPTER III

THE SCIENCE OF DOGMAS

1. The Mixed Character of Dogmatics

We have shown the necessity of a free criticism of dogmas. This criticism, if it is religious, will at the same time be positive; it will tend not to destroy, but to distinguish, in each dogma, that which is truly religious and permanent from that which is philosophical and fleeting. Such is the object of the discipline that, in the schools, is called Dogmatics, or the Science of Dogmas. It remains to define its task and to point out the resources which it has at its disposal. Both points are connected with its relation to the Church and to Philosophy. The science of dogmas has always necessarily followed the life of the one and the vicissitudes of the other.

In the religious experiences of the Church it finds the material that it elaborates; from philosophy it borrows the methods according to which it treats this material and the form in which it organises it. This science is, therefore, a mixed science: positive and practical in its object, speculative and theoretical in its procedure, it seeks to connect the religious and moral experience with the rest of the experience of humanity, and to effect the synthesis claimed, in order to their full vigour, by the scientific order of thought and by the moral order of practical life.

This intermediate position of our science, between the Church and philosophy, constitutes its independence and its originality. If, as in Catholicism, it were absolutely subjected to the authority of the Church, and were limited to receiving, without critical examination, its successive decisions and traditions, it would be confounded with the history of dogmas, and would be merely a survival of scholasticism. On the other hand, if it did not start from the data furnished by history and by the personal and collective experience of piety,—if it did not study the Christian life in its objectivity and in its historic continuity, but abandoned itself to purely subjective and general speculations—it would be fatally confounded with philosophy. It escapes this double peril, first, by taking as its object the study of the doctrinal tradition of the Church, tracing it back to its generative principle, following it in its successive forms and necessary evolution; and, secondly, by freely applying to this objective material the principles and rules of a truly rational method, a method that may be avowed as such by philosophers. It thus constitutes the philosophy of religion in general and of Christianity in particular, setting itself to connect the consciousness of the Church with the general consciousness of humanity, and establishing or maintaining between them communications equally profitable to both.