Well, and why stop at God? Liberty of thought, which has been incessantly turning and adapting dogma to its progress, has it in its power to make a step beyond. Immutable faith is hemmed in by a circle which is daily shrinking. For the liberal Protestant this contraction has reached its extreme, and centre and circumference are one and the process is continuing. Why should not God Himself be a symbol? What is this mysterious Being, after all, but a popular personification of the divine or even of ideal humanity; in a word, of morality?
The result practically a religion of morals. Perceived to be so in Germany.
Thus a purely moral symbolism comes in process of time to be substituted for a metaphysical symbolism. We are close upon the Kantian conception of a religion of duty, resting upon a simple postulate or even a simple generalization of human conduct, to the effect that morality and happiness are in the last resort in harmony. A faith in morals, thus understood, has been adopted by many Germans as the basis of religious faith. Hegelians have converted religion into a moral symbolism. Strauss defines morality as the “harmonization” of man with his species, and defines religion as the harmonization of man with the universe; and these definitions, which seem at first sight to imply a difference in extent and a certain opposition between morality and religion, aim in reality at showing their ultimate unity; the ideal of the species and the purpose of the universe are one, and if by chance they should be distinct, it would be the more universal ideal that morality itself would command us to follow. Von Hartmann, also, in spite of his mystical tendencies, concludes that there is no religion possible except one which will consecrate the moral autonomy of the individual, his salvation by his own effort and not by that of somebody else (autosoterism as distinguished from heterosoterism). From which it follows that, in Von Hartmann’s opinion, the essence of religious adoration and gratitude should be one’s respect for the essential and impersonal element in one’s self; in other words, piety is, properly speaking, no more than a form of morality and of absolute renouncement.
Also in France.
In France, as is well known, M. Renouvier follows Kant and bases religion upon morality. M. Renan also makes of religion a little more than an ideal morality: “Abnegation, devotion, sacrifice of the real to the ideal, such,” he says, “is the very essence of religion.” And elsewhere: “What is the state but egoism organized? what is religion but devotion organized?” M. Renan forgets, however, that a purely egoistic state, that is to say a purely immoral state, could not continue to exist. It would be more accurate to say that the state is justice organized; and since justice and devotion are in principle the same, it follows that the state as well as religion rests ultimately upon morality: morality is the very foundation of social life.
Also in England.
In England, also, the same process of the transformation of a religious faith into a purely moral faith may be observed. Kant through the intermediation of Coleridge and of Hamilton has exercised a great influence upon English thought and upon the course of this transformation. Coleridge brought down the Kingdom of God from Heaven and domesticated it upon earth; the reign of God for him, as for Kant, became that of morality. For John Stuart Mill, whose point of approach was widely different from that of Coleridge, the outcome of the study of religions was the same—that their essential value has always consisted in the moral precepts they inculcate; the good that they have done should be attributed rather to the stimulus they have given to the moral sentiment than to the religious sentiment properly so called. And it is to be added, Mill says, that the moral principles furnished by religions labour under this double disability, that (1) they are tainted with selfishness, and operate upon the individual by promises or menaces relating to the life to come without entirely detaching him from a preoccupation with his own interest, and, (2) they produce a certain intellectual apathy, and even an aberration of the moral sense, in that they attribute to an absolutely perfect being the creation of a world so imperfect as our own, and thus in a certain measure cloak evil itself in divinity. Nobody could adore such a god willingly without having undergone a preliminary process of degeneration. The true religion of the future, according to John Stuart Mill, will be an elevated moral doctrine, going beyond an egoistic utilitarianism and encouraging us to pursue the good of humanity in general; nay, even of sentient beings in general. This conception of a religion of humanity, which is not without analogy to the Positivist conception, might be reconciled, John Stuart Mill adds, with the belief in a divine power—a principle of goodness present in the universe. A faith in God is immoral only when it supposes God to be omnipotent, since it, in that case, charges him with responsibility for existing evil. A good god can exist only on condition that he is less than omnipotent, that he encounters in nature, nay in human nature, obstacles which hinder him from effecting the good that he desires. Once conceive God thus, and the formula of duty reads simply: Help God; work with Him for the production of what is good, lend Him the concurrence that He really needs since He is not omnipotent. Labour also with all great men—all men like Socrates, Moses, Marcus Aurelius, Washington—do as they do, all that you can and ought to do. This disinterested collaboration on the part of all men with each other and with the principle of goodness, in whatsoever manner that principle may be conceived or personified, will be, in John Stuart Mill’s judgment, the ultimate religion. And it is evidently no more than a magnified system of morality, erected into a universal law for the world. What is it that we call the divine, except this that is the best in ourselves? “God is good,” cried Feuerbach, “signifies: goodness is divine; God is just signifies: justice is divine.” Instead of saying: there have been divine agonies, divine deaths, one has said, God has suffered, God has died. “God is the apotheosis of the heart of man.”[55]
Matthew Arnold’s “Literature and Dogma.”
An analogous thesis is maintained with great cleverness in a book which caused considerable stir in England: Mr. Matthew Arnold’s “Literature and Dogma.” The author, in common with religious critics generally, remarks the growing tension that nowadays exists between science and dogma. “An inevitable revolution, of which we all recognize the beginnings and signs, but which has already spread, perhaps, farther than most of us think, is befalling the religion in which we have been brought up.” Mr. Arnold is right. At no former period have unbelievers appeared to have so strong a hold in right reason; the old arguments against providence, miracles, and final causes, that the Epicureans brought into prominence, seem as nothing beside the arguments furnished in our days by the Laplaces and the Lamarcks, and quite recently by Darwin, the “evictor of miracles,” in Strauss’ phrase. One of the sacred prophets whom Mr. Arnold is fond of quoting once said: “Behold, the days come, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord: and they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it.” The time predicted by the prophet Mr. Arnold might well recognize as our own; might it not with truth be said of the present that it lacks the word of the Eternal, or soon will lack it? A new spirit animates our generation; not only are we in doubt whether the Eternal ever did speak or ever does speak to man, but many of us believe in the existence of no other eternity than that of a universe of mute and unfeeling matter which keeps its own secret except as against those who have the wit to find it out. There are of course, even to-day, some few faithful servants in the houses of the Lord; but the Master seems to have departed for the far countries of the past, to which memory alone has access. In Russia in the older seigniorial estates, a disc of iron is fastened to the wall of the mansion of the lord of the soil; and when he returns from a journey, the first night he passes in his dominion, some follower runs to the disc of iron and in the silence of the night beats upon the metal to announce his vigilance and the presence of the master. Who will awaken nowadays the voice of the bells in the church-steeples to announce the return to His temple of the living God, and the vigilance of the faithful? To-day the sound of the church-bells is as melancholy as a cry in the void; they tell of the deserted house of God, of the absence of the lord of the soil, they sound the knell of the believers. And is there nothing that can be done to domesticate religion once more in the heart of man? There is but one means: to see in God no more than a symbol of what exists always at the bottom of the human heart—morality. And it is to this expedient that Matthew Arnold also turns his attention. But he is not content with a purely philosophic system of morals, he aims at the preservation of religion, and in especial of the Christian religion; and to that end he brings forward a new method of interpretation, the literary and æsthetic method, the purpose of which is to glean from the sacred texts whatever they may contain of moral beauty, in the hope that it may incidentally prove to contain also what is true. It aims at reconstructing the primitive notions of Christianity, in whatsoever they possessed of vagueness, of indecision, and at the same time of profundity, and to set them in opposition over against the gross precision of popular views. In matters of metaphysic or religion there is nothing more absurd than an excessive precision; the truth in such matters is not to be rounded in an epigram. Epigram can at best serve, not as a definition, but as a suggestion of the infinities that it really does not circumscribe. And just as the verity in such matters overpasses the measure of language, so it overpasses the personalities and the figures which humanity has chosen as representative of it. When an idea is powerfully conceived, it tends to become definite, to take unto itself a visage, a voice; our ears seem to hear and our eyes to see what our hearts feel. “Man never knows,” said Goethe, “how anthropomorphic he is.” What is there so surprising in the fact that humanity has personified that which in all climes claimed its allegiance—the idea of goodness and of justice? The Eternal, the eternally Just, the Omnipotent who squares reality with justice, He who parcels out evil and good, the Being who weighs all actions, who does all things by weight and measure, or rather who is Himself weight and measure—that is the God of the Jewish people, the Javeh of adult Judaism, as He ultimately appears in the mist of the unknown. In our days He has become transmuted into a simple moral conception, which, having forcibly taken possession of the human mind, has at last clothed itself in a mystical form—has become personified by alliance with a crowd of superstitions that the “false science of theologians” regards as inseparable from it and from which a more delicately discriminating interpretation—an interpretation more literary and less literal—should set it free. God having become one with the moral law, a further step may be taken; one may regard Christ who immolated Himself to save the world as a moral symbol of self-sacrifice, as the sublime type in which we find united all the suffering of human life and all the ideal grandeur of morality. In His figure the human and the divine are reconciled. He was a man, for He suffered, but His devotion was so great that He was a god. And what then is that Heaven which is reserved for those who follow Christ and walk in the path of self-sacrifice? It is moral perfection. Hell is the symbol of that depth of corruption to which, by hypothesis, they will fall who, by a persistent choice of evil, ultimately lose all notion even of goodness. The terrestrial paradise is a charming symbol for the primitive innocence of the child: he has done as yet no evil, he has done as yet no good; his earliest disobedience is his first sin; when desire is awakened in him for the first time, his will has been conquered, he has fallen, but this fall is precisely the condition of his being set upon his feet again, of his redemption by the moral law; behold him condemned to labour, to the hard labour of man upon himself, to the struggle of self-mastery; without that contest to strengthen him he would never see the god descend in him, Christ the Saviour, the moral ideal. Thus it is in the evolution of the human conscience that a key to human symbolism must be found.[56] Of them must be said what the philosopher Sallust said of religious legends generally in his treatise “On the Gods and the World”: Such things have never happened, but they are eternally true. Religion is the morality of the people; it shows to them, realized and divinized, the higher types of conduct which they should force themselves to imitate here below; the dreams with which it peoples the skies are dreams of justice, of equality of goods, of fraternity: Heaven pays for earth. Let us then no longer employ the names of God, of Christ, of the Resurrection except as symbols, vague as hope itself. Then, according to Mr. Matthew Arnold, and those who maintain the same thesis, we shall begin to love these symbols, our faith will find a resting place in the religion which before seemed to be but a tissue of gross absurdities. Beneath dogma, which is but the surface, we shall find the moral law, which is the substance. This law, it is true, has in religion become concrete; it has, so to speak, taken on colour and form. That, however, is simply owing to the fact that people are poets; they think in images or not at all. You can only attract their attention by pointing your finger at something. After all, what harm is there in the fact that the apostles, opening the blue ether, showed the gaping nations of the earth the thrones of gold and seraphim and white wings, and the kneeling multitude of the elect? This spectacle fascinated the Middle Age, and at times, when we shut our eyes, we seem to see it still. This poetry, spread upon the surface of the moral law, lends it an attractiveness that it did not possess in its bare austerity. Sacrifice becomes less difficult when it presents itself crowned with a halo. The early Christians were not fond of representing Christ as bleeding under the crown of thorns, but as transfigured and triumphant; they preferred to keep his agony in the background. Such pictures as ornament our Churches would have filled them with horror; their young faith would have been shaken by the image of the “agony upon the cross,” which caused Goethe also a sort of a repugnance. When they represented the cross it was no longer burdened with the God, and they took care even to cover it with flowers and ornaments of every kind. You may see it in the rude figures, the designs and sculptures found in the catacombs. To hide the cross beneath an armful of flowers is precisely the marvel realized by religion. And when religions are regarded from this point of view, all ground vanishes for looking with disdain upon the legends which constitute the material of popular faith. They become comprehensible, they become lovable, one feels one’s self enveloped in an “infinite tenderness” for this spontaneous product of naïve thought in quest of goodness, in pursuit of the ideal, for these fairy-tales of human morality, profounder and sweeter than all other fairy-tales. It was necessary that religious poetry should prepare the earth long beforehand for the coming of the mysterious ideal; should embellish the place where it was to descend, as the mother of the Sleeping Beauty, seeing the eyes of her daughter grow heavy with the sleep of a hundred years, placed with confidence at the side of the bed the embroidered cushion, on which the enamoured prince would one day kneel to reawaken her with a kiss.