Philosophical insufficiency of Mr. Arnold’s position.
Considered not from the point of view of history but purely from that of philosophy, Mr. Arnold’s doctrine is much more attractive, for its aim is precisely to enable us to discover our own ideas in the ancient books as in a mirror. Nothing could be better, but are we really in want of this mirror? Do we really need to rediscover our modern conceptions embodied in the form of myth and more or less distorted in the process? Do we really need voluntarily to go back to the state of mind of primitive peoples? Do we really need to dwell upon the somewhat narrow conception that they possessed of justice and of morality before we shall be capable of conceiving a justice more generous in its proportions and a morality more worthy of its name? Would it not be much the same sort of thing as for one who was teaching children physics to begin by seriously inculcating the classic theory of nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum, of immobility of the earth, etc.? The authors of the Talmud in their naïve faith said that Javeh, filled with veneration for the book which he had himself dictated, would devote the first three hours of every day to a study of the sacred law. The most orthodox Jews do not to-day oblige their God to this recurrent period of meditation; might not one without danger permit mankind a somewhat similar economy of time? Mr. Arnold, whose mind moves so easily, although with so plentiful a lack of directness and of logic, criticises somewhere or other those who feel a need of a foundation of fable for their faith, a foundation of supernatural intervention and marvellous legend, and he says that many religious men resemble readers of romances or smokers of opium; the reality becomes insipid to them, although it is really more grand than the fantastic world of opium and romance. Mr. Arnold does not perceive that, if the reality is, as he says, the greatest and most beautiful of things, we have no further need of the legend of Christianity, not even interpreted as he interprets it: the real world, and by the real world I understand the moral not less than the physical universe, should prove abundantly sufficient for us. Ithuriel, Mr. Arnold says, has punctured miracles with his spear; and did he not at the same stroke puncture symbolism? We prefer to see truth naked rather than tricked out in parti-coloured vestments; to clothe truth is to degrade it. Mr. Arnold compares a too absolute faith to intoxication; one might willingly compare Mr. Arnold to Socrates, who could drain off more than any other guest at the table without becoming intoxicated. Not to become intoxicated was, for the Greeks, one of the prerogatives of the sage. With this reservation they permitted him to drink, but in our days the sages make small use of the permission; they admire Socrates without imitating him, and find that sobriety is still the best means of keeping one’s head. One might say as much to Matthew Arnold. The Bible with its scenes of massacre, of rape, and of divine vengeance is in his judgment bread for the soul; the soul can no more do without it than we can ourselves do without eating. The reply is that he has himself proved it to be a dangerous form of nourishment, and that it is sometimes better to fast than to eat poison.
Buddhism more deeply symbolic than Christianity.
For the rest, if one persists in seeking in the sacred books of by-gone ages for the expression of primitive morality, it is not in the Bible, but rather in the Hindu books that a literary or philosophical interpretation will find the most extraordinary example of moral symbolism. The entire world appears to the Buddhist as the realization of the moral law, since in his opinion beings take rank in the universe according to their virtues or vices, mount or descend on the ladder of life according to their moral elevation or abasement. Buddhism is in certain respects an effort to find in morals a theory of the universe.
Dependence of religion upon morality.
In spite of the partial lapses from logical consistency that have been here pointed out in the theory of moral symbolism, there is one conclusion that is logically insisted on in the books just examined, and in especial Mr. Arnold’s book, namely: that the solidest support of every religion is a more or less imperfect system of morals; that the power of Christianity, as of Buddhism, has lain in its moral injunctions, and that if one suppressed this moral injunction there would nothing remain of the two great “universal” religions brought forth by human intelligence. Religion serves, so to speak, as an envelope for morality; it protects morality against the period of its ultimate development and efflorescence, but when once moral beliefs have gained strength enough they tend to protrude from this envelope, like a flower bursting out of the bud. Some years ago what was at that time called Independent Morality was much discussed; the defenders of religion maintained that the fate of morality is intimately bound up with it—that if morality were separated from religion it must decline. They were perhaps right in pointing out the intimate connection between morality and religion, but they were mistaken in maintaining that it is the former that is dependent; it would be truer to say the precise opposite, that it is religion that depends upon morality, that the latter is the principal and the former the subordinate. The Ecclesiast says somewhere, “He hath set the world in their heart.” It is for that reason that man should first look into his own heart, and should first of all believe in himself. Religious faith might more or less logically issue out of moral faith, but could not produce the moral faith, and if it should go counter to the moral faith it would condemn itself. The religious spirit cannot therefore accommodate itself to the new order of things except by abandoning, in the first place, all the dogmas of a liberal faith, and then all the symbols of a more enlightened faith and holding fast by the fundamental principle which constitutes the life of religion and dominates its historical evolution; that is to say, the moral sentiment of Protestantism in spite of all its contradictions has really introduced into the world a new principle; it is this, that conscience is its own judge, that individual initiative should be substituted for objective authority.[61] Such a principle includes as a logical consequence not only the suppression of real dogmas and of mysteries, but also that of precise and determinate symbols; of everything, in a word, which proposes to impose itself upon the conscience as a ready-made truth. Protestantism unwittingly contained in its own bosom the germ of the negation of every positive religion that does not address itself exclusively and directly to private judgment, to the moral sense of the individual. In our days no one is willing to believe simply what he is told to believe; he must accept it independently: he believes that the danger of private judgment is only apparent, and that in the intellectual world, as in the world of civil liberty, it is out of liberty that all authority worthy of respect takes its rise. The revolution which tends thus to replace a religious faith, founded on the authority of texts and symbols, by a moral faith founded upon the right of private judgment recalls the revolution accomplished three centuries ago by Descartes, who substituted evidence and reasoning for authority. Humanity is increasingly anxious to reason out its own beliefs, to see with its own eyes. The truth is no longer exclusively locked up in temples; it addresses itself to everybody, communicates with everybody, gives everybody the right to act. In the cult of scientific truth everyone, as in the early days of Christianity, is capable of officiating in his turn; there are no seats reserved in the sanctuary, there is no jealous God, or rather the temples of truth are those which each of us rears in his own heart—temples which are no more truly Christian than Hebrew or Buddhist. The absorption of religion into morality is one with the dissolution of all positive and determinate religion, of all traditional symbolism and of all dogmatism. Faith, said Heraclitus profoundly, is a sacred malady, ἱερὰ νόσος. For us moderns it is no longer a sacred malady, and it is one from which all of us wish to be delivered and cured.