The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Proposed reform in Catholic countries.

One very desirable step in Catholic countries is that the priest should be given complete civil liberty, should be allowed to leave the Church if he choose, without becoming an outcast in society, should be free to marry, and to enjoy absolutely all the rights of citizenship. A second desirable step, and an essential one, is that the priest, who is one of the schoolmasters of the nation, should himself receive a higher education than he does to-day. The state, far from endeavouring to diminish the income of the priesthood—a very slight economy—might well, at need, augment it and exact diplomas analogous to those demanded of other instructors, and sufficient evidences of competence in extended historical and scientific inquiries and in religious history.[81] Already a number of priests in country districts are studying botany, mineralogy, and, in some instances, music. The ranks of the clergy contain a great quantity of live force, which is neutralized by a defective primary education, by lack of initiative, by lack of habits of freedom. Instead of endeavouring to separate church and state by a species of surgical operation, free-thinkers might well take their stand on the concordat, and profit by the fact that the state controls the income of the clergy, and endeavour to reawaken the priesthood to the conditions of modern life. In sociology, as in mechanics, it is sometimes easier to make use of the obstacles to one’s advancement than to try to batter them down. Whatever is, is in some measure useful; from the very fact that clerical education still maintains its existence it may be argued that it still plays a certain rôle in maintaining the social equilibrium, even if it be but a passive rôle, the rôle of counterpoise. But whatever possesses some degree of utility may well acquire a higher degree; whatever is may be transformed. We must not endeavour to destroy the priesthood but to transform it; to supply it with other practical and theoretical pursuits than the mechanical handling of the breviary. Between the literal religion which the majority of the French clergy teach, and a national and human ideal, there exist innumerable degrees which must be achieved successively and slowly, by a gradual intellectual progress, by an almost insensible widening of the intellectual horizon. Meanwhile, until the priest shall have passed through these successive degrees and have become aware of his essential superfluousness, it is good that he should make himself useful in the manner in which he still believes himself capable of being of use: but one thing should be exacted of him, that he should not make himself harmful by stepping outside of the limits within which he is properly confined.

II. Education provided by the state.

State neutrality in religious matters.

The task undertaken by a state that is endeavouring to substitute a lay for a clerical education is one of increasing importance. The law ought, no doubt, to recognize all religions as equal, but, as has been remarked,[82] there are two ways in which this recognition may be conducted: the one passive, the other active. The government may stand neutral simply, and abstain from either refuting or from giving comfort to the pretensions of any given system of theology; or it may be actively neuter, that is to say, it may pursue its task of scientific and philosophical achievement in complete indifference to any and every system of theology.[83] It is a neutrality of the latter sort that should be practised in primary and secondary instruction, and that should govern the conduct of the instructor.

Importance of the schoolmaster.

The schoolmaster has always been a mark for raillery, and sometimes justly so; to-day he is slightly regarded by everyone with any pretensions to high acquirements. Renan and Taine, and partisans generally of an intellectual aristocracy, can scarcely suppress a smile at the mention of this representative of democracy, of science for small children. University professors show small tolerance for the pedantry of their humble assistant, who is sometimes ignorant of Greek. Men of culture, with any tincture of poetry or of art, regard the man as something very prosaic and utilitarian whose main ambition is to instruct some thousands of peasants in the alphabet, grammar, and the names of the principal cities of Europe, and of the geographical localities from which we obtain pepper and coffee. And yet this despised schoolmaster, whose importance is daily increasing, is the sole middle-man between the belated masses and the intellectual élite, who are moving ever more and more rapidly forward. He has the advantage of being necessary and the disadvantage of knowing it; buried in his remote village, his accomplishments impress him almost as much as they do the children and the peasantry about him; the optical illusion is a natural one. But if an exaggerated estimate of his own importance sometimes gives rise in him to an offensive pedantry, it supplies him with the sort of devotion that enables a humble functionary to rise to the height of the duties to which he has been called. And who, after all, but society, is responsible for the fashioning and instruction of the schoolmaster? And cannot society raise the level of his intelligence in proportion as it increases the magnitude of his task? A little knowledge makes a pedant, much knowledge makes a scholar. There will always be schoolmasters who will be as well educated as one could wish, provided only that their salaries are raised side by side with the list of required studies. It is strange that a society should not do its best to form those whose function it is in turn to form it. The great question of popular education becomes in certain aspects a question of shillings and pence. The practical instruction of schoolmasters has already been carried to a certain degree of perfection; he has been initiated into an apprenticeship, and introduced, as it were, into the kitchen of certain sciences; he has been supplied with notions on agriculture and chemistry which often enable him to give excellent advice to the peasantry. It would be very easy a little to perfect his theoretical knowledge, to give him a broader knowledge of the sciences which he considers too exclusively on their practical side, to give him some conception of things as a whole, to raise him above an exclusive adoration of the isolated facts of historical or grammatical minutiæ. A little philosophy would make a better historian and a less tedious geographer. He might be introduced to the great cosmological hypotheses, to some sufficient notions of psychology, and in especial of child-psychology, and finally a little history of religion would familiarize him with the principal metaphysical speculations that the human mind has put forth in its endeavour to pass beyond the bounds of science; he would become, as a result of it, more tolerant in all matters of religious belief. This more extended instruction would permit him to follow at a distance the progress of science; his intelligence would not stand still, he would not come to his complete maturity somewhere between the ABC-book and the grammar. Moreover, intellectual elevation is always accompanied by a moral elevation which manifests itself in all the conduct of life, and sometimes a word from a schoolmaster may change all the rest of a pupil’s existence. The greater one’s intellectual, and in especial, one’s moral superiority, the greater one’s influence over those about one. Even at the present time the very modest amount of knowledge at the disposal of the ordinary teacher gives him a very genuine influence; he is believed in, his words are listened to and accepted. The peasant—that doubting Thomas—who nowadays shakes his head over what the priest says, is becoming accustomed to consult the schoolmaster; the schoolmaster has shown him how to make more grain grow in the same amount of ground; the quivering of a blade of grass in the wind is for a man of the people the most categorical of affirmations; to accomplish something is to prove: action is ratiocination enough. Moreover the schoolmaster demonstrates the practical power of science by fashioning successive generations of mankind, by converting them into men. It is at the schoolmaster’s hands that everyone receives the provision of knowledge that must last him and maintain his strength throughout his whole life; he prepares one for life as the priest prepares one for death, and in the eyes of the peasant, preparation for life is much more important than preparation for death. Life has its mystery as well as death, and in the former case the fact of one’s capability is certain; the schoolmaster often determines the future of the pupil in a manner that is visible and verifiable; and nothing like so much can be said for the priest. The power of the latter also has diminished with the change that has taken place in the popular notion of punishment after death. The priest’s power lies in ceremonies, in propitiatory or expiatory sacrifices; the virtue of sacrifices of both kinds equally is to-day looked on sceptically. Knowledge is better than prayer, and the priest is gradually losing his ascendency over the people. The schoolmaster is often the butt of raillery, but the country priest, whom it was so much the fashion to idealize at the beginning of the century, is to-day a mark for open mirth. The reaction was natural and in some measure legitimate; perfection is not of this world, and dwells neither in the state nor the school, but the rôle of the schoolmaster and the priest in humanity is important, for they are the sole dispensers of science and metaphysics to the multitude. We have seen how much it is to be hoped that the priest, who is so ignorant to-day in Catholic countries, will soon receive a better education, will soon begin to create a reason for his continued existence in modern society. If he falls too far behind the intellectual movement of the times, he will drop out simply, and the schoolmaster will inherit his power. After all there are all kinds of apostles, in blouse and frock-coat as well as in priestly robes; and the proselytism of some of them is based upon a mystical disinterestedness, and of others on a certain practical aim; there are some who travel about the world, and some who sit by the fire and are none the less active for all that. What may be affirmed safely is that in all times apostles have been even more disposed to address little children than men, and it is notable that the modern Vincent de Paul was a schoolmaster-Pestalozzi.

Moral education the legitimate successor of religious education.

What is taking the place of religious education, in existing societies, is moral education. The moral sentiment, as we know, is the least suspicious element in the modern religious sentiment, and metaphysical hypotheses, based in the last resort upon moral conceptions, are the ultimate and highest outcome of religious hypotheses. To the elements of philosophic morality it has been proposed to add, in secondary and even in primary instruction, some notion of the history of religions[84]. If this proposition is to be made acceptable it must be reduced within just limits. Let us cherish no illusion; M. Vernes is wrong if he believes that a professor, and in especial a schoolmaster, ever could dwell with insistence upon the history of the Jews without coming into conflict with the clergy. A truly scientific criticism of the legends which are usually taught children under the name of sacred history positively batters down the very foundations of Christianity. Clergymen and priests would not endure it; they would protest and with some show of reason against it, in the name of religious neutrality: religion is not less certain in their eyes than science, and the ignorant faith that distinguishes many of them has not yet been tempered by a habit of free criticism; so that anything like a genuine historical education which should openly controvert portions of the traditional theology must be considered in advance as impossible. There must be no question in the matter of openly refuting anybody; the course of instruction must simply be such as to furnish those who follow it with a criterion of truth, and to teach them to make use of it. We believe therefore that if the history of religions is ever made a part of the regular course of instruction, it will deal principally with everything but the history of the Jews. It might furnish elementary instruction on the moral system of Confucius, on the moral metaphysical notions involved in Indo-European religions, on the antique Egyptian religion, on the Greek myths, and finally on the religious and moral atmosphere in which Christianity took its rise, and on which it in some sort depended and throve. It would be well even to make scholars in primary schools acquainted with the names of some of the great sages in the history of the world, with their actual or legendary biography, with the moral maxims which are attributed to them. What harm could it do to instruct our children in the aphorisms uttered by Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and to let them see something of what humanity really believed before the time of Christ? One cannot destroy the old faith openly and in a minute, but one may do much to undermine and justly to undermine it by showing where and how it borrowed much of all that is best in it—that it is not an exception in the history of human thought nor even, in all respects, unsurpassed in its kind.

Helplessness of religion in the face of argument.