The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Historical religions to be regarded historically.

We have come a long way in all this from the servile interpretation of the blind leaders who fasten upon particular texts and lose sight of their subject as a whole. If one approaches a picture too near, the perspective disappears and all the colours lose their proper value; one must stand back a certain distance and see it in a favourable light: and then alone the richness of the colours and the unity of the work appear. Religions must be looked upon in the same way. If the spectator stands sufficiently above them and aloof from them, he loses all prejudice, all hostility, in respect to them; their sacred books come even in time to merit in his eyes the name of sacred, and he finds in them, Mr. Arnold says, a providential “secret,” which is the “secret of Jesus.” Why not recognize, adds Mr. Arnold, that the Bible is an inspired book, dictated by the Holy Spirit? After all, everything that is spontaneous is more or less divine, providential; whatever springs from the very sources of human thought is infinitely venerable. The Bible is a unique book, corresponding to a peculiar state of mind, and it can no more be made over or corrected than a work of Phidias or Praxiteles. In spite of its moral lapses and its frequent disaccord with the conscience of our epoch, it is a necessary complement of Christianity; it manifests the spirit of Christian society, it represents the tradition of it, and attaches the beliefs of the present to those of the past.[57] The Bible and the dogmas of the Church, having been formerly the point of departure for religious belief, have come nowadays, no doubt, in the face of modern faith, to be in need of justification; and this justification they will obtain; to be understood is itself to be forgiven.

The moral doctrine of the New Testament the main strength of Christianity.

If the New Testament contains at all a more or less reflective moral theory, it is assuredly that of love. Charity, or rather affectionate justice (charity is always justice, absolutely considered), such is the “secret” of Jesus. The New Testament may then be considered, according to the opinion of Mr. Matthew Arnold, as before all else a treatise on symbolical morality. The actual superiority of the New Testament, as compared with Paganism and with pagan philosophy, is a moral superiority; therein lay the secret of its success. There is no theology in the New Testament unless it be the Jewish theology, and the Jewish theology had proved itself incapable of the conquest of the world. The power of the New Testament lay in its morality, and it is its morality which even in our times survives still, more or less transformed by modern progress. And it is upon the morality of the New Testament that modern Christian societies must of necessity lean, it is in the morality of the New Testament that they will find their true strength; the morality of the New Testament is the principal argument that they can invoke in proof of the legitimacy of religion itself and, so to speak, of God.

Logical outcome of Matthew Arnold’s position.

Mr. Matthew Arnold and the group of liberal critics, who, like him, are inspired by the spirit of the age (Zeitgeist), seem thus to have guided faith to the ultimate point beyond which nothing remains but to break definitively with the past and its texts and dogmas.

Religious thought in these pages is bound by the slenderest threads to religious symbolism. At bottom, if one looks close, liberal Christians suppress religion, properly so called, and substitute a religious morality in its stead. The believer of other times affirmed the existence of God first, and then made His will the rule of conduct; the liberal believer of our day affirms the existence, first of all, of the moral law, and cloaks it in divinity afterward. He, like Matthew Arnold, treats with Javeh on equal terms, and speaks to Him almost as follows: “Art Thou a person? I do not know. Hast Thou had prophets, a Messiah? I no longer believe so. Hast Thou created me? I doubt it. Dost Thou watch over me—me in especial—dost Thou perform miracles? I deny it. But there is one thing, and one alone, in which I do believe, and that is in my own conception of morality; and if Thou art willing to become a surety for that and to bend the reality into harmony with my ideal, we will make a treaty of alliance; and by the affirmation of my existence as a moral being, I will affirm Thine into the bargain.” We are far away from the antique Javeh, the Power, with whom no bargain could be made; the jealous God, who wished man’s every thought to point toward Him alone, and who would make no treaty with His people unless He could precisely dictate the terms.

Practical attenuation of Christian faith.

The more distinguished German, English, and American clergymen thrust theology so far into the background for the purpose of forwarding practical morality that one may apply to all of them the words of an American periodical, the North American Review: that a pagan, desirous of making himself acquainted with the doctrines of Christianity, might frequent our most fashionable churches for an entire year and not hear one word about the torments of hell or the wrath of an incensed God. As to the fall of man and the expiatory agony of Christ, just so much would be said as to fall short of giving umbrage to the most fanatical believer of the theory of evolution. Listening and observing for himself, he would reach the conclusion that the way to salvation lies in confessing one’s belief in certain abstract doctrines, beaten out as thin as possible by the clergyman and by the believer, in frequenting assiduously the church and extra-religious meetings, in dropping an obolus every Sunday into the contribution box, and in imitating the attitudes of his neighbours. All the terms of theology are so loosely employed that all those are considered Christians whose character has been formed by Christian civilization, all those who have not remained total strangers to the current of ideas set up in the Occident by Jesus and Paul. It was an American clergyman who had abandoned the narrow dogmas of Calvin[58] that, after having employed a long life in becoming more and more liberal, discovered, in his seventieth year, this large formula for his faith: “Nobody ought to be regarded as an infidel who sees in justice the great creed of human life, and who aims at an increasingly complete subjection of his will to his moral sense.”

II. What is the possible value and the possible duration of this moral and metaphysical symbolism to which it is being attempted to reduce religion?