The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and men.

The gods inevitably become protectors of social justice.

To the personification of the law, religious morals inevitably joined that of the sanction which plays so capital a rôle in every human society. The celestial government has always been a projection of the human government, with a penalty at first terrible and subsequently softened. To say the truth, the theory of a sanction is the systematization of that of a providence. The distinguishing characteristic of a providence is that it awards or recompenses, insomuch that one may bring down upon one’s self or avoid its anger, by such and such conduct. Well, the instant a man admits that a divine power is governing him, this power will inevitably appear to him to be exercising a control over his conduct, and, as it were, sanctioning it. This control will at first be exercised only in regard to the personal relations of the individual, with his god and his gods. But the individual will soon recognize that if the gods take an interest in him they may well take an interest also in the other members of the tribe, provided that these last know how to render them propitious; and to injure the other worshippers of a god would be indirectly to injure the god himself, and provoke his anger. All the members of a tribe therefore find themselves protected against each other by their association with the gods, religion lends support to social justice, and whoever violates social justice expects the gods to punish him. This expectation also must have been confirmed by the facts, for if antisocial and unjust conduct had habitually prevailed among men, social life would have been impossible. Injustice must then always on an average have carried its sanction with it, and this sanction must have appeared to be the direct work of the gods, passing judgment from on high on the social conduct of their clients, as Roman patrons did, seated beneath the columns of the atrium.

And of human justice.

As religions intermingled and grew in extent, the clientage of a god, at first extended to the members of a single tribe, passed beyond its bounds. Men, of no matter what origin, might become citizens of the celestial city, of the superhuman association which took charge of each of its members, so that the divine sanction tended increasingly to become confounded with the moral sanction, and one understood that God protected justice not only within the bosom of a tribe, but everywhere within the limits of humanity.

Natural desire to have the scales loaded on the side of rectitude.

While in the matter of the sanction the sociomorphic conception of the world tended thus to become a moral conception, morality itself must have tended, in order to eke out its own insufficiency, to ally itself with religion. Human society, powerless to make itself always respected by every one of its members, inevitably invoked the aid of the society of superior beings which enveloped it on all sides. Man being essentially a social animal, ζῶον πολιτικόν, could not be resigned in the presence of the success of antisocial conduct, and whenever it seemed that such conduct had succeeded humanly, the very nature of mankind tended to make it turn toward the superhuman to demand a reparation and a compensation. If the bees should suddenly see their hives destroyed before their eyes without there being any hope of ever reconstructing them, their whole being would be shaken, and they would instinctively await for an intervention of some kind, which should re-establish an order as immutable and sacred for them as that of the stars is for us. Man, by virtue of the moral nature with which heredity has furnished him, is thus inclined to believe that wickedness ought not to have the last word in the universe; the triumph of evil and of injustice always stirs his indignation. This species of indignation is observable in infants almost before they can talk, and numerous traces of it may be found even among animals. The logical result of this instinctive protest against evil is a refusal to believe in its definitive triumph.[44]

Results in victory being given in heaven to principle of light.

Man, in whose eyes the society in which the gods live corresponds so closely to human society, must almost inevitably imagine the existence among them of antisocial beings, of Ahrimans and Satans, protectors of evil in heaven and on earth, but it is natural that he should give the victory in the end to the “principle of good” over the “principle of evil.” Of all things it is the most repugnant to him to believe that the universe is fundamentally indifferent to the distinction between good and evil; a divinity may be irascible, capricious, and even intermittently wicked, but man cannot understand an impassible and cold nature.

Gods legitimated by alliance with the moral forces of society.