The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Summary.

To sum up, the creative power once ascribed to God is in our opinion an extension of the notion of special Providence, which itself is of empirical origin. When theologians nowadays begin by establishing the creation, in order therefrom to deduce a special Providence, they are precisely inverting the order of things as they appeared in the beginning. It is only through the continually increasing preoccupation of abstract thought and metaphysical speculation with the question of the first cause, that the idea of a creative deity has acquired thus a sort of preponderance, and constitutes in our day an essential element in religion. Dualism, as we have seen, is of the essence of this notion; dualism is the principal form under which the union of souls and bodies, the relation of a special providence to natural laws, the relation of creator to created has been conceived. The notion, however, of a supreme unity running through all things has been caught more or less vague glimpses of, from remote times down to the present day. And it is on this notion that pantheistic and monistic religions, principally those of India, are based. Brahmanism and Buddhism tend to what has been called “absolute illusionism” for the benefit of a unity in which the supreme being takes for us the form of non-existence.

Dangers of effort to classify systems of religious metaphysics.

The temptation is natural systematically to class diverse systems of religious metaphysics and to represent them as evolving, one after the other in a regular order, conformable to a more or less determinate scheme; but one must be on one’s guard here against two things: first, the seduction of a system, with the metaphysical abstractions to which it leads; second, the pretense of finding everywhere a regular progress constantly headed toward religious unity. Religious philosophers have erred in both these respects; Hegel, for example, yielded to the temptation of imposing upon the history of religion his monotonous trilogy, of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In Von Hartmann the Hegelian spirit, influenced by Schopenhauer, still survives. We have seen Von Hartmann borrowing from Max Müller the abstract conception of a divinity at once unified and multiple, a species of primitive synthesis out of which historical religions were to arise by a process of differentiation: out of henotheism, as out of matter still void and without form, was to arise polytheism, and then by a process of degenerescence was to arise polydemonism or animism, and finally fetichism.[42] This order of development, as we have seen, is contrary to matter of fact.

Fetichism, understood simply as the ascription of life to natural objects, is primitive. Animism, or the conception of indwelling spirit, arises subsequently. Polytheism, or the worship of a certain number of analogous objects, such as the trees of a forest, implies some distinction between the deity and the forest, whereas fetichism limits itself strictly to the animation of each particular tree, and finally henotheism, or the vague conception of an indwelling divinity in all things, is ulterior and derivative. Monistic pantheism or monism lies but one step beyond.

Logically posterior often historically prior.

Remark also that Von Hartmann, who endeavours to prove that a vague monism is the primitive form of religion, regards the Vedas as a fair example of the earliest form of natural religion, traces of which remain more or less distinctly manifest in all mythologies. But this is positively to forget that for an anthropologist the Vedas are quite modern compositions, and that Hindu literature belongs to a period of high refinement and civilization. Monistic metaphysics may be the ultimate goal toward which all religions tend, but it is at least not the point of departure. Finally, Von Hartmann endeavours to establish the fact of a certain logical order in religious development, a progress. This progress does not exist in history nor anywhere outside of the abstract system constructed by Von Hartmann; it is dialectic, not historic. The divers religious points of view have often coincided in history; and sometimes a logically superior point of view has even preceded an inferior.

Comte’s classification logical, not psychological.

Another classification, not less open to suspicion than that of Von Hartmann, is the celebrated Comtist progression from fetichism to polytheism and from polytheism to monism. In this classification the framework no longer consists of metaphysical abstractions, but of numbers. But numbers also possess their artificial and superficial side; they do not express the most fundamental aspects of religion. In the first place, it is a matter of extreme difficulty to perceive any radical difference between naturistic fetichism and polytheism. Multiplicity of divinities is a characteristic common to both. The sole difference that Comte was able to establish is that in polytheism a whole class of objects, for example all the trees of a forest, or a whole class of phenomena, as lightning and storm, is represented by one divinity. But this species of abstraction and generalization is much less important, much more exterior and purely logical, than the psychological and metaphysical progression from a grossly unitarian and concrete naturism to a dualistic animism. This latter line of development is in the direction of naturalistic and spiritualistic metaphysics, which possess a deeper significance than a system of mathematical enumeration and logical generalization. The passage from polytheism to monotheism is also conceived by Comte somewhat too mathematically. Polytheism early resulted in a certain hierarchy and subordination of the whole body of individual deities to some one powerful god: Jupiter, Fate, etc. On the other hand, monotheism has always provided some place for secondary divinities—angels, devils, spirits of every kind, to say nothing of the trinitarian conception of the Godhead itself. Mathematical terms, in this connection, obscure profound problems which belong really to metaphysics and to morals.

The real classification.