The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Distinction between religious ecstasy and philosophical meditation.

One must be on one’s guard against a multitude of illusions in this connection, and must carefully distinguish between two very different things: religious ecstasy and philosophical meditation. One of the consequences of our profounder knowledge of the nervous system is an increasing contempt for ecstasy and for all of those states of nervous intoxication or even of intellectual intoxication which were formerly regarded by the multitude, and sometimes even by philosophers, as superhuman, and truly divine. Religious ecstasy, so called, may be a phenomenon so purely physical that it suffices to apply a bit of volatile oil of cherry laurel to induce it in certain subjects, and to fill them with ecstatic beatitude, and make them pray and weep and kneel. Such was the fact in the case of a hysteric patient, a hardened courtesan of Jewish origin; it sufficed even to induce in her definite visions, even such as that of the girl with golden hair in the blue robe starred with gold.[69] The intoxication indulged in by the followers of Dionysius in Greece, like that indulged in by hasheesh-eaters, was no more than a violent means of inducing ecstasy and of entering into communication with the supernatural world.[70] In India,[71] and among the Christians, fasting is practised to attain the same end, namely a nervous excitation of the nervous systems. The macerations of the anchorite were, says Wundt, a solitary orgie, in the course of which monks and nuns ardently pressed in their arms fantastic images of the Virgin and the Saviour. According to a legend of Krishnaïsm, the Queen Udayapura, Mira Bai, being pressed to abjure her God, threw herself at the feet of the statue of Krishna and made this prayer: “I have quitted for thee my love, my possessions, my crown; I come to thee, oh, my refuge! Take me.” The statue listened motionless; suddenly it opened and Mira disappeared inside of it. To vanish thus into the bosom of one’s God is—is it not?—the perfect ideal of the highest human religions. All of them have proposed it to man, as a prime object of desire, to die in God; all of them have seen the higher life as a form of ecstasy; whereas the fact is that, in a state of ecstasy, one descends on the contrary to a lower and a vegetative plane of existence, and that this apparent fusion with God is no more than a return to a primitive inertia, to a mineral impassibility, to a statuesque petrifaction. One may believe one’s self uplifted in a state of ecstasy, and mistake for an exaltation of thought what is in reality no more than a sterile nervous excitement. The trouble is that there is no means of measuring the real force and extent of thought. Under normal circumstances the only means that exist are action; one who does not act is inevitably inclined to exaggerate the value of his thought. Amiel himself did not escape from this danger. Fancied superiority disappears the moment a thought seeks expression of whatsoever kind. The dream that is told becomes absurd; the ecstasy in which one retains complete control of one’s mind, in which one endeavours to take stock of the confused emotions one experiences, vanishes before us and leaves behind no more than a fatigue, a certain subjective obscurity, like a winter twilight, which precipitates a frost upon the window-panes that intercepts the last rays of the sun. My most beautiful verses will never be written, the poet says: “Of my work, the better part lies buried in myself.”[72] That is an illusion by which dream seems always superior to reality; an illusion of the same sort as that which makes us attach so much value to certain hours of religious exaltation. The truth is that the poet’s best verses are those which he has written with his own hand, his best thought is that which has possessed vitality enough to find its formula and its music; the whole of him lies in his poetry. And we also, we are in our actions, in our words, in the glance of an eye or the accent of a word, in a gesture, in the palm of a hand open in charity. To exist is to act, and a thought which is incapable of expression is an abortion which has never really been alive and has never merited to live. In the same way the true God is also the one who can be domesticated in one’s own heart, who does not fly the face of reflective consciousness, who does not show himself in dreams alone, whom one does not invoke as a phantom or a demon. Our ideal ought not to be some passing and fantastic apparition, but a positive creation of our spirit; we must be able to contemplate it without destroying it, to feed our eyes upon it as upon a reality. For the rest this ideal of goodness and of perfection, persisting as it does in the face of inner scrutiny, has no need of an objective existence in some sort material, to produce its proper effect upon the spirit. The profoundest love subsists for those who have been, as well as for those who are, and reaches out into the future as well as into the present. Nay, it even in a manner outstretches the measure of existence and develops a power of divining and loving the ideal that shall some day be. Maternal love is a model now as always for all moral beings, in that it does not await the birth of its object before making the first steps in its service. Long before the child is born the mother forms an image of it in her fancy, and loves it and gives herself to it in advance.

The highest form of prayer.

For a truly elevated spirit the hours consecrated to the formation of its ideal will always be precious hours of patient attention and meditation, not only upon what one knows or does not know, but upon what one hopes and will attempt; upon the ideal seeking for birth through one’s instrumentality, and leaning upon one’s heart. The highest form of prayer is thought. Every form of philosophic meditation possesses, like prayer, an element of consolation, not directly, for it may well deal with the saddest of realities, but indirectly because it enlarges the heart. Every aperture broken open upon the infinite braces us like a current in the open air. Our personal sorrows are lost in the immensity of the infinite, as the waters of the earth are lost in the immensity of the sea.

As for those who are not capable of thinking for themselves, of standing spiritually on their own feet; it will always be good for them to retrace the thoughts which appear to them to be the highest and the noblest product of the human mind. On this account the Protestant custom of reading and of meditating on the Bible is, in principle, excellent; the book however is ill-chosen. But it is good that man should habituate himself to read or to re-read a certain number of times a day, or a week, something else than a newspaper or a novel; that he should turn now and then to some serious subject of meditation and dwell on it. Perhaps the day will come when every one independently will compose a Bible of his own; will select from among the works of the greatest human thinkers the passages which especially appeal to him, and will read them and re-read and assimilate them. To read a serious and high-minded book is to deal at first hand with the greatest of human thoughts; to admire is to pray, and it is a form of prayer that is within the power of all of us.

CHAPTER IV.
RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG THE PEOPLE.

I. Is religious sentiment an innate and imperishable possession of humanity?—Frequent confusion of a sentiment for religion with a sentiment for philosophy and morals—Renan—Max Müller—Difference between the evolution of belief in the individual and the evolution of belief in the race—Will the disappearance of faith leave a void behind?

II. Will the dissolution of religion result in a dissolution of morality among the people?—Is religion the sole safeguard of social authority and public morality?—Christianity and socialism—Relation between non-religion and immorality, according to statistics.

III. Is Protestantism a necessary transition stage between religion and free-thought?—Projects for Protestantizing France—Michelet, Quinet, De Laveleye, Renouvier, and Pillon—Intellectual, moral, and political superiority of Protestantism—Utopian character of the project—Uselessness, for purposes of morals, of substituting one religion for another—Is the possession of religion a condition sine qua non of superiority in the struggle for existence?—Objections urged against France and the French Revolution by Matthew Arnold; Greece and Judea compared, France and Protestant nations compared—Critical examination of Matthew Arnold’s theory—Cannot free-thought, science, and art evolve their respective ideals from within?