Modern French Philosophy: a Study of the Development Since Comte

by John Alexander Gunn

I. Comte’s effort in his “Religion of Humanity”—Renan and the Church—Freedom—Denial of supernatural elements in Christianity—Vie de Jésus—Renan not irreligious—Piety—Love and Goodness reveal the Divine—God the “ideal”—Vacherot and Taine.

II. Renouvier’s efforts, with Pillon, in the Critique philosophique and Critique religieuse—His republican theology—Freedom, personality and God—The deity as finite—God as Goodness and as a Person.

III. Ravaisson’s blend of Hellenism and Christian thought—Boutroux—Fouillée on the Idea of God—The importance of Guyau’s L’Irreligion de l’Avenir—The decay of dogma and ecclesiasticism—The term “irreligion” misleading—Sociology and religion-Freedom—Religious education and tolerance—Modernism and the Church—Loisy and others—Symbolism and Fidéisme.

CONCLUSION: The personal factor in faith—Freedom vital to religion—Change of attitude since the eighteenth century—Value of religion—Tendency towards a free religion devoid of dogmas, expressive of the best aspirations of man’s mind.

CHAPTER VII
RELIGION

It is outside our purpose to embark upon discussions of the religious problem in France, in so far as this became a problem of politics. Our intention is rather to examine the inner core of religious thought, the philosophy of religion, which forms an appropriate final chapter to our history of the development of ideas.

Yet, although our discussion bears mainly upon the general attitude to religion, upon the development of central religious ideas such as the idea of God, and upon the place of religion in the future—that is to say, upon the philosophy of religion—it is practically impossible to understand the religious attitude of our thinkers without a brief notice of the religious situation in France during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In our Introduction we briefly called attention to the attempt of the Traditionalists after the Revolution to recall their countrymen to the Christian faith as presented in and by the Roman Catholic Church. The efforts made by De Bonald, De Maistre, Chateaubriand, Lamennais and Lacordaire did not succeed as they had hoped, but, nevertheless, a considerable current of loyalty to the Church and the Catholic religion set in. Much of this loyalty was bound up with sentimental affection for a monarchy, and arose partly from anti-revolutionary sentiments.[^[1]] It cannot, however, be entirely explained by these political feelings. There was the expression of a deeper and more spiritual reaction directed against the materialistic and sceptical teachings of the eighteenth century. Man’s heart craved comfort, consolation and warmth. It had been starved in the previous century, and revolution and war had only added to the cup of bitterness. Thus there came an epoch of Romanticism in religion of which the sentimental and assumed orthodoxy of Chateaubriand was a sign of the times. His Génie du Christianisme may now appear to us full of sentimentality, but it was welcomed at the time, since it expressed at least some of those aspirations which had for long been denied an expression. It was this which marked the great difference between the two centuries in France. The eighteenth was mainly concerned with scoffing at religion. Its rationalism was that of Voltaire. In the first half of the nineteenth century the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. Romanticism, in poetry, in literature, in philosophy and in religion was à la mode, and it led frequently to sentimentality or morbidity. Lamartine, Victor Hugo and De Vigny professed the Catholic faith for many years. We may note, and this is important, that in France the only form of Christianity which holds any sway over the people in general is the Roman Catholic faith. Outside the Roman Church there is no religious organisation which is of much account. This explains why it is so rare to find a thinker who owns allegiance to any Church or religion, and yet it would be wrong to deem them irreligious. There is no via media between Catholicism and free personal thought. This was a point which Renan quite keenly felt, and of which his own spiritual pilgrimage, which took him out of the bounds of the Church of his youth, is a fine illustration. Many of France’s noblest sons have been brought up in the religious atmosphere of the Church and owe much of their education to her, and Rome believes in education. The control of education has been throughout the century a problem severely contested by Church and State. More important for our purpose than the details of the quarrels of Church and State is the intellectual condition of the Church itself.

[1] De Maistre regarded the Revolution as an infliction specially bestowed upon France for her national neglect of religion—his religion, of course. The same crude, misleading, and vicious arguments have since been put forward by the theologians in their efforts to push the cause of the Church with the people. This was very noticeable both in the war of 1870 and that of 1914. In each case it was argued that the war was a punishment from God for France’s frivolity and neglect of the Church. In 1914, in addition, it was deemed a direct divine reply to “Disestablishment.”

This reveals a striking vitality, a vigour and initiative at war with the central powers of the Vatican, a seething unrest which uniformity and authority find annoying. How strong the power of the central authority was, the affair of the Concordat had shown, when forty bishops were deposed for non-acceptance of the arrangement between Napoleon and the Pope.[^[2]] Stronger still was the iron hand of the Pope over intellectual freedom.