Respect for the welfare of sentient beings in general the essence of morality.
This sanction, we have seen, is a special form of the notion of a Providence. Those who believe in a special Providence distributing good and evil admit, in the last resort, that this distribution takes place in conformity with the conduct of the receivers and the sentiments of approval or disapproval that that conduct inspires in the divinity. The idea of a Providence, in the natural course of its development, becomes therefore one with the notion of distributive justice, and this latter, on the other hand, becomes one with the idea of divine sanction. The idea of divine sanction has been conceived up to this point as one of the essential elements of morality, and it seems, at first glance, that religion and morality here coincide, that their respective needs here unite, or rather that morality reaches completeness only by the aid of religion. The notion of distributive justice naturally involves the notion of a celestial distributor, but we have seen in a preceding work that the notion of a sanction properly so called, and the notion of a divine penal code, have in reality no essential connection with morality; that on the contrary they possess a character of immorality and irrationality; and that thus the religion of the vulgar in no respect coincides with the highest morality, but that, on the contrary, the very fundamental idea of the religion of the vulgar is opposed to morality.[62] The founders of religion believe that the most sacred law is the law of the strongest; but the idea of force logically resolves itself into the relation between power on the one hand and resistance on the other, and physical force is always, in the sphere of morals, a confession of weakness. The summum bonum therefore can contain no suggestion of force of this especial kind. If human law, if civil law be condemned to rely upon a backing of physical force, it is therein precisely that it lies under the reproach of being merely civil and human. The case stands otherwise with the moral law, which is immutable, eternal, and in some sort inviolable; and in the presence of an inviolable law one can in no sense assume an attitude even of suppressed violence. Force is powerless against the moral law, and the moral law has therefore no need on its own side of a show of force. The sole sanction of which the moral law stands in need, the author has said elsewhere, as against the man who supposes himself to have abrogated it, is and ought to be the mere fact of its continued existence face to face with him, rising up before him ever anew, as the giant Hercules believed himself to have vanquished rose ever stronger to his embrace. To possess the attribute of eternity in the face of violence is the only revenge that goodness personified or not, under the figure of a god, can permit itself as against those who violate it.[63] In human societies one of the distinguishing traits of high civilization is slowness to take offence; with the progress of knowledge one finds less and less ground for indignation in the conduct of one’s fellow-men. When the being involved is by definition the very personification of love the idea of offence becomes ridiculous; it is impossible for any philosophic mind to admit the bare conception of offending God, or of drawing down upon one, in the Biblical phrase, his anger or his vengeance. Fear of an external sanction, or of any sanction other than that of conscience, is therefore an element that the progress of the modern mind tends to exclude from morality. It is in vain for the Bible to say that fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; morality does not truly begin until fear ceases to exist, fear being, as Kant said, pathological, not moral. Fear of hell may have possessed in former times a certain social utility, but it is essentially a stranger in modern society, and, a fortiori, will be in the society of the future. Moreover, respect for the happiness of people in general is becoming less and less adulterated by any admixture of fear. This respect, mingled with love and even engendered by love, is coming to be an altogether moral, and an altogether philosophic sentiment, purified of anything in the nature of mysticism, and in the best sense religious.
Unstable equilibrium of the Christian notion of absolute love.
II. Having seen how readily the notion of respect became corrupt in Christianity, let us consider the fate of the notion of love. If the importance which it gave to this principle constitutes the chief honour of Christianity is not the God of the Christians, nevertheless, conceived in a manner inconsistent with the very essence of His being? The God of Christianity, or at least of orthodox Christianity, is a conception of absolute love which involves a contradiction and the destruction of all true fraternity. For the love affirmed to be absolute is in fact limited, since it has to do with a world that is marred by evil, metaphysical, sensible, moral. The love is not even universal, since it is conceived as an especial grace more or less arbitrarily bestowed or withheld, according to the dogma of predestination. The doctrine of grace, round which theology has played with such excess of subtlety, completes the highest principle of morality, the principle of love by the addition of the grossest notion of anthropomorphism: that of favour. God is always conceived on the model of absolute kings who accord favour and disfavour capriciously; one of the most vulgar of sociomorphic relations being chosen, as one perceives, as the true analogue of God’s relation to His creatures. The two elements of the notion of grace are antagonistic to each other. Absolute love is in its nature universal, favouritism is in its nature particular. There are, according to theology, a certain number of beings who are excluded from universal love; the sentence of damnation is in its very essence such an exclusion. Thus understood, divine charity is incompatible with true fraternity, with true charity; for true charity God does not possess—sets us no example of it. If we believe that God hates and damns, it will be in vain for Him to forbid personal vengeance. We shall inevitably espouse His hatreds, and the very principle of vengeance will find its support and its highest realization in Him. When St. Paul said: “Let thyself not conquer by the instrumentality of evil, but overcome evil by goodness,” the precept was admirable. Unhappily God was the first to violate it, to decline to overcome evil by good. Do as I bid thee and not as I myself do is the very spirit of Christian teachings. Is it not in the midst of a sort of hymn to charity and forgiveness that the characteristic phrase of St. Paul occurs: “If thine enemy have hunger give him to eat and thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head.” Thus the apparent forgiveness becomes transmuted into a refined form of vengeance, which the divine sanction serves only to make more terrible, and which, under the cloak of benefits, nay even of caresses, pours upon the head of one’s enemy an avenging flame; one’s very charity sets the torch to the fires of hell. This indelible stain of barbarism on the page of love, this atavistic animal instinct of vengeance ascribed to God, shows the dangerous side of the theological element introduced into the morality of love.
Conflict between divine and human love.
Another danger to which a religion founded upon a divine love is subject is mysticism; a sentiment destined to an increasing antagonism with the modern mind and condemned, therefore, ultimately to disappear. The heart of man, in spite of its fertility in giving birth to passions of all sorts, has nevertheless always concentrated itself upon a small number of objects which find their own level. God and the world are two antagonists between which our sensibility is portioned out. One or the other of them inevitably receives the greater share. In all times religious sects have felt a possible opposition between absolute love of God and love of man. In a number of religions God has shown himself jealous of the affection devoted to others, and thus in a sense stolen from Him. He was not content with the superfluity of the human heart, He was bent on appropriating the soul in its entirety. Among the Hindus, as we know, the very essence of supreme piety lies in detachment from the world, in a life of solitude in the midst of great forests, in the rejection of all earthly affection, in a mystical indifference in regard to all mortal things. In the western world, when Christianity had made its way, this thirst of solitude, this home-sickness for the desert seized once more upon the soul, and thousands of men fled the faces of their fellows, quitting their families and their homes, renouncing all other love but that of God, feeling themselves more intimately in His presence when they were distant from all beings else but Him. The whole of the Middle Ages were tormented by this antagonism between divine and human love. In the end, with the immense majority of men, human love carried the day. It could not be otherwise; the very Church could not preach complete detachment for everybody under pain of having nobody to preach to. But among scrupulous and strenuous souls the opposition between divine and human love manifested itself in all the circumstances of life. One remembers Mme. Périer’s account of Pascal. She was surprised at times that her brother repulsed her, became suddenly cold to her, turned away from her when she approached to soothe him in his pain; she began to think he did not love her, she complained of it to her sister, but it was in vain to try to undeceive her. Finally the enigma was explained on the very day of Pascal’s death by Domat, one of his friends. Mme. Périer learned that in Pascal’s opinion the most innocent and fraternal friendship is a fault for which one habitually fails to take one’s self sufficiently to task, because one underestimates its magnitude. “By fomenting and suffering these attachments to grow up, one is giving to someone else some portion of what belongs to God alone; one is in a manner robbing Him of what is to Him the most precious thing in all the world.” It would be impossible better to express the mystical antagonism between divine and human love. This principle occupied so prominent a place in the foreground of Pascal’s mind that, the more readily to keep it always before him, he wrote with his own hand upon a piece of paper: “It is unjust in me to permit anyone to form an attachment for me, however voluntarily, and with whatever pleasure they may do it. In the long run I should deceive them, for I belong to nobody but to God, and have not the wherewithal to satisfy a human affection.... I should therefore be culpable, if I should allow anyone to love me, if I should attract people toward me.... They should pass their lives and employ their effort in pleasing and searching for God.” The instant God is conceived as a person and not as a simple ideal, there inevitably arises in souls tinged with mysticism, a rivalry between His claims and those of other persons. How can the Absolute admit any human being to a share of what essentially is His? He must dwell in as absolute a solitude at the bottom of man’s heart as on the height of heaven.
Exists at the present day.
The rivalry between divine and human love perceived by the Jansenists, as by many of the early Christians and by mystics generally, exists even to-day for a large number of men. In certain religious houses any excessively affectionate demonstration toward their parents is forbidden to children, and a fraternal or filial kiss is made the basis of a case of conscience. If Protestant education and custom are not at one on this point with Catholic education and custom, the reason is that Protestantism, as has already been observed, has no talent for ultimate logical consequences. Catholicism, on the contrary, holds logic in scrupulous respect. To cite but one example: is not the interdiction of marriage in the case of the clergy a logical deduction from the conception of a religion which is founded on the theory of the fall of man, and whose purpose in the world is essentially anti-carnal? Love for a woman is too absorbing, too exclusive, to coexist in the heart of a priest, side by side with an undiminished love for God. Of all the sentiments of the soul, love is the one which fills it most nearly to the limit of its capacity. It is, in this respect, in diametric opposition to the theological sentiment which consists in the recognition of a sort of subjective void and personal insufficiency. Two lovers are of all the world the beings who are most sufficient unto themselves, they are of all the world those who experience least the need of God. Well, for mystics, love that is not given to God is love wasted. The lightest veil is enough to screen them once and forever from the “intelligible sun.” It is of the very essence of such a God to be relegated to some region above the world, exiled in a manner from the soul of man; there are regions of love in which He does not exist and never will exist. He calls me, and if I do not turn my face in His direction precisely, I lose Him.
Conflict between mysticism and egoism.