Religions of authority and the religion of the spirit

Front matter

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Preface

This volume forms a sequel to the work which the author published in 1897, under the title, " Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based upon Psychology and History."

Two systems of theology still confront one another: the theology of authority and the theology of experience. They are characterised by methods radically opposed in the scientific development of religious ideas and Christian dogmas. To the solution of the question of method the present work is consecrated. At the present hour one method is dying and destined soon to disappear ; the other is taking on ever more vigorous development, and is destined to triumph.

The problem here discussed belongs not simply to the order of philosophy. It reacts strongly upon the social order. In fact, the relations between civil and religious society, between Church and State, necessarily differ in character according as religion is conceived of as an inner inspiration upspringing in human consciences that have been tilled and sown by the divine Spirit, or as a supernatural institution charged by a higher and external authority with the education, training, and government of human spirits. In the first case religion becomes inherent in civil society itself, as it is in the human conscience; it acts beneath the surface, like the hidden sap that awakens the winter-bound tree to the new life of spring, yet neither suppresses nor does violence to its legitimate development. In the second, on the contrary, religion claims external authority as a divine law to which all human laws must yield, as an extra-human truth which the intelligence must receive with docility, as a tutelage, in fact, to which man must submit. Hence inevitably arise those irremediable conflicts, less violent among Protestant nations,

vtt viii PREFACE

because the authority of Protestant dogma is always relative, more profound and acute among Catholic peoples, by reason of their moral customs, and their concordats, which latter, it is true, may moderate the violence of these conflicts, but leave untouched the fatal root of all the evil.

In France, especially, the religious question underlies all political agitation. The strange alternation of movements of revolt and of reaction, between which the country oscillates, is both consequence and symptom of a fundamental religious problem existing in its political life, ever ill stated and ever wrongly solved.

Nevertheless, it is not in the least degree from a political point of view that the question is treated in these pages. Such problems demand to be persistently studied and meditated by themselves and for themselves alone, without prepossession either of dislike or favour, in the sole interest of truth. This book is in no sense a work of polemics. Whether discussing the Catholic or the Protestant dogma of authority, our intention has not been to refute either, but before all things to give a historic explanation of their formation and their destiny. Every system has its immanent logic which impels it toward its point of perfection, and thus revealing its internal inconsistencies or insufficiencies, impels it no less irresistibly to dissolution and ruin. The history of a dogma is its inevitable criticism. Revealing the laborious method of its formation, it explains its origin ; pointing out the elements which have entered into its composition, it defines its nature; and finally, making manifest the changes which, from epoch to epoch, have taken place in general ideas, the new configuration of the historic soil upon which these constructions of the past repose, it lays bare their foundations, and by that very act reveals their transient and contingent character. In this sense Schiller's saying is true : Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht.

In an argument against the systems and method of authority we have not wished to impose upon the reader the necessity of believing us upon our own word. We have supported each important affirmation

PREFACE ix

by authentic citations. This part of our work is that which has cost us the most labour.

This volume is especially offered to students, to those who read not for mere amusement, but for instruction's sake, and who seek in these matters to reach a reasonable, sound, and accurate conviction. Such will here find bibliographical directions which may aid them in their own researches. The list of citations is far from complete; it was necessary to be content with those that are essential.^

More than ever we are convinced that psychology and history are the two nursing mothers of religious philosophy. Our former volume was simply a work of psychology and history, and nothing else will be found here.

Paris, August 14, 1899.

* Appendix I.

Contents

Preface by Madame Sabatier . yii

Introduction

THE PROBLEM

I. The Conflict of Methods xr

II. Authoritj'- and Autonomy xviii

III. Of Authority in Matters of Religion xxviii

Book I The Roman Catholic Dogma Of Authority Chapter I

DEFINITION OF THE DOGMA

I. The Formula of the Dogma . , . S

II. The Meaning of the Dogma 8

III. The Root of the Dogma and Its Constituent Elements .... 12

Chapter II The Church

I. The Catholic Notion of the Church ........ 16

II. The Messianic Kingdom and the Church ... ^ ... 21

III. The Greco-Roman Basis of the Catholic Church 27

IV. The Church and Heresies . . 32

Chapter III Tradition

I. Historic and Supernatural View 39

II. The Authority of Tradition in Judaism 42

III. The Earliest Christian Tradition 44

IV. The Baptismal Formula and the Apostolic Symbol 51

V. The Genesis of the Catholic Theory of Tradition 55

VI. Development of the Catholic Theory . ... . . . ,61 xii CONTENTS

Chapter IV The Episcopatk

I. The Episcopate and Tradition 68

II. History of the First Christian Community of Corinth .... 70

III. Progressive Development of the Episcopate 75

IV. The Priesthood 82

V. Apostolic Succession 90

VI. The Theory of Cyprian— Cathedra Petri 98

Chapter V The Papacy

I. The Formative Law of the Catholic Hierarchy 101

II. The Share of Rome in the Origin of the Papacy 105

III. The Legend of St. Peter's Chair 112

IV. First Age of the Papacy — Grandeur and Decadence 120

V. The Infallible Pope 129

VI. The Future of the Papacy 136

Book II The Protestant Dogma Of Authority Chapter I

PRIMITIVE PROTESTANTISM

I. The Reformation and Humanism . 145

II. Originality of the Reformation Principle 150

III. The Bible and the Reformers 155

IV. The Inward Witness of the Holy Spirit; or, The Subjective Basis of

Protestantism . 160

CHAPTER II

THE INFALLIBILITY OF THE BIBLE

I. Origin of the Idea of Inspiration 165

II. Belief in Inspiration in the Christian Church ...... 167

III. The Principle of the Dogma 174

IV. The Construction of the Dogma 175

V. Comparison of the Protestant and Catholic Dogmas of Authority . .183

CONTENTS xiii

CHAPTER III

THE PROGRESSIVE DISSOLUTION OF THE DOGMA

I. The Basis of the Dogma Displaced 188

II. The Progress of Biblical Criticism 191

III. Concessions and Compromises — The Triumphs of Rationalism . . . 197

IV. Latent Germs and New Methods 202

CHAPTER IV

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE IX THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

I. Revival and Reaction 212

II. The Final Crisis 218

III. The Last Bulwark of the System of Authority 229

CHAPTER V

WHAT IS THE BIBLE?

I. The Two Elements of the Answer 235

II. The Historic Notion of the Bible .235

III. The Rehgious Notion of the Bible .... .... 240

IV. The Attempt at Synthesis 244

V. Conclusion 250

Chapter I From The Religions Of Authority To The Religion Of The Spirit

Preliminary Dialogue 255

I. Authority and Religion 255

II. Historic Testimony and Criticism 263

III. Why has the Christian Religion Hitherto Taken on Authoritative Forms? 278

Chapter II Jesus Christ The Founder Of The Religion Of The Spirit

I. The Teaching of Jesus, Its Form 283

II. Jesus and the Old Testament 288

III. The Person of Jesus Christ, Its Authority 292

IV. The Nature of the Gospel 295 xiv CONTENTS

Chapter III The Kew Testament The Chabter Of The Religion Of The Spirit

I. The Fulfilment of the Messianic Promise 301

II. The Paulinian Notion of Inspiration 305

III. The Johannean Doctrine of Inspiration 309

IV. The Idea of the Universal Priesthood 312

V. The Tradition of the Religion of the Spirit 313

Chapter IV Content Of The Eelioion Of The Spirit

I. The Antinomy Resolved 319

II. The Gospel of Salvation ... . . 323

III, The Gospel of Salvation and the Person of Christ 329

IV. Faith, Belief, and Theology 335

Chapter V Scientific Theology, Its Matter And Method

I. The Spirit of Piety and the Scientific Spirit 342

II. Conditions on which Theology May Become Scientific .... 345

III. The Degree of Objectivity in Religious and Christian Experience . . 349

IV. Religion and Theology . 350

V. The Matter, Function, and Method of Theology 359

Chapter VI The Organisation Of Christian Doctrine

I. Unity; Its Organising Principle 362

II. Analysis of the Christian Consciousness 366

III. The Three Degrees of Religious Evolution 369

IV. Construction of the System 375

INTRODUCTION THE PROBLEM

I

The Conflict of Methods

To the thinking man a discord between methods is a graver matter than an opposition between doctrines. The antagonism which has arisen between traditional theology and the kindred group of all other modern disciplines is of this kind.

In the former the method of authority still reigns.^ The latter depend only upon experience. It follows that between the two there can be no bond nor any common standard.

It is the property of the method of authority to base all judgment of doctrine upon the exterior marks of its origin and the trustworthiness of those who promulgated it. In religion this method appeals to miracles, which accredit God's messengers to men, and stamp their words or writings with the divine imprint.

On the other hand, the modern experimental method puts us in immediate contact with reality, and teaches us to judge of a doctrine only according to its intrinsic value, directly manifested to the mind in the degree of its evidence. The two methods are so radically opposed that to accept the latter is at once to mark the former as insufficient and outworn.

It sometimes happens that the advocates of the former, to make it the more acceptable, reduce it to the necessary and legitimate use of testimony admitted in matters of history. It is easy to show the confusion which must follow. Historical testimony, derived from men who

1 Appendix II.

XV xvi INTRODUCTION

are recognised as fallible and limited, is always received subject to caution, and the truth which the historian draws therefrom is simply the result of the comparisons which he institutes between various testimonies, and the verification to which he submits them. Thus the foundation of historic certainty is still evidence verified by rational criticism. Quite otherwise is the method of authority. The testimony upon which the argument is based is the testimony of God. The point of departure is the axiom that it is reasonable and just that human reason should subordinate itself to the divine reason, should indeed be silent and humble before it. All reasoning of this kind avowedly or tacitly implies on the part of the thinking subject a declaration of incompetence, and as a consequence a conscious or unconscious act of abdication.

In the Middle Ages the method of authority, lording it over the human mind, dominated in all sciences. A proposition of Aristotle, an utterance of Scripture, a dictum of the Fathers, a decision of a council, settled officially, and for most men quite as fitly, a problem of physics, astronomy, or history as a problem of morals or philosophy.

One stands astounded on ascertaining how great was the authority of the ancients in the schools up to the end of the seventeenth century. Yet this infantile method was vanquished on the day when Galileo and Bacon opposed to it in the realm of physics the method of observation and experiment, and when Descartes, in philosophy, subjecting all traditional ideas to a provisional doubt, resolved to accept as true only those which appeared to him to be evidently such. It was an intellectual ^pvolution of incalculable importance, which put an end to the long minority of the human mind by asserting its autonomy.

To say that the mind is autonomous is not to hold that it is not subject to law; it is to say that it finds the supreme norm of its ideas and acts not outside of itself, but within itself, in its very constitution. It is to say that the consent of the mind to itself is the prime condition and foundation of all certitude. This principle explains the character, the independence, and the marvellous expansion of modern culture during

INTRODUCTION xvii

the past three hundred years. If theology persists in subjecting itself to an ancient method from which all other disciplines have freed themselves, it will not only find itself in sterile isolation, but it will expose itself to the irrefutable denials and unchallengeable judgments of a reason always more and more independent and certain of itself.

Without doubt, if religion could remain in the realm of pure sentiment, it would be beyond the jurisdiction of science; but religion expresses and realises itself in doctrines and institutions which cannot be exempted from criticism. These doctrines, which bear upon their face the indelible date of their birth, implicate as to the constitution of the universe, the history of the early ages of humanity, the origin and nature of the writings in the canonical Scriptures, certain notions borrowed from the philosophy and general science of a bygone period of human history. To force them upon the philosophy and science of to-day and to-morrow is not merely to commit an anachronism; it is to enter upon a desperate conflict in which the authority of the past is defeated in advance.

This is why traditional theology appears to be always in distress; one by one she abandons her ancient positions, having been unable to find security or a basis of defence in any of them. Let astronomy tell the story of the heavens, or geology that of the earth ; let Egypt, India, or Assyria reveal its past; let historical criticism study the texts and monuments of antiquity ; let Darwin and his successors relate the evolution of creatures and the history of life upon our globe, and some section of the sacred walls is inevitably undermined, and the entire edifice of ancient beliefs seems shaken to its foundations.

It may perhaps be said : Granted that with the method of authority theology cannot maintain its dignity as a true science ; is it yet certain that it can survive without this method.**

Thus, in the eyes of the majority, the problem of authority becomes a question of life or death for theology, and even for religion. To f orestaD a hasty conclusion, let us first of all point omt to troubled minds xviii INTRODUCTION

that a change of method does not necessarily entail the destruction of a science. The latter can disappear only if the object of its study vanishes. Now the religious phenomenon is the permanent object of theology. So long as the religious phenomenon of Christianity is repeated, so long it will continue to be necessary to study it, to determine its conditions, its nature, cause, and significance. The experimental method destroyed the astrology and physics of ancient days, but it created a new physics and a new astronomy. Why should not the same method, adopted by theology, have the same fecundating and rejuvenating effect.? And if this transformation is not logically impossible, why should it not be justified in the eyes of the Christian conscience as well as in those of history and philosophy? To this question the studies collected in this volume are meant to reply; and for this radical revolution it is their purpose to prepare.

II 'Authority and Autonomy

The conflict of methods ends in the antinomy between the authority of tradition and the autonomy of the mind. These are two historic and social puissances, which, though often opposed one to another, are none the less allied and correlative. In the moral progress of humanity, and in the acquisition of learning, it may be said that they play equal and equally necessary parts. It is important, then, before going farther, to take account of their relations.

These relations at once lead back to those of the individual with his species. Authority is the right of the species over the individual, autonomy is the right of the individual with regard to the species.

In metaphysics there is no problem more important than that of the relation of the particular to the general, of the individual being to the universal being. The question, at bottom, is to know whether the spirit shall be subordinated to the creature or the creature to the

INTRODUCTION xix

spirit ; whether in the phenomenon of consciousness, which is necessarily individual, we are to see an accident without meaning or the manifestation of the true being. In the former case all individuaUty, mere ephemeral efflorescence, is engulfed in a materialistic pantheism; it has just the degree of reality, and the destiny, of the wave that ceaselessly swells and falls back upon the face of the rayless ocean. In the other case, individualisation^ that is, the persistent production of more distinctly marked individualities, ever more stable and more clearly conscient, becomes the very law of universal evolution. Consciousness appears as the final cause, and hence as the profound reason of things, and where it takes on a moral character it is crowned in the eyes of the whole universe with an inviolable and sacred majesty.

Yet this is only half the truth. While tending to individuality the world tends neither to anarchy nor to disorder. Individuality does not exhaust the phenomenon of consciousness. In every consciousness there is a new principle of unification, the germ of an order grander and more beautiful than the material order which is maintained by physical laws. Side by side with individual energies, which doubtless cause division and separation, is there not in the intelligence itself an element of generalising reason, and in the heart a principle of sympathy, a law of fraternal love, bringing individual wills into concord and unity? Solidarity, which in nature is a ruthless fact, becomes in the realm of the spirit a moral ideal, a holy obligation. Should it not be the task of humanity as it emerges from nature, and rises into the life of the spirit, to realise and to make apparent above the physical universe that moral universe which reproduces all its riches, and all its harmony in a higher plane, and with an ineffable glory?

For it is a fact that the moral consciousness does not appear at the beginning of evolution, nor does it at any moment burst suddenly into being all luminous and perfect. It emerges slowly and laboriously from the night of nature. It cannot establish itself without subordinating physical laws to its own laws, hence contradictions and repeated con-

XX INTRODUCTION

flicts. Thus there is always a double relation between nature and the spirit; nature remains for the moral consciousness a necessary support which it has no right to despise, and at the same time an obstacle which it ought to overcome, and a limit which it must overpass. In a positive sense, nature prepares for the advent of the spirit ; this is its reason for being. In a negative sense, the spirit can triumph only in raising itself above nature. Let us here descend from metaphysics to history. In the light of these principles the relations between the species and the individual will be easily defined.

Every individual life is from the beginning determined by the collective life from which it emanates. Man is not born adult or independent. Little by little he differentiates himself from the species, as the child emerges from the matrix in which it was formed. If none should live for himself, it is because none exists by himself,

I belong to my race, to my family, by my organism. The fact of my birth has determined in advance the conditions of my life and the outlines of my destiny ; it has made me a white man and not a negro, a European, a Frenchman of the nineteenth century, instead of a savage and a barbarian. Upon my nurture depend not only my health and my race instincts, but also my intellectual faculties and my moral inclinations; from society, in the bosom of which I grow up, I receive my education and all my ancestral heritage. In fact, my being is like a body immersed in an encompassing and penetrating fluid. ^

Heredity, which imposes upon me the irresistible bias of ancestral life ; political order, which shuts me up in its decrees ; custom, which in time becomes second nature; historic tradition and testimony of my fellows, which extend my life in time and space and enlarge my personal experience to embrace the total experience of humanity — ^who shall show the limits of the empire which species exercises over the formation of the individual, and over the course of his destinies?

All these influences are concentrated and made active by relations which they are continually creating and developing. Authority of the

INTRODUCTION xxi

family, authority of the school, authority of the tribe, of the city and the Church; these are conservative and educating potencies, without which the progress of civilisation and moral culture were not even conceivable.

Authority, then, has its roots in the organic conditions of the life of the species, and its end in the formation of the individual. This essentially pedagogical mission at once justifies and limits it. Like every good teacher, authority should labour to render itself useless.

What does the man become under this tutelage? From his parents and masters the child receives his language, his ideas, his manner of life, his very ways of thinking and feeling. At the outset his trust is entire, his faculty of testing and of criticism almost null. But soon, by the very process of education, his reason awakes and grows stronger. From thenceforth he carries within himself an inward judge who summons to his tribunal, and judges by his own law, the things which surround him, and those which are taught him. He will know for himself the world in the midst of which he lives ; he tests by his own experience the statements of his teachers. The latter may no longer rely upon the prestige of their authority ; they are obliged to give him proofs and reasons ; they must persuade him if they would gain him, and if in his turn he expresses an opinion, it is no longer upon the faith of others, but as the result of an inward ordeal to which he has submitted it. Thus the method of direct intuition and experiment succeed the method of authority, not by the way of arbitrary evolution, but progressively, and as the necessary effect of the development of the conscience and the reason. And what is the education of mankind if not the passage from faith in authority to personal conviction, and to the sustained practice of the intellectual duty to consent to no idea except by virtue of its recognised truth, to accept no fact until its reality has been, in one way or another, established.

A like evolution toward autonomy has gone forward in the history of humanity. Only it has been slower and more stormy. Emerging xxii INTRODUCTION

from the state of nature, humanity tends to the state of reason, but it has not yet arrived there. The heavy chains of primitive animality still weigh it down, and it is only by throwing off those that are outward, transforming and spiritualising those that are within, that it can rise to liberty and light, and establish itself at last in the moral security of the autonomous conscience. Authority which is purely exterior is neither reasonable nor disinterested. It ought to be a guide, but it grows blind ; tutelage becomes tyranny. The past is continually struggling for self -perpetuation against the future which is sure to dawn. Hence those conflicts, crises, revolutions, martyrdoms, which make the path of the human race a road to Calvary. The son of man is perpetually climbing it, bearing his cross.

And yet the goal is there, and this goal is the enfranchisement of the spirit. History is a moral pedagogy, whose vitality lies in this perpetual struggle between the autonomy of the conscience and social authority. Of this struggle are bom all the problems which civilised peoples to-day have to face.

In the political order it is the conflict between the governing class and the governed. The authority of the former has long been maintained by virtue of the might of victorious strength, or the sovereignty of divine authority. The awakened reason asks authority for its credentials, and the latter may present only such as are reasonable. In one way or another it must show that it acts only for the greatest good of the governed, and exists only by virtue of their consent. To reconcile the autonomy of the citizen with the necessities of the social order: this is the political problem.

The same conflict exists in the economic order between capital, which, being accumulated wealth, is also the authority of the past, and labour, which represents the present effort of living energy. Labour will no longer be the slave of capital; it also aspires to autonomy. To conciliate the autonomy of labour with the necessities of the industrial order: this is the economic problem.

INTRODUCTION xxiii

In the bosom of the family the same cause produces the same results. What is it that has so notably weakened the ancient authority of the father over his children and domestics, and of the husband over his wife? Whence comes the struggle now going on in all civilised nations between woman and man? It is the same principle of autonomy, which, gathering strength from all that develops the forces of the mind, so disquietingly shocks the deepest foundations of the old world. To reconcile the rights of the moral personality of woman and child with the existence and the unity necessary to a family, this above all others, is the social problem.

In the order of religious and philosophic thought, the antagonism is not less acute, nor the crisis less threatening. The dualistic conception of the natural and the supernatural, the antithesis of a world exterior to God and a God exterior to the world, acting and reacting upon one another from without, the government of the world by those catastrophes which we call miracles, the supernatural authority which the churches draw from this method to substantiate their claim to impose their irrational dogmas upon the faith of the simple, and govern minds as the kings of the earth used to govern bodies, all this old system has succumbed under the irresistible activity of the emancipated philosophic reason. Here, again, autonomy in revolt first of all showed the way to irreligion and atheism, just as, in politics, it engenders uprisings and causes strikes in the industrial order, and the free union in the family order. Violent explosions always make ruins, but ruins are not solutions. To reconcile the autonomy of thought with the indefeasible laws of the moral consciousness, scientific freedom with faith in the God who is spirit: this is the religious and moral problem — more profound and urgent than all the others.

The relations between authority and autonomy are, then, neither simple nor easy, because autonomy and authority are not fixed quantities, but states essentially unstable, and always yet to be. It must be clearly understood that the passage from one system to another has as xxiv INTRODUCTION

its ineluctable condition, so far as man is concerned, the passing of the animal life into the life of the spirit. The sovereignty of external authority is weakened only when that of reason and the conscience begin and increase. As the reptile may not hope to soar in upper air before growing wings and becoming a bird, so the man who continues to live a purely animal life may not aspire to a true autonomy. Violent agitations may achieve a change of master, but they cannot bring the man out of slavery. Here the nature of the being determines the conditions of his life. The animal can but serve or disappear.

This is the vicious circle in which those revolutionaries are turning who dream that by violence they can put an end to a system of authority. If they join forces to oppose a greater material strength to that which the hated authority commands, they may, indeed, triumph over it, but the victorious strength, being merely brute strength, must necessarily create a new rule of authority, which will be as much more burdensome as the strength which founded it was more irresistible. Thus, in the French Revolution, we saw the despotism of absolute monarchy give place to the tyranny of the Convention, and this, after a few years of anarchy, disappear before the military tyranny of Napoleon. Material forces were opposed to and beaten by forces greater, but of the same nature. Reason is to liberty, and to the harmony of spirits, that which the law of gravitation is to the movements of matter. Reason can assert no influence over the movements of bodies, weight can do nothing with the organisation of spirits. The sole way of escape from the action of brute force is the consciousness of yielding full obedience to the inward law of reason.

Authority is a necessary function of the species, and for very selfpreservation it watches over that offspring in whom its life is prolonged. To undertake to suppress it is to misapprehend the physiological and historic conditions of life, whether individual or collective. Itself both pedagogic method and social bond, it may be transformed, it camiot

INTRODUCTION xxv

disappear. Pure anarchists are unconscious dreamers. The species and the individual, tradition which is the experience of the past, and the experience of to-day which will be the tradition of to-morrow, are data equally positive and inviolable. Their reciprocal play, the actions and reactions which flow from them, are the very warp of history. None may with impunity isolate himself from his race and his social cradle. None may dare, without forfeit, to renounce the benefits or the burdens of the solidarity which unites him with his brothers, his forefathers, and his children. We should fall to the level of the brute if each one had to begin for himself the work of the ages. Individuality itself would thus find its ruin, for individuality is the child and heir of the labours of the entire human race, which alone, by preparing its moral and material conditions, have made possible its appearance. Why, then, is the civilised man less a slave to the fetters of nature than the savage.? His present autonomy rests upon the authority of tradition, and is its fruit.*