Systematic subordination among the gods.
Little by little, by the growth of experience, man achieves the conception of an orderly subordination among the different voluntary beings with whom he peoples the earth, a sort of unification of special providences, a more or less regular organization of the world. Responsibility for current events retreats from cause to cause into the distance, from powerful being to still more powerful being; primitive man still insists on believing that every event is still the sign, the expression of a volition. Once more his faith is dualistic: he conceives the world as dependent upon the will of some one or more superior beings who direct it, or suspend at need the ordinary course of things.
Development of belief in miracle.
It is at this stage in the evolution of religion that the conception of miracles appears. The notion of miracles is at first very vague in primitive religions; the period at which this notion begins to become definite marks the initiation of a further step in the development of religion. If, in effect, the marvellous has in all times formed a necessary element in the constitution, it did not possess in the beginning the same character as nowadays; it was not so definitely distinguished from the natural order of things. Human intelligence had not yet distinguished scientific determinism and supernaturalism. A natural phenomenon! The bare idea is almost modern; that is to say, the idea of a phenomenon subject to immutable laws, bound up together with the whole body of other phenomena and forming with them a single unit. What a complex conception, and how far above the reach of primitive intelligence! What we call a miracle is a natural phenomenon to a savage, he sees miracles every hour; properly speaking, he sees nothing else but miracles, that is to say, surprising events. Primitive man, in effect, takes no notice of what does not surprise him (surprise, it has been said, is the father of science), and one of the immediate characteristics, in his opinion, of what surprises him, is that it is intentional.[39] That it should be so no more shocks him, than a paradox shocks a philosopher. The savage is not acquainted with the laws of nature, he has no notion of their being universal to prevent his admitting exceptions to them. A miracle is simply to him a sign of a power like his own, acting by methods unknown to him and producing effects above the limits of his own capacity. Are such effects infinitely above his capacity? No such notion enters into the question; it suffices that they be above it at all to make him bow down and adore.
Marks a degree of intellectual progress.
The belief in miracles, so anti-scientific nowadays, marks a considerable progress in the intellectual evolution. It amounts, in effect, to a limitation of divine intervention to a small number of extraordinary phenomena. A conception of universal determinism is, in fact, beginning to make its appearance. The belief in dualism, in the separation between spirit and body, becoming constantly more marked, ends in the belief in distinct and separate powers.
Conception of God as Providence more essential than that of Him as First Cause.
Belief in a power miraculously distributing good and evil, in a Providence, is the most vital element in religion. The most important act in every religion, indeed, is propitiation and entreaty; well, this act is not simply directed toward God as such, but toward God as a presiding divinity, a power capable of favouring or disfavouring us. And the great Oriental religions have reached their present state of perfection without any special effort to make the notion of God precise, without specially insisting upon any of his distinguishing attributes except such as are subsidiary to this notion of a Providence awarding good and evil; and popular fancy hastens to ascribe the accomplishment of this distribution to genii, to good and evil spirits; it need go no further, it need not penetrate to the Great Being, to the infinite, so to speak, to the noumenon, and to the abyss which, in effect, is to it a comparative matter of indifference. Even in religions of Christian origin—in especial, in Catholicism, and the Greek Church—God is not always addressed directly; saints, angels, the Virgin, the Son, the Holy Spirit, are much more frequently invoked as mediators. There is something vague, and obscure, and terrible, in God the Father; He is the creator of heaven and hell, the great and somewhat ambiguous principle of goodness, and, in some dim way, of evil. One may see in Him the germ of an indirect personification of nature, which is so indifferent to man, so hard, so inflexible. Christ, on the contrary, is the personification of the best elements of humanity. The responsibility for ferocious laws, maledictions, eternal punishments, is laid upon the shoulders of the Old Testament Deity hidden behind His cloud, revealed only in the lightning and the thunder, reigning by terror, and demanding the life even of His Son as an expiatory sacrifice. At bottom, the real God adored by the Christians is Jesus, that is to say, a mediating Providence whose function is to soften down the asperities of natural law, a Providence who distributes nothing but good and happiness, whereas nature distributes good and evil with equal indifference. It is Jesus we invoke, and it is to the personification of Providence rather than to that of the first cause of the world that humanity has kneeled these two thousand years.
Increasing opposition between notion of Providence and science.
A belief in miracles and in a Providence comes, in the course of its development, into sharper and sharper conflict with a belief in the order of nature. Man gives himself up to an exclusive preoccupation with what he supposes to be the means of ameliorating his destiny and that of his fellows: providential interference with the course of nature, sacrifice, and prayer are his great means of action on the world. He lives in the supernatural. There exists always, in the early stages of every religion, a certain sentiment of evil, of suffering, of terror; and to correct it the believer takes refuge in miracles. Providence is thus the primitive means of progress, and man’s first hope lay in the superhuman.