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CHAPTER III.
RELIGIOUS MORALS.

Table of Contents

I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and men—Morality and immorality in primitive religions—Extension of friendly and hostile relations to the sphere of the gods—Primitive inability in matters of conscience, as in matters of art, to distinguish the great from the monstrous.

II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and men—Patronage—That divine intervention tends always to be conceived after the model of human intervention and to sanction it.

III. Worship and religious rites—Principles of reciprocity and proportionality in the exchange of services—Sacrifice—Principle of coercion and incantation—Principle of habit and its relation to rites—Sorcery—Sacerdotalism—Prophecy—The externals of worship—Dramatization and religious æsthetics.

IV. Subjective worship—Adoration and love; their psychological origin.

I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and men.

Religion and morals not originally related.

We are to-day inclined to see everywhere a very intimate relation between religion and morals, since Kant recognized in ethics the aim and sole foundation of the conception of God. In the beginning nothing of the sort existed. It is plain from the preceding chapters that religion was at first a physical explanation of events, and above all of events in their relation to the interests of mankind, by a theory of causes acting for ends of their own after the manner of the human will; an explanation, that is to say, by causes at once efficient and final; and theology is the development of a primitive teleology. Man imagined himself to be living in society with beneficent or maleficent beings, at first visible and tangible, then progressively invisible and separate from the objects they inhabited. Therein, as we have said, lay the first step of religion. Religion was in the beginning nothing more than an imaginative extension of human society; the explanation of things by a theory of volitions analogous to the volitions by means of which man himself acts on the world, but of another order, of a higher degree of power. Well, these volitions are sometimes good, sometimes evil, sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile: friendship and hatred are the two categories under which man inevitably classified the superior powers with whom he believed himself to be in relations. Morality was in no sense one of the distinguishing characteristics of these powers; man was quite as naturally inclined to attribute to them wickedness as goodness, or rather he felt vaguely that the rules of conduct by which he was himself bound were not necessarily those by which these beings, at once analogous to men and so different from them, were themselves bound. Also in his relations with the gods, with the powers of nature, man in nowise believed that the rules of mere human society, of the family, of the tribe, of the nation, were always and in every respect applicable. Thence it came that to render the gods propitious, man had recourse to practices which he would have blamed in mere human morals: human sacrifices, anthropophagy, sacrifices of virginity, etc.[43]

Religion much less moral than society.

If one stops to recollect that moral laws are in a great measure the expression of the very necessities of human life, and that the generality of certain rules is due to the uniformity of the conditions of life on the surface of the globe, one will understand why it was that one’s relations to the gods, that is to say to creatures of the imagination, were not dominated so directly as one’s relations to one’s fellow-men by the exigencies of practical life, but were regulated by much more variable and fantastic laws containing often a visible germ of immorality. The divine society was an imaginary extension of human society, not an imaginative perfection of it. It was physical fear, timor, and not moral reverence, which gave being to the first gods. The human imagination, labouring thus under the empire of fear, naturally gave birth to a prodigy more often than to an ideal. For the primitive conscience, as for primitive art, the distinction between the great and the monstrous was by no means sufficiently marked. The germ of immorality, therefore, not less than of morality lies at the root of every religion. Once more, it would be an error to believe that religions are immoral in that they are anthropomorphic, or sociomorphic; rather the contrary is true, they are not moral except in so far as they are sociomorphic. Mutilation, for example, cruelty, obscenity are foreign to the conceptions which dominate human conduct. One may verify in every religion what is observed in Christianity, that the truly moral God is precisely the man-God, Jesus, whereas God the Father, who pitilessly sacrifices his own son, is anti-human and immoral, precisely in that he is superhuman.

Summary.

In effect we find our fundamental proposition confirmed afresh: religion is a sociology conceived as a physical, metaphysical, and moral explanation of all things; it is the reduction of all natural, and even supernatural forces to a human type, and the reduction of their relations to social relations. Also the progress of religion has been exactly parallel to the progress in social evolution, which has itself been dominated by the progress of subjective morals and conscience. The gods were at first divided into two classes: the beneficent and the maleficent, who ultimately came to be recognized as respectively virtuous and wicked. Then these two classes were absorbed into their respective chiefs, into Ormuzd and Ahriman, into God and Satan, into a principle of good and a principle of evil. Thus by a fresh dualism spirits themselves were separated and ranged into classes, as the spirit itself had previously been separated from the body. Finally the principle of goodness subsisted victoriously under the name of God. He became the personification of the moral law and the moral sanction, the sovereign legislator and judge, in a word, the living law of universal society, as a king is the living law in a human society. To-day God tends to be identified with the human conscience purified ad infinitum, and adequate with the universe. For these last and most subtle representations of the religious sentiment, God is no more than a symbol of the moral and the ideal. One may see in this evolution of religious ideas the gradual triumph of sociomorphism, since it is characterized by an extension to the universe at large of social relations which are incessantly progressing toward perfection among men.