The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Among the most developed sentiments of women there are two which constitute the strength of their disposition to propriety: modesty, the dignity of their sex, and love, which is exclusive when it is true. But for these two powerful causes religious motives would always have weighed lightly with her. If religion exercises a great control over women, it is by taking possession of these two motives: the surest means of making women listen, and almost the sole means, is to awaken their love, or to appeal to their modesty: to give themselves or to refuse themselves are the two great acts which dominate their lives, and immorality among them generally increases directly with the diminution of their modesty. Thence arises a new and delicate problem, whether modesty, that compound of power and grace, is not rather a religious than a moral virtue, and if religion has maintained it, would it not disappear with the disappearance of religion, and be enfeebled by a religion increasingly scientific and, in a sense, positive? Note in the first place, that if the essence of all feminine virtue is modesty, as of all male virtue it is courage, that very fact constitutes an additional reason for doing everything in one’s power to make modesty independent of religion, in order that it may stand unaffected by the doubts which necessarily, in the modern world, will overwhelm the latter. Certainly modesty is capable of serving remarkably well as a safeguard for beliefs, and even for irrational beliefs; it always prevents one from pushing reason, as from pushing desire to the end, but there is a true and a false, a useful and a harmful modesty. The first, as we shall see, is not bound up with religion, either in its origin or in its destiny.

Origin of modesty.

In the first place is modesty of religious origin? Every young girl feels vaguely that she has at her disposal a treasure which a number of people desire. This sentiment, which is confused with some obscure consciousness of sex, was necessary to enable the female to attain complete physical development before giving herself. Precocious immodesty must inevitably, in effect has, resulted in an arrested development. It might easily have produced also a comparative sterility. Modesty is thus a guarantee for the continuance of the species, one of the sentiments that natural selection must inevitably have tended to preserve and to increase. It is a condition, moreover, of sexual selection; if the female had been disposed to give herself indiscriminately, the species would have suffered. Happily desire is checked by modesty, an obstacle which it can remove only on condition of the woman’s being strongly attracted by the object desired; a quality which will subsequently be transmissible to the species. From the point of view of sexual selection there is in modesty a great deal of coquetry—a coquetry which is unaware of its aim, which is half unconscious, and often mistakes for a duty what is really but a bit of management. The art of provisional refusal, and of attractive flight, must inevitably have attained a high development among superior beings, for it is a powerful medium of seduction and selection. Modesty has developed side by side with it, and really constitutes but a fugitive moment in the eternity of female coquetry. Coquetry originates in the young girl who is yet too ignorant to be really modest, but too much of a woman not to love to attract and to retreat; and at the other extreme it constitutes the last remnant of modesty in women who really possess none. Finally, modesty is also composed largely of an element of fear, which has been very useful in the preservation of the race. Among animals the female almost always runs some risk in the presence of the male, which is generally stronger than she; love-making is not only a crisis but a danger, and she must mollify the male before surrendering herself to him, must seduce him before satisfying him. Even in the human race, in primitive times, women were not always safe from violence from men. Modesty secures a sort of expectant love which was necessary in primitive times, a proof, a period of mutual scrutiny. Lucretius has remarked that children, by their weakness and by their fragility, have contributed to the softening of human manners; the same remark applies to women and to this sense of their own comparative weakness, which they experience so acutely in modesty, and which they to some degree communicate to men. Women’s fears and scruples have made man’s hand less hard; their modesty has given rise in him to a certain form of respect, to a form of desire which is less brutal and more gentle; they have civilized love. Modesty is analogous to the species of fright that inclines a bird to flee one’s caresses, which bruise it. One’s very look possesses some element of hardness for a bird; and is it not a prolongation of touch? In addition to these various elements there goes, to the composition of a young girl’s or a young man’s modesty, a higher and more properly human element; the fear of love itself, the fear of something new and unknown, of the profound and powerful instinct which is awakening in one after having up to that time lain asleep, which abruptly arises in one and struggles for dominance with the other forces and impulses of one’s being. The young man, unaccustomed as yet to submit to the domination of this instinct, finds in it something stranger and more mysterious than in any other; c’est l’interrogation anxieuse de chérubin.[93]

Religious education and modesty.

To sum up, the sentiment of modesty neither originates in religion nor depends upon it; it is only very indirectly allied to it. Even from the point of view of modesty a religious education is not above reproach. Among Protestants, is the reading of the Bible always a good school? M. Bruston has contended for the propriety of reading the Song of Songs in an epoch like ours when marriages are often made out of interest rather than of inclination; and indeed we agree with him that the reading of the Song of Songs does tend to develop certain inclinations in young girls, but hardly an inclination to a regular and complicated church marriage. Among Catholics how many indiscreet questions the confessor puts to the young girl! How many prohibitions, as dangerous in their way as suggestions! And even in the item of modesty excess is a defect; a little wholesome liberty in education and manners would do no harm. Catholic education sometimes distorts the woman’s mind by making it too different from that of the man, and by accustoming it to a perpetual timidity and discomposure in the presence of the being with whom she must pass her life, and by rendering her modesty somewhat too indeterminate and savage, and converting it into a sort of religion.

True modesty.

There is also sometimes manifest a sort of perversion of modesty in the mystical tendencies of woman, which are especially strong at the age of puberty. These tendencies, exploited by the priesthood, give rise to convents and cloisters. A Catholic education too often constitutes for young girls a sort of moral mutilation; one endeavours to keep them virgins, and one succeeds in converting them into imperfect women. Religions are too inclined to consider the union of the sexes under I know not what mystical aspect, and, from the point of view of morals, as a stain. Certainly purity is a power; it is with a little diamond point that mountains, and even continents, are nowadays pierced, but Christianity has confounded chastity with purity. True purity is that of love, true chastity is chastity of heart; chastity of heart survives chastity of body, and stops at the point beyond which it would become a restriction, an obstacle to the free development of the entire being. An eunuch or a young man studying for the priesthood may well be destitute of chastity; the smile of a young girl at the thought of her fiancé may be infinitely more virginal than that of a nun. Nothing moreover stains the mind like a too exclusive preoccupation with the things of the body; incessant attention to them necessarily evokes a chain of immodest imagery. St. Jerome in his desert, believing, as he relates, that he saw the Roman courtesans dancing naked in the moonlight, was less pure in heart and brain than Socrates unceremoniously paying a visit to Theodora. A too self-conscious modesty is immodest. The whole grace of virginity is ignorance; the instant virginity becomes aware of itself it is tarnished; virginity, like certain fruits, can only be preserved by a process of desiccation. Love and sunshine transform the universe. Modesty is simply a coat of mail which presupposes a state of war between the sexes, and aims at preventing a blind promiscuity; the mutual self-abandonment of love is more chaste than the modest inquietude and the immodest suspicion which precede it; there grows up between two people who love each other a sort of confidence that results in their neither wishing nor being able to keep back anything from each other; self-constraint, suspicion, consciousness of antagonism of interest, all disappear. This is assuredly the characteristic of the most perfect form of reunion that can exist in this world; Plato believed that the human body is the prison of the spirit and cuts it off from immediate communication with its fellow-spirits; paradoxical as it may seem, it is in love that the body becomes less opaque, and effaces itself, and soul communicates with soul. Nay, marriage itself preserves in women a sort of moral virginity, as one may recognize on the scarred and discoloured hands of old women the white line that has been protected for thirty years, by the wedding ring, against the wear and tear of life.

M. Renan on celibacy.

Modesty is a sentiment which has survived, as we have seen, because it was useful to the propagation of the species; mysticism perverts and corrupts it and enlists it precisely against the propagation of the species. Between a Carmelite nun and a courtesan like Ninon de Lenclos the sociologist might well hesitate; socially they are almost equally worthless, their lives are almost equally miserable and vain; the excessive macerations of the one are as foolish as the pleasures of the other; the moral desiccation of the one is often not without some analogy to the corruption of the other. Vows or habits of perpetual chastity, the monastic life itself, have found in our days an unexpected defender in M. Renan. It is true he does not regard such matters from the point of view of Christianity. If he has a word to say in favour of perpetual chastity, it is strictly in the name of physiological induction; he considers chastity simply as a means of heightening the capacity of the brain and of increasing one’s intellectual fertility. He does not absolutely blame impurity, he delights in a sense, as he himself says, in the joys of the debauchee and the courtesan; he possesses the boundless curiosity and the accomplished impudicity of the man of science. But he believes that there exists a sort of intellectual antinomy between complete intellectual development and bodily love. The true man of science should concentrate his entire vitality in his brain, should devote his life to abstractions and chimeras; by this reservation of his entire strength for the service of his head, his intelligence will flower in double blossoms, the monstrous beauty of which, produced by the transformation of stamens into petals, is the achievement of sterility. Love is a heavy tax to pay for the vanities of the world, and in the budget of the human race women count almost exclusively on the side of expense. Science, economical of time and force, should teach one to disembarrass one’s self of women and love, and to leave such futilities to the drones. These paradoxes that M. Renan puts forth rest on a well-known scientific fact: that the most intelligent species are those in which reproduction is least active; fertility, generally speaking, varies inversely to cerebral energy. But love must not quite be confounded with sexual activity, unless one is to draw the somewhat strange conclusion that among animals hares are those who are best acquainted with love, and among men Frenchmen are those who know least of it. From the fact that excessive commerce with the other sex paralyses the intelligence, it does not in the least follow that the sentiment of love produces the same effect and that one’s intellectual power diminishes with the growth of one’s heart.

Love a cerebral stimulant.