Dreams of an astronomer

by Camille Flammarion

Yes, the supreme being is unknowable. The human mind cannot comprehend the infinite, eternal, immutable spirit, the organising power of that All of which the Earth and Man are but particles as imperfect as they are mediocre. This Infinite is to the infantile deity imagined by man as the midday sun is to the muddy obscurity of a mole-burrow under the roots of meadow grass. His existence is proved by the universal organisation. Everything is organised, from the humblest leaf to the world system. An invisible, immaterial element of a spiritual nature, as yet imperfectly revealed by our means of investigation, manifests itself within us and around us. This spiritual principle should be revered as enveloping the world and enfolding us. But the clergy of all religions, of all times and of all countries, have always monopolised the idea of God and appropriated it to their exclusive and intolerant purpose of domination. When they speak of God, they mean their own God. The free spirits who do not acknowledge their figure-head are treated as atheists and hated and persecuted as such. They will not admit that one may be a Deist and yet anticlerical. But they are not too unintelligent to know that it is an injustice, a stupidity, and a lie to treat as atheists those thinkers who deny the divinity of Jesus. The people who dare to reduce God to their size and even to put Him in their pocket are the greatest blasphemers.

It is strange that Man, still in a coarse, savage, and barbarous state, hardly emerged from the primitive shell of ignorance, incapable of knowing even his own body, hardly able to spell the great book of the universe, should have considered himself capable of describing God. He does not know his own little ant-heap and he pretends to discover the unknowable. At a time when nothing was known, when astronomy, physics, chemistry, natural history, and anthropology were as yet unborn, when the feeble and meandering human mind was still surrounded by illusions and errors, human audacity conceived the so-called religions and the gods placed at their heads.

That Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Socrates, Jesus, or Mahomet should have striven to give to mankind a code of morals destined to deliver them from barbarism and to teach them the idea of good, such efforts and achievements cannot but receive the homage and admiration of all who value the intellectual and moral progress of humanity. That the founders and organisers of religious rites should place at the head of every cult an ideal, an inviolable being in whose name they pretend to govern, even that can be recognised as a work of social utility, of a value not rising above the worldly standard, and having no object beyond the general good of man and societies. But that those gods invented by man should be considered as really existing, and in an absolutely imaginary heaven which perished in the first conquests of astronomy, that they should have been, and are still, adored by a certain portion of the human race, and that even in our time legislators of all nations dare to base their politics on divine right, to show the “finger of God” in the most monstrous plagues of the social body, and decorate their battle-flags with a local providence, as in the time of Joan of Arc, of Constantine, or of David—that is the shocking anachronism, a mixture of imposture and credulity, of hypocrisy and stupidity unworthy of the era of sincere and positive research in which we live, and which should load the functionaries who live at the expense of such a system with the contempt of every independent man.

Definitions are misleading. Were pagans like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, not more spiritual than Pope Alexander the Sixth or Cardinal Dubois, who were true atheists?

The search for the nature of the First Cause—I do not say the “knowledge of God,” which would be an expression worthy of a “theologian” and absurd in itself—but simply the search for the Absolute Being, for the origin of the energy which sustains, animates, and governs the universe, for the intelligent force which acts everywhere and perpetually through infinity and eternity and gives rise to the appearances which strike our eyes and are studied by our science—this search, I say, could not be undertaken nor even properly conceived before the first discoveries of astronomy and modern physics, that is to say, before the investigations of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. It is only two centuries ago that the purely religious idea, free from idolatries, from all sorts of mythologies, of errors and superstitions produced by primitive ignorance—it is only during the last two centuries that it was possible for this idea to arise out of modern scientific evolution. All the religions existing at the present day have been founded during ages of ignorance, when we knew nothing about the earth or the heavens. True religion, i.e. the union of free spirits in the search for truth, can only be the work of an epoch like ours, in which some courageous and disinterested spirits free from the hypocrisy of false doctrines, yet without falling into the puerile atheism of superficial minds which only see the outer shell, will sincerely and freely apply all branches of science to the search for the intimate constitution of the universe and of the human being. The future will teach us. To-day we know but little; we are only beginning to learn. The unknown God conceived by the thinkers, by Socrates, by Plato, by Marcus Aurelius, by Voltaire (as ardent a Deist as he was a violent anticlerical), by Newton, by Descartes, by Linné, by Euler, by Spinoza, by Kant, by all pure Deists, surpasses in his grand immensity all the poor inventions of the clergy of all denominations. One cannot see the creator of the hundred million suns of the Milky Way looking down upon a small village in Judea and inspiring Judith to seduce Holophernes with the object of cutting off his head after betraying him with her caresses; or conferring on Joshua the power of arresting the movement of the solar system to give him time to exterminate the besiegers of Gibeon! What sort of opinion had such writers of the Supreme Being? And what opinion of him is still held by those preachers who continue to teach this “Holy Scripture”?

The Infinite cannot be comprehended by the Finite.

He who has made the tour of the world, who has visited Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, reasons in a manner wider beyond comparison with the state of humanity than he who has never left his country. Between the narrow, incomplete, and false ideas of the latter and the judicious, exact, and just appreciations of the former there is the difference of night and day.

Unfortunately we preach to the deaf. For one man who reasons there are a hundred who do not. The struggle against the domination of the spiritual directors is very platonic and the clergy despise it. The Church has organised marriage, birth, and death into ceremonies which seduce the imagination and please the women. Compare the civil marriage and the religious marriage; the former cold, dull, insipid; the latter impressive and attractive with the altar garlanded with flowers, and the enchantment of the music which makes the creator descend into the bosom of the spouse, “Veni, Creator Spiritus.” It will be centuries before the religious form of marriage is entirely replaced by the civil. A certain free-thinking father refrained from having his four boys baptized so as to leave them entire liberty of conscience. All four got baptized on the eve of their marriage as their brides wished to be married in church. Faith or convention, that is how the world goes—and the priests smile at the simplicity of the layman.

What is Sunday for most Christians but a day for fine clothes?

Tradition has created a distinguished society often permeated with hypocrisy, but to belong to which is “good form.” Ancient errors are preserved without being credited. Convention governs the “well-disposed” people.