Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History

by Auguste Sabatier

In every living organism, in fact, there is a principle of stability and a principle of movement. The identity of a human being persists through all the modifications, internal and external, which he undergoes. So with the language of a people; and so with every historical religion. Its fundamental and regulative principle is the relation it establishes between the soul and God. The form or external realisation of this principle depends, no doubt, on the race, the geographical environment, the historical period. It will vary therefore with these circumstances. But the religious type or organic principle remaining the same, this religion will appear the same throughout the incessant movement of its dogmas, rites, and symbols. This is the very condition of its life. Forms which cannot bend, symbols whose fresh and living interpretation is exhausted, a rigid body that no longer assimilates or eliminates any external element, represent a state of sterility and death, to be followed by a speedy dissolution.

Pious men are right in clinging obstinately to the stability of their principle of piety, but they ought to cling as tenaciously to the renewal of forms and ideas in their religion; for this is the only proof that their treasure has kept its value, and their religious principle its organising virtue. The life of a religion is measured by this power of adaptation and renovation. If Christianity is the universal and eternal religion, it is because its virtuality in this respect is infinite.

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Before I close, let me try to prevent two misunderstandings. In saying that in dogmas we must distinguish the religious substance and the intellectual form, I do not mean that we either can or ought to isolate them from each other, or that we can ever hope to have them separately. Piety is only conscious for us and discernible by others when incarnate in its expression or intellectual image. A religion without doctrine, a piety without thought, a feeling without expression, these are things essentially contradictory. It is as vain to wish to seize pure piety, as in philosophy it is to seek to define "the thing in itself." When we speak of the inward religious fact, then, of pious experience, we do not speak of a bare experience; we speak of a psychological phenomenon, of a precise and, consequently, formulated experience.

In the second place, for religious science, it is not a question of isolated experience, of the experience of a single individual. The material would be too precarious, and the field of observation too limited. The question refers to the individual life in its continuity, and to the life of the religious society considered in its historical development.

A social and universal as much and even more than it is an individual fact, it is in the social life of the species, in organised religious societies, in their institutions, their common worship, their liturgy, their rules of faith and discipline, that religion objectively realises its fundamental principle, manifests its inner soul, and develops all its power. It is only as a social manifestation that it can become an object of scientific study, and that it has need of explanation. Moreover, a religious life which remains hidden in the individual consciousness, which does not communicate itself, which does not create any spiritual solidarity, any fraternity of soul, is as if it were not; it is a mere film of feeling, an ephemeral poetic flower, which has no more effect on the individual himself than it has on the human race.

From these considerations springs a method. The dogmatic treatment of religious knowledge will have for its subject the tradition of the religious society as it is fixed, conserved, and developed in its historic monuments. It will consider that tradition from the symbolic point of view, as the objective revelation of the inner life of the Church, and of its piety. The tradition will then appear not as something dead and immutable, but as a power continuing in ourselves. To grasp this soul in its fruitful continuity and in the perpetual renewal of the external organism; to comprehend them in their living unity; to tell the story of the genesis of dogmas and their endless metamorphoses as a constant and necessary incarnation of the principle that is manifested in them; to follow this uninterrupted chain in history, and prolong it into our own life,—such is the method, at once critical and positive, conservative and progressive, firm in piety and always deferential to science, which critical symbolism enables us to apply to all religious creations.

The error of that form of religious knowledge called Orthodoxy is that of forgetting the historically and psychologically conditioned character of all doctrines, and of desiring to raise into the absolute that which is born in time, and which must necessarily modify itself in order to live in time. Impotent to arrest the current of ideas and the movement of minds, it can only establish its rule by political measures, by regulations enacted and applied like civil laws—decisions of popes, bishops, or synods, trials for heresy, dogmatic tribunals. Orthodoxy has lost the sense of the symbolical character of Confessions of Faith, which, however, it still names symbols. Its misfortune and its failing is to be anti-historical.

The error of Rationalism, at once the brother and the enemy of orthodoxy, is of the same nature, but it is produced in an opposite sense. It does not lose sight of the imperfect and precarious character of traditional dogmas and symbols; it exaggerates it; but it loses sight of their specifically religious contents. Orthodoxy is mistaken as to the nature of the body of religion; rationalism as to the nature of its soul. Beneath the old traditional ideas it seeks for other ideas, moral or rational ideas, freer from sensible elements, and less contradictory, which it mistakes for the essence of religion. It replaces dogmas by other dogmas which it believes to be more simple, and which it regards as absolute truth. But in giving to religion a rational or doctrinal content, it empties it of its real content, of specific religious experience; it kills faith, which no longer having an object of its own, no longer has a raison d'être. It has less liking than orthodoxy for symbolism and for religious creations; it is radically impossible for it to comprehend, and consequently to interpret, them. The chief vice and the misfortune of rationalism is to be anti-religious.

The theory of Critical Symbolism, whose broad outlines we have traced, will bring us out of this old antithesis. It shows to us the kind of truth and the legitimacy possessed by symbolical ideas, without ignoring the psychological and historical determinism which rules their form and their appearance. It must not be imagined that, from this point of view, everything becomes fluid and inconstant in religion—that nothing in it can be fixed or permanent. In the progress of his life, man is destined to realise his spiritual nature, to attain to what St. Paul calls "the stature of Christ," in which the religious and moral ideal is realised. This moral stature is a reality, the highest of all realities. We tend towards it without ceasing, and the value of each moment of our inner life is measured by the progress that it marks towards that supreme end. For this inner life there is a norm which imposes itself on the consciousness with an imperative necessity, and, consequently, there may be religious symbols which are normal and normative in relation to others. These are the symbols which represent with perfect simplicity and fitness either this ideal end of the Christian life or some of the necessary moments through which the soul passes on the way to it. There are symbols, in a word, such as that of the Heavenly Father, the Kingdom of God, the New Birth, the Effusion of the Holy Spirit, so intimately bound up with our religious life, with its origin, its progress, or its end, which one cannot conceive as disappearing, so long as the spiritual life of humanity exists. All the exclusively religious words of Christ which bear directly on the consciousness are of this number. And it is of them that He was able to say without being contradicted by the ages: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away."