The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

The absolute detachment of the mystic leads to another consequence which is equally in opposition to modern tendencies; it treats, that is to say, as an absolute zero a being who has at least the value of unity, to wit: the ego. If I aim at the welfare of all sentient beings indiscriminatingly, I aim also in some measure at my own, who am one of them; and moreover, it is for my own that I can labour to best advantage. This ego counts for something in this world, it is a unit in the sum. The pure love inculcated by mysticism, on the contrary, lets the ego go for nothing, after the manner of the muleteer, who, in reckoning his mules, always forgot to count the one he was sitting on; the missing mule never turned up except when he dismounted, so that he ultimately resolved to go forward on foot. The transcendent and chimerical morality of mysticism might be compared to a purely humanitarian theory of politics; it is indeed even more abstract. Patriotism, no doubt, leans upon a delusion when it regards one’s native country as the centre of the world, but does not humanitarianism lean not upon one but upon a whole series of illusions? In the item of illusions here below one must put up with the least false and most useful. Well, it is probably not wholly without utility that each nation in the universe should act for itself; if each should attempt to act exclusively for the universe as a whole and for the love of the whole, either it would not act at all or it would conceive the future of the universe practically on the model of its own future and would commit an uninterrupted succession of mistakes. Very frequently in this world unconscious and indirect collaboration is more efficacious than that which is conscious and direct. Men often do more for the best aims of humanity by directing their attention in a spirit of rivalry toward needs comparatively immediate but which for that very reason stimulate their efforts and their hopes, than by uniting for the attainment of an object so distant that it discourages them. In morals and politics one has not only to hit upon the best means of combining the forces of humanity, but also upon what is the best means of exciting human effort; and on that score there is something to be said even for the love of the parish in which one is born. One’s parish is at least a definite object: one knows where it is, one cannot lose one’s way, one may entertain a hope, nay even a certitude, of reaching it, and hope and certitude are great allies. And the same is true of self-love and love for those with whom one identifies one’s self. It is precisely this that mysticism ignores and by that means puts itself in opposition to the scientific spirit. For mysticism there is no compromise possible between the fact and its ideal which denies the fact. Logically mysticism ought to address its efforts toward total annihilation, much after the manner of the followers of Schopenhauer and of Hartmann. It would be better for the world to go off in smoke, so to speak; to become sublimated like the corpses which the worshippers of the sun used to expose to its rays, to be converted, as far as possible, into vapour.

Love of God on the decline.

Excess destroys itself. If pleasure ends in disgust, mysticism possesses also its seamy side in a certain disenchantment with God himself, in a certain home-sickness for unknown joys, in that sadness peculiar to the cloister for which Christians were obliged to invent a new name, in the Latin language, to designate—acedia. When in the Middle Ages all one’s preoccupations and affections were turned toward heaven, human tenderness was impoverished to precisely that extent. The intellectual and moral evolution of our days has moved in a contrary direction; love of God is on the decline. Love of mankind, on the contrary, and love of living beings in general, is on the increase. A sort of substitution of the one for the other is taking place. Does it not seem as if earth’s turn had come, and that much of the force previously spent in futile adoration, devoted toward the clouds, is being more and more practically employed in the service of humanity?

Love of man to take its place.

Formerly, ideas of human fraternity and loving equality were promoted in especial by the Christians. The explanation is simple: God was conceived by them as an actual father, a genitor; men seemed to the early Christians all of one family, having a common ancestor. So that divine love and human love were regarded by them as inseparably bound up with each other. It is to be added that Christianity, which made its way into the world through the lower classes of society, had everything to gain by giving prominence to notions of fraternity and equality; it was by this means among others that it conciliated the masses, who were for a long time its main support. But from the moment it found itself able to rely upon the higher classes of society, how quickly it changed its language is well known, and at the present moment the position of Christianity is precisely opposite to that which it occupied in the ancient world. Ardent advocates of the ideas of fraternity are often adversaries of religion, are often free-thinkers, sometimes decided atheists. The system of thought which founded the love of men for each other upon a community of origin is almost universally rejected. Social doctrines, which in former times were so often based upon the element of socialism in the New Testament, are nowadays being formed and inculcated in complete independence of religious faith and often in positive antagonism to any religious faith whatever. Religion sometimes presents itself as an additional obstacle, simply, to the brotherhood of man, in that it creates more stubborn divisions among them than differences of class or even of language. By an inevitable evolution religion has to-day come to represent among certain nations the spirit of caste and intolerance, and consequently of jealousy and enmity, whereas non-religion has come to be the recognized champion of social equality, of tolerance, and of fraternity. Behind God, rightly or wrongly, as behind their natural defender, the partisans of the old order of things, of privilege and hereditary enmities, have ranged themselves; in the breast of the faithful a mystical love for God corresponds to-day as in other days to an anathema and malediction on mankind. It was long ago remarked that those whose blessing is most fluent can also show themselves at need the most fluent to curse; the most mystical are the most violent. Nothing can equal the violence of the gentle Jesus himself when he is speaking of the Pharisees, whose doctrines possessed so close an analogy to his own. Whoever believes himself to have felt the breath of God upon his forehead becomes bitter and obstinate in his relations with mere men; he is no longer one of them. So that the notion of the divine, of the superhuman tends toward that of the antinatural and antihuman.

And also love of family.

The aim of progress in modern societies is to domesticate peace within their limits as well as without, to suppress mysticism, and to concentrate upon the real universe, present or to come, the whole body of our affections; to bind our hearts together in so intimate a union that they shall be sufficient unto themselves and unto each other, and that the human world, magnified by the eyes of love, may gather to itself the totality of things. In the first place the love of family, which scarcely existed at all in ancient times, and which in the Middle Ages was almost entirely absorbed by the conception of authority and of subordination, can scarcely be said to have acquired before our days a considerable hold on human life. It is only since the eighteenth century and the spread of the theory of equality that the father of a family, in especial in France, has ceased to consider himself as a sort of irresponsible sovereign, and begun to treat his wife in some sort as his equal and to exercise over his children no more than the minimum of possible authority. Whenever women shall receive an education almost equivalent to that given to men, the moral equality between them and men will have been consecrated, and as love is always more complete and more durable between beings who consider each other as morally equal, it follows that the love of family will increase, will draw to itself a greater proportion of the desires and aspirations of the individual. In positive opposition to religion, which has undertaken to combat the love of woman by restraining it within narrow limits, the love of woman has attained little by little an intensity that it never possessed in ancient times: it suffices to read our poets to become convinced of it, and it will continue to increase with the intellectual development of women, which will make a closer and more complete union between men and women possible than exists at present. The association of man and woman being capable thus of becoming in a manner a sort of intellectual association and fellowship, it will result in a fertility of a new species: love will no longer act upon the intelligence solely as the most powerful of stimulants, it will contribute positive elements hitherto unknown. It is impossible to predict the sort of work that the combined labour of man and woman will produce when they possess a preparation for it that will be practically upon both sides equal. Some hint of what one means may be gathered from examples actually under one’s eyes. In the present century men and women of talent are tending to come into closer relations with each other; and I might cite the names of Michelet and Mme. Michelet, of John Stuart Mill and his wife, of Lewes and George Eliot, and other names besides. But not to give an undue prominence to great names like these, which are after all exceptions in the human race, it is not too much to assert that from the very top of the social ladder to the bottom the family tends increasingly to become a unity, a more and more perfect organism in which man will one day find scope for all of his powers and capabilities. The importance of the family increases, as that of the city and of the despotic tutelage of the state decreases. This importance, which is almost non-existent in purely military societies (of which Lacedæmon may serve as the accomplished exemplar), becomes greater and greater in free and industrial societies such as those of the future, and thus there opens a new field for human activity and sensibility. The love of men and women for each other and of both for their children, heightened by the growing sentiment of equality, is destined in the author’s judgment to create a new and non-mystical sort of religion, the worship of the family. If a cult for the gods of the hearth was one of the earliest religions, perhaps it will also be actually the last: the family hearth possesses in and of itself an element of sacredness, of religion, since it binds together as about a common centre beings so diverse in origin and sex. And thus the modern family, founded on the law of equality, seems by its very spirit, and by the sentiments which it excites, to be in growing opposition to religious mysticism. The true type of the priest, whatever Protestantism may say, is the solitary man, the missionary here below, devoted body and soul to God; whereas the type of the practical philosopher and the modern sage is a loving, thinking, labouring man, devoted to those who are dear to him.

And love of country.

A similar antagonism may be seen between the sentiment of mysticism and of allegiance to the state. The citizen who knows that the fate of his country lies in his arms, who loves his country with an active and sincere love, is a worshipper in a social religion. Great politicians have almost always been large and liberal minds. The ancient republics were comparatively non-religious for their time; the disappearance of monarchy coincides in general, in the history of mankind, with enfeeblement of faith. When everybody shall feel himself as equally and truly a citizen as anybody else, and shall be able to devote himself with an equal love to the good of the state, there will no longer be so great a store of unemployed activity, of surplus sensibility lying ready to the hand of mysticism. For the rest, let us magnify a little the sphere of human activity; not only the family and the state are nowadays demanding an increasingly large share of one’s attention and affection, but the human race itself is coming to be each day more and more intimately present to the mind of each of us. We find it more and more difficult even in thought to isolate ourselves, to become absorbed either in ourselves, or in God. The human world has become infinitely more human than formerly; all the bounds which separated men from each other (religion, language, nationality, race) are regarded already by superior men as artificial. The human race itself is coming to be recognized as a part only of the animal kingdom, the entire world claims the attention of science, offers itself to our love and opens for the devotees of mysticism the perspective of a species of universal fraternity. Just in so far as the universe thus grows larger, it becomes less and less insufficient in our eyes; and this surplus of love, which formerly mounted toward heaven in search of some transcendent resting place, finds ample room upon the surface of the earth and of heavenly bodies not unknown to astronomy. If the mystical tendency of the human mind be not destined completely to disappear, if it possesses any element of permanency, it will at least change its direction, and indeed, little by little is changing it. Christians were in no sense wrong in finding society in ancient times too narrow and the ancient world too cabined and confined under its dome of crystal; the very reason for the existence of Christianity lay in this vicious conception of society and of nature. To-day the one thing needful is to magnify the world till it shall satisfy the needs of man; until an equilibrium be established between the universe and the human heart. The aim of science is not to extinguish the need to love which constitutes so considerable an element of the religious sentiment, but to supply that need with an actually existing object; its function is not to put a check upon the outleap of human affection but to justify it.

But the love of a personal God must be distinguished in all this from love of the ideal God.