The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Analogy between nineteenth century and times of the Antonines superficial.

The increasing multiplicity of sects, for example of the Protestant sects; the courageous efforts of certain disciples of Comte and of Spencer, the birth of Mormonism in America and of Brahmaism in India, have been regarded as symptoms of a religious fermentation analogous to that which disturbed the world at the time of the Antonines and very possibly destined, like that, to result in a renovation. “All things in nature spring from humble beginnings, and no one can to-day say whether the unconscious mission of the fisherman and publicans, gathered eighteen centuries ago on the borders of Lake Tiberias about a gentle and mystical idealist, will not to-morrow be handed on to such and such an association of spiritualists prophesying in a gorge of the Rocky Mountains; to such and such an illuminated gathering of socialists in some back shop in London; to such and such a band of ascetics, meditating, like the Essenes of old on the miseries of the world, in some jungle of Hindustan. Perhaps all they need is to discover on the road to Damascus another Paul, to give them a passport to future ages.”[115] These analogies between our century and that of the Antonines are very superficial; between the century which, as a whole, is of an unexampled incredulity and the century which was of an unexampled credulity—which accepted all religion from that of Isis and Mithra to that of Christ; from that of the talking serpent to that of Christ incarnate in the body of a virgin. During the past eighteen hundred years a new thing has been born into the world—science; and science is not compatible with supernatural revelations, which are the foundation of religions.

Attempt to found a religion to-day on miracles desperate.

Will it be objected that miracles still happen? Possibly one or two notable ones in a century! The surprising thing is not that miracles still happen, but that, with millions of believers, including in their ranks thousands of excited women and children, they do not happen frequently. Every day ought to bring forth its duly authenticated miracle, but unhappily daily miracles no longer happen—except in mad-houses and hospitals for the hysterical, where they are observed and reported nowadays by incredulous men of science. When they happen elsewhere, true believers themselves are almost afraid of them and do not care to talk about them. Of old a king forbade God to perform miracles; the Pope has done almost as much to-day; they are regarded as objects of doubt and suspicion, rather than of edification. Among orthodox Protestant nations, miracles do not happen; enlightened theologians among them no longer insist on the marvellous elements in the early Christian tradition; they regard them as more likely to enfeeble than to confirm the authority of the Scriptures. Add that as a means of founding a new religion, or of reviving old religions, a miracle or two would do no good; they would rather result in the total destruction of the faith they were intended to establish. A whole series of miracles would be necessary, a sort of marvellous atmosphere in which the whole face of nature should be transformed, a mystic halo not only visibly resting on the head of the prophet, but reflected on the believers who surround him. In other words, the Messiah must be in his lifetime quite as wonderful as he is always reported to be afterward, and that without deception or finesse, either on his part or on the part of those who surround him and are supported by his divinity. Unhappily, in our days great men are immediately taken account of by history, which verifies everything, describes everything, sets down in plain print the contemporary fact, otherwise so likely to settle, with time, into some fantastic shape. Even the legend of Napoleon, which he himself laboured with all the resources of despotic power and brutal force to establish, did not last thirty years in Europe; in the East it exists still, transfigured. Personalities shrink beneath the touch of history. If Jesus had lived to-day his letters would have been published, and it is impossible to believe in the divinity of anybody after one has read his correspondence. The slightest facts of an interesting man’s life are ascertainable: state records enable us to ascertain important dates, what he did from year to year and even sometimes from day to day; sometimes a mere appearance in court, such as happened in the life of Shakspeare’s father, may serve to fix a date; and in the life of a prophet there would be no lack of appearances in court since unlicensed assemblies are interdicted. Life to-day is so hemmed in by reality, so disciplined, that it is difficult for the marvellous to find entrance, or to make good its lodgment even if it should get in. We live in little numbered and windowed boxes, in which the least disturbance attracts attention; we are watched like soldiers living in barracks; we have every evening to be present at the roll-call, with no possibility of dropping out of the society of men, of returning into ourselves, of avoiding the big eye of society. We are like bees living under a glass; the observer can watch them at work, watch them constructing their hive, watch them making their honey; and the sweetest of honey, even the honey with which the ancients nourished the baby Jupiter, ceases to be marvellous when one has been present at its tardy and painstaking elaboration.

We are far from the time when Pascal could say “Miracles are as a flash of lightning that reveals.” The lightning no longer flashes. Science stands ready to explain the first miracle that arises in support of a new religion.

Genius has deserted the service of religion.

Metaphysical and poetic genius also, upon which religions were so dependent in their earliest stages in the past, have also withdrawn from their service. Read the descriptions of the latest miracles, those at Lourdes, for example: the little girl taking off her stockings to step into the rivulet, the words of the Virgin, the vision repeated as a spectacle before witnesses who saw nothing—all of it is trivial and insignificant; how far we have travelled from the Lives of the Saints, the Gospel, the great Hindu legends! The poor in spirit may see God or the Virgin, but they cannot make others see them; the poor in spirit cannot found or revive religion; it requires genius, and genius, which bloweth where it listeth, bloweth to-day elsewhere. If the Bible and the Gospels had not been sublime poems they would not have made the conquest of the world. Æsthetically considered, they are epics greater than the Iliad. What Odyssey equals that of Jesus? Refined Greeks and Romans did not at first appreciate the simple, impassioned poetry of the Gospels; it was long before they admired the style of the Scriptures. St. Jerome, transported in a dream to the feet of the Sovereign Judge, heard a menacing voice cry: “Thou art naught but a Ciceronian!” After this dream St. Jerome applied himself to the study of the beauties of the Bible and the New Testament, and came ultimately to prefer them to the balanced periods of the great Latin orator: the Sermon on the Mount, in spite of some inconsistencies (in part the work of the disciples), is more eloquent than the most eloquent of Cicero’s orations, and the invectives against the Pharisees, authentic or not, are better literature than the denunciations against Catiline. M. Havet, in our judgment, entirely misses the point, when he asks how “so great a revolution could have taken its rise from such commonplace literature as the New Testament.” The literary excellence of the New Testament is of a new kind, unparalleled among the Greeks or the writers of the Old Testament; it possesses the grace of tenderness and of unction, which is well worth the lyrical fire of the prophets; it is a profound and naïve manual of popular morality, and every word makes one’s heart vibrate. The literary success of the New Testament was fully merited. The Hebrew people, who had not produced one man of science, had evidently produced a succession of sombre, tender, puissant poets unparalleled among any other people; a fact which in a great part explains the victorious progress of Hebrew religion. Poetry, like hope, is the sister of faith, and is more necessary than hope to faith, for one may forego the distant grace of hope when one is under the present charm of an illusion.

And the conditions in which alone genius could succeed are wanting.

To found a great religion has demanded and will always demand the services of men of genius such as Jesus was, or, to be quite historic, as St. Paul was. But if genius is to found religion it can do so only under two essential conditions. It must in the first place be absolutely sincere; we no longer live in a period when religion can be benefited by imposture; it must, in the second place, distinctly impose upon itself; it must be the dupe of its own inspiration, of its own interior illuminations, disposed to see in them something superhuman, to feel itself in direct communication with God, or at least especially designated by God. This second condition was easy to realize in ancient times when, in their ignorance of psychological and physiological phenomena, not only men like Jesus but philosophers like Socrates and Plotinus believed that they felt within them something supernatural, took their visions and their ecstasies seriously; and, unable to explain their own very genuine genius, regarded it as a proof of some mysterious or miraculous communication with God. Purely and simply to rank these great men among lunatics would be absurd; they were simply seeking to explain phenomena which overtaxed their knowledge and gave what, after all, was the most plausible explanation for the times in which they lived. With the scientific knowledge that we possess nowadays, and which every man who attains a certain intellectual level inevitably will possess, men like Moses and Jesus, men who are inspired, will be obliged, so to speak, to choose between two alternatives; to see in their inspiration simply the natural impulse of genius, to speak in their own name, to make no pretences to revelation or prophecy, to be, in effect, philosophers, or actively to allow themselves to be deceived by their own exaltation, to objectify it, to personify it, to become madmen in downright earnest. At the present day those who are not capable of naming the force that is acting in them and declaring it to be natural and human, and of preserving their self-mastery, are definitively regarded as of unsound mind; prophets who believe in their own prophecies are sent to Charenton. We are familiar with distinctions that were unknown in ancient times, even to the promoters of religious ideas; the great men who founded religions were carried away by the movement they had themselves called into being; were divinized by the God that they themselves had brought to men. Genius is as capable of going to school as stupidity; and, like stupidity, it has been to school in the nineteenth century and is familiar with nineteenth-century science. A time will come—nay, probably has come for Europe—when prophets, apostles, and Messiahs will be extinct among men. It is a species which is dying out. “Who of us, who of us will become a god?” None of us will become a god, and more than that none of us wants to. Science has killed the supernatural in us even in the very centre of our being, in our deepest ecstasies; visions no longer put on the shape of apparition but of simple hallucination, and the day they become so strong that we believe in them we lose all power to make anybody else believe in them, and become, not uncommonly, amenable to the law. The middle term between the man of genius and the fool, the man of inspiration, of revelation, the Messiah, the God, has disappeared.

Dissemination of knowledge has weakened the religious sentiment.