II. Criticism of symbolic faith—Inconsequence of liberal Protestantism—Is Jesus of a more divine type than other great geniuses—Does the Bible possess a greater authority in matters of morals than any other masterpiece of poetry—Criticism of Matthew Arnold’s system—Final absorption of religions by morality.
Inevitable tendency of religion toward non-religion.
Every illogical position being in its nature unstable, the very inconsequence of a religion obliges it to a perpetual evolution in the direction of an ultimate non-religion, which it approaches incessantly by almost insensible steps. The Protestant knows nothing of the ordeal of a Catholic obliged to accept everything or to reject everything; he knows nothing of prodigious revolutions and subjective coups d’état; he possesses instinctively the art of transition, his credo is elastic. There are so many different creeds, each a little more thorough-going than the last, that he may pass through, that he has time to habituate his spirit to the truth before being obliged to profess it in its simplicity. Protestantism is the only religion, in the Occident at least, in which it is possible for one to become an atheist unawares and without having done one’s self the shadow of a violence in the process: the subjective theism of Mr. Moncure Conway, for example, or any such ultra-liberal Unitarian is so near a neighbour to ideal atheism that really the two cannot be told apart, and yet the Unitarians, who as a matter of fact are often simply free-thinkers, hold, so to speak, that they still believe. The truth is that an affectionate faith long retains its charm, even after one is persuaded that it is an error and dead in one; one caresses the lifeless illusions and cannot bring one’s self altogether to abandon them, as in the land of the Slavs it is the custom to kiss the pale face of the dead in the open coffin before throwing upon it the handful of earth which severs definitely the last visible bonds of love.
Exemplified in the case of Brahmanism and Buddhism.
Long before Christianity, other great religions, Brahmanism and Buddhism, which are much more comprehensive and less arrested in their development, followed the course of evolution by which a literal faith comes to be transformed into a symbolic faith. They have been reconciled successively with one metaphysical system after another—a process which has been inevitably carried forward with a fresh impulse under the English rule. To-day Sumangala, the Buddhist high-priest of Colombo, interprets in a symbolic sense the at once profound and naïve doctrine of the transmigration; he pretends to reject miracles. Other enlightened Buddhists freely accept modern doctrines, from those of Darwin to those of Spencer. On the other hand, in the bosom of Hinduism there has grown up a really new and wholly theistical religion, that of the Brahmaists.[54] Râm Mohum Roy founded, at the beginning of the century, a very deeply symbolical and wide-spread faith; his successors have gone the length, with Debendra Nâth Tâgore, of denying the authenticity even of the very texts which they were in the beginning most concerned to interpret mystically. This last step was taken suddenly, under circumstances which it is worth while to detail, because they sum up in a few characteristic strokes the universal history of religious thought. It happened about 1847. The disciples of Râm Mohum Roy, the Brahmaists, had been for a long time engaged in a discussion about the Vedas, and, quite as in the case of our liberal Protestants, had been giving especial prominence to texts in which they imagined they found an unmistakable affirmation of the unity of the Godhead; and they rid themselves of all concern with the passages that seemingly contradicted this notion by denying their authenticity. Ultimately, somewhat alarmed at their own progress, they sent four Pundits to Benares to collate the sacred texts: it was in Benares that, according to the tradition, the only so-called complete and authentic manuscript was preserved. During the two years that the labour of the Pundits covered, the Hindus waited for the truth in the same spirit that the Hebrews had done at the foot of Sinai. Finally the authentic version, or what purported to be such, was brought to them; and they possessed the definitive formula of revelation. Their disappointment was great, and they took the matter into their own hands, realizing at one blow the revolution which the liberal Protestants are pursuing gradually in the bosom of Christianity: they rejected definitively the Vedas and the antique religion of the Brahmans, and proclaimed in its stead a theistical religion, which rests in no sense whatsoever upon revelation. The new faith must in time develop, not without heresy and schism, but its adherents constitute to-day in India an important element in progress.
Preservation of the letter while tampering with the spirit of the Bible.
In our days very estimable persons have essayed to push Christianity also into a new path. In according the right of interpretation to private individuals, Luther gave them the right of clothing their own individual thoughts in the language of the antique dogmas and the texts of the sacred books. Insomuch that by a singular revolution, the “Word,” which was considered in the beginning as the faithful expression of the divine thought, has tended to become for each of us the expression of our own personal thought. The sense of the words depending really upon ourselves, the most barbarous language can be made at a pinch to serve us for the conveyance of the noblest ideas. By this ingenious expedient texts become flexible, dogmas become acclimated more or less to the intellectual atmosphere in which they are placed, and the barbarism of the sacred books becomes disguised. By virtue of living with the people of God we civilize them, we lend them our ideas, inoculate them with our aspirations, everyone interprets the Bible to suit himself, and the result is that the commentary ultimately overgrows and half obscures the text itself; we no longer read with undimmed vision—we look through a medium which disguises everything that is hideous, and lends a fresh beauty to everything that is beautiful. At bottom the veritable sacred Word is no longer the one which God pronounced and sent forth reverberating, eternally the same, down the centuries; it is the one which we pronounce or rather whisper—for is it not the sense which one puts upon it that constitutes the real value of an utterance? and it is we who determine the sense. The Divine Spirit has passed into the believer and, at certain times at least, the true God would seem to be one’s own thought. This attempt at a reconciliation between religion and free-thought is a masterpiece of tact. Religion seems always to lag a little behind, but free-thought by exercise of a little ingenuity always find means, in the end, of helping it forward. The progress of the two consists of a series of arrangements, compromises, something like what takes place between a conservative Senate and a progressive Chamber of Deputies, honestly in search of a modus vivendi.
Extension of symbolic interpretation to essential dogmas.
By a procedure which Luther would never have dared to emulate Protestants have taken the liberty of employing on essential dogmas this power of symbolical interpretation which Luther reserved for texts of a secondary importance. The most essential of dogmas, that upon which all others depend, is the dogma of revelation. If, since Luther’s time, an orthodox Protestant feels himself at liberty to discuss at his ease whether the sense of the sacred Word is really this, that, or the other, he never for an instant questions whether the Word itself is really sacred in effect, or whether it really possesses any meaning that can properly be called divine. When he holds the Bible he has no doubt but that he has his hand upon the truth; he has only to discover it beneath the words in which it is contained, has only to dig for it in the sacred Book as a labourer might dig in a field in search of a buried treasure. But is it then quite certain that the treasure is really there, that the truth lies ready-made somewhere between the covers of the Book? That is the question which the liberal Protestant is asking himself, and he has already taken possession of Germany, of England, of the United States, and possesses even in France a large number of representatives. Previous to his advent all Christians were at one in the belief that the sacred Word really exists somewhere; at the present day this belief itself tends to become symbolic. No doubt there was in Jesus a certain element of divinity, but is there not in all of us, in one sense or another, a certain element of divinity? “Why should we be surprised,” writes a liberal clergyman, “at finding Jesus a mystery, when we are all of us ourselves a mystery?” According to the new Protestants there is no longer any reason for taking anything at its face value, not even what has hitherto been considered as the spirit of Christianity. For the most logical of them, the Bible is scarcely more than a book like another; custom has consecrated it; one may find God in it if one seeks Him there, because one may find God anywhere and put Him there, if by chance He be really not there already. The divine halo has dropped from Christ’s head, or rather he shares it with all the angels and all the saints. He has lost his celestial purity or rather we share it with him, all of us; for is not original sin also a symbol, and are we not all of us born innocent sons of God? The miracles are but fresh symbols which represent, grossly and visibly, the subjective power of faith. We are no longer to look for orders directly from God; God no longer talks to us by a single voice, but by all the voices of the universe, and it is in the midst of the great concert of nature that we must seize and distinguish the veritable Word. All is symbolic except God, who is the eternal truth.
And even to the conception of God.