[14] Cf. Renan’s Essay in Questions contemporaines on “L’Avenir religieux des Sociétés modernes.”
Renan is in agreement with the central ideas of Jesus’ own faith, and he rightly regards him as one of the greatest contributors to the world’s religious thought. Renan’s religion is free from supernaturalism and dogma. He believes in infinite Goodness or Providence, but he despises the vulgar and crude conceptions of God which so mar a truly religious outlook. He points out how prayer, in the sense of a request to Heaven for a particular object, is becoming recognised as foolish. ‘As a “meditation,” an interview with one’s own conscience, it has a deeply religious value. The vulgar idea of prayer reposes on an immoral conception of God. Renan rightly sees the central importance for religion of possessing a sane view of the divinity, not one which belongs to primitive tribal wargods and weather-gods. He aptly says, in this connection, that the one who was defeated in 1871 was not only France but le bon Dieu to which she in vain appealed. In his place was to be found, remarks Renan with a little sarcasm, “only a Lord God of Hosts who was unmoved by the moral ‘délicatesse’ of the Uhlans and the incontestable excellence of the Prussian shells.”[[15]] He rightly points to the immoral use made of the divinity by pious folk whose whole religion is utilitarian and materialistic. They do good only in order to get to heaven or escape hell,[[16]] and believe in God because it is necessary for them to have a confidant and sonsoler, to whom they may cry in time of trouble, and to whose will they may resignedly impute the evil chastisement which their own errors have brought upon them individually or collectively. But, he rightly claims, it is only where utilitarian calculations and self-interest end, that religion begins with the sense of the Infinite and of the Ideal Goodness and Beauty and Love.
[15] Dialogues et Fragments philosophiques, p. ix.
[16] One pious individual thought to convert Renan himself by writing him every month, quite briefly, to this effect “There is a hell.”
He endeavours in his Examen de Conscience philosophique (1888) to sum up his attitude upon this question. There he affirms that it is beyond dispute or doubt that we have no evidence whatever of the action in the universe of one or of several wills superior to that of man. The actual state of this universe gives no sign of any external intervention, and we know nothing of its beginning. No beneficent interfering power, a deus ex machinâ, corrects or directs the operation of blind forces, enlightens man or improves his lot. No God appears miraculously to prevent evils, to crush disease, stop wars, or save his children from peril. No end or purpose is visible to us. God in the popular sense, living and acting as a Divine Providence, is not to be seen in our universe. The question is, however, whether this universe of ours is the totality of existence. Doubt comes into play here, and if our universe is not this totality, then God, although absent from his world, might still exist outside it. Our finite world is little in relation to the Infinite, it is a mere speck in the universe we know, and its duration to a divine Being might be only a day.
The Infinite, continues Renan, surrounds our finite world above and below. It stretches on the one hand to the infinitely large concourse of worlds and systems, and, on the other, to the infinitely little as atoms, microbes and the germs by which human life itself is passed on from one generation to another. The prospect of the world we know involves logically and fatally, says Renan, atheism. But this atheism, he adds, may be due to the fact that we cannot see far enough. Our universe is a phenomenon which has had a beginning and will have an end. That which has had no beginning and will have no end is the Absolute All, or God. Metaphysics has always been a science proceeding upon this assumption, “Something exists, therefore something has existed from all eternity.” which is akin to the scientific principle, “No effect with- out a cause.”[[17]]
[17] Examen de Conscience philosophique, p. 412 of the volume Feuilles détachées.
We must not allow ourselves to be misled too far by the constructions or inductions about the uniformity and immutability of the laws of nature. “A God may reveal himself, perhaps, one day.” The infinite may dispose of our finite world, use it for its own ends. The expression, “Nature and its author,” may not be so absurd as some seem to think it. It is true that our experience presents no reason for forming such an hypothesis, but we must keep our sense of the infinite. “Everything is possible, even God,” and Renan adds, “If God exists, he must be good, and he will finish by being just.” It is as foolish to deny as to assert his existence in a dogmatic and thoughtless manner. It is upon this sense of the infinite and upon the ideals of Goodness, Beauty and Love that true faith or piety reposes.
Love, declares Renan, is one of the principal revelations of the divine, and he laments the neglect of it by philosophy. It runs in a certain sense through all living beings, and in man has been the school of gentleness and courtesy—nay more, of morals and of religion. Love, understood in the high sense, is a sacred, religious thing, or rather is a part of religion itself. In a tone which recalls that of the New Testament and Tolstoi, Renan beseeches us to remember that God is Love, and that where Love is there God is. In loving, man is at his best; he goes out of himself and feels himself in contact with the infinite. The very act of love is veritably sacred and divine, the union of body and soul with another is a holy communion with the infinite. He remarks in his Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse, doubtless remembering the simple purity and piety of his mother and sister, that when reflection has brought us to doubt, and even to a scepticism regarding goodness, then the spontaneous affirmation of goodness and beauty which exists in a noble and virtuous woman saves us from cynicism and restores us to communication with the eternal spring in which God reflects himself. Love, which Renan with reason laments as having been neglected on its most serious side and looked upon as mere sentimentality, offers the highest proof of God. In it lies our umbilical link with nature, but at the same time our communion with the infinite. He recalls some of Browning’s views in his attitude to love as a redeeming power. The most wretched criminal still has something good in him, a divine spark, if he be capable of loving.
It is the spirit of love and goodness which Renan admires in the simple faith of those separated far from him in their theological ideas. “God forbid,” he says,[[18]] “that I should speak slightingly of those who, devoid of the critical sense, and impelled by very pure and powerful religious motives, are attached to one or other of the great established systems of faith. I love the simple faith of the peasant, the serious conviction of the priest.”