Protestantism and liberty of conscience.
The Protestantism of Luther and Calvin was a compromise replacing a despotism; it was a broad faith, although it is at the same time intolerant and orthodox; for there are certain things even in Protestantism which do not admit of compromise; it contains dogmas that it is impious to reject, and which, to the free-thinker, seem scarcely less contrary to calm reason than the dogmas of Catholicism; it contains a system of metaphysical or historical theses regarded not as merely human, but as divine. The most desirable thing in a religion that is to be progressive is that the sacred texts should be ambiguous; and the text of the Bible is not ambiguous enough. How are we to doubt, for example, the divinity of Christ’s mission? How doubt the miracles? A belief in the divinity of Christ, and the genuineness of the miracles, are the very foundation of the Christian religion; Luther was obliged to accept them, and in our day even they bear down with their full weight on orthodox Protestantism. So that what seemed at first a generous concession to liberty of thought amounts in the end to little. The circle one moves about in is so contracted! Protestants, too, are fettered; the chain is simply longer and more flexible. Protestantism has rendered services of great importance to law and to liberty of conscience; but alongside of the concessions to liberty that it enforced, it contains dogmas from which the use of “charitable constraint” may logically be deduced. These dogmas which are essential to true Protestantism are: original sin, conceived as even more radical than it appears in Catholicism, and as destructive of freedom of the will; the redemption, which recognizes the death of God the Son as necessary to redeem man from the vindictiveness of God the Father; predestination in all its rigour; grace and election in their most fatalistic and mystical form; and last and most important, an eternity of suffering without purgatory! If all these dogmas are simply philosophical myths, Christian is a purely verbal title, and one might as well call one’s self a heathen, for all the myths of Jupiter, Saturn, Ceres, Proserpine, and the “divinities of Samothrace,” are also susceptible of becoming symbols of higher metaphysics; we refer the reader to Jamblicus and Schelling. We must thus assume that orthodox Protestants believe in hell, redemption, and grace; and if so, the consequences that we have deduced from these dogmas become inevitable. Also Luther, Calvin, Théodore de Bèze, have preached and practised intolerance for the same reasons as did the Catholics. They claimed the right of private judgment for themselves alone, and only in so far as they felt need of it; they never raised it to the level of an orthodox doctrine. Calvin burned Servetius, and the Puritans in America in 1692 punished witchcraft with death.
Every heresy serves liberty of conscience.
If Protestantism has in the long run served the cause of liberty of conscience, the reason is simply that every heresy is an instance of liberty and of that enfranchisement which brings in its train a series of additional heresies. In other words, heresy is the victory of doubt over faith. By doubt Protestantism serves the cause of liberty; by faith it would cease to serve it and would menace it—if it were logical. But the characteristic of certain minds is precisely to come to a halt halfway between freedom and liberty, between faith and reason, between the past and the future.
Protestantism a mark of logical feebleness in those who hold it.
Over and above the dogmas admitted in common, the true Protestant demands further some fixed objective expression of his belief: he attempts—he also—to incorporate it in a certain number of customs and rites which create the need they satisfy and incessantly give fresh life to a faith incessantly on the point of a decline; he demands temples, priests, a ceremonial. In the item of ceremonial as well as in the item of dogmas, orthodox Protestants nowadays feel themselves to be much superior to Catholics; and they have really rejected a considerable number of naïve beliefs and of useless rites not infrequently borrowed from paganism. You should hear an excited Protestant, in a discussion with a Catholic, speak of the Mass, that degrading superstition in which “the most material and barbarous interpretation possible” is put upon the words of Christ—He that eateth me shall live by me. But does not this same Protestant admit with the Catholic the miracle of the redemption, of Christ sacrificing himself to save mankind? If you admit one miracle, what reason is there to stop with that or any succeeding miracle? “Once more in this order of ideas,” says Mr. Matthew Arnold, “and what can be more natural and beautiful than to imagine this miracle every day repeated, Christ offered in thousands of places, everywhere the believer enabled to enact the work of redemption and unite himself with the Body whose sacrifice saves him.” A beautiful conception, you acknowledge, for a legend, but you refuse to put faith in it on the ground that it shocks your reason; very good, but you reject in the same breath all the rest of the irrationalities that are part and parcel of Christianity. If Christ sacrificed himself for the human race, why should not he sacrifice himself for me? if he came to a world that did not call him, why should he not come to me who call upon him and pray to him? if God once took on a form of flesh and blood, if He once inhabited a human body, why find it strange that He should be present in my flesh and blood? You want miracles, on condition that you are not to see them; what is the meaning of such false modesty? When one believes a thing, one must live in the heart of this belief, one must see it and feel it everywhere; when one possesses a god, it is in order that he may walk and breathe on earth. He whom we adore must not be relegated to a corner of the heavens, or forbidden to appear in our midst; and they must not be made sport of, who see him, and feel him, and touch him. Free-thinkers may laugh, if they have the courage, at the priest who believes that God is present in the Host that he holds in his hands, and present in the temple when he officiates. They may laugh at the peasant children who believe that Saints or the Virgin present themselves before them to listen to their wants, but a true believer cannot do otherwise than take all this seriously. Protestants take baptism very seriously, and think it absolutely necessary to salvation. Luther certainly believed in the devil; he saw him everywhere, in storms, in fires, in the tumult that his passage along the streets often excited, in the interruptions that occurred in his sermons; he challenged, and threatened all devils, “were they as numberless as the tiles of the roofs.” One day he even exorcised the Evil One, who had been vociferating in the person of the audience, so efficiently that the sermon, which opened in the midst of the greatest disturbance, was finished in peace; the devil had been frightened. Why, then, do orthodox Protestants, especially in our day, so genuinely wish to stop arbitrarily short in their faith? Why believe that God or the devil appeared to men two thousand years ago, and at no time since? Why believe in the Gospel cures and not in the naïve legends that are related of the Communion, or in the miracles at Lourdes? All things hold together in a faith, and if you propose outraging human reason, why not do it thoroughly? As Mr. Matthew Arnold observes, the orthodox Protestant doctrine, in admitting that the Son of God could substitute himself as an expiatory victim for man, condemned for the fault of Adam,—in other words that he could suffer for a crime that he had not committed for men who had not committed it either,—is only to accept the following passage literally and rudely: “The son of man is come to give his life as a ransom unto many.” From the moment that one holds literally to a single text, why not do the same in regard to others? In introducing a certain share of liberty into their faith, the Protestants have also introduced a spirit of inconsequence; this is its characteristic and its defect. Someone said to me once: “If I should try to believe everything, I should end by believing nothing.” This was Luther’s reasoning; he wished to make some allowances for enlightenment; he hoped to preserve the faith by minimizing it. But the limits are artificial. Only listen to Pascal, who possesses the French talent for logic, and is at the same time a mathematician, making light of Protestantism. “How I detest such nonsense!” he cries: that is, not to believe in the Eucharist, etc. “If the Gospel is true, if Jesus Christ is God, what difficulty is there in all that?” Nobody saw more clearly than Pascal the things that, as he says, are “unjust” in certain Christian dogmas, that are “shocking,” are “far-fetched,” the “absurdities”; he saw it all and accepted it all. He accepted everything or nothing. When one makes a bargain with faith, one does not pick and choose; one takes all and gives all. It was Pascal who said that atheism was a sign of strength of mind, but a strength displayed in one direction only. One might turn that round and say that Catholicism implies strength of mind, at least on one point. Protestantism, though of a higher order in the evolution of belief, remains to-day a mark of a certain weakness of mind in those who, having made the first step toward freedom of thought, rest there; it is a halt midway. At bottom, however, the two rival orthodoxies, over which nowadays civilized nations dispute, are equally astonishing to those who have passed beyond them.
III. The dissolution of dogmatic faith in modern society.
Dogmatic faith distanced by science.
Can a dogmatic faith, whether narrow or broad, indefinitely coexist with modern science? We think not. Science consists of two portions: the constructive and the destructive. The constructive portion is already far enough advanced, in modern society, to provide for certain desiderata which dogma undertook formerly to supply. We have to-day, for example, more extended and detailed information about the genesis of the world than is found in the Bible. We are attaining by degrees a certain number of facts relating to the affiliation of species. And all the celestial or terrestrial phenomena which strike the eye are already completely explained. The definitive why has not been given, no doubt; we even ask ourselves if there is one. But the how has already been in a great part dealt with. Let us not forget that religions in the beginning took the place of physics; that physical theories constituted for a long time an essential and preponderant part of them. Nowadays physics and religion have been distinguished, and religion has lost by the separation a large part of its power, which has passed over to science.