The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Which soon came to be conceived as coercive.

Add that to the notion of seducing the gods that of constraining is soon joined. To the conception of an exchange of services is soon joined that of a species of coercion exercised in some vague manner by the intermediation of some friendly god or even by some simple magic formula which has once succeeded, once procured the object demanded! Formulæ consecrated by custom appear to be equally binding on gods and men. Accordingly the cult, at first more or less loose, more or less arbitrary, ultimately becomes minutely regulated; ultimately becomes what one knows as a rite. A rite, at its lowest, is simply the result of a tendency to repeat indefinitely an act which, at some time or other, has seemed to render a god or a fetich propitious. After propitiation comes mechanical custom. Religion, as Pascal well said, is to a large extent habit. Rites are born of the need to perform again and again the same act, under the same circumstances; a need which is the foundation of custom, and without which all life would be impossible. Moreover, there is something sacred in every habit whatsoever, and every act, whatever it may be, tends to become a habit and by that fact to become respectable, to be in some sort self-consecrated. Rites, therefore, strike root in the very foundations of our being; the need for rites manifests itself very early in the life of the child. Children not only imitate other people and themselves, repeat other people and themselves, but exact a scrupulous precision in these repetitions; in general they do not distinguish the end from the means by which, and the circumstances under which, it is pursued; they do not yet possess a sufficiently exercised intelligence to understand that the same line of action may lead to the same result in different ways and under different circumstances. I once observed a child of from eighteen months to two years old: if I got up from my armchair and paraded about the room for its amusement, and stopped, it was necessary before beginning once more that I should return to my seat; the child’s pleasure was much diminished if the repetition was not exact. The child was accustomed to be fed by a number of people indifferently; still if I had given it some one thing—milk to drink, for example—a number of times, it was no longer satisfied to receive milk from anybody else, and insisted that the same person should always give it the same thing. If, on leaving the house, I took another cane than my own, the child would take it away from me to put it back where it belonged. It was unwilling that one should wear one’s hat in the house or go bare-headed out of doors. And finally, I saw it achieve a veritable bit of ceremonial on its own account. It had been accustomed to be told to call a domestic at the top of the servants’ stairway; one day the domestic was in the room when the child was told to call her; the child looked at her, turned about, went to the top of the stairway where it usually called her, and there only shouted out her name. All the conduct of life, in effect the most important as the most insignificant, is classified in a child’s head, rigorously defined, and modelled on the type of the first act of that kind that has caught its attention, without the child’s ever being able to distinguish the object of an act from its form. This confusion between purpose and form exists in a no less striking degree among savages and primitive peoples, and it is upon this very confusion that the sacred character of religious rites is founded.

Primitive man possesses a repugnance not to novelty but to a breach of custom.

The trouble that is apparent in a child or an uncultivated man in the presence of whatever deranges his established association of ideas, has been explained by a pure and simple horror of novelty. Lombroso has even coined a word to designate this psychological state; he has called it misoneism. But let us not confound two quite distinct things, a horror of a breach of custom and a horror of novelty; there are new perceptions, and habits that may be added to the whole body of already existing perceptions and habits without deranging them much or at all; and against these neither the savage nor the child rebels. Though the child never wearies of listening to the same tale and becomes irritated the moment one alters its least detail, it will listen no less passionately to a new tale; and new toys and new walks delight it. The same taste for novelty is observable among savages, just in so far as it can be gratified without disturbing their preconceived ideas. Primitive man is like the miser who will not part with any of his acquired treasure, but asks nothing better than to increase it. He is naturally curious, but he has no desire to push his curiosity to the point of contradicting what he knows already or believes he knows. And in a measure he is right, he is simply obeying the powerful instinct of intellectual self-preservation; his intelligence is not sufficiently supple constantly to knit and unknit the associations of ideas which experience has established in him. A black, out of an attachment for Livingstone, wished to accompany him to Europe; a few days on the steamer drove him insane. It is, therefore, in obedience to a certain branch of the instinct of self-preservation that primitive peoples are so conservative in their customs and rites; but they show themselves no less willing to appropriate the customs and rites of other people whenever they can do so without abandoning their own. The Romans ultimately came to accept the cult of all the peoples in the world without, however, any abandonment of their national cult; and fêtes, which are properly survivals of paganism, subsist even at the present day; one acquires superstition, and customs, much more easily than one loses them.

Worship in public confirms cult.

The power of example contributes also to lend an additional stability to the public cult; an individual becomes hardened in a practice which he finds universal in the society in which he lives. Thence comes the importance of public worship; the practice of public worship makes those who abstain from it conspicuous. Public worship is a viva voce poll. Everyone sits in judgment upon you, all of your acquaintances become your accusers, and all men who worship God are your enemies. Not to think as everybody else does is comprehensible—but not to act as everybody else does! To wish to break away from the servitude of action which, once established, tends to perpetuate itself! In the end the machine bends; one becomes brutalized. Even among people of superior minds the force of habit is incredible. In the hours of doubt, in his youth, M. Renan wrote to his adviser: “I recite the Psalms; I could pass hours and hours, if I but followed my own inclination, in the churches.... I experience lively returns of devotion.... At times I am simultaneously both Catholic and rationalist! When one cuts loose from such beliefs, beliefs which have become a second nature to one, it seems as if one has severed one’s self from one’s whole past. One has in some sense lived them, and one is attached to them as to one’s own life; to abandon them is to resolve to die to one’s self. It seems as if one’s entire strength had come from them and that one will be as feeble as a child when one has lost them; they are to one what Samson’s hair was to him. Happily they will grow again.”

Priesthood a consequence of established rites.

Priesthood is a consequence of the establishment of rites. The priest is the man supposed to be most capable of influencing the divinity by a minute and learned observation of the sacred rites. Rites, in effect, the moment they become complicated by an accumulation of diverse customs lie beyond the knowledge and power of the ordinary man; it requires a special education to talk to the gods in the complex language which alone they understand, in the formulæ which coerce their wills. Whoever possesses this imagination is a species of magician or sorcerer; and the priesthood arose out of sorcery, of which it was simply the regular organization.[47]

Tendency of priest to become a sacred person.