The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

The externals of worship remain to-day, in special in the Catholic and Greek religions, a collection of traditional, inflexible formulæ, which could not be trusted to produce their effect if a word or a gesture in them were changed; certain ceremonies are really veritable traditional forms of incantation. Rites resemble the invisible bonds in which Faust held the Devil; but it is God himself in this case that is enchanted, charmed, and overpowered. At bottom the belief which makes the Chinese priest turn his praying machine, the belief which makes the devotee tell her beads, the belief which makes the priest thumb his breviary or say salaried masses for unknown peoples, which in the Midi makes rich people pay beggars to mumble prayers before their doors, all rest upon one and the same principle: they all rest on a faith in a power of the rite, of the traditional formula in and of itself, no matter who pronounces it. The efficacity of the interested prayers does not seem to depend solely on the legitimacy of what one demands but on the form employed in demanding them; and this form has been determined at bottom by experience; the majority of devotees perform minute experiments on the comparative virtue of individual prayers, masses, offerings, pilgrimages, miraculous waters, etc.; they amass the result of their observations and transmit them to their children. The invocation of certain privileged Madonnas, such as the Madonna at Lourdes, is even to-day a vestige of primitive sorcery. The priest inherits all these naïve experiments as to the conditions appropriate to induce a miracle, and he systematizes them. Priests being men picked for their capability in the function which was regarded as the most useful of all others for the preservation of society, necessarily came to constitute a really superior caste and to be personally in some sense the object of the cult which they administered. The perfect type of sacerdotal privilege is hereditary priesthood as it existed in ancient Judaism, as it still exists in India; every Brahman is born a priest and needs no special education. The thirty-seven great priests of Vishnu in Gujerat are honoured even to-day as the visible incarnation of Vishnu.[48]

Antagonism between priest and prophet.

Historically the priest has always found a rival, sometimes an adversary, in the prophet, from Buddha to Isaiah and Jesus. The prophet is not a priest bound to a sanctuary and slave to a tradition, but an individual. “Prophecy,” says M. Albert Réville, “is to religion what lyrism is to poetry.” The prophet and the lyric poet, in effect, both speak in the name of their own inspiration. The prophet is often a revolutionist, the priest is essentially a conservative; the one represents innovation, the other custom.

Dramatic element in cult.

Exterior forms of worship and rites allying themselves with refined and elevated sentiments have in all religions taken on a symbolic and expressive character that they did not possess in the practice of primitive sorcery; they have become æsthetic and by that fact rendered durable. For whoever looks upon the most ancient religious ceremonies with the eye of an artist, they consist in the reproduction, nowadays too mechanically and unconsciously, of a work of art which once was not without its significance and its beauty. They are nowadays like a hand-organ playing admirable compositions by some old master. Pfleiderer, in his “Philosophy of Religion,” has shown that the dominant element in the externals of worship is dramatic, the dramatization of some mythological or legendary scenes. It is especially among the Aryans that this element predominates; the Aryans are especially susceptible to the charm of great epics and dramas. The Semites are lyric rather, and thence arises the importance of prophecy among them; although the lyric element was also represented among the Greek poets and Pythonesses. The dramatic element, on the contrary, is visible in certain symbolic ceremonies of Christianity and Judaism. The Mass was formerly a veritable drama of the Passion in which the spectators also took part; the half pagan, half Christian processions that still subsist to-day possess for the crowd something of the attractiveness of the opera. The Communion is a dramatization of the Lord’s Supper. Catholicism especially is distinguished by the possession of dramatic and æsthetic (too often gross) elements, which explain, not less than historical reasons, its victory over Protestantism among the nations of southern Europe, which are more artistic than those of the north, and more sensually artistic. The æsthetic superiority of a religion is not to be disdained by the thinker. It is the æsthetic element in every rite which, as we shall see, is its most respectable characteristic. Moreover, religious sentiment and æsthetic sentiment have always gone hand in hand; and this union has been one of the most important factors in the development of the æsthetic sentiment; it is thus that dramas and epics dealt in the beginning with gods and demi-gods rather than with men; the earliest romances were religious legends; the first odes were sacred chants and songs. Music and religion have always been allied. But in the end, the æsthetic element becomes feeble and is replaced, as religion loses its vitality, by a species of mechanical routine. In the East, even more than among us, this phenomenon is manifest, the whole tendency there is toward monotonous and interminable ceremonials. The Parsees, the representatives of the oldest existing religion, pass six hours a day in prayer. And according to the Indian Mirror the following is a description of the festival of the Lord, a part of the cult of Brahmaism, the altogether modern and wholly deistical religion founded by Ram Mohun Roy and Keshub: “At precisely six o’clock a hymn was intoned in chorus in the upper gallery of the mandir to announce the day’s solemnity. Others followed to the accompaniment of the harmonium, and thus, after a succession of hymns, the sacred office was reached, which, counting in the sermon, lasted from seven to ten o’clock. A part of the congregation then retired to take some rest, but those who remained intoned the vedi to demand of the minister explanations in regard to several points of his sermon. At noon, the assembly having convened, four pundits came out successively and recited Sanskrit texts. At one o’clock the minister gave a conference.” Then came the exposition of a number of philosophical and religious theses, delivered by their respective authors. Hymns, meditations, and prayers in common lasted till nearly seven o’clock, when the initiation of seven new Brahmaists was celebrated. This ceremony, including a sermon, lasted not less than two hours, and the assembly, which, if one may believe the reporter, did not show any sign of fatigue after these fifteen hours of continuous devotion, separated with a hymn to the effect that it had not yet had enough: “The heart wishes not to return home.”

IV. Subjective worship—Adoration and love.

Subjective worship a refinement on public and external worship.

Subjective worship has grown out of, and been a refinement upon, the external cult, which in the beginning was in the eyes of mankind much the more important of the two. To the incantation, to the material offering, to the sacrifices of the victims succeeded subjective prayer and the subjective offering of love, and the subjective sacrifice of egoistic passion. To external homage, to evidences of fear and respect by which one was supposed to recognize the superior power of the gods, as one bows down in recognition of the superior power of kings, succeeded a mental adoration, in which a god is recognized as all-powerful but also as all-beneficent. The mental bowing down of the entire soul before God is the last refinement of ritual; and ritual itself in the higher religions comes to be the simple sign and symbol of this adoration.[49] Thus the primitive sociomorphic character of the cult becomes progressively more subtle: the semi-material society, consisting of gods and men, becomes a wholly moral society, composed of men and the principle of goodness, which still continues to be represented as a person, as a master, as a father, as a king.

The love of God an outlet for the surplus of human love.

The highest form of subjective worship is love of God, in which all the duties of religious morality may be regarded as summed up. Adoration contains in it a vitiating element of respect for power; love is a more intimate union. The love of God is a partial manifestation of the need to love which exists in every human being. This need is so great that it cannot always find satisfaction in real life; it tends therefore to stretch beyond, and not finding upon earth an object which completely suffices for it, it seeks one in heaven. The love of God appears thus to be an expression of the superabundance of the love of man. Our heart sometimes feels too big for the world and seeks to overpass its limits. Let us not forget, for the rest, that the world has been strangely contracted by religious ignorance, intolerance, and prejudice; the sphere left open to the need of loving was formerly a very narrow one: it is not astonishing that the latter should have stretched out its arms toward a celestial and supernatural being.