Rousseau (Volume 1 and 2)

by John Morley

CHAPTER V.

THE SAVOYARD VICAR.

The band of dogmatic atheists who met round D'Holbach's dinner-table indulged a shallow and futile hope, if it was not an ungenerous one, when they expected the immediate advent of a generation with whom a humane and rational philosophy should displace, not merely the superstitions which had grown around the Christian dogma, but every root and fragment of theistic conception. A hope of this kind implied a singularly random idea, alike of the hold which Christianity had taken of the religious emotion in western Europe, and of the durableness of those conditions in human character, to which some belief in a deity with a greater or fewer number of good attributes brings solace and nourishment. A movement like that of Christianity does not pass through a group of societies, and then leave no trace behind. It springs from many other sources besides that of adherence to the truth of its dogmas. The stream of its influence must continue to flow long after adherence to the letter has been confined to the least informed portions of a community. The Encyclopædists knew that they had sapped religious dogma and shaken ecclesiastical organisation. They forgot that religious sentiment on the one hand, and habit of respect for authority on the other, were both of them still left behind. They had convinced themselves by a host of persuasive analogies that the universe is an automatic machine, and man only an industrious particle in the stupendous whole; that a final cause is not cognisable by our limited intelligence; and that to make emotion in this or any other respect a test of objective truth and a ground of positive belief, is to lower both truth and the reason which is its single arbiter. They forgot that imagination is as active in man as his reason, and that a craving for mental peace may become much stronger than passion for demonstrated truth. Christianity had given to this craving in western Europe a definite mould, which was not to be effaced in a day, and one or two of its lines mark a permanent and noble acquisition to the highest forces of human nature. There will have to be wrought a profounder and more far-spreading modification than any which the French atheists could effect, before all debilitating influences in the old creed can be effaced, its elevating influences finally separated from them, and then permanently preserved in more beneficent form and in an association less questionable to the understanding.

Neither a purely negative nor a direct attack can ever suffice. There must be a coincidence of many silently oppugnant forces, emotional, scientific, and material. And, above all, there must be the slow steadfast growth of some replacing faith, which shall retain all the elements of moral beauty that once gave light to the old belief that has disappeared, and must still possess a living force in the new.

Here we find the good side of a religious reaction such as that which Rousseau led in the last century, and of which the Savoyard Vicar's profession of faith was the famous symbol. Evil as this reaction was in many respects, and especially in the check which it gave to the application of positive methods and conceptions to the most important group of our beliefs, yet it had what was the very signal merit under the circumstances of the time, of keeping the religious emotions alive in association with a tolerant, pure, lofty, and living set of articles of faith, instead of feeding them on the dead superstitions which were at that moment the only practical alternative. The deism of Rousseau could not in any case have acquired the force of the corresponding religious reaction in England, because the former never acquired a compact and vigorous external organisation, as the latter did, especially in Wesleyanism and Evangelicalism, the most remarkable of its developments. In truth the vague, fluid, purely subjective character of deism disqualifies it from forming the doctrinal basis of any great objective and visible church, for it is at bottom the sublimation of individualism. But in itself it was a far less retrogressive, as well as a far less powerful, movement. It kept fewer of those dogmas which gradual change of intellectual climate had reduced to the condition of rank superstitions. It preserved some of its own, which a still further extension of the same change is assuredly destined to reduce to the same condition; but, nevertheless, along with them it cherished sentiments which the world will never willingly let die.

The one cardinal service of the Christian doctrine, which is of course to be distinguished from the services rendered to civilisation in early times by the Christian church, has been the contribution to the active intelligence of the west, of those moods of holiness, awe, reverence, and silent worship of an Unseen not made with hands, which the Christianising Jews first brought from the east. Of the fabric which four centuries ago looked so stupendous and so enduring, with its magnificent whole and its minutely reticulated parts of belief and practice, this gradual creation of a new temperament in the religious imagination of Western Europe and the countries that take their mental direction from her, is perhaps the only portion that will remain distinctly visible, after all the rest has sunk into the repose of histories of opinion. Whether this be the case or not, the fact that these deeper moods are among the richest acquisitions of human nature, will not be denied either by those who think that Christianity associates them with objects destined permanently to awake them in their loftiest form, or by others who believe that the deepest moods of which man is capable, must ultimately ally themselves with something still more purely spiritual than the anthropomorphised deities of the falling church. And if so, then Rousseau's deism, while intercepting the steady advance of the rationalistic assault and diverting the current of renovating energy, still did something to keep alive in a more or less worthy shape those parts of the slowly expiring system which men have the best reasons for cherishing.

Let us endeavour to characterise Rousseau's deism with as much precision as it allows. It was a special and graceful form of a doctrine which, though susceptible, alike in theory and in the practical history of religious thought, of numberless wide varieties of significance, is commonly designated by the name of deism, without qualification. People constantly speak as if deism only came in with the eighteenth century. It would be impossible to name any century since the twelfth, in which distinct and abundant traces could not be found within the dominion of Christianity of a belief in a supernatural power apart from the supposed disclosure of it in a special revelation.[337] A præter-christian deism, or the principle of natural religion, was inevitably contained in the legal conception of a natural law, for how can we dissociate the idea of law from the idea of a definite lawgiver? The very scholastic disputations themselves, by the sharpness and subtlety which they gave to the reasoning faculty, set men in search of novelties, and these novelties were not always of a kind which orthodox views of the Christian mysteries could have sanctioned. It has been said that religion is at the cradle of every nation, and philosophy at its grave; it is at least true that the cradle of philosophy is the open grave of religion. Wherever there is argumentation, there is sure to be scepticism. When people begin to reason, a shadow has already fallen across faith, though the reasoners might have shrunk with horror from knowledge of the goal of their work, and though centuries may elapse before the shadow deepens into eclipse. But the church was strong and alert in the times when free thought vainly tried to rear a dangerous head in Italy. With the Protestant revolution came slowly a wider freedom, while the prolonged and tempestuous discussion between the old church and the reformed bodies, as well as the manifold variations among those bodies at strife with one another, stimulated the growth of religious thought in many directions that tended away from the exclusive pretensions of Christianity to be the oracle of the divine Spirit. The same feeling which thrust aside the sacerdotal interposition between the soul of man and its sovereign creator and inspirer, gradually worked towards the dethronement of those mediators other than sacerdotal, in whom the moral timidity of a dark and stricken age had once sought shade from the too dazzling brightness of the All-powerful and the Everlasting. The assertion of the rights and powers of the individual reason within the limits of the sacred documents, began in less than a hundred years to grow into an assertion of the same rights and powers beyond those limits. The rejection of tradition as a substitute for independent judgment, in interpreting or supplementing the records of revelation, gradually impaired the traditional authority both of the records themselves, and of the central doctrines which all churches had in one shape or another agreed to accept. The Trinitarian controversy of the sixteenth century must have been a stealthy solvent. The deism of England in the eighteenth century, which Voltaire was the prime agent in introducing in its negative, colourless, and essentially futile shape into his own country, had its main effect as a process of dissolution.

All this, however, down to the deistical movement which Rousseau found in progress at Geneva in 1754,[338] was distinctly the outcome in a more or less marked way of a rationalising and philosophic spirit, and not of the religious spirit. The sceptical side of it with reference to revealed religion, predominated over the positive side of it with reference to natural religion. The wild pantheism of which there were one or two extraordinary outbursts during the latter part of the middle ages, to mark the mystical influence which Platonic studies uncorrected by science always exert over certain temperaments, had been full of religiosity, such as it was. These had all passed away with a swift flash. There were, indeed, mystics like the author of the immortal De Imitatione, in whom the special qualities of Christian doctrine seem to have grown pale in a brighter flood of devout aspiration towards the perfections of a single Being. But this was not the deism with which either Christianity on the one side, or atheism on the other, had ever had to deal in France. Deism, in its formal acceptation, was either an idle piece of vaporous sentimentality, or else it was the first intellectual halting-place for spirits who had travelled out of the pale of the old dogmatic Christianity, and lacked strength for the continuance of their onward journey. In the latter case, it was only another name either for the shrewd rough conviction of the man of the world, that his universe could not well be imagined to go on without a sort of constitutional monarch, reigning but not governing, keeping evil-doers in order by fear of eternal punishment, and lending a sacred countenance to the indispensable doctrines of property, the gradation of rank and station, and the other moral foundations of the social structure. Or else it was a name for a purely philosophic principle, not embraced with fervour as the basis of a religion, but accepted with decorous satisfaction as the alternative to a religion; not seized upon as the mainspring of spiritual life, but held up as a shield in a controversy.

The deism which the Savoyard Vicar explained to Emilius in his profession of faith was pitched in a very different tone from this. Though the Vicar's conception of the Deity was lightly fenced round with rationalistic supports of the usual kind, drawn from the evidences of will and intelligence in the vast machinery of the universe, yet it was essentially the product not of reason, but of emotional expansion, as every fundamental article of a faith that touches the hearts of many men must always be. The Savoyard Vicar did not believe that a God had made the great world, and rules it with majestic power and supreme justice, in the same way in which he believed that any two sides of a triangle are greater than the third side. That there is a mysterious being penetrating all creation with force, was not a proposition to be demonstrated, but only the poor description in words of an habitual mood going far deeper into life than words can ever carry us. Without for a single moment falling off into the nullities of pantheism, neither did he for a single moment suffer his thought to stiffen and grow hard in the formal lines of a theological definition or a systematic credo. It remains firm enough to give the religious imagination consistency and a centre, yet luminous enough to give the spiritual faculty a vivifying consciousness of freedom and space. A creed is concerned with a number of affirmations, and is constantly held with honest strenuousness by multitudes of men and women who are unfitted by natural temperament for knowing what the glow of religious emotion means to the human soul,—for not every one that saith, Lord, Lord, enters the kingdom of heaven. The Savoyard Vicar's profession of faith was not a creed, and so has few affirmations; it was a single doctrine, melted in a glow of contemplative transport. It is impossible to set about disproving it, for its exponent repeatedly warns his disciple against the idleness of logomachy, and insists that the existence of the Divinity is traced upon every heart in letters that can never be effaced, if we are only content to read them with lowliness and simplicity. You cannot demonstrate an emotion, nor prove an aspiration. How reason, asks the Savoyard Vicar, about that which we cannot conceive? Conscience is the best of all casuists, and conscience affirms the presence of a being who moves the universe and ordains all things, and to him we give the name of God.