Part 5

I might multiply these texts; but these surely suffice to show that the words of Jesus Christ in relation to himself, and those of His Apostles, are in perfect unison; He speaks of himself as they speak of Him; He qualifies himself as they qualify Him; He calls God His "Father," as His disciples call Him "the Son of God." He has the same faith in himself, in His nature, and in His mission, as St. Matthew, St. John, St. Peter, and St. Paul had in Him.

It is a great source of error, in the study of facts, not to know how to stop at their general and essential features, and, losing sight of these, to give prominence to partial and secondary features. On the subject of the divinity of Jesus Christ, that fundamental principle of the Christian religion, the precise meaning and import of such or such a word may be disputed; such or such an expression may be thought an interpolation, and so eliminated in any particular Gospel, in any particular Epistle; nevertheless there will always remain infinitely more than sufficient evidence of the fact that those who at the present day believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, believe simply what the Apostles believed and said, and that the Apostles themselves only believed and said, nearly nineteen centuries ago, what Jesus Christ himself said to them.

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The opponents of the dogma of the Incarnation and of the divinity of Jesus Christ disregard equally man and history, the complex elements of human nature, and the meaning of the great facts which mark the religious life of the human race.

What is man himself, but an incomplete and imperfect incarnation of God? The materialists who deny the soul, and the naturalists who deny creation, are alone consistent in rejecting the Christian dogma. All who believe in the distinction of spirit and matter, who do not believe that man is the result of the fermentation of matter, or of the transformation of species, are constrained to admit the presence in human nature of the divine element, and they must necessarily accept these words in Genesis: "God created man in his own image;" that is to say, they must acknowledge the presence of God in frail and fallible humanity.

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I open the histories of all religions, of all mythologies, the most refined as well as the grossest; I find at every step the idea and the assertion of the Divine Incarnation. Brahmanism, Buddhism, Paganism, all faiths, all religious idolatries, abound in incarnations of every kind and date, primitive or successive, connected with this or that historical event, adapted to explain this or that fact, to satisfy this or that human propensity. It is the natural and universal instinct of men to picture to themselves the action of God upon the human race under the form of the incarnation of God in man.

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Like all religious instincts, that of the belief in the Divine Incarnation may engender, and has engendered, the most absurd superstitions, the most extravagant hypotheses. In the same way as the natural faith in God has been the source of all idolatries, so the tendency to incarnate God in man has given rise to, and admitted, every kind of strange imagining and spurious tradition. Are we then to pronounce all divine incarnation false, every tradition of it spurious? Rather let us say that it proceeds from the infirmity of the human mind, if we see realities and mere chimeras, truths and errors, in such close proximity, if we find them calling one another by the same names and unceasingly confounding one another's attributes. The pretended incarnation of Brahma, or of Buddha, proves no more against the divinity of Jesus Christ than the adoration of idols proves against the existence of God. Jesus Christ, God and Man, has characteristics which appertain to Him alone. These have founded His power and occasioned the success of His works, a power and a success which belong to Him alone. {75} It is not a human reformer, but God himself, who, through Jesus Christ, has accomplished what no human reformer has ever accomplished, or even conceived,--the reform of the moral and social condition of the world, the regeneration of the human soul, and the solution of the problems of human destiny. It is by these signs, by these results, that the divinity of Jesus Christ is manifested. How was the Divine Incarnation accomplished in man? Here, as in the union of the soul and the body, as in the creation, arises the mystery; but if we cannot fathom the reason of it, the fact not the less exists. When this fact has taken the form of dogma, theology has sought to explain it. In my opinion, this was a mistake; theology has obscured the fact in developing and commenting upon it. It is the fact itself of the Incarnation which constitutes the Christian faith, and which rises above all definitions and all theological controversies. To disregard this fact--to deny the divinity of Jesus Christ--is to deny, to overthrow the Christian religion, which would never have been what it is, and would never have accomplished what it has, but that the Divine Incarnation was its principle, and Jesus Christ--God and Man--its author.

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V. The Redemption.

I enter into the sanctuary of the Christian faith.

God has done more than manifest himself in Jesus Christ. He has done more than place upon the earth and before men His own living image, the type of sanctity and the model of life. The Creator has accomplished, through Jesus Christ, toward man, His creature, an act of His beneficence and at the same time of His sovereign power. Jesus Christ is not only God made man to spread the divine light upon men; He is God made man to conquer and efface in man moral evil, the fruit of the sin of man. He brings not only light and law, but pardon and salvation. {77} And it is at the price of His own suffering, of His own sacrifice, that He brings these to them. He is the type of self-devotion at the same time as of sanctity. He has submitted to be a victim in order to be a saviour. The Incarnation leads to the Cross, and the Cross to the Redemption.

Here are the supreme dogma and mystery. Here are revealed plainly the sense and the import of Christianity. By what ways did Jesus Christ penetrate the human soul to accomplish this great work? How did He win the human soul to the Christian faith, in order to snatch it from evil and to save it?

When man fails in the duty of which he recognises the law,--when he commits the wrong which he is bound to shun,--when, after sin, repentance arises within him, and a sense of the necessity of expiation is soon joined with this sentiment of repentance, the moral instinct of man teaches that repentance does not suffice to efface the fault, and that it requires to be expiated: reparation supposes suffering.

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And when the religious sentiment is joined to the moral sentiment,--when man believes in God, and sees in Him the author and dispenser of the moral law, he regards himself as guilty of transgression toward God whom he has disobeyed, he feels the need of being pardoned and of being restored to the favour of the Sovereign Master whom he has offended.

Among all nations, in all religions, under all social forms, these two instincts--as to the necessity of expiation to ensue upon the fault, and the necessity of pardon to follow the transgression--appear natural and inherent in the human soul. They have been at all times and in all places, the source of a multitude of beliefs and practices; some pure and touching, others foolish and odious: these may all be briefly comprised in the single expression, _sacrifices_. The histories of all nations, barbarous or civilized, ancient or modern, teem with sacrificial rites of every description, whether they be of a nature gross or mystical, of a performance mild or bloody; rites invented and celebrated either to expiate the sins of man, or to appease the anger of God and regain His favour.

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Nor is this all; we have here to note another moral fact, not less real although it seems stranger to the eyes of superficial reason. Mankind has believed that a fault might be expiated by another than its author, that innocent victims might be efficaciously offered up to influence God, and to save the guilty. This belief has led to sacrifices no less absurd than atrocious: the pretended expiation has become an additional crime: it has at the same time been also the source of heroic acts and sublime examples of self-devotion. Both the domestic records of families and the public histories of nations have furnished us with admirable instances of innocence voluntarily offering itself as a sacrifice, taking upon itself the penalty, the suffering, the death, to expiate the sin of others, and to win from Divine Justice--now satisfied--the pardon of the offender.

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And are we then to regard this merely as a pious, a generous illusion, a devotedness as vain as admirable? Yes, such is the view that all those must adopt who believe neither in Providence nor prayer, nor in the existence of any efficacious relation between the actions of man and the purposes of God; no solidarity between men, no connection between the sacrifice of him who practises the act of self-devotion, and the destiny of him who is its object. But those who have faith in the living God, in His continued presence, and His never-sleeping providence, those who believe that nothing in man, whether it be good or whether it be evil, is in vain, that every moral act bears its fruit visible or invisible, immediate or remote, such as these cannot fail to feel, to have, as it were, a presentiment, that in such self-sacrifice of the innocent for the salvation of the guilty, there exists a mysterious virtue. The secret of this it may not be given them to fathom, but it nevertheless gives life in their bosom to the hope that such sublime devotion will not fail of its object.

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And now, to pass from this feeling, and from the acts of man, whose reality no one can dispute, to the corresponding dogmas of Christianity, let me, by the side of these acts of devotedness and self-sacrifice of the human creature in his innocence seeking to atone for the sins of the human creature who is guilty, place the self-devotion and the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the Man-God, tendered to ransom from sin the race of mankind and to open to it the way of salvation; who is not struck by this sublime analogy? What connection and harmony between the purest, the most generous, instincts of the human soul, and the dogma of God's Redemption? I touch upon none of the questions, I enter into none of the controversies which have sprung up with respect to this dogma of Redemption; I do not weigh with a view to compare faith and works, nor do I essay to assign the part due to divine grace or to human virtue; I do not define or seek to number the elect, but I pause upon the fact itself of the Redemption by Jesus Christ, the fact upon which the dogma itself reposes. {82} All that the most renowned heroes, the most glorious saints of humanity have striven to accomplish, in order to expiate the sins of any creature or any nation, Jesus Christ the Elect of God, the Son of God, the God-Man, came to effect for all mankind, by means of incomparable sorrow, humiliation, and sufferings. And, as was affirmed by St. Paul in the first century, and by Bossuet in the seventeenth, this very suffering, this humiliation, this martyrdom of Jesus Christ, have constituted his victory and his empire. And I would ask, what other spectacle than that of God made man to constitute himself victim--made victim to become the saviour--could have excited in the soul of mankind those outbursts of admiration, of respect, and of love, that ardent, invincible, and contagious faith, of which the Apostles and the primitive Christians have left us the evidences and the example? It was requisite that the victim and the sacrifice should be equal to the work. {83} That work was the Christian religion, that incomparable system of facts, dogmas, precepts, promises, which, in the midst of all the doubts and all the controversies of the mind of man, have for nineteen centuries afforded satisfaction and solution to those aspirings of the human race, which nature prompts, whether they assume the form of religious instincts or religious problems.

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Third Meditation.

The Supernatural.

To a system so grand, and in such profound harmony with man's own nature, an objection is made which is thought decisive; that system proclaims the Supernatural, has the Supernatural for its principle and foundation. It is objected that the Supernatural itself has no existence.

This objection is not novel, but it has at this moment in appearance assumed a more serious and formidable shape than ever. It is in the name of science itself, of all the human sciences, of the physical sciences, historical science, philosophical science, that the pretension is made that is to reduce the Supernatural to a nonentity, and to banish it from the world and from man.

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The reverence that I feel for science is infinite. I would have it as free and unshackled as I would desire to see it honoured. But I would at the same time like to see it deal somewhat more rigorously and logically with itself. I would like to see it less exclusively absorbed by its own peculiar labours and occupations, its momentary successes; more careful not to forget or omit any of the ideas or any of the facts which bear upon the subject with which it deals, and for which in its solution it has still to account.

In whatever quarter, at this day, the wind may be, the abolition of the Supernatural is a difficult enterprise, for the belief in the Supernatural is a fact natural, primitive, universal, constant in the life and history of the human race. We may interrogate mankind in all times and places, in all states of society and degrees of civilization, we find it always and everywhere spontaneously believing in facts and causes beyond the sphere of this palpable world, of this living piece of mechanism termed nature. In vain do we extend, explain, amplify nature itself; the instinct of man, the instinct of human masses, has never suffered that nature to confine it: it has always sought and seen something beyond.

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It is this belief--instinctive, and hitherto indestructible--which is qualified as a radical error; this universal and enduring fact in man's history it is which men seek to abolish. They go farther; they affirm that it is already abolished--that the _people_ no longer believe in the Supernatural, and that any attempt to bring them back to it would be vain. Incredible conceit of man! What, because in a corner of the world in one day among ages brilliant progress may have been made in natural and historical science--because in the name of the sciences, and in brilliant books, the Supernatural has been combated, they proclaim the Supernatural vanquished, abolished; and we hear the judgment pronounced, not merely in the name of the learned, but of the people! Have you then completely forgotten, or have you never thoroughly comprehended, humanity and the history of humanity? {87} Do you ignore absolutely what the people really is, and what all those nations are that cover the surface of the earth? Have you never then penetrated into those millions of souls in which the belief in the Supernatural is and abides, present and active even when the words which move their lips disown it? Are you then unconscious of the immense distance which there is between the depths and the surface of those souls, between the variable breaths which only ruffle the minds of men, and the immutable instincts which preside over their very being? True, there are, in our days, amongst the people, many fathers, mothers, children, who believe themselves incredulous, and mock scorn fully at miracles; but follow them in the intimacy of their homes, amongst the trials of their lives, how do these parents act, when their child is ill, those farmers when their crops are threatened, those sailors when they float upon the waters a prey to the tempest? They elevate their eyes to heaven, they burst forth in prayer, they invoke that Supernatural power said by you to be abolished in their very thought. By their spontaneous and irresistible acts they give to your words and to their own a striking disavowal.

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But to advance a step towards you, admitted that the faith in the Supernatural is abolished; let us enter together that society and those classes to whom this moral ruin is a triumph and a vaunt. What then ensues? In the place of God's miracles, man's miracles make their appearance. They are searched for, they are called for; men are found to invent them, and to contrive them to be recognised by thousands of beholders. It is not necessary to go either far in time or wide in space to see the Supernatural of Superstition raising itself in the place of the Supernatural of Religion, and Credulity hurrying to meet Falsehood half-way.

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But away with these unhealthy paroxysms of humanity; and to return to its sober and enduring history. We will admit that the instinctive belief in the Supernatural has been the source and abides the foundation of all religions, of religion in the most general sense of the word, and of essential religion. The most serious, at the same time the most perplexed, of the thinkers who in our days have approached the subject, M. Edmond Scherer, saw plainly enough that that was the question at issue, and he has so put it in the third of his "Conversations Théologiques," noble yet sad imaging forth of the fermentation in his own ideas and the struggles which they occasion in his soul. "The Supernatural is not a something external to religion," says one of the two speakers between whom M. Scherer supposes the discussion, "it is religion itself." "No," says the other, "the Supernatural is not the peculiar element of religion, but rather of superstition: the Supernatural fact has no relation with the human soul, for it is the essence of the Supernatural that it goes beyond all those conditions which constitute credibility; its essence indeed is the being _anti-human_." {90} The discussion continues and becomes animated: the contrary nature of the perplexities experienced by the two speakers becomes manifest. "Perhaps," says the Rationalist, "the Supernatural was a necessary form of religion for ill cultivated minds: but rightly or wrongly, our modern civilization rejects miracles; without positive denial, it remains indifferent to them. Even the preacher knows not how to deal with them; the more he is in earnest, the more his Christian feeling has inwardness and vitality, the more does the miracle also disappear from his teaching. Miracles formerly constituted the great force of the sermon, at the present day what are they but a secret source of embarrassment? Everybody feels vaguely when confronted by the marvellous accounts in our sacred volumes, what he feels when confronted by the Legends of the Saints; it is impossible for that to be religion, it is only its superfoetation." "It is true," exclaims with sorrow the hesitating Christian, "we believe no longer in miracles; you might have added that neither do we any more believe in God himself; the two things go together. {91} We hear much now-a-days of Christian Spiritualism--of the religion of the conscience, and you yourself seem to see that men in giving up miracles are making progress in religion. Ah! why is it that the intimate experience of my own heart cannot express itself in a forcible protest against any such opinion? Whenever I find my faith in miraculous agency vacillating within me, the image of my God seems to be fading away from my eyes: He ceases to be for me God the free, the living, the personal; the God with whom the soul converses, as with a master and friend; and this holy dialogue once interrupted, what is left us? How does life become sad? how does it lose its illusions? Reduced to the satisfaction of mere physical wants, to eat, to drink, to sleep, to make money, deprived of all horizon, how puerile does our maturity appear, how sorrowful our old age, how meaningless our anxieties!

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"No more mystery, no more innocence, no more infinity, no longer any heaven above our heads, no more poesy. Ah! be sure: the incredulity which rejects the miracle has a tendency to unpeople heaven, and to disenchant the earth. The Supernatural is the natural sphere of the soul. It is the essence of its faith, of its hope, of its love. I know how specious criticism is, how victorious its arguments often appear; but I know one thing besides, and perhaps I might here even appeal to your own testimony; in ceasing to believe in what is miraculous, the soul finds that it has lost the secret of divine life; henceforth it is urged downwards towards the abyss, soon it lies on the earth, and not seldom in the dirt."

In his turn the disbeliever in the Supernatural is troubled and saddened: "Listen," he says: "the history of humanity seems to be sometimes moving in obedience to the following scheme. The world begins with religion, and, referring all phenomena to a first cause, it sees God everywhere. {93} Then comes philosophy, which, having discovered the connection of secondary causes, and the laws of their operation, makes a corresponding deduction from the direct intervention of divinity, and then founding itself upon the idea of necessity (for it is only necessity which falls within the domain of science, and science is in fact but the knowledge of what is necessary); philosophy tends in its very fundamental principle to exclude God from the world. It does more; it finishes by denying human liberty as it has denied God. The reason is evident: liberty is a cause beyond the sphere of the necessary connection of causes, a first cause, a cause which serves as cause to itself: and from that moment philosophy, unequal to any explanation, feels itself disposed to deny that first cause. A philosophy true to itself will ever be fatalistic. For from that moment philosophy corrupts and destroys itself. When it has no other God than the universe, no other man than the chief of the mammalia, what is it but a mere system of Zoology? {94} Zoology constitutes the whole science of the epoch, of the Materialists, and to speak plainly, that is our position at the present day. But materialism can never be the be-all and the end-all of the human race. Corrupt and enervated, society is passing through immense catastrophes, is falling in ruins; the iron harrow of Revolution is breaking up mankind like the clods of the field; in the bloody furrows germinate new races; the soul in the agony of its distress believes once more; it resumes its faith in virtue, it finds again the language of prayer. To the age of the Renaissance succeeded that of the Reformation; to the Germany of Frederick the Great, the Germany of 1812. So faith springs up for ever and ever out of its ashes. Ah, that I must add it, humanity rises again but to resume the march which I have just described. But can it be said of it besides, that like this Globe of ours it is making any movement in advance whilst it is so turning round itself, and if it does so advance, towards what is it gravitating?

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'Whither, whither, O Lord, marches the earth in the heavens?'" [Footnote 18]

[Footnote 18: Mélange de Critique Religieuse, par Edmond Scherer--Conversations Théologiques, pp. 169-187.]