Chapter III: Dissolution of Religious Morality (2)

The very nature of the conceptions confirms what we have just said respecting temptation and sin. Directly or indirectly, every idea is a suggestion, an incitement to action; it tends even to take exclusive possession of us, to become a fixed idea, to employ us as a means to its own end, to realize itself often in spite of us; but as our thought embraces all things in the universe, high and low, we are incessantly solicited to act in opposite directions; temptation, from this point of view, is simply the law of thought, and the law of sensibility. And ascetics and priests have endeavoured as a means of struggling against temptation to confine human thought, to prevent it from playing freely about the things of this world. But the things of this world are precisely those which are always present, which solicit us most strongly and constantly. And the greater our effort to exclude them from the mind, the greater their power over us. There is nothing one sees more clearly than what one resolves not to look at; there is nothing that makes the heart beat so quickly as what one resolves not to love. The cure for temptation, so persistently demanded by essentially religious people, is not restriction of thought but enlargement of thought. The visible world cannot be hidden, it is folly to attempt it, but it can be magnified indefinitely. Incessant discoveries may be made in it and the peril of certain points of view counteracted by the novelty and attractiveness of certain others, and the known universe lost sight of in the abyss of the unknown. Thought bears its own antidote—a science sufficiently great is more trustworthy than innocence; a boundless curiosity is the cure for all petty curiosities. An eye which reaches the stars will not aim long at a low mark; it is protected by its command of space and light, for light is purifying. By making temptation infinite one makes it salutary and in the best sense divine. Asceticism, and the artificial maturity that comes of a dissolute life, often amount to the same thing. One must keep one’s youth and memory green, and one’s heart open. “I was not a man before years of manhood,” said Marcus Aurelius. Both asceticism and debauchery make men precociously old, wean them from love and enthusiasm for the things of this world. The island of Cythere and the desert of Thebes are alike deserts. To remain young long, to remain a child even in the spontaneity and affectionateness of one’s heart, to preserve not in externals, but in “internals,” something of lightness and gaiety is the best means of dominating life; for what is more powerful than youth? One must neither stiffen one’s self, nor bristle up against life, nor cowardly abandon one’s self to it; one must take it as it is, that is to say, according to the popular maxim, “as it comes,” and welcome it with an infant’s smile without any other care than to maintain one’s possession of one’s self, in order that one may possess all things.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Prayer.]

III. Morality and religion are inseparable in all historical faiths, and the essential act of subjective worship, the fundamental rite commanded by religious morality, is prayer.

[Sidenote: Kinds of prayer distinguished.]

To analyze prayer into all its component elements would be very difficult and far from simple. Prayer may be an almost mechanical accomplishment of the rite, the babbling of vain words, and as such it is despicable even from the point of view of religion. It may be an egoistic demand, and as such it is mean, simply. It may be an act of naïve faith in beliefs more or less popular and irrational, and on this score its value is so slight that it may be neglected. But it may be also the disinterested outpouring of a soul which believes itself to be in some fashion or other serving someone else, acting upon the world by the ardour of its faith, conferring a gift, an offering, devoting something of itself to someone else. Therein lies the grandeur of prayer: it is then no more than one of the forms of charity and the love of mankind. But suppose it should be demonstrated that this especial form of charity is illusory, does one imagine that the very principle of charity itself will by that fact receive a check?

[Sidenote: Superficiality of most pleas in its behalf.]

Many arguments have been urged in favour of prayer, but the majority of them are quite external and superficial. Prayer, it has been said, as being a demand on a special Providence, is sovereignly consoling; it is one of the sweetest of the satisfactions incident to religious faith. One who had been converted to free-thought said to me recently, “There is but one thing in my former faith that I regret, and that is that I can no longer pray for you and imagine that I am serving you.” Assuredly it is sad to lose a faith which consoled one; but suppose that someone believed himself to possess the fairy-wand and to be able to save the world. Some fine morning he finds himself undeceived, he finds himself alone in the world with no power at his disposal more mysterious than that of his ten fingers and his brain. He cannot but regret his imaginary power, but he will labour nevertheless to acquire a real power and the loss of his illusions will but serve as a stimulus to his will. It is always dangerous to believe that one possesses a power that one has not, for it hinders one in some degree from knowing and exercising those that one has. The men of former times, the times of absolute monarchy, who had access to the ear of princes, possessed a power analogous to that which the believers on their knees in temples still believe themselves to possess; this power, in the case of kings, their confidential ministers have lost as the result of purely terrestrial revolutions; and have they thereby been diminished in their dignity as moral beings? No, a man is morally greater as a citizen than as a courtier; one is greater as the result of what one does one’s self only, or attempts to do, and not as the result of what one endeavours to obtain from a master.

[Sidenote: Arguments for its utility equally good for auricular confession.]

Will the individual never be able to do without prayers conceived as a constant communication with God, as a daily confession, a faith in Him and before Him? He will probably not renounce it until he is capable of existing without it. Arguments to prove the practical utility of prayer, conceived as a direct communication with one’s living ideal, would all hold equally good in favour of Catholic confession before the priest as a realization of the moral ideal. Nevertheless, when Protestants suppressed the confession they gave a fresh development to moral austerity: the morality of Protestant peoples, which is defended only by the voice of conscience, is not inferior to that of Catholic peoples.[65] Is it any more necessary for the purpose of ascertaining one’s faults and curing them to kneel before a personified and anthropomorphic God than before a priest beneath the roof of a church? Experience alone can decide, and a number of men seem already successfully to have tried the experiment. The scrutiny of a philosophical conscience has been proved to be sufficient.

[65] See below chapter iv.

[Sidenote: Prayer as a subjective relief.]

Finally it has been said that prayer, even conceived as destitute of objective effect, nevertheless justifies itself by the comfort it affords; one has attempted to argue in its favour on purely subjective grounds, but prayer runs the risk precisely of losing its power as a consoler the instant one ceases to believe in its objective efficiency. If nobody hears us, who will continue to offer up petitions simply to ease the burden of his own heart? If the orator is uplifted by the sympathy of the assembly which listens to him, does it follow that he will experience the same effect if he deliver his oration in the void with the knowledge that his thought, his word, his emotion, are lost, and spend themselves in space?

[Sidenote: Subjective charity the durable element in prayer.]

If prayer is really to be its own reward, it must not consist of a demand addressed to some Being exterior to one’s self, it must be a subjective act of love, what Christianity calls an act of charity. Charity is the eternal element in prayer. To ask for something for one’s self is a thing difficult to justify; to ask for something for someone else is at least a beginning of disinterested conduct. “How much longer thy prayers grow, grandmama, day by day!” “The number of those for whom I pray increases day by day.” Over and above this element of charity, prayer contains a certain beauty—a beauty which will not disappear with the disappearance of the superstitions which have clustered about it. The moral beauty of prayer is intimately bound up with certain profound human sentiments: one prays for somebody whom one loves; one prays out of pity or of affection; one prays in despair, in hope, in gratitude; so that the most elevated of human sentiments sometimes ally themselves with prayer and colour it. This tension of one’s whole being at such times finds its way out upon the visage, and transfigures it with the intense expression that certain painters have loved to catch and to perpetuate.[66] What is most beautiful and probably also what is best in prayer is, more than all else, the human and moral element in it. If there is thus an essential charity in genuine prayer, charity of the lips is not enough, that of the heart and hands must be added to it, and that is to say in the last resort action must be substituted for it.

[66] This, however, is exceptional; in church, during the
services, the majority of the faces remain inexpressive, for
the reason that prayer with the majority of the faithful is
almost always mechanical.

[Sidenote: Increasing tendency for such prayer to express itself in action.]

Prayer for love and charity tends increasingly to find vent in action: a verification of this fact may be found in history. Formerly, in a moment of distress, a pagan woman would have thought only of appeasing the anger of the Gods by some blood sacrifice, by the murder of some innocent member of the larger mammals; in the Middle Ages she would have made a vow or founded a chapel—things still vain and powerless to alleviate the misery of this world; in our days she would think rather, if she were a person of some elevation of spirit, of giving money in charity, of founding an establishment for the instruction of the poor or the care of the infirm. One sees in that fact the march of progress in religious ideas; the time will come when such actions will no longer be accomplished for a directly interested end but as a sort of exchange with the divinity, a traffic of kindness; they will constitute a recognized part of public worship, the essence of worship will be charity. Pascal asks, somewhere, why God has bestowed prayer upon man, why God has commanded man to pray; and he replies profoundly enough: “To give him the dignity of seeing himself as a cause”; but if he who demands benefits by prayer possessed formerly the dignity of being, in his own right, a cause, how much greater is the dignity of him who by the exercise of his own moral will procures the object of his desire? And if to be the cause of one’s own well-being be thus the essence of prayer, of that which brings man nearest to God, of that which lifts man nearest to His level—may one not say that the most disinterested, the most sacred, the most human, the most divine of prayers is moral conduct? In Pascal’s opinion, it is true, moral conduct presupposes two terms, duty and power, and man cannot always do what he should; but one must break with the antique opposition established by Christianity, between the sentiment of duty and the practical powerlessness of a man shorn of all adventitious aid—shorn of grace. In reality the sentiment of duty is, in and of itself, the first vague consciousness of a power existent in us, of a force which tends to achieve its own realization.[67] Consciousness of his power for good and of the power of the ideal unite in man, for this ideal is no more than the projection, the objectification, of the highest power within, the form that that power takes in reflective intelligence. Every volition is at bottom no more than a capability of some sort in labour, an action in the stage of germination: the will to do good, if it is conscious of its own power, has no need to await the prompting of external grace; it is itself its own grace; by the very fact of its birth it becomes efficacious; by the very fact of wishing, nature creates. Pascal conceived the moral end, which duty places before us, too much after the manner of a physical and external object, that one might be able to look upon but not to attain. “One directs one’s looks on high,” says he, in his “Pensées,” “but one rests upon the sand and the earth will slip from under one, and one shall fall with one’s eyes on heaven.” But might not one respond that the heaven of which Pascal is here speaking, the heaven we carry in our own bosoms, is something quite different from the heaven which we perceive spread out above our heads? Must it not here be said that to see is to touch and to possess; that a sight of the moral end renders possible a progress toward it; that the resting point one finds in the moral will, the most invincible of all the forms of volition, will not give way beneath one, and that one cannot fall, in one’s progress toward goodness and that in this sense to lift one’s eyes toward heaven is already to have set one’s feet on the way thither.

[67] See on this point our _Esquisse d’une morale sans
obligation_, p. 27.

[Sidenote: Ultimate claim for prayer.]

There remains one more aspect under which prayer may be considered. It may be regarded as a species of spiritual elevation, a communication with the universe or with God.[68] Prayer has in all times been glorified as a means of uplifting the whole being to a plane that it otherwise would have been unable to attain. The best of us, as Amiel said not long since, find complete development and self-knowledge in prayer alone.

[68] “Oh, God” said Diderot, at the end of his _Interprétation
de la nature_, “I do not know if Thou existest, but I shall
bear myself as if Thou sawest into my soul; I shall act as if I
felt myself in Thy presence.... I ask nothing of Thee in this
world, for the course of things is necessary in and of its own
nature, if Thou dost not exist, and necessary if Thou dost, by
Thy decree.”

[Sidenote: Distinction between religious ecstasy and philosophical meditation.]

One must be on one’s guard against a multitude of illusions in this connection, and must carefully distinguish between two very different things: religious ecstasy and philosophical meditation. One of the consequences of our profounder knowledge of the nervous system is an increasing contempt for ecstasy and for all of those states of nervous intoxication or even of intellectual intoxication which were formerly regarded by the multitude, and sometimes even by philosophers, as superhuman, and truly divine. Religious ecstasy, so called, may be a phenomenon so purely physical that it suffices to apply a bit of volatile oil of cherry laurel to induce it in certain subjects, and to fill them with ecstatic beatitude, and make them pray and weep and kneel. Such was the fact in the case of a hysteric patient, a hardened courtesan of Jewish origin; it sufficed even to induce in her definite visions, even such as that of the girl with golden hair in the blue robe starred with gold.[69] The intoxication indulged in by the followers of Dionysius in Greece, like that indulged in by hasheesh-eaters, was no more than a violent means of inducing ecstasy and of entering into communication with the supernatural world.[70] In India,[71] and among the Christians, fasting is practised to attain the same end, namely a nervous excitation of the nervous systems. The macerations of the anchorite were, says Wundt, a solitary orgie, in the course of which monks and nuns ardently pressed in their arms fantastic images of the Virgin and the Saviour. According to a legend of Krishnaïsm, the Queen Udayapura, Mira Bai, being pressed to abjure her God, threw herself at the feet of the statue of Krishna and made this prayer: “I have quitted for thee my love, my possessions, my crown; I come to thee, oh, my refuge! Take me.” The statue listened motionless; suddenly it opened and Mira disappeared inside of it. To vanish thus into the bosom of one’s God is—is it not?—the perfect ideal of the highest human religions. All of them have proposed it to man, as a prime object of desire, to die in God; all of them have seen the higher life as a form of ecstasy; whereas the fact is that, in a state of ecstasy, one descends on the contrary to a lower and a vegetative plane of existence, and that this apparent fusion with God is no more than a return to a primitive inertia, to a mineral impassibility, to a statuesque petrifaction. One may believe one’s self uplifted in a state of ecstasy, and mistake for an exaltation of thought what is in reality no more than a sterile nervous excitement. The trouble is that there is no means of measuring the real force and extent of thought. Under normal circumstances the only means that exist are action; one who does not act is inevitably inclined to exaggerate the value of his thought. Amiel himself did not escape from this danger. Fancied superiority disappears the moment a thought seeks expression of whatsoever kind. The dream that is told becomes absurd; the ecstasy in which one retains complete control of one’s mind, in which one endeavours to take stock of the confused emotions one experiences, vanishes before us and leaves behind no more than a fatigue, a certain subjective obscurity, like a winter twilight, which precipitates a frost upon the window-panes that intercepts the last rays of the sun. My most beautiful verses will never be written, the poet says: “Of my work, the better part lies buried in myself.”[72] That is an illusion by which dream seems always superior to reality; an illusion of the same sort as that which makes us attach so much value to certain hours of religious exaltation. The truth is that the poet’s best verses are those which he has written with his own hand, his best thought is that which has possessed vitality enough to find its formula and its music; the whole of him lies in his poetry. And we also, we are in our actions, in our words, in the glance of an eye or the accent of a word, in a gesture, in the palm of a hand open in charity. To exist is to act, and a thought which is incapable of expression is an abortion which has never really been alive and has never merited to live. In the same way the true God is also the one who can be domesticated in one’s own heart, who does not fly the face of reflective consciousness, who does not show himself in dreams alone, whom one does not invoke as a phantom or a demon. Our ideal ought not to be some passing and fantastic apparition, but a positive creation of our spirit; we must be able to contemplate it without destroying it, to feed our eyes upon it as upon a reality. For the rest this ideal of goodness and of perfection, persisting as it does in the face of inner scrutiny, has no need of an objective existence in some sort material, to produce its proper effect upon the spirit. The profoundest love subsists for those who have been, as well as for those who are, and reaches out into the future as well as into the present. Nay, it even in a manner outstretches the measure of existence and develops a power of divining and loving the ideal that shall some day be. Maternal love is a model now as always for all moral beings, in that it does not await the birth of its object before making the first steps in its service. Long before the child is born the mother forms an image of it in her fancy, and loves it and gives herself to it in advance.

[69] _Report of MM. Bourru and Burot au Congrès scientifique de
Grenoble_, August 18, 1885.

[70] A defender of the use of hasheesh scientifically employed,
M. Giraud, who conceives that it is possible to induce ecstasy
at will, and to regulate it by medical doses, writes us
with enthusiasm: “A bit of hasheesh dispenses with painful
mystical expedients to induce ecstasy. There is no further
need of asceticism; the result is an intoxication, but a
sacred intoxication, which is nothing else than an excess of
activity in the higher centres.” We believe that every sort
of drunkenness, far from possessing a sacred character, will
constitute for ever and always, in the eyes of science, a
morbid state, in no sense enviable from any rational point
of view, by an individual in normal health; the constant
employment of stimulants will exhaust the nervous system and
throw it out of order, as the daily employment of nux vomica
will, in the long run, destroy the power of a healthy stomach.

[71] See above what we have already said in regard to the
Yoghis and asceticism.

[72] M. Sully-Prudhomme.

[Sidenote: The highest form of prayer.]

For a truly elevated spirit the hours consecrated to the formation of its ideal will always be precious hours of patient attention and meditation, not only upon what one knows or does not know, but upon what one hopes and will attempt; upon the ideal seeking for birth through one’s instrumentality, and leaning upon one’s heart. The highest form of prayer is thought. Every form of philosophic meditation possesses, like prayer, an element of consolation, not directly, for it may well deal with the saddest of realities, but indirectly because it enlarges the heart. Every aperture broken open upon the infinite braces us like a current in the open air. Our personal sorrows are lost in the immensity of the infinite, as the waters of the earth are lost in the immensity of the sea.

As for those who are not capable of thinking for themselves, of standing spiritually on their own feet; it will always be good for them to retrace the thoughts which appear to them to be the highest and the noblest product of the human mind. On this account the Protestant custom of reading and of meditating on the Bible is, in principle, excellent; the book however is ill-chosen. But it is good that man should habituate himself to read or to re-read a certain number of times a day, or a week, something else than a newspaper or a novel; that he should turn now and then to some serious subject of meditation and dwell on it. Perhaps the day will come when every one independently will compose a Bible of his own; will select from among the works of the greatest human thinkers the passages which especially appeal to him, and will read them and re-read and assimilate them. To read a serious and high-minded book is to deal at first hand with the greatest of human thoughts; to admire is to pray, and it is a form of prayer that is within the power of all of us.