Part 3

Far from destroying this sentiment, experience and the spectacle of life explain and confirm it. In reflecting on his destiny, man recognises in it three different sources, and divides, so to say, into three classes the facts which make up the whole. He is conscious of being subject to events which are the consequence of laws, general, permanent, and independent of his will, but which by his intelligence he observes and comprehends. {27} By the act of his free will he also himself creates events, of which he knows himself to be author, and these have their own consequences and enter too into the tissue of his life. Lastly, he passes through events, in his view, neither the result of those general laws from which nothing can withdraw him, nor the act of his own liberty,--events of which he perceives neither the cause, the reason, nor the author.

Man attributes this last class of events sometimes to a blind cause, which he terms chance; at another, to an intelligent and supreme intention which is in God. His mind at times revolts at the inanity of this word _chance_, which explains and defines nothing; and he then pictures to himself a mysterious, impenetrable power, a merely necessary chain of unknown facts, to which he gives the name of fatality, destiny. To account for this obscure and accidental part of human life, which originates neither from any general and conceivable laws, nor from the free will of man himself, we must choose between fatality and Providence, chance and God.

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I express my meaning without hesitation. Who ever accepts as a satisfactory explanation the theory of fatality and chance, does not truly believe in God. Whoever believes truly in God, relies upon Providence. God is not an expedient, invented to explain the first link in the chain of causation, an actor called to open by creation the drama of the world, then to relapse into a state of inert uselessness. By the very fact of his existence, God is present with his work, and sustains it. Providence is the natural and necessary development of God's existence; his constant presence and permanent action in creation. The universal and insuperable instinct which leads man to prayer, is in harmony with this great fact; he who believes in God cannot but have recourse to Him and pray to Him.

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Objections are raised to the name itself of God. He acts, it is said, only by general and permanent laws: how can we implore His interference in favour of our special and exceptional desires? He is immutable, ever perfect, and ever the same: how is it conceivable that He lends Himself to the fickleness of human sentiments and wishes? The prayer which ascends to Him is forgetful of his real nature. Men have treated the attributes of God as furnishing an objection to his Providence.

This objection, so often repeated, never fails to astonish me. The majority of those who urge it, assert at the same time that God is incomprehensible, and that we cannot penetrate the secret of his nature. What then is this but to pretend to comprehend God? and by what right do they oppose his nature to his providence, if his nature is, to us, an impenetrable mystery? I refrain from reproaching them for their ambition; ambition is the privilege and the glory of man; but in retaining it, let them not overlook its legitimate limits. There is only this alternative: either man must cease to believe in God, because he cannot comprehend Him, or in effect admit his incomprehensibility, and still at the same time believe in Him. {30} He cannot pass and repass incessantly from one system to the other, now declaring God to be incomprehensible; now speaking of Him, of his nature and his attributes, as if He were within the province of human science. Great as is the question of Providence, the one I have here to consider is still greater, for it is the question of the very existence of God; and the fundamental inquiry is to know whether He exists, or does not exist. God is at once light and mystery: in intimate relation with man, and yet beyond the limits of his knowledge. I shall presently endeavour to mark the limit at which human knowledge stops, and indicate its proper sphere; but this I at once assume as certain: whoever, believing in God and speaking of Him as incomprehensible, yet persists in endeavouring to define Him scientifically, and seeks to penetrate the mystery, which he has yet admitted, is in great risk of destroying his own belief, and of setting God aside, which is one way of denying Him.

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But I leave for a moment these two simultaneous propositions, namely, the impossibility of comprehending God, and the necessity of believing in Him; and I proceed at once to that objection to the special providence of God which is drawn from the general character of the laws of nature. This objection results from confounding very different things, and overlooking a fundamental one,--the fact characteristic indeed of human nature. It is true that the providence of God presides over the order of the world which He governs by general and permanent laws: these laws would be more accurately designated by another name; they are the Will of God, continually acting upon the world, for not only the laws but the Lawgiver are there ever present. But when God created man, He created him different from the physical world; free, and a moral agent; and hence there is a fundamental difference between the action of God on the physical world, and his action on man. {32} I shall subsequently state my opinion as to the full meaning of the expression, "Man is a free being," and as to the nature of the consequences to which it leads; for the present, I assume, as a certain and incontestable fact, this principle of human liberty,--of the free determination of man considered as a moral agent. Admitting this, it cannot be said that God governs mankind at large by general and permanent laws; for what would this be but to ignore or annul the liberty granted to man, that is to say, to misconceive and mutilate the Work of God himself. Man exercises a free determination, and in his own life actually gives birth to events which are not the result of any general and external laws. Divine Providence watches the operations of man's volition, and records the manner in which it has been exercised. It does not treat man as it deals with the stars in heaven and the waves of the ocean, which have neither thought nor will; with man it has other relations than with nature, and employs a different mode of action.

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There is little wisdom in instituting comparisons between objects or facts not essentially analogous; and the idea of God has been so often disfigured by representing Him in the image of man, that I mistrust the efficacy of any analogies borrowed from humanity to convey a conception of God. I cannot, however, overlook the fact, that God has created man in his own image, nor can I absolutely refrain from seeking, in nature or the life of man, some type to shadow forth the features of God. Let us consider the human family: the father and mother assist in directing the active development of the child; they watch over it with authority and tenderness; they control its liberty without annulling it, and they listen to its little prayers--now granting them, now refusing them, as their reason dictates, and with a view to the child's main and future interests. {34} The child, without thought or design, by the spontaneous instinct of its nature, recognizes the authority and feels the tenderness of its parents; as it advances in age, it sometimes obeys and sometimes resists their injunctions, using or misusing its natural liberty; but in all the fickleness of its will, it asks, it entreats, full of confidence--joyous and thankful when it obtains from its parents what it desires; yet, when denied, still ready again to ask and to entreat with the same confidence as before.

This is what takes place in the government of the human family when ruled according to the dictates of nature and right. An image we have here, imperfect but still true--a shadowing-forth, faint yet faithful--of Divine Providence. Thus it is that the Christian religion qualifies and describes the action of God in the life of man. It exhibits God as ever present and accessible to man, as a father to his child; it exhorts, encourages, invites man to implore, to confide in, to pray to God. It reserves absolutely the answer of God to that prayer; He will grant, or He will refuse: we cannot penetrate his motives--"The ways of God are not our ways." {35} Nevertheless, to prayer, ceaseless and ever renewed, the Christian dogma associates the firm hope that "nothing is impossible with God." This dogma is thus in full and intimate harmony with the nature of man; whilst recognizing his liberty, it does homage to his dignity; in tendering to him the resource of an appeal to God it provides for his weakness. In science, it suppresses not the mystery which cannot be suppressed; but, in man's life, it solves the natural problem which weighs upon the soul.

III. Original Sin.

The dogmas of Creation and Providence bring us into the presence of God; it is the action of God upon the world and man that they proclaim and affirm. The dogma of Original Sin brings us back to man; it is the act of man towards God, which stands at the very beginning of the history of mankind.

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In what does this dogma consist? What are the elements and the essential facts which constitute it, and upon which it is founded?

The dogma of Original Sin implies and affirms these propositions:

1. That God, in creating man, has created him an agent, moral, free, and fallible;

2. That the will of God is the moral law of man, and obedience to the will of God is the duty of man, inasmuch as he is a moral and free agent;

3. That, by an act of his own free will, man has knowingly failed in his duty, by disobeying the law of God;

4. That the free man is a responsible being, and that disobedience to the law of God has justly entailed on him punishment;

5. That that responsibility and that punishment are hereditary, and that the fault of the first man has weighed and does weigh upon the human race.

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The authority of God, the duty of obedience to the law of God, the liberty and responsibility of man, the heritage of human responsibility are, in their moral chronology, the principles and the facts comprised in the dogma of Original Sin.

I turn away my attention for a moment from the dogma itself, its source, its history, the Biblical and Christian tradition of this first step in evil of the human race. And considering man, his nature, and his destiny in their actual and general state, I investigate and verify the moral facts as they manifest themselves at the present day, to the eyes of good sense, amidst the disputes of the learned.

Man, at his birth, is subjected to the moral authority, as well as the physical power of the parents who, humanly speaking, created him. Obedience is to him a duty, and at the same time a necessity. This physical necessity and this moral obligation, however ultimately connected with each other, are not one and identical; and the child, in its spontaneous development, instinctively feels the moral obligation long before it is conscious of the physical necessity. {38} The instinctive feeling of the obligation is united with the growing sentiment of affection; and the child obeys the look, the voice of its mother, unconscious of its absolute dependence upon her. As the sentiment of affection and the instinct of obligatory obedience are the first dawn of moral good in the development of the child, so the impulse to disobedience is the first symptom, the first appearance of moral evil. It is with the voluntary disobedience of the child to the will of its mother that the moral infraction commences, and it is in disobedience that it resides. It considers neither the motives nor the consequences of its act; it is simply conscious that it disobeys, and regards its mother with a mingled feeling of restlessness and defiance; it tries, with hesitation, the maternal authority; it strives to be, and especially to appear, independent of the natural and legitimate power which rules it, and which it recognises at the very moment when it opposes its own will to that higher law.

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As the child, so is the man. As man is born free, so he lives free; and as he is born subject, so he lives subject. Liberty co-exists with authority and resists without annulling it. Authority exists before liberty, and as it does not yield to it, so neither does it supersede it. Man, inasmuch as he knows that he disobeys, renders homage to authority by the very fact of his disobedience. Authority, on its side, recognizes the liberty of man, by the condemnation which it passes on him for having misused it; for he would not be responsible for his acts were he not free. In the co-existence of these two powers, authority and liberty, at one time in accordance, at another in conflict, lies the great secret of nature and of human destiny, the fundamental principle of man and of the world.

Let it be clearly understood that I speak here of the moral world, of the world of thought and of will. In the physical world there is neither authority nor liberty; there are merely certain forces, forces acting inevitably and unequally. {40} If the question concerned the material world, could I do better than repeat what Pascal has admirably said: "Man is but a reed--the weakest in nature--but he is a reed which thinks; the universe need not rise in arms to crush him; a vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But were the universe to crush him, man would still be nobler than the power which killed him, for he knows that he dies; and of the advantage which the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing." When man obeys or disobeys, he knows just as well that authority confronts him, as that liberty of action abides with himself. He knows what he does, and he charges himself with the responsibility. Moral order is here complete.

Throughout all times and in all places, in all men, as in the first man, disobedience to legitimate authority is the principle and foundation of moral evil, or, to call it by its religious name, of sin.

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Disobedience has various and complicated sources; it may spring from a thirst for independence, from ambition or presumptuous curiosity, or from giving rein to human inclinations and temptations; but, whatever its origin, disobedience is ever the essential characteristic of that free act which constitutes sin, as it is also the source of the responsibility which accompanies it.

Eminent men, eminently pious men, have combated the doctrine of human liberty; unable to reconcile it with what they term the divine prescience, they have denied the fundamental fact of the nature of man, rather than fully acknowledge the mystery of the nature of God. Others, equally eminent and sincere, have limited themselves to raising doubts regarding human liberty, and denying it the value of an absolute and peremptory fact. In my opinion, they have confounded facts essentially different, although intimately blended; they have ignored the special and simple character of the very fact of free will. During a course of lectures which I delivered thirty-five years ago at the Sorbonne, on the history of civilization in France, having occasion to examine the controversy of St. Augustine with Pelagius on free will, predestination, and grace, I explained these subjects in terms which I repeat here, finding no others which appear to me more exact and more complete:--

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"The fact which lies at the foundation of the whole dispute," I said in 1829, "is liberty, free will, the human will. To comprehend this fact exactly, we must divest it of every foreign element, and confine it strictly to itself. It is the want of this precaution that has led to such frequent misconception of the thing itself; men have not looked simply at the fact of liberty, and at that alone. It has been viewed and described, so to speak, _péle-méle_ with other facts, closely connected to it, it is true, in the moral life of man, but which are no less essentially different. For example, human liberty has been said to consist in the act of deliberating upon and choosing between motives; that deliberation, and that choice and judgment consequent upon it, have been regarded as the essence of free will. {43} Not so at all. These are acts of the intellect, not of liberty; it is before the intellect that the various motives of resolution and action, interests, passions, opinions, and such like, present themselves; the intellect considers, compares, estimates, weighs, and judges them. This is a preparatory task, which precedes the act of volition, but which does not in any way constitute it. When, after deliberation, man has taken full cognisance of the motives presented to him, and of their value, there takes place a process entirely new, and wholly different, that of free will; man forms a resolution--that is to say, he commences a series of facts having their source in himself, of which he regards himself as the author; and these are effectuated because he wills them; they would have no existence did he not will it, and would be different if he desired to produce them otherwise. Now, let us imagine all remembrance of this process of intellectual deliberation obliterated, the motives so known and appreciated, forgotten; concentrate your thought, and that of the man who takes a resolution, upon the moment when he says, 'It is my will, therefore I shall do so; and ask yourself, ask too the man, whether he could not will and act otherwise. {44} Without doubt, you will reply, as he will do, 'Assuredly,' and this it is that reveals the fact of liberty; it consists wholly in the resolution which man takes after the deliberation is at an end; it is the resolution that is the proper act of man, which is through him and through him alone; a simple act, independent of all the facts which precede or accompany it, identical in the most varied circumstances, always the same, whatever be its motives or its results.

"At the same time that man feels himself free, and is conscious of the power of commencing by his own will alone a series of facts, he recognises that his will is subjected to the empire of a certain law, which takes different names, according to the circumstances to which it is applied--moral law, reason, good sense, &c ... Man is free, but according even to man's own way of thinking, his will is not arbitrary; he may use it in an absurd, senseless, unjust, and culpable manner, and whenever he uses it a certain rule must govern it. The observance of this rule is his duty, the task assigned to his liberty."

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It is that act of a will (that is to say of a will strictly brought back to its central and essential limits) acting freely in the intimate recesses of his being, which, in the case of disobedience to the law of duty, constitutes in man sin, and entails on him its responsibility.

Is this responsibility exclusively personal, and limited to the author of the act, or communicated, so to say, by contagion, and transmitted in a certain measure to his descendants?

I am still considering only actual appreciable acts, such as they produce and manifest themselves in the moral life of the human race.

We find the poetry and mythology of nearly all nations expressing the idea of an Utopian state of existence, referred to times remote and primitive, to which they assign different names, as the Golden Age, the Age of the Gods, and which they picture as an epoch when there existed no moral and physical evil in the world,--an era of peace, bliss, and innocence. {46} This is the more remarkable, as it has no foundation, and finds no pretext in any tradition of historical times, however remote; for from the commencement of history, from the time that we can discern any trace of facts at all precise and authentic, it is not the Golden Age, on the contrary, it is the Iron Age which appears--an epoch of violence and ignorance and barbarism, in which war and force are rampant, and which has not in effect the least resemblance to those beautiful dreams of ancient poetry. Without now seeking to establish any relation between these mythological dreams and the Biblical traditions; or, for the moment, drawing from the Golden Age any argument in support of the Garden of Eden; I merely point it out as a great fact, as evidence of a general instinct, so to say, of the human imagination. What is the meaning of this? Whence comes this Utopia of innocence and bliss in the cradle of the human race? {47} To what does this idea of a primal time, without strife, without sin, and without pain, correspond?

But from this cradle of man and this primitive poetry, to revert to the present time, to real life, to the cradle of the infant, why is it that, apart from all personal affection, we so readily term infancy the age of innocence? How is it that we find it so charming to give it this name, and regard it under this aspect? Physical ill is already present, for it begins with the very beginning of life; but moral ill has not yet appeared; life has not yet brought to the soul its trials, nor called forth its failings, and the idea of the soul without spot or stain has for us an inexpressible attraction; we feel a deep joy in witnessing innocence, or at least its image in the child, when we no longer see it around us, nor find it within ourselves.

What means this universal instinct, which in the dreams of the imagination, as well as in the intimate scenes of domestic life, whether we turn in thought to the cradle of the human race or to that of the infant, leads us to regard innocence as the primitive and normal state of man, and makes us place in the spot where innocence resides that which some term Paradise, and others the Golden Age?

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Manifestly between the soul without spot and the soul tainted with evil, between the creature who is merely fallible and the creature who has sinned, there is a very great change of state, a distance immense, an abyss. We have a secret feeling of this deplorable change, of the fall into this abyss; and it is without premeditation, by the mere impulse of our nature, that we suffer our thoughts to bear us far--far beyond that abyss, and to pause on the rapturous contemplation of a state anterior to the fall. Hence spring, and thus are explained, the power and the charm which the idea of innocence has for us; absolute innocence we have never seen, but the idea is still vouchsafed to us; and so it appears to us in the cradle of the world, and in the cradle of the infant, and the pleasure is infinite which we derive from the ideal spectacle of purity which they each suggest.

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Is this a pleasure foreign to all personal sentiment, to all secret reference to ourselves, the pleasure, that is to say, of a simple spectator? No: these impressions, which the picture of innocence awakens in us, are connected with and carry us back to ourselves; this change in the state of man, that mysterious Past which has thrown him so far from innocence, leaving him, nevertheless, the idea and the worship of it--these were not the lot of the first man alone: the entire human race was, and remains, subject to them. Our present evil does not proceed solely from ourselves; we have received it as a heritage before having brought it upon us as a penalty: we are not merely fallible beings, we are the children of a being who has sinned.

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