Читать книгу The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study - Guyau Jean-Marie - Страница 12

Conception of creation dualistic.

After the notion of Providence one must deal, in running through the metaphysical principles of religion, with the notion of a creator, which has acquired in our days an importance that it did not possess formerly. This conception, like that of the soul and of a special providence, presented itself originally under the form of dualism. Man conceived in the beginning a god as fashioning a world more or less independent of himself, out of some pre-existing material. It was only later that this crude dualism was refined into the notion of creation ex nihilo, which represented the traditional duality as produced by a primitive unity—God, who had at first existed alone, created out of nothing a world distinct and separate from himself.

Conception of creation natural.

The following conversation, of which I can guarantee the authenticity, affords an example of naïve metaphysic. The two interlocutors were a little peasant girl, four years old, who had always lived in the country, and a young girl from town, the daughter of the owner of the farm. They had gone out into the garden where a number of flowers had opened that morning; the little peasant girl admired them enthusiastically, and addressing her companion, for whom she had long entertained a species of cult: “It is you, mistress, is it not,” she cried, “who makes these flowers?” This interrogation did not embody an incipient speculation in a sphere of physics; the child simply attributed an unknown power to a visible and palpable being. Her mistress replied laughingly, “No, not I. I haven’t the power.” “Who does it then?” the child asked. One perceives the persistence, in primitive intelligences, of the impulse to explain things by the direct action of somebody’s volition, the impulse to place somebody behind every event. “It is God,” replied the elder girl. “And where is God? Have you ever seen Him?” No doubt the little peasant, who regarded the city as a very surprising place, supposed one might meet God there, face to face, and God did not, as yet, represent to her anything supra-physical. But how admirably disposed she was for the reception of a more or less illegitimate metaphysic! “I have never seen God,” replied her mistress, “and nobody has ever seen Him. He lives in heaven, and at the same time lives among us; He sees us and hears us; it is He who made the flowers, who made you and me, and everything that exists.” I shall not report the child’s replies, for I believe that she was too much astonished really to say anything. She was in a situation such as a savage finds himself in when a missionary comes and talks with him about God, the supreme being, creator of all things, a spirit existing without a body. Savages sometimes refuse to understand, and point to their heads and declare that they suffer; sometimes they believe that one is making fun of them, and even among our children there is a good deal of persistent and mute astonishment, which wears off slowly with the lapse of time. What is striking in the little conversation reported above, is the way in which the metaphysical myth necessarily rises out of the scientific error. An inexact induction first gives rise to the notion of a human being acting by means to us unknown and mysterious; this notion, once obtained, fastens upon the body of such and such an individual, the object antecedently of especial veneration; from this individual it retreats in course of time to another more distant, from country to town, from earth to heaven, from visible heaven to the invisible essence of things, the omnipresent substratum of the world. Simultaneously with this retrograde movement, the being endowed with marvellous powers becomes increasingly vague and abstract. The human intelligence, in developing its conception of the supernatural being, employs what theologians call the negative method, which consists in abstracting one known attribute after another. If men and races of men have always followed this procedure, it is less because of any refinement of thought on their part than in obedience to the pressure of an external necessity. Directly as man becomes acquainted with nature, he sees all traces of his god fly before him; he is like a miner who, thinking that he recognizes the presence of gold in the soil beneath his feet, begins to dig, and finding nothing, cannot make up his mind to believe that the earth contains no treasure; he sinks his shafts deeper and deeper in an eternal hopefulness. Just so, instead of breaking with his gods, man exiles them to a greater and greater distance as he advances in knowledge. What nature excludes tends to take on a metaphysical character; every error which persists in spite of the progress of experience takes refuge in heaven, in some sphere more and more completely inaccessible. Thus the somewhat gross origins of religions are not irreconcilable with the refined speculations incident to their period of development. Human intelligence, once launched into infinite space, inevitably describes a wider and wider orbit about reality. A mythical religion is not a completely rational and a priori construction; it always rests upon alleged experience, upon observations and analogies, which are tainted with error; it is, therefore, false a posteriori, and therein lies the explanation of the invincible and increasing divergence between myth and verity.

God conceived as orderer rather than as creator.

In the beginning men conceived God rather as an orderer of the universe, as a workman fashioning a pre-existing matter, than as a creator; we find this notion still predominant among the Greeks. Its genesis was probably something as follows: Whoever supposes the existence of God regards the world as an instrument in His hands; God employs the thunder, the wind, the stars for purposes of his own, as man employs his arrows and his hatchet. Does it not naturally result from that conception that God fashions these marvellous instruments just as man fashions his arrows and hatchet? If the little peasant girl, of whom we spoke above, had not seen her father repair or make his tools, make a fire, make bread, till the soil, she would never have asked who made the flowers in the garden. The child’s first why involves the following reasoning: Somebody has acted on this thing as I myself have acted on such and such another thing; who, then, in the present case is it? The abstract notion of causality is a consequence of the practical development of our own causality; the greater the number of things that one can make one’s self, the greater one’s astonishment at seeing things done by other people with greater rapidity or on a larger scale. The more bound down one is one’s self, to the employment of tedious artifice, the more one admires what is produced suddenly by a power which is apparently extraordinary. So that the notion of a miracle thus more naturally arose from one’s experience of the practical arts, than, so to speak, from brute experience, and for the rest contained no element which was contradictory to the naïve science of the earliest observers. Every question presupposes a certain kind and amount of action on the part of the questioner; one does not demand the cause of an event until one has one’s self been the conscious cause of such and such another event. If man possessed no influence in the world, he would not ask himself who made the world. The mason’s trowel and carpenter’s saw have played a considerable part in the development of religious metaphysics.

Notion of creation ex nihilo of empirical origin.

Remark, also, how easy it is, even at the present day, to confound the word make with the word create, which indeed did not exist in primitive times. How should one distinguish precisely what one fashions from what one creates? There is a certain element of creation in fashioning; and this element sometimes positively assumes a magical character, seems to rise ex nihilo. What a marvel, for example, is a spark of fire obtained from stone or wood! The Hindus see in it the symbol of generation. In fire the earliest races of men laid their fingers on the miraculous. In appearance the pebble one strikes or the dried wood one rubs to produce a spark is not itself consumed; it gives without loss, it creates. The first man who discovered the secret of producing fire seemed to have introduced something genuinely new into the world, to have ravished the power of creation from the gods. In general, what distinguishes the artist, properly so called, from the simple workman is the feeling that he possesses a power which he does not understand, that he produces in some sense more than he aims at, that he is lifted above himself; genius is not fully conscious, as simple talent is, of its resources; it contains an element of the unforeseen, a force which is not calculable in advance, a creative power; and therein lies the secret of the true artist’s personal pride. Even in a matter of purely physical power a superexcitation of the nervous system may place at one’s disposal an amount of muscular energy one did not suppose one possessed: the athlete, no more than the thinker, at such times knows the limits of his own strength and the marvels of which he is capable. Each of us possesses thus, during certain hours of his existence, the consciousness of a more or less creative power, of the direct production of something out of nothing. One feels that one has produced by force of will a result that one’s intelligence cannot wholly account for, that one cannot rationally explain. Therein lies the foundation and in a measure the justification of a belief in miracles, in the extraordinary power of certain men, and, in the last analysis, in a power of creating. This indefinite power that man sometimes feels well up within him, he naturally ascribes to his gods. Since he conceives them as acting upon the world in a manner analogous to himself, he conceives them as capable of giving rise to new elements in the world; and this notion of creative power once introduced continuously develops till the day when it leads one, from induction to induction, to the belief that the entire world is the work of a divinity, that the earth and the stars have been fashioned and created by a supernatural volition. If man can strike fire out of a stone, why might not God strike a sun out of the firmament? The conception of a creator, which seems at first a remote consequence from a chain of abstract reasoning, is thus one of the innumerable manifestations of anthropomorphism; one of the ideas which, at least originally, seems to have been rather paraphysical than metaphysical. It rests at bottom upon an ignorance of the possible transformation and actual equivalents of forces, owing to which every apparent creation is resolvable into a substantial equivalence and every apparent miracle into an exemplification of immutable order.

Summary.

To sum up, the creative power once ascribed to God is in our opinion an extension of the notion of special Providence, which itself is of empirical origin. When theologians nowadays begin by establishing the creation, in order therefrom to deduce a special Providence, they are precisely inverting the order of things as they appeared in the beginning. It is only through the continually increasing preoccupation of abstract thought and metaphysical speculation with the question of the first cause, that the idea of a creative deity has acquired thus a sort of preponderance, and constitutes in our day an essential element in religion. Dualism, as we have seen, is of the essence of this notion; dualism is the principal form under which the union of souls and bodies, the relation of a special providence to natural laws, the relation of creator to created has been conceived. The notion, however, of a supreme unity running through all things has been caught more or less vague glimpses of, from remote times down to the present day. And it is on this notion that pantheistic and monistic religions, principally those of India, are based. Brahmanism and Buddhism tend to what has been called “absolute illusionism” for the benefit of a unity in which the supreme being takes for us the form of non-existence.

Dangers of effort to classify systems of religious metaphysics.

The temptation is natural systematically to class diverse systems of religious metaphysics and to represent them as evolving, one after the other in a regular order, conformable to a more or less determinate scheme; but one must be on one’s guard here against two things: first, the seduction of a system, with the metaphysical abstractions to which it leads; second, the pretense of finding everywhere a regular progress constantly headed toward religious unity. Religious philosophers have erred in both these respects; Hegel, for example, yielded to the temptation of imposing upon the history of religion his monotonous trilogy, of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In Von Hartmann the Hegelian spirit, influenced by Schopenhauer, still survives. We have seen Von Hartmann borrowing from Max Müller the abstract conception of a divinity at once unified and multiple, a species of primitive synthesis out of which historical religions were to arise by a process of differentiation: out of henotheism, as out of matter still void and without form, was to arise polytheism, and then by a process of degenerescence was to arise polydemonism or animism, and finally fetichism.[42] This order of development, as we have seen, is contrary to matter of fact.

Fetichism, understood simply as the ascription of life to natural objects, is primitive. Animism, or the conception of indwelling spirit, arises subsequently. Polytheism, or the worship of a certain number of analogous objects, such as the trees of a forest, implies some distinction between the deity and the forest, whereas fetichism limits itself strictly to the animation of each particular tree, and finally henotheism, or the vague conception of an indwelling divinity in all things, is ulterior and derivative. Monistic pantheism or monism lies but one step beyond.

Logically posterior often historically prior.

Remark also that Von Hartmann, who endeavours to prove that a vague monism is the primitive form of religion, regards the Vedas as a fair example of the earliest form of natural religion, traces of which remain more or less distinctly manifest in all mythologies. But this is positively to forget that for an anthropologist the Vedas are quite modern compositions, and that Hindu literature belongs to a period of high refinement and civilization. Monistic metaphysics may be the ultimate goal toward which all religions tend, but it is at least not the point of departure. Finally, Von Hartmann endeavours to establish the fact of a certain logical order in religious development, a progress. This progress does not exist in history nor anywhere outside of the abstract system constructed by Von Hartmann; it is dialectic, not historic. The divers religious points of view have often coincided in history; and sometimes a logically superior point of view has even preceded an inferior.

Comte’s classification logical, not psychological.

Another classification, not less open to suspicion than that of Von Hartmann, is the celebrated Comtist progression from fetichism to polytheism and from polytheism to monism. In this classification the framework no longer consists of metaphysical abstractions, but of numbers. But numbers also possess their artificial and superficial side; they do not express the most fundamental aspects of religion. In the first place, it is a matter of extreme difficulty to perceive any radical difference between naturistic fetichism and polytheism. Multiplicity of divinities is a characteristic common to both. The sole difference that Comte was able to establish is that in polytheism a whole class of objects, for example all the trees of a forest, or a whole class of phenomena, as lightning and storm, is represented by one divinity. But this species of abstraction and generalization is much less important, much more exterior and purely logical, than the psychological and metaphysical progression from a grossly unitarian and concrete naturism to a dualistic animism. This latter line of development is in the direction of naturalistic and spiritualistic metaphysics, which possess a deeper significance than a system of mathematical enumeration and logical generalization. The passage from polytheism to monotheism is also conceived by Comte somewhat too mathematically. Polytheism early resulted in a certain hierarchy and subordination of the whole body of individual deities to some one powerful god: Jupiter, Fate, etc. On the other hand, monotheism has always provided some place for secondary divinities—angels, devils, spirits of every kind, to say nothing of the trinitarian conception of the Godhead itself. Mathematical terms, in this connection, obscure profound problems which belong really to metaphysics and to morals.

The real classification.

From the point of view of metaphysics the great question is that of the relation which exists between the divinity and the world and mankind; a relation of immanence or of transcendence, of duality or of unity. We have seen that, from this point of view, religions have passed from an extremely vague primitive immanence to a relation of transcendence and of separation, ultimately to return, sometimes with comparative rapidity (as in India), sometimes very slowly (as among Christian nations), to the notion of an immanent God in whom we live and move and have our being.

Progressive encroachment of deterministic conception.

Along with this difference of conception there necessarily goes a corresponding difference in the parts ascribed respectively to determinism and natural law, and to the arbitrary will of the deity or deities. That is to say, the conflict between religion and science, or what will one day become such, exists implicitly in the earliest conceptions of the world. In the beginning, to be sure, there being no such thing as science properly so called, no conflict is apparent; one explains whatever one chooses as the product of an arbitrary will, then little by little the regularity, the determinism, the orderliness of certain phenomena are remarked. Divinities cease to be absolute princes, and become more or less constitutional sovereigns. Therein lies the law of religious evolution, which is much more significant than the law promulgated by Comte; humanity tends progressively to restrict the number of the phenomena with the natural course of which the gods are supposed to interfere; the sphere of natural law tends progressively to become more and more nearly all-comprehensive. The Catholic nowadays no longer believes that a goddess brings his crops to maturity or that a particular god launches a thunder-bolt, though he is still profoundly inclined to imagine that God blesses his fields or punishes him by destroying his house by a flash of lightning; arbitrary power tends to be concentrated in a single being placed on a height above nature. At a still further stage in the course of evolution, the will of this being is conceived as expressed in the laws of nature themselves without allowing for the existence of miraculous exceptions; Providence, the Divinity, becomes immanent in the scientific ordering and determinism of the world. In this respect the Hindus and the Stoics are far in advance of the Catholics.

Unification of creeds incidental to that encroachment.

The absorption of the respective worships of a number of deities into the worship of one deity has been an incidental consequence of the progress of science. Humanity began by offering up a multitude of special services to a multitude of special gods. If one were to believe certain linguists, it is true, natural objects—the sun, fire, the moon—were at first adored as impersonal entities; their subsequent personification being due to a too literal interpretation of figurative impressions habitually employed to designate them, such as Ζεύς, the brilliant. Certain myths, no doubt, did spring from this source: nomina, numina; but humanity does not usually progress from the general to the particular. Primitive religion, on the contrary, was at first subdivided or rather simply divided into cults of all sorts; it was only later that simplifications and generalizations arose. The passage from fetichism to polytheism and to monotheism was simply the consequence of a progressively scientific conception of the world; of the progressive absorption of the several transcendent powers into a single power immanent in the laws of the universe.

Development of sociological and moral sides of religion.

More important still than this metaphysical and scientific evolution of religion is the sociological and moral evolution. What is really important in a religious theory is less the conceived relation of the primary substance to its manifestations in the universe, than the attributes ascribed to this substance and to the inhabitants of the universe. In other words, what sort of a society does the universe constitute? What sort of social relation more or less moral between the various members are derivable from the fundamental tie which binds them to the principle which is immanent in all of them? That is the great problem for which the others simply constitute a preparation. The problem is to interpret the true foundation of beings and of being, independently of numerical, logical, and even metaphysical relations. Well, such an interpretation cannot be other than psychological and moral. Psychologically, power was the first and essential attribute of divinity, and this power was conceived as redoubtable. Intelligence, knowledge, foreknowledge, were only at a later period ascribed to the gods. And finally, divine morality, under the twofold aspects of justice and goodness, is a very late conception indeed. We shall see it develop side by side with the development of the systems of practical morals that are incident to religion.