The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Tolerance highly intellectual.

On the whole, one must distinguish two kinds of virtue on which religion has influence. The first are the virtues that may be called positive and active, of the heart and of instinct, like charity and generosity; at all times and in all countries they have existed among men; religion exalts them, and to Christianity the honour is due of having developed them to their highest degree. The second category includes the purely intellectual virtues, whose operation consists rather in checking and confining than in extending the sphere of one’s activity—the virtues of self-possession, of abstinence, and of tolerance, which are quite modern really and the result of science, which has brought about a clearer knowledge of its own limitations even. Tolerance is a very complex virtue, much more intellectual than charity; it is a virtue of the head rather than of the heart; the proof of it is that charity and intolerance are often found together, forming an alliance rather than opposing each other. When tolerance is not philosophical and wholly reasoned, it takes on the aspect of a simple good-humour that greatly resembles moral weakness. Really to demonstrate the greatness of tolerance, one must put to the front the objective reasons drawn from the relativity of human knowledge and not the subjective reasons drawn from our own hearts.[53] Up to the present time tolerance has been founded on respect for the person and the will of another: “It is necessary,” it is said, “for man to be free—free to deceive himself and to do evil, if need be;” and nothing is truer, but there is another source of tolerance which is more substantial and tends to gain ground more and more rapidly as dogmatic faith disappears. This source is distrust of human thought and conscience, which are not free not to deceive themselves, and to which every article of absolute faith must necessarily be also an article of error. So that, at the present day, tolerance is no longer a virtue, but simply an affair of the intelligence; the further one goes, the more one sees that one does not in the least understand; the more one sees that the beliefs of one’s neighbour are a complement to one’s own, that no one of us can be right alone, to the exclusion of all others. By the mere development of the intelligence which makes us aware of the infinite variety of the world and the impossibility of any one solution of eternal problems, each individual opinion comes to have a value in our eyes: it is nothing more nor less than a bit of evidence bearing on the theory of the universe, and it goes without the saying that no one item of evidence can be made the basis of a definitive judgment, a dogmatic conclusion, without appeal.

II. Broad dogmatic faith.

Conflict between intelligence and dogmatism.

“The aim of most men,” as an English writer says, “is to pass through life with as little expenditure of thought as possible:” but what is to become of those who think, and of intellectual men in general? Even without suspecting it, one will ultimately allow an interpretation more or less broad of the texts to which one has seemed to cling in a narrow and literal faith. There is almost no such thing as a perfectly orthodox believer. Heresy enters by one door or another, and strange to say it is that precise fact that keeps traditional faith alive in face of the progress of science. An absolute and immutably literal faith would be too offensive to last long. Orthodoxy either kills the nations in which it entirely stifles freedom of thought or it kills faith in itself. Intelligence can never stand still; it is a light that moves, like that cast by the sun on the dripping oars as the boat is being lustily rowed along.

Dogmatism doubly irrational.

The partisans of literal interpretation and authority seem sooner or later to accept two irrational hypotheses instead of one; it is not enough for them that there have been certain revelations from on high, they insist that the very terms in which the divine thought is incorporated shall be divine, sacred, and immutable, and of an absolute exactitude. They divinize human language. They never think of the difficulties that someone might feel who was not a god but simply a Descartes, a Newton, or a Leibnitz, to express his great thoughts in an unformed and half-savage tongue. Genius is always superior to the language that it makes use of, and the words themselves are responsible for many of the errors in its thoughts; and a “divine inspiration,” brought down to the level of our language, would be perhaps more embarrassed than an even purely human inspiration. Nothing therefore can be stranger, to those who examine the matter calmly, than to see civilized nations seeking for a complete expression of the divine thought in the literatures of ancient peoples and semi-barbarous nations, whose language and intelligence were infinitely inferior to ours; their god, talking and dictating, would nowadays hardly be given a certificate of competency in a primary examination. It is the grossest anthropomorphism to conceive a divinity not in the type of an ideal man but in the type of a barbarous man. Also, it is not simply that a literal faith (the primitive form of all revealed faith) ultimately appears to be entirely irrational; it is that this characteristic becomes constantly more marked, for the reason that faith stands still, or tries to stand still, while humanity marches on.

Dogmatism is intellectual indifference or death.

But for a certain number of heresies born and circulated among them, but for a constant stream of fresh thought, people holding by a literal religion would be a caput mortuum in history, a little “like the faithful Tibetians of Dalaï-lama,” as Von Hartmann says. Literal religions cannot last and perpetuate themselves except by a series of compromises. There are always in the minds of the sincere and intelligent believer periods of advancement and of reaction, steps forward followed by a recoil. Confessors know these sudden changes well, and are prepared to deal with them and keep them within certain limits. They themselves are subject to such changes; how many of them have thought they believed and been suspected of heresy! If we could see into the bottom of their minds what reconciliations should we not perceive, what secret accommodations and compliances! There is in every one of us something that protests against literal faith, and if this protestation is not explicit, it is often none the less real. No one can hope to read more exactly than he who reads between the lines. When one venerates and admires everything, it is generally what one simply does not understand. Very many minds positively like vagueness and accommodate themselves to it, they believe in gross and arrange the details to suit themselves; sometimes even, after accepting a thing as a whole, they eliminate one by one all its parts. Generally speaking, those who aspire to literal faith nowadays are divisible into three classes: the indifferent, the blind, and unconscious Protestants.