The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

The Greeks, who of all ancient people are supposed to have been the least religious, were of all ancient people those who showed most reverence for the dead. The most irreligious city in modern times, Paris, is that in which the fête for the dead is most solemn, in which the entire people rise to celebrate it, and that also in which we see the most flippant street Arab take off his hat in the presence of a funeral and salute the visible image of the eternal enigma. A respect for the dead which binds the generations of mankind together, which is the essence of the most certain form of immortality, that of memory and example, will not disappear with the decay of religion. Corpus Christi may be forgotten, but All Souls’ Day will be observed till the end of human time.

III. Associations for æsthetic purposes—Worship of art and nature.

Association for enjoyment of products of æsthetic genius.

I. The third notion which is destined to survive historic religions, and which has been as yet imperfectly realized, is that of voluntary association for the purpose of enjoying in common some æsthetic pleasure of a high and morally refining kind; therein lies what will survive of the ceremonial of diverse religions. The artistic elements pent up in various religions will disengage themselves, will become independent of tradition, of symbolism taken seriously, and of superstition. Science, metaphysics, and morals all have their poetical side, and in so far are analogous to religion.

Destined prevalence of admiration.

The pure abstraction by which the thinker escapes beyond the limits of sentiment is an unstable and unlasting state of mind; abstraction contains something fictitious, for nothing abstract exists in nature; abstraction is of value only as an instrument; its aim is to grapple with some one side of the reality, to enable one subsequently more easily to embrace the reality as a whole. Every general result that abstraction can achieve may sooner or later become the object of a sentiment. The progress of science, as Mr. Spencer says, has always been accompanied side by side by a corresponding progress in the faculty of admiration; this faculty must inevitably develop, in the future, when man will have attained a less fragmentary and more genuinely synthetic conception of the universe. Admiration is one of the surviving elements of the religious sentiment. Man will always be subject to astonishment, and will always contemplate the universe in a spirit of wonder, although, no doubt, the time must come when he will cease to kneel. Artistic genius, even when inspired by great philosophical and cosmological ideas, remains essentially different from religious genius properly so called, the distinctive character of which is to be dogmatic. The Greeks were of all peoples the most poetical and the least religious. Poetry, like metaphysics, consists in constructions in the realm of imagination and thought, which are capable of infinite variety and tend to overrun the whole compass of the human mind. Dogmatic religion, on the contrary, tends continually to limit the fertility of the imagination and of philosophic thought; it implies a certain poverty of mind to cling always to the same conception, to feel no desire to pass beyond it, to create. Metaphysical hypothesis, unshackled by dogma, gifted with variety and liberty, must inevitably be fertile even in the domain of art; it cannot dwell forever among abstractions, it must produce a corresponding sentiment, a poetic sentiment which will not be the naïve assurance of faith but the proper emotional reaction in the presence of a transformation of the real world under the influence of thought conceiving the ideal. For the philosopher, as for the poet, every surface that science touches, every form and figure in the world that the finger of knowledge taps, gives forth a sound, not of the void, but, so to speak, of the “essential inwardness of life.” They resemble the marbles in Italy which give forth, beneath a blow, a sound as harmonious as their forms. There is an inner harmony that may well go along with harmony of surface; science shows us the laws of surfaces, philosophy and poetry put us into sympathy with what lies below the surface. If it is impossible to deny, as pure idealists attempt to deny, the objective character of the world in which we live, one can, at least, not say where objectivity begins and subjectivity ends. Between Naghiri and Yarkand there exists an almost unknown tribe called Hunza, whose language presents a peculiarity which it is impossible to separate from one’s notion of humanity; one cannot, in their speech, express the idea of a horse simply, but must say my horse or thy horse or his horse. Our language is more perfect than that of the Hunza, but we are absolutely incapable of conceiving things in abstraction from all notion of human personality; in especial, when we are dealing, not with individual, external objects, but with the cosmos as a whole. There is no such thing as a world existing in isolation; there is only your world, my world, the human world. Man is so inseparably associated with his conception of the universe that it is impossible to know what our universe would be apart from us, or what we should be apart from it. The metaphysician and the poet are at one in celebrating the projection of humanity into all things. At their highest points poetry and philosophy coincide. Metaphysics is the poetry of pure reason, poetry is the metaphysics of the senses and of the heart. The two supply us with our conception of the world, and, after all, since we are the product of the world, it must be in some sense akin to all that we contain. The fundamental secret of things lies at the bottom of human thought. Poetry is a light and winged creature, Plato says, but he was speaking of the poetry of the poet, of his sonorous and harmonious words; but the poetry of the metaphysician, the poetry of profound ideas and hidden causes, is also a winged thing, but winged not to be enabled to skim the surfaces of things as a land bird skims the surface of land and sea, but to be enabled to dive as “divers” do when they plunge into the limpid waves, and, at the risk of asphyxia, walk upon the opaque bottom of the sea and tear it up with their beaks in search of food and come up shaking their feathers from none knows where. Sometimes their search has been in vain, sometimes they bring up buried treasure; and they alone of all beings employ their wings not to skim and to touch the surface of things, but to penetrate to the depths of them. The last word of poetry, as of thought, will be to dive beneath the moving flood and sweep of things, and seize the secret of the material universe which is also the secret of the spiritual universe.

Art in a measure to take the place of religion.

II. The more feeble dogmatic religions become, the greater the necessity for a stronger and higher art. Humanity needs a certain amount of distraction, and even, as Pascal said, of “diversion.” A human beast, such as an English or German labouring man, knows but one distraction in the world: eating and drinking, especially drinking. Many English labourers never go to the theatre or to church, never read, know nothing of the pleasures of home; the gin-palace and gin take the place of art, religion, and the family. Opium plays the same role in China. They who do not know how to amuse themselves brutalize themselves; self-brutalization is, at least, a change, an element of variety in the monotony of life, a break in the continuity of the chain of misery. Oblivion from time to time is imperative. One of the ancients said that he would rather be a master in the science of oblivion than in that of memory. The only porches of forgetfulness that are open to the more debased portions of mankind are sleep and intoxication; people at a higher stage of civilization may approach art and adoration; and these two forms of distraction are the highest and sweetest.[125]

Art as a diversion.

The amount of activity devoted by men to religion and æsthetics may appear at first sight useless and even harmful; but it must be recognized that humanity is always possessed of a surplus which must be expended in some way or other. Prayer and religious exercises, regarded as occupations simply, are of the least harmful of pastimes, are of the least vain of the various forms of distraction. Prayer and the church have hitherto been the art and theatre of the poor. No doubt art and prayer cannot be made to constitute alone the whole of life; mystics have believed that it is practical life that is the diversion, and that the serious element in things is religious contemplation. Precisely the opposite is true: preoccupation with art and metaphysics should dominate human life, but not absorb it. Religion in especial, with its myths, is too generously compounded of illusion and downright fiction to be made the centre of life; religion is a radiant coloured cloud that wreaths the summit of the mountain. If we climb up into it we perceive that it is empty and sombre within, that it is a cloud, damp and cold like other clouds and radiant only from below.