Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History Part 2

History and exegesis have dissipated the illusions and the ignorance on which these two strange affirmations rested. The Bible appears to us as the work, slowly and laboriously constructed, of the ancient Jewish Synagogue, and of the Early Christian Church. It needed more than four centuries to establish and to delimitate the New Testament. The books which compose it were still in the time of Eusebius divided into two cla.s.ses: books admitted everywhere and books contested. Why then should we not have the same liberty as Origen of doubting the authenticity of 2 Peter, _e.g._, or as Denis of Alexandria in discussing the apostolic origin of the Apocalypse? As to the theory of verbal inspiration, which makes the sacred writers G.o.d's penmen merely, no savant nowadays can defend it, so thoroughly have biblical studies set forth the personal originality of each of them, and the merits or the imperfections of their works. Moreover, the distinction clearly made in all the schools between the sacred writings and revelation must be considered as an inalienable conquest of modern theology. There is no one now who does not admit this truth, which would have seemed intolerable to our fathers, namely, that the word of G.o.d is in the Bible, but that all the Bible is not the word of G.o.d.

If this be so one sees new questions surging up and awaiting solution.

What is the relation of the word of G.o.d to the Bible? By what sign may we recognise the first and distinguish the second? Further, if there be any word of G.o.d outside the Bible, if there has been any revelation of G.o.d beyond the limits of the Hebrew people and primitive Christianity--and how can we deny this without denying the worth of religion?--what relation is there to establish, and what synthesis to make, between the biblical revelation and the other revelations suited to the various human families? Lastly, what place does the religion of Jesus occupy in the religious evolution of humanity? Modern theology seems deaf to these questions. Despairing of a solution, it hesitates to approach them. But they must be answered. Contemporary philosophy presses them upon the conscience of Christians. The scholastic theory, it is clear, cannot bring any solution to these new problems. As soon as the distinction is made in our consciousness between the word of G.o.d and the letter of holy Scripture, the first becomes independent of all human form and of all external guarantee. It is with it as with the light of the sun. It is only recognised by the brightness with which it floods us. But take care to introduce this criterion of religious and moral evidence into the scholastic theory is to deposit an explosive in the heart of it which shatters it to atoms.... I leave to others the task of masking or repairing the ruins. A task more urgent and more fruitful awaits us. We must build up, on a new principle, a new theory of revelation, a theory that will at once bear the test of criticism and give satisfaction to piety.

4. _Psychological Notion_

To return to psychology. In all piety there is some positive manifestation of G.o.d. Otherwise, one might question the value of religious phenomena.

Three consequences follow: the revelation of G.o.d will be evident, interior, progressive.

It will be interior, because G.o.d, not having phenomenal existence, can only reveal Himself to spirit, and in the piety that He Himself inspires.

If revealers and prophets believed they heard the voice of G.o.d outside themselves they were the victims of a psychological illusion that a.n.a.lysis discerns and dissipates. The old theologian was right who said:

_Nulla fides si non primum Deus ipse loquitur; Nulla que verba Dei nisi quae in penetralibus audit Ipsa fides._[1] This interior revelation is only made, it is true, in connection with some external event of Nature or of History. If wonder is the beginning of philosophy it is also the commencement of piety. Religious emotion does not spring up by chance and unconditionally. But external signs are only revealers for those who know how to comprehend them, and who are able to interpret them in a religious sense. That is why the distinction sometimes made between the _manifestation_ of G.o.d in things and divine _inspiration_ in consciousness, between the sign or external miracle and the inward word, is of little worth except for pedagogic purposes. The manifestation of G.o.d in Nature or in History is always a matter of faith. It would only appear to be such in the light on the hearth of consciousness. Put out that inner light and everything speedily becomes obscure: "If the light that is in thee be darkness, there will be darkness round about thee," says Jesus. To the deaf man the universe is mute. The starry heavens which bent the pensive brows of Newton and of Kant before the majesty of G.o.d, said nothing to Laplace.

Lit up within, the soul of Christ saw everywhere the signs of G.o.d.

Caiaphas saw none. In the cross of Jesus, where St. Paul discerned the manifestation of the wisdom and the power of G.o.d, the Pharisees had only seen the crus.h.i.+ng proof that this Messiah was a mere impostor.

[1] There is no faith save in the heart where G.o.d has first made Himself heard, and there are no divine words except those which faith hears in the inmost sanctuary of the soul.

This inward revelation will be also _evident_. The contrary would imply a contradiction. He who says revelation says the veil withdrawn, the light come. True, the word _mystery_ is often on the lips of Jesus, and in the writings of the New Testament; but, when applied to the essence of the Gospel it never has the meaning which is given to it later in the language of theology. The mystery of which Jesus, Paul, and the Apostles speak is a revealed mystery, _i.e._ a mystery which has become evident to pure hearts and pious souls through the public preaching of it. The Gospel is not obscurity; it is daylight, and it is nonsense to demand a criterion of evangelical revelation other than itself, any other evidence, _i.e._, than its own truth, beauty, and efficiency.

Lastly, this revelation will be _progressive_. It will be developed with the progress of the moral and religious life which G.o.d begets and nourishes in the bosom of humanity. The word of G.o.d is not that of a poor human founder who formulates in abstract terms ideas which are but the pale shadows of things. It is essentially creative. It carries with it all the substance of being and all the potency of life. It realises that which it proclaims, and never manifests itself except by its works. When G.o.d wished to give the Decalogue to Israel, He did not write with His finger on tables of stone; He raised up Moses, and from the consciousness of Moses the Decalogue sprang. In order that we might have the Epistle to the Romans, there was no need to dictate it to the Apostle; G.o.d had only to create the powerful individuality of Saul of Tarsus, well knowing that when once the tree was made the fruit would follow in due course. The same with the Gospel; He did not drop it from the sky; He did not send it by an angel; He caused Jesus to be born from the very bosom of the human race, and Jesus gave us the Gospel that had blossomed in His inmost heart. Thus G.o.d reveals Himself in the great consciousnesses that His Spirit raises, fills, illumines one by one; they form a sacred theory through the ages and leave on history a track of light which brightens, broadens to the perfect day.

A new and graver problem here arises. This revelation, made in the depths of the human soul, remains individual and subjective. How will it become objective and concrete? How will it be made an educating, saving power? This problem would be insoluble if Leibniz was right, if human souls were independent monads, closed against and impenetrable to one another, if it had been necessary, in a word, to regard them as absolute ent.i.ties, posited from the beginning by the Creator. But they are nothing of the kind. Social philosophy has sufficiently demonstrated that no individual exists either by himself or for himself alone. In each man it is humanity that is realised--that is to say, a moral life common to all. Moral goods are in essence universal. They do not exist, doubtless, apart from the consciousness of the individual; but no consciousness acquires them without acquiring them, in principle at least, for all others.

Whence comes that religious kins.h.i.+p of souls, that facility of communion between them, and that infinite extension and prolongation of one and the same inspiration, if not from the presence in each of the same indwelling G.o.d? Men are only divided by their external idols. In proportion as they plumb their being and descend into the depths of their spiritual nature, they discover the same altar, recite the same prayer, aspire to the same end. It is for this profound reason that individual revelations become universal. There are only prophets chosen of G.o.d because there is a general vocation and election of all men. If humanity were not potentially and in some degree an Immanuel (G.o.d with us), there would never have issued from its bosom Him who bore and revealed this blessed name. The religious experience He pa.s.sed through, He pa.s.sed through for us; the victory He won was for our advantage and is repeated indefinitely in every sincere soul that joins itself to Him to live His life. Thus the revelation of G.o.d given at one point and in one consciousness infallibly s.h.i.+nes forth, perpetuates and multiplies itself. A vibration set up in a soul resounds in kindred souls. An illumined consciousness illuminates in turn. There are religious filiations, just as there are historical genealogies. Thus the inner revelation becomes consistent and objective in history; it forms a chain, a continuous tradition, and becoming incarnate in each human generation, remains not only the richest of heritages, but the most fecund of historical powers.

One step more. Let us follow this historical incarnation of religious tradition into its most material form. The inner experiences of men of G.o.d and the witness of them that they give to the world, express themselves naturally in speech, and this in its turn is transformed into Scripture. It is in this way that in all civilised religions divine revelation is presented to man in the form of a sacred writing; everywhere it is gathered into collections of sacred books which have been called the bibles of humanity. While all these have been born according to the same psychological and historical laws, it does not follow that they have all the same value, or that an unintelligent syncretism has the right to mix together the various elements in them to make of them one common and characterless Bible. No; each of them naturally belongs to a particular stage in the ladder of divine revelations, and there we must leave them. The highest will always be that which contains the deepest and purest expression of inward religion, and consequently offers to man the most precious treasure.

The rank of the Hebrew and Christian Bible is thus found to be logically determined by the moral worth of the Hebrew and the Christian religions. But in leaving historical criticism and religious experience to make here the necessary demonstration and render it daily more evident, we must once more call to mind the always human conditions of these written collections, of those at the top as well as those at the bottom of the ladder, conditions which forbid us ever to identify the letter and the spirit, the divine inspiration and the particular form in which it has been clothed.

G.o.d, wis.h.i.+ng to speak to us, has never chosen any but human organs.

With whatever inspiration He has endowed them, that inspiration has always therefore pa.s.sed through human subjectivity; it has only been able either to express or to translate itself in the language and the turn of mind of a particular individual and of a particular time. Now, no individual and historical form can be absolute. If the contents are divine, the vessel is always earthen. The organ of the revelation of G.o.d necessarily limits it. It must of necessity accommodate itself to the limits of human receptivity. How could it possibly enter and mingle with the changing waves of the intellectual and moral life of humanity unless it flowed in the bed of the river and between its banks?

However incontestable this historical complexity of the divine and human elements in religion, most men seem incapable of comprehending it, and of frankly accepting it. Men of little faith, we feel ourselves lost the moment men take from us the illusion that we ever have before us and outside of us the divine revelation in an objective and unadulterated form, when alongside authority and tradition they make a place for the freedom and the interpretation of consciousness.

Is there then some chemistry by which we can separate that which G.o.d has joined so indissolubly? Has life ever been seen apart from living beings or light apart from luminous vibrations? Why not make an effort to see that the wisdom of G.o.d is infinitely greater than our own, and that what He has given us is better than that of which we dreamed.

Life and light, even if they are not absolute, propagate themselves with none the less force.

Lastly, what is the criterion by which you may recognise an authentic revelation of G.o.d in the books you read, in the things you are taught?

Listen: only one criterion is sufficient and infallible: every divine revelation, every religious experience fit to nourish and sustain your soul, must be able to repeat and continue itself as an actual revelation and an individual experience in your own consciousness.

What cannot enter thus as a permanent and const.i.tuent element into the woof of your inner life, to enrich, enfranchise, and transform it into a higher life, cannot be for you a light, or, consequently, a divine revelation. The spirit of life is not there. Do not believe that the prophets and founders have transmitted to you their experience in order to make yours needless, or that their revelation has been brought to you in a book for you to receive pa.s.sively and as if it were an alien thing. Religious truth cannot be borrowed like money, or, rather, if you do so borrow it you are none the richer. Remember what the Samaritans said to the woman: "Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world" (John iv. 42). Thus the divine revelation which is not realised in us, and does not become immediate, does not exist for us. And I admire the counsel of G.o.d, Who, wis.h.i.+ng to raise man into liberty, did not give to him an objective revelation which would have become to him a yoke of bondage. The aim of tradition is liberty, and liberty returns lovingly to tradition when, instead of finding it a yoke, it sees in it only a help, an aliment, a guide.

5. _Conclusion_

Such, in its principle, and with all its consequences, is the new idea of revelation given to us by psychology and history. Before it vanish the insoluble ant.i.theses and conflicts raised by scholasticism between supernatural and natural revelation, between what the theologians call immediate and mediate, between a universal and a special revelation.

Synthesis is made, and peace is re-established.

There is not and could never have been two revelations different in nature and opposed to each other. Revelation is one, in different forms and various degrees. It is at once supernatural and natural: supernatural by the cause which engenders it in souls, and which, always remaining invisible and transcendent, never exhausts or imprisons itself in the phenomena it produces; natural, by its effects, because, realising itself in history, it always appears therein conditioned by the historical environment and by the common laws which regulate the human mind.

This revelation also is immediate for all, for the least in the kingdom of heaven, as for the greatest of the prophets; for G.o.d desires to admit them all into direct and personal communion with Himself; and it is equally mediate for all; for it comes to none, whether prophets or their disciples, unconditionally, and without previous preparation.

Lastly, it is not less false and futile to oppose universal revelation to particular revelations as two exclusive quant.i.ties. Particular revelations enter into general revelation as varieties into species.

Every special revelation, if it be really from G.o.d, is human, and tends to become universal; every general revelation was once individual, for it could only have been made in an individuality. Among the men and peoples chosen by G.o.d as organs there is inequality in gifts but solidarity in the common work. We must not mistake the one or the other. The religious vocation of humanity does not exclude--it prepares and supports--the particular vocation of Israel. In this national vocation there is a place for that of the prophets, and, among the prophets, for the vocation of Him who was their heir, and in Whom the revelation of G.o.d was completed, because in His consciousness was realised perfectly the very idea of piety.

Is everything explained in religion, then, and nothing left obscure?

Far from that! There remains the ground from which emerges the conscious and moral life of the soul; there remains that initial mystery, the relation in our consciousness between the individual and the universal element, between the finite and the infinite, between G.o.d and man. How can we comprehend their co-existence and their union, and yet how can we doubt it? Where is the thoughtful man to-day who has not broken the thin crust of his daily life, and caught a glimpse of those profound and obscure waters on which floats our consciousness?

Who has not felt within himself a veiled presence and a force much greater than his own? What worker in a lofty cause has not perceived within his own personal activity, and saluted with a feeling of veneration, the mysterious activity of a universal and eternal power?

_In Deo vivimus, movemur et sumus_. There is perhaps no other mystery in religion; at all events all others are but particular forms of this.

But this mystery cannot be dissipated, for, without it, religion itself would no longer exist.

CHAPTER III

MIRACLE AND INSPIRATION

In speaking of revelation we have already touched on the doctrines of inspiration and of miracle, which are dependencies of it, and, as it were, const.i.tuent parts. But these two notions are still so obscure in the public mind, and give rise to so many and such lively controversies, that it may be well to return to them and study them by themselves and in some detail.

In this matter there are two causes of dispute and misunderstanding.

The first is that everybody believes he ought to begin by giving his own personal and arbitrary definition of miracle, and afterwards explain by way of deduction why he believes or does not believe in it.

The debate thus turns on a question of terminology--that is to say, on a vain and barren logomachy. The second cause is that the defenders of miracle always keep to abstractions, instead of following their contradictors on to the ground of criticism of miraculous stories and placing themselves in presence of the facts which alone make up the matter of the discussion. They believe they have gained everything when they have proved that G.o.d, according to the very definition of the idea that we have of Him, can do everything--which no one denies--while the problem consists not in knowing what G.o.d can do _in abstracto_, but what He has done _in concreto_, in Nature and in History. Now, in order to know what is really done, and whether there are or ever have been produced phenomena which must be referred to the immediate intervention, and to a particular volition of G.o.d, independently of the concurrence of second causes, this is evidently something that only the critical observation of facts, past or present, can teach us. Every other method of research and discussion is illusory.

Faithful to our own, we here place ourselves at the historical point of view. Convinced that ideas have a history, and are most clearly and surely defined by their very evolution, we shall confine ourselves to following and describing that evolution. We shall seek in the first place to ascertain the notion of miracle that was current in antiquity; after that we shall see what became of it in mediaeval theology; and lastly we shall see into what elements it has resolved itself in modern times, as much at the point of view of science as of piety. As religious inspiration, properly speaking, is but a particular miracle, a miracle of the psychological order, the solution available for the one will apply to the other.

1. _The Notion of Miracle in Antiquity_

The primitive conception of Nature was animistic. In everything _astonis.h.i.+ng_, extraordinary, men used to see the action of spirits like themselves, with whom their religious imagination peopled the heavens, the earth, the seas. They lived in miracle. It would be easier to enumerate the things that were not than the things that were to them miraculous. The word Nature, which has become so familiar and so indispensable to designate the regular course of things, does not exist in primitive languages. One does not meet with it even in the language of the Old Testament. This is because the conception it represents only came into existence later, and by a slow and laborious process, in the philosophy of the Greeks. The cosmos, ordered and harmonious and fixed, is the sublime creation of h.e.l.lenic reason.

Elsewhere, no doubt, with experience of life and the daily return of phenomena, a certain order, the effect of custom, would exist around man and be established in his mind. He learned to distinguish between the habitual course of things and the prodigies which caused him wonder, fear, or hope, and in which he always saw the effect either of the favour or the anger of a demon or a G.o.d. His imagination, to which his ignorance gave free play, and his credulity, which religious terror held open to all impressions, stories, legends, wrapped his life in an atmosphere of marvel, gentle or terrible, but incessant. Eclipses, earthquakes, thunder, lightning, rainbows, deluges, accidents, maladies, etc.--these were the work of particular actors, personal, impa.s.sioned like man, hidden behind the scenes. Add to this the inventions of sorcerers and priests; ... transport yourself into this first effervescence of the human faculties, into this luxuriant vegetation of poetical creation in the early human mind, and you will have some idea of what, for centuries on centuries, must have been the mental state of primitive historic humanity. Such, however, is the comparative poverty of human conceptions, that, when you come to catalogue these marvels, you see them reduced to a small number of miracles which turn up everywhere and again and again among all peoples. Their similarity approaches to monotony.... The question for the moment is not whether these miraculous facts are real or not, but how the men who have transmitted them to us represented them. There is no doubt on this point. To them they were not simply astonis.h.i.+ng facts that admitted of a natural explanation. Modern theologians and savants who seek and find for them explanations of this kind do not perceive that they contradict themselves, and that to explain miracle in this way is to destroy it. No; that which is miraculous in these events--to the contemporaries of Tarquin in Rome, of Joshua in Palestine, to the people in our own day--is this, that they are produced, contrary to the natural course of things, solely by a special intervention of the divine will. That is the mark and characteristic of ancient miracle.

Efface it, for any reason whatever, and miracle disappears. That which makes it possible is ignorance of Nature and its laws: that which supports it is the religious belief in the existence of these supernatural wills and in their unexpected invasion of the succession of accustomed things. "Without this belief," as M. Menegoz remarks,[1]

"the birth of a myth or of a legend could not be explained. St. Denis, decapitated, would not have been able to carry his head." In fact, the miracles you find in the apocryphal legends are exactly of the same nature as those which are met with in narratives held to be more historical.

[1] _La notion biblique du miracle_ (Lecon d'ouverture), 1894.

I must add that this notion of miracle is absolutely the same in Biblical as in profane literature. In a general way, no doubt, the supernatural in the history of Israel and in the early days of Christianity is of a more sober, more profoundly moral and religious character than it is everywhere else. But the sacred writers do not represent miracles differently. Without exception, they also conceive of them as a violation, by a particular volition of G.o.d, of the ordinary course of things.... Still, so far from being more striking or more numerous, miracles and prodigies in the Bible are rarer than elsewhere, clearer, less fantastic, more under law to conscience and to common sense. The wors.h.i.+p of one G.o.d, invisible, spiritual, in whom centres the ideal of wisdom, reason, righteousness, conceived by the prophets, joined to the lack of imagination in the Hebrew race, has freed the Bible from the luxuriant growths of oriental mythologies and theogonies, as of the marvellous in the poesy of Greece. Nothing purifies the mind like a great moral idea around which all the rest organises itself. It is very remarkable that the great prophets, Isaiah, Amos, Micah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, work hardly any miracles. If prodigy has penetrated into the life of Jesus at two or three points, the explanation is to be found in the mistakes or the legendary corruptions for which His biographers are alone responsible, and which criticism may eliminate without violence. Prodigy, properly so called, is quite foreign to the wholly moral conduct of His life, and to the strictly religious conception of His work. He did not found His religion on miracle, but on the light, the consolation, the pardon and the joy which His gospel, issuing from His holy, loving heart, brought to broken and repentant souls. His works proceeded only from His charity. Far from wis.h.i.+ng to impose belief in His miracles, He often forbids men to divulge them. It is to the faith of the afflicted that He refers their cure. He turns away from the seductive invitations of miraculous _Messianism_ as from the distrust or the curiosity of an incredulous wisdom. To those who demanded of Him an indubitable prodigy come from heaven, He answers that no sign shall be given them save the preaching of repentance by the prophet Jonah. The whole temptation in the wilderness is simply a victory of the moral consciousness over the religion of physical prodigy. His filial piety to the Father raised Him above miracle itself and above the dualism that miracle supposes in Nature and in the divine action. He discovers in everything the signs of the presence, the will, the affection, of His Father. He accepts them, submits to them, celebrates them, without preoccupying Himself with the ordinary or the extraordinary manner in which they may be manifested. This absolute piety, absolutely pure and confident, succeeds in realising the unity of the world and the universal and continuous action of G.o.d, quite as well as the dialectic of a Scotus Eriginus or a Spinoza or a Hegel; for it suppresses still more radically the old and mortal ant.i.thesis of the natural and the supernatural. Nature in its expansion and its evolution--what is it but the very expression of the Will of the Father? How can you imagine then that there could ever be conflict in it between the order which reigns in it and the action of Him by whom that order is maintained day by day and moment by moment? If the thought of Jesus was bounded by the ancient notion of miracle, it must be acknowledged that His piety was not imprisoned in it, but went beyond it. Not having come into the world to teach science, He contented Himself with the opinions He had inherited with the rest of His people, and which const.i.tuted the science of Nature of His little popular environment, without concerning Himself as to whether these opinions were erroneous or correct.

Miracle was not then something essentially religious as it is to-day.

Belief in miracles was not a sign of piety. Everybody shared in it, men of the world as well as men of G.o.d. Herod believed in them not less than the apostles. The Pharisees did not doubt them; they only denied the miracles of Jesus; they attributed them to Beelzebub.

Christ did not doubt any more than they did that Satan and the demons wrought as many and perhaps more miracles than the messengers of G.o.d.

He did not wish them to believe the doctrine because of the prodigy, but in the prodigy because of the doctrine. It will be seen how far they were at that time from the dualism of our day, and from the conflict created by scholasticism between science and piety.

When we examine this ancient notion of miracle, especially in the superior expression it receives in the Bible, we discover in it two things: it is made up of two judgments of a very different order: of an intellectual and scientific order, disclosing that which then existed in point of fact, a _naf_ and perfect ignorance of the nature and the laws of things; and of a judgment of a religious order, implying an absolute confidence in an all-good G.o.d who is almighty to respond to the cry of His children and to deliver them. These two judgments are so thoroughly blended in the biblical notion of miracle that orthodox theologians and irreligious philosophers agree in declaring them to be inseparable, and they would compel us to choose between a piety hostile to the elementary results of science, and a science radically hostile to piety. The dilemma is specious but false. To see it vanish it is only necessary to perceive that these two judgments, not being of the same nature, cannot be eternally _solidaire_. The settlement of the controversy in which Christian thought has been engaged for the last three centuries will consist in separating them.