Part 24

Schleiermacher, emotional and fervent, is of opinion that the only hope for religion lies in surrendering all its outworks and leading it back to its inmost stronghold, the purely personal _feeling_ of the individual. He tries to penetrate to the very foundation of human existence, to the depth where both consciousness and action originate, to the sources of personal life. He calls upon his reader to try to realise the original condition of the soul, in which the Ego and the object are blent in one, where there is consequently no question either of perception of the object or of perception of a self differing from the object. He describes this as a condition which we are incessantly experiencing and yet not experiencing, since all life consists in its perpetual cessation and recurrence. It is, he says, evanescent and invisible, like the fragrance exhaled by dew-laden flowers and fruits, chaste and light, like a virginal kiss, and holy and fecund, like a bridegroom's embrace; nay, it is not only _like_ all this, it _is_ all this; for this condition of the human soul is the marriage of the universe, of the All, with reason personalised; in this condition the individual is for a moment the world-soul and feels its infinite life to be his own. "This," says Schleiermacher, "is the nature of the first conception of every living and original energising force in your lives, to whatever province it may belong; it is such a condition that produces every religious emotion."[2]

In consequence of this theory Schleiermacher regards every feeling, every emotion, in so far as it expresses the united life of the Ego and the All in the manner described, as religious. "The feelings, the feelings alone, provide the elements of religion." He maintains that there is no feeling which is not religious, unless it is the product of a diseased or depraved condition, adding a note to the effect that this holds good even of the feelings of sensual enjoyment, so long as they are not contrary to nature or depraved. His endeavour is to rescue religion from antagonism with science and culture by making it out to be the essence of every noble, nay, of every healthy feeling. A true German, he pantheistically maintains that the broad stream of life which flows through all created beings is the sacred fountain of all piety and all religions. Therefore he would do away with every definite religious system; even belief in God and immortality does not seem to him to be essential to religion. He exclaims enthusiastically: "Join with me in reverently offering a lock to the holy, outcast soul of Spinoza in the realm of shades. He apprehended the great world-spirit; the infinite was to him all in all, the universe his one and eternal love; with holy innocence and deep humility he mirrored himself in it, and it in return found its most pleasing mirror in him. He was full of religion and of the spirit of holiness."

Even the age of enlightenment did not deal so-called revealed religion a severer blow than did this emotionalism. Schleiermacher, as we see, resolves religion into feeling, and in so doing destroys its authority by making over this authority to the human soul in all its endless variability. All rules, ordinances, dogmas, and principles disappear; each individual is, by a special process, to make everything his own. For Schleiermacher maintains that "however perfectly a man may understand such principles, however firmly he may be convinced that he possesses them, if he does not know and cannot prove that they have arisen in himself as expressions of his own spiritual life and are consequently originally his own, we must not let ourselves be persuaded to believe that such a man is a religious man. He is not; his soul has never conceived; his religious ideas are only supposititious children, the offspring of other souls, whom he, in the secret feeling of his own impotence, has adopted."

Thus essentially Protestant in the good (hence not the sectarian) sense of the word is the religious revival in Germany in its beginnings. It asserts _personal_ originality to be the one essential factor in religion, and defines as the province of religion the whole widespread realm of our warm, true feelings. Natural, healthy feeling is always holy, at no time peculiarly holy.

A marked and significant contrast to all this is provided by the principles set forth in Lamennais' great work, which forms the Latin and Catholic counterpart to Schleiermacher's Lectures. These principles, the programme of pure externality, are as follows:

1. That _feeling_ or indirect revelation is not the means by which men are intended to attain to the knowledge of true religion.

2. That _scientific research_ or _reasoning_ is not the means by which men are intended to attain to the knowledge of true religion.

3. That _authority_ is the means by which men are intended to attain to the knowledge of true religion; and that consequently the true religion is unquestionably the religion which rests upon the strongest possible visible (!) authority.

It is to prove these three remarkable and droll assertions that Lamennais has written his four thick volumes. Let us make ourselves acquainted with their very imperfect chain of reasoning.

It is of paramount importance to us human beings to discover an infallible criterion of what is true and what is false. What we seek is _certainty_. But where are we to find it?

We cannot derive it from our senses, for our senses deceive us, says Lamennais. That the senses conjointly correct such false impressions as each sense separately produces, is a fact of which he does not take cognisance. We are, in his opinion, the less certain of any necessary connection between the impressions of our senses and the reality of things, from our not even being certain of our own existence. How we, if we are not certain of that, can be certain of anything whatsoever, is a question he leaves unanswered.

Conviction, the inward feeling that the thing must be so, is, he affirms, as deceptive as are the impressions of the senses. The irresistible force with which a principle imposes itself upon our reason affords no proof of the truth of that principle. Error is always possible. That one may quite well acknowledge one's fallibility generally speaking, and yet regard one's self as certain of the truth in many single, definite cases, is another fact he leaves out of reckoning.

Next comes the turn of scientific research or reasoning. This, he maintains, leads to doubt of everything, for the highest of all principles do not admit of proof; we are not certain, moreover, of the reliability of memory. It is impossible to parry this attack upon the scientific method in so far that it is of course impossible to prove the reliability of memory without pre-supposing the reliability of the memory which is to be proved. But of the indirect proofs of the reliability of memory provided by human experience Lamennais does not say a single word.

He touches provisionally upon the subject of complete doubt. Complete doubt would lead to complete insanity. The spirit of self-preservation compels us to believe and to act according to our belief. It is, in the Abbé's opinion, this want of ability to doubt, or the knowledge that one will, if one doubts, be regarded by other men as ignorant or mad, which forms the foundation of all human certainty. Common consent (_sensus communis_) thus becomes for us the seal of truth, and there is no other. Difference of opinion at once begets uncertainty. A principle or a fact is more or less certain according as it is more or less universally accepted and borne witness to. Hence Lamennais' definition of a science is: A science is a collection of thoughts and facts on which all men are agreed. Though his standpoint is a different one, he resembles the English empirical philosophers of a later day in refusing even to such a science as geometry any foundation but that of common consent. The fact that many a mistaken scientific conclusion has been taken for truth is due, he believes, to the circumstance that science has reached only a small number of human beings. What, he exclaims, are a few hundred savants compared with the whole human race! He strangely enough forgets that the human race has never unanimously accepted a single scientific truth previous to its discovery by men of science, in fact has never shown original unanimity in any belief.

Lamennais asks: When two persons disagree, what do they do after they have in vain attempted to over-persuade one another? and he answers: They appeal to arbitration. But what is arbitration? Arbitration is _authority_, and this authority declares with which of the differing opinions certainty, or if not certainty, at least probability rests. The fact that the arguments of reason, as such, only create doubt, and the fact that the strongest proof of the mistakenness of an assertion always is: "You are the only one who thinks thus," direct us to the _principle of authority_ as the only true and final principle.

Lamennais' theory, consistently developed, would lead to acceptance of the vote of the majority as the proof of truth. But our final destination is, as we know, the Catholic religion. It is interesting to follow the vaults by which the principle of authority, conceived of as it is in this work, carries us straight into the arms of the church.

Lamennais begins by defining all learning, all apprehension, as the obeying of an authority. This is the same as Bonald's theory, that we accept language upon the authority of those who teach us it, and accept along with it the truths which are necessary to self-preservation, truths which God in his all-powerful word (_i.e._ language) has revealed to every people upon earth. Our intellectual life, _the law of which is obedience_, is, then, simply a participation in the highest reason, a perfect harmony with the witness which the infinite being has borne of himself. Divine reason, which communicates itself by means of language, is the first cause of the existence of reasonable beings, and faith their necessary manner of being. Thus the principle of certainty and the principle of life are one.

Man being created for truth, the reason of universal humanity cannot err. Very different is it with the reason of the individual, which can be overwhelmed by doubt. If it separates itself from society it dies. _Væ soli!_ exclaims Lamennais. The proud man imagines when he is required to bow to authority that what is demanded of him is that he shall yield up his reason. He is mistaken. Authority is simply universal reason, reason revealed through a witness. "It animates and preserves the universe which it has created. Without it no existence, no truth, no order."

It is, then, authority alone which gives us certainty concerning religion. "Religion is not only doctrine, not only systematised knowledge--it is also, it is essentially, a law." But there is no law without authority; these two ideas involve each other. Thus religion is necessarily based upon authority--the true religion upon supreme authority. It is defined as: "The sum of the laws which follow from the nature of reasonable beings;" and to learn what these are we must, consequently, have recourse to authority.

Let us follow the connecting thread in this network of sophisms, that we may be able to pull it to pieces. It runs thus: Reason is developed only by the aid of language, the witness. The witness is only to be found in society. Hence man can only live in society. Hence there must have been society, intercourse, between God and the first man. (Observe the unproved assertion of the existence of an Adam, also Bonald's doctrine that God gave Adam language--in short, elements taken from so-called revealed religion as authority, employed to prove that so-called revealed religion rests upon authority.) The necessity of witness involves the necessity of faith, without which witness would be of no effect. Hence faith lies in the very nature of man, is the first condition of life. The certainty of faith is founded upon its harmony with reason, _i.e._ upon the strength of the authority which bears witness. Hence the witness of God is infinitely certain, since it is nought else but the revelation of infinite reason or of supreme authority. No witness is possible except where there is society. Hence no authority or certainty is possible without a society. No human society can exist except in virtue of that original society of God and man which came into being by virtue of the truths or laws originally revealed by his word. Hence these truths cannot be lost in any society without the destruction of that society resulting from the loss. They are consequently to be found in every society. These essential truths are preserved only by means of witness, which has no power or effect without authority. Hence, as there is no authority except in society, there is also no society without authority; where there is no authority, there is no society. But it is to be noted that there are two species of society; for man stands both in temporal relations to his fellow-men, and in eternal relations to them and to God. These two societies are the political or civil (temporal) society and the spiritual (eternal) society. Consequently there are two authorities, and these authorities are _infallible_, each in its own domain.

This all sounds extraordinarily logical; if _ergo_ were a sufficient proof, there would be no want of proofs. But let us examine one or two of the links in the chain of argument.

The Ego, says Lamennais, cannot alone, in solitude, develop self-consciousness. The premise is correct, and we infer from it what there is to infer when we say that the _I_ has consequently developed with the assistance of a _you_. This is a thought to which Feuerbach has devoted special attention, and which he has followed out in a variety of directions. But Lamennais, taking as his premise the Old Testament supposition of a single man existing before the rest of the race, builds the doctrine of the communication between this man and God, and all that follows thereon, upon this foundation, which sinks with the edifice erected on it.

Lamennais declares the infallible sign of the truth to be universal consent. _But upon what does the authority of this consent rest?_ Has it a cause, or is it simply a fact?

If it has a cause, if the reason of all is to provide the law for the reason of the individual, then that very individual reason for which Lamennais has such a profound contempt is, after all, the supreme judge of the truth. For it is it which, in the first place, invests universal consent with its great importance, and in the second, determines in each separate case whether or not universal consent is to be bestowed.

If, on the other hand, the authority of common consent is a fact, that is to say, a thing which simply follows from our nature, then the certainty with which it inspires us is in no wise different from any other certainty. But Lamennais himself has just been opposing the idea of certainty resulting from an inward feeling, been denying our certainty even of our own existence, the certainty which we require being _infallible_ certainty. What on earth should make belief in authority more infallible than any other certainty?

Lamennais' chain of argument leads us finally to two infallible authorities. The word "infallible" tells us that the Roman Catholic Church is not far off. Infallibility insinuates itself as an inevitable consequence of authority.

There is one point on which all the writers who help to bring about the revival of ecclesiasticism agree, on which Joseph de Maistre, the inaugurator of the revival, is in perfect harmony with Lamennais, its last exponent, little favour though he shows to the other paradoxes of his latest disciple. This point is the infallibility of the Pope. It must be remembered that in the eighteenth century the Papal power had appeared to be defunct. A Pope had corresponded with Voltaire and accepted the dedication of his _Mahomet_. The Pope had himself done away with his faithful Janissaries, the Jesuits. The religious reaction begins by the re-assertion, nay, by the exaggeration even from a Roman Catholic point of view, of the power and importance of the Pope. De Maistre said: "Without the Pope, no authority; without authority, no faith"--that is, without a Pope, no faith. The supremacy of the Pope thus becomes the very fountain, the very kernel of Christianity; in our days (in the writings of Bishop Ségur) the Pope has actually become a sacrament, "the real presence of Jesus upon earth."

De Maistre argued thus: There is no religion without a visible church; there is no church without government, no government without sovereignty, and no sovereignty without infallibility. He cited the principle of the irresponsibility of the king, which, in his estimation, was essentially the same as that of the infallibility of the Pope. Every government, he insisted, is from its very nature absolute, endures no insubordination; from the moment when it becomes permissible to oppose it, on the pretence of its being unjust or mistaken, it can no longer be called a government. And he attempted, as we have already seen, to prove, by appeal to the unquestioned discipline prevailing on board ship and the unquestioned decisions of the courts of justice, how familiar men are in all other domains of life with that idea of infallibility which it is considered correct to take umbrage at where the Pope is concerned.

This dexterous defence has every merit conceivable in a defence of an irredeemably lost case. That we are obliged to regard the temporal sovereign, though he is not infallible, as being so, does not prove that the Pope, as the spiritual sovereign, really is infallible. The fact that there must always be a supreme power, qualified to demand outward submission, does not prove that this power has also the right to demand intellectual submission. But perhaps outward submission is sufficient? Joseph de Maistre in reality grants that it is. He writes: "As regards the dogma of the infallibility of the Pope, we have no _interest_ in throwing doubt upon it. When one of those theological questions which must of necessity be submitted to the arbitration of a supreme court occurs, it is of no interest to us whether it is decided in this way or that, but it is of great interest that it should be decided at once and without appeal."

Lamennais, who like De Maistre arrives at the conclusion that there are two infallible authorities, the authority of the state and the authority of the church, goes, as being a generation younger than his master, a stage farther on the road they both tread. When it proves to be impossible in the long run to uphold the two authorities, each in its own domain, he does not hesitate to decide which of them, in case of a collision, must give way to the other. He draws his final inference thus; "Spiritual authority corresponds to the inalterable law of justice and truth, temporal authority to the force which compels rebellious wills to submit to this law. _Force is necessarily subordinate to the law, the state to the church_. Otherwise we should have to acknowledge two independent powers--the one the preserver of justice and truth, the other blind, and therefore by its nature destructive of justice and truth."[3] A haughty conclusion this, and most characteristic of the beginning of the nineteenth century!

It proves what power Lamennais desired the Catholic Church to possess. We have still to note the last vault, by which it is proved that the Catholic Church _is_ the authority of which so much has been written. Lamennais writes: "In the choice of a religion, then, the question reduces itself to this--Is there anywhere to be found such an authority as that which we have described, or, in other words, is there a spiritual and visible society which declares (!!) that it possesses this authority? We say a visible society, for every witness is external (remember that the witness of the inward voice is rejected), and we affirm that such witness would afford conclusive proof of the authority spoken of, because it would be the expression of the most universal reason."

"If such a society did not exist, the only true religion would be the traditional religion of the human race, _i.e._ the sum of the dogmas and precepts which are hallowed by their being traditional in every nation, and which were originally revealed by God."

"But if there is such a society, then its dogmas and precepts constitute the true religion." From this climax the rest of the argument follows of itself: "Since the death of Jesus Christ Christian society has incontestably been in possession of the highest authority. Of the various Christian communities the Catholic Church is clearly stamped as that possessing most authority. In it alone are to be found all the truths of which man stands in need; it alone provides him with perfect knowledge of the duties or laws of reason; in it alone he finds certainty, salvation, and life."

Now we have reached the desired haven. But it is not enough that we have reached it in a perfectly disabled condition--we suffer shipwreck within the harbour. For Lamennais frankly confesses at the end of his book that all religions rest upon authority, but that nevertheless the original traditions of all except one have been more or less corrupted by additions which must be regarded as errors. These errors have, however, also been validated by authority, exist only by its permission. What a confession! It destroys the virtue of his whole argument.

But of this Lamennais is quite unconscious. He approvingly quotes the following utterance of a Catholic writer: "The Catholic religion is a religion of authority, and therefore it alone is a religion of certainty and peace," and triumphantly recalls Rousseau's saying, that if any one could persuade him on Sunday that he was in duty bound to submit in matters of faith to the decision of another, he would on Monday become a Catholic, and that every thoughtful, truthful man placed in the same position would act in exactly the same manner. Lamennais claps his hands with delight at having produced such a proof of its being right for the individual to submit to authority in matters of faith. A pretty proof!

One of two things must be the case. The authority of the Catholic Church either does, or does not, rest upon the universal acknowledgment of its validity. If it does, then the authority of the church _is_ universally acknowledged and needs no vindication, since no one denies it. If it does not, then, according to Lamennais' own theory, it is invalid, and no defence is of any avail.

But we cannot stop here. The doctrine that universal consent is the criterion of what is true, must itself prove its truth by being universally accepted. Can one imagine a more cruel instance of the irony of fate than that the doctrine in question should have been not only universally disputed but actually (in 1832) repudiated by the church itself? Lamennais was then suddenly left in the lurch, _alone_ with the doctrine that it is the complete unanimity of all which proves truth. Can one imagine a more absurd contradiction? Yes, a more absurd is possible, namely, the very thing which presently happened--Lamennais, the obedient son of the church, bowing to its authority, himself renounced and abjured his doctrine that the authority of the church is the infallible seal of the truth.