Du système qui fait d’une religion positive le fondement exclusif de la morale et des lois, et de l’

CHAP. 8: > Of the system that makes a positive religion the exclusive foundation of morality and laws, and of the influence of this system on civilization.It seems that I am not following the natural gradation of ideas, in passing from the examination of the system in which laws are considered the expression of the general will, to the examination of the system in which they are considered only the expression of the will of a supernatural being. But there is more analogy between the one and the other than it appears when one considers them only separately; the writer who imagined the first sensed its weakness, and it is by the second that he sought to fortify it. Having counted for nothing the understanding of peoples and the enlightenment that can arise from discussion, he was obliged to make his legislator speak in the name of the divinity. He believed that neither good morals nor good laws could exist, unless the civil magistrates were at the same time the ministers of religion. He admired the institutions of Mohammed, because he believed he perceived in them the union he desired, and he condemned the Christian religion, because he saw that religious power was separated from civil power. This system, which has been put into practice several times, and which has been the admiration of several philosophers [49], would not displease some ministers of certain Christian creeds; they would willingly consent, not to hand over their spiritual authority to the civil magistrates, but to unite, in their pious hands, all the powers of the State; they would even resign themselves to consulting only the general will, provided that the power to make it speak belonged only to them.

In subjecting to examination some of the causes and consequences of this system, it is not my purpose to investigate what services morality and legislation can draw from this or that religious opinion, nor to examine to what point certain special beliefs have advanced or retarded the progress of morals or laws. I propose only one thing; it is to show the consequences of a system which, excluding the observation of facts from the study of these two sciences, rests all the duties of men exclusively on the precepts that are supposed to have been given by a superior will. In this system, one never has to consider the consequences of an action, a habit, or a law, relative to the goods and evils that may result from it in this life; nor does one have to investigate its causes, whether in things or in men. The principle and the end of human actions are found exclusively in a supernatural, invisible being, which the imagination cannot picture, nor the intelligence conceive. Nothing is moral or legitimate but what conforms to the will of this being; and this will can be known only through the precepts contained in this or that book, and by the decisions of the men who call themselves its ministers.

This system, which has existed and which still exists among different peoples, at least in theory, certainly has nothing in common with the Christian religion. The author of this religion willed that it be foreign to laws and to government; he established precepts of morality, but without excluding, in any way, either reasoning or the study of facts. What I have to say here can therefore relate only to religions foreign to Christianity, or to pretensions that this religion condemns, even when one wishes to found them upon it. I have already indicated, at the beginning of this work, some of the reasons that serve as a pretext for the system I am now examining, and I have given a glimpse of a part of the results it produces. But the subject is so important that it will be impossible for me to show all its consequences here, and I will be obliged to limit myself to the exposition of a few general facts.

We have seen, in the preceding chapters, that nations are carried toward their prosperity by a tendency inherent in their own nature, but that they do not always see what makes them prosper or decline. We have then seen that by enlightening them on the effects that result from each thing, one directs the action that is in them toward the destruction of what is fatal to them, and toward the establishment of what is useful to them.

This tendency that the human race has to destroy the obstacles that oppose its progress is not a creation of scholars: science observes it, it does not give it existence. Nor is it scholars who make a certain cause produce a certain effect; they show how one derives from the other: but they are not the authors of the filiation.

If the tendency that the human race has to destroy what is fatal to it is an evil, if it is the result of a corrupt and fallen nature, it is not, then, to philosophers that it must be imputed; they are part of the human race, but they do not determine its nature; if such opinions, such habits, such institutions produce for nations such consequences, it is not them who are to be blamed; they cannot make things be other than they are.

It may be a misfortune that absolute power is for peoples a cause of misery and ruin, instead of being a cause of prosperity. If exactions, violence, and ignorance made nations flourish, things would certainly go much better; everyone would be happier, masters as well as slaves. But the author of our nature has decided otherwise: he has attached misfortune to ignorance, to error, to servitude; he has made prosperity depend on liberty and enlightenment. Muslim families, transported to and enlightened in Philadelphia, would prosper there like American families; American families, transported to and brutalized in Constantinople, would decline there like Muslim families. Such is the law of our nature.

But, if science changes nothing in the nature of men or of things, if it confines itself to indicating the connection that exists between causes and effects, how is it that certain governments and ministers of certain religions show themselves so opposed to the progress of enlightenment? How do they fear that one might show peoples the effects of certain opinions, of certain habits, and of certain institutions? It is because, in general, they know the indestructible tendency of nations as well as we do, and they are not well convinced of the truth and force of the religious and political dogmas whose belief they impose upon them. They know that if peoples ever see clearly the road that can lead them to prosperity, no power will have enough force to stop them: to prevent them from advancing, it is necessary to prevent them from seeing.

If there were men who believed it in their interest to preserve in a people habits or institutions fatal to men, or to prevent the establishment of useful habits or institutions, how would they have to go about it to stop the tendency that carries nations toward their prosperity? They should, first, oppose anyone pointing out the connection that exists between these habits or institutions and the bad or happy effects that result from them. They should, second, attribute to these habits and institutions the good or bad effects produced by other causes. They should, finally, persuade peoples that these habits and institutions produce, in a world they cannot see, results different from those they produce in this one. With such means, there are no fatal habits or institutions that cannot be long preserved; there are no advantageous habits or institutions whose establishment cannot be prevented.

It is remarkable, however, that the system which excludes the observation of facts from the study of morality or legislation, in order to found either of these two sciences on precepts and dogmas, is not itself founded on any religious precept or dogma. I know, at least, of no dogma or precept in any religion that forbids men from investigating the consequences of human actions or institutions. Research on legislation and on morality does not seem to me to have been any more forbidden by the founders of religions than research on physics or on astronomy. There are, however, among the ministers of almost all creeds, men who make it a system to condemn them.

This system, praised at once by priests and by philosophers, is easily conceived, although it rests on no positive dogma. There is no philosophical system, created by the imagination, that can withstand examination; there is no religion that does not impose upon men a greater or lesser number of moral duties, that does not recommend certain habits and proscribe others; there are even religions that contain systems of legislation and principles of government. In subjecting to analysis the actions commanded and the actions forbidden, one may find that some among the former are fatal to the human race, while among the latter, there are some that are favorable to it. One can, consequently, turn against a certain commandment or a certain prohibition the tendency that carries human nature toward its prosperity. If it were proven, for example, that enlightenment is one of the principal causes of the virtues and prosperity of nations, a religious precept that recommended ignorance would, by that very fact, lose a great part of its influence, and would give little consideration to the men charged with teaching it.

The founders of religions, in establishing moral duties, had for their object, at least in that, the happiness of the men upon whom they imposed them, even when, to have these duties fulfilled, they employed means that good faith condemned. Most of the legislators of antiquity made a supernatural being intervene in the formation of their laws; they surrounded themselves with miraculous circumstances, fit to win the votes of an ignorant and barbarous multitude. The observation of their moral or legislative precepts having, in their opinion, to produce only happy consequences, they had no fear of seeing their results investigated. Such research, moreover, was probably not within the reach of the men to whom they gave laws. We must not, therefore, be surprised not to find in their precepts the prohibition of investigating the causes or consequences of such actions or such institutions.

But not all the ministers of each religion have the same confidence as the founders in the utility of the precepts they wish to have observed. The progress that enlightenment has made may have rendered doubtful what was not so several centuries ago. It happens, moreover, that the precepts of a religion multiply with time, and that to those established in the interest of the human species, the ministers charged with having them observed sometimes add others that have for their object only their own particular interest. They cannot then, without exposing themselves to a personal danger, permit an investigation into the consequences of the actions they prescribe or forbid, of the institutions they protect or whose establishment they fear. They are in the same case as the agents of a government who exist only by abuses: for them to continue to prosper, the people must imagine that they have an interest in their existence. A single error discovered on a single object can, moreover, suffice to have the examination of all forbidden; can one believe, for example, that the Roman church would not have forbidden the study of astronomy, if it could have foreseen that this science would lead to the discovery of the earth's movement around the sun?

There is a still more powerful reason to exclude the analytical method from morality and legislation, in order to rest these two sciences only on religious precepts. Peoples have such a need for legislation and morality that a body which can make itself the exclusive guardian of laws and good morals is assured of having a boundless influence over them. To persuade the population that this or that belief is the exclusive foundation of probity, of good faith, of temperance, of chastity, of filial piety, of conjugal fidelity, of respect for property, and finally of all virtues, is to make this belief, and the ministers who are its guardians, the foundation of the social order; it is to give the members of the clergy an importance that places them far above all magistrates, and that puts them, in a way, in the rank of the divinity [50].

One then measures one's respect for the ministers of religion not by the truth of their doctrines, but by the utility attributed to the belief. If one cannot believe, one at least pretends to; one seeks to inspire in others a faith one does not have oneself, because one supposes they will be the better for it. Thus can a vast system of hypocrisy be organized in a nation; thus can one come to consider opinions one believes to be false as the sole guarantee of good morals and good laws. The more one is inclined to have laws and morality respected, the more deference one must show for the men who are the guardians of the powers one supposes to be their basis, even when one oneself judges these beliefs to be ill-founded: one deceives men for their own interest: it is out of virtue that one is a hypocrite.

To deceive peoples with a view to making them better is an action that not all moralists have condemned, and that some philosophers have sometimes highly approved. J.-J. Rousseau, so severe in his principles of morality, admires the legislators of antiquity who made the gods intervene to make their ideas triumph: he does not find lying condemnable, provided that he who makes use of it is a man of genius. But, as there is no projector who does not believe himself to be such, it is clear that none should abstain from employing this means; to not make use of it, one would have to suppose that the laws one imposes are bad, or admit that one believes them to be so, and what legislator has ever made such an admission?

The effects produced by the system I am examining here are not the same in all circumstances and in all religions.

The peoples who cover the earth are divided by several principal religions, each of which is divided into a multitude of particular sects. Not only does each of these religions proclaim that all the others are false, but each sect admits in principle the falsity of all the other sects of its own religion. I do not have to examine here which is the sect that admits all truths without any mixture of errors; it is enough for me to observe that there cannot exist two that are in the same case; and that consequently, all, save one, exclude useful truths, or consecrate fatal errors. In considering all religions, save one, as the work of men, and all sects, save one, as containing errors and excluding a greater or lesser number of truths, it will be easy for us to see the consequences that a system which exclusively founds morality or legislation on a particular belief produces upon the human race [51].

It is evident, in the first place, that the precepts of a religion, being judged good for the sole reason that they are considered the expression of a superior will, cannot be modified either by the consequences that result from observation, or by the progress of enlightenment. It follows from this that a people is stationary on all points that its religion has decided: none of the truths it excludes can any longer be recognized; none of the errors it consecrates can be destroyed [52].

A religion whose dogmas and precepts were fixed in times of ignorance and barbarism naturally excludes more truths and consecrates more errors than a religion that was fixed at an epoch when some enlightenment already existed, if, moreover, the one does not contain a greater number of precepts than the other. Thus, when two religions exist simultaneously among a people, the latter is the one that opposes the fewest obstacles to its progress, if it is the result of persuasion and not of violence. A reformation cannot be effected without the help of reasoning; reformers always begin by being in the minority; they can have on their side neither the force that results from numbers, nor that which the possession of authority gives; they must have that which results from reason.Second, between two religions, the one containing the fewest dogmas, precepts, or prohibitions is also the one that places the fewest obstacles to the progress of the human mind, and consequently opposes least the progress of morality and legislation. A religion that would regulate all social relations, that would contain a code of morals and a code of legislation, and that would determine even the customs and professions of civil life, would make the nation that had adopted it the slave of its priests. Among such a people, reasoning would be considered seditious and impious; any attempt to establish purer morals or better laws would be at once an outrage against the divinity and an act of revolt against the government. Since social habits and laws would be considered in terms of their relation to the supposed will of a superior being, and not their relation to the prosperity of nations, peoples would be no more enlightened by experience than by reasoning. Even their sufferings and their decline would be fruitless, and would not authorize them to complain. If they wished to make any progress, they would have to destroy their religious ideas, their legislation, their government, and even their private habits. This would be all the more difficult for them, as they could not be enlightened by any discussion and would have no confidence in reasoning. Their ideas and morals would be formed by the very ones who governed them. Moreover, the ministers of religion, the natural guardians of morals and laws, would add to the ignorance and prejudices of the multitude the interest born of esprit de corps and the possession of power [53].

A system that founds morality exclusively on the precepts of a positive religion, while leaving legislation subject to reason and experience, is much less contrary to a nation's progress than the preceding one. However, private morality exercises such an influence on the well-being of men, and is so intimately linked with legislation, that it is impossible for such a system not to be a source of quarrels and an obstacle to their improvement. If the government preserves its independence, it can change morals by the force of laws and by the progress of enlightenment; if it is subjugated or dominated by the ministers of religion, the latter can change the laws by changing ideas and morals. If they associate for oppression, one will have all the vices of a theocratic government: the priests will lend the support of religion to oppressive laws; the civil authorities will lend the support of laws to sacerdotal pretensions. If they are divided with roughly equal forces, one will see the quarrels between the priesthood and the civil authorities revived, and peoples will make war on one another to determine whether they must obey their magistrates or their priests.

We have seen that a people persuaded that this or that religious opinion was the exclusive foundation of the social order and of good morals could become hypocritical by system, and in a way by virtue. This can indeed happen when there exist institutions, laws, and enlightenment sufficient for morals to retain some purity; but if the government is vicious and the population ignorant, morals become corrupted as belief weakens. Now, as everyone recognizes that all religions, and even all sects, save one, are false; and as it is in the nature of error to perish, it follows that, in almost all countries, one gives morality a false and perishable basis whenever one gives it exclusively for support a particular belief.

King Numa, to inspire in the Romans respect for property, could find it convenient to persuade them that the boundary stones that marked the fields were gods, and that those who moved them would be punished by invisible powers; he could also find it suitable to make them believe that his laws were inspired in him by the divinity. A people ignorant and simple enough to believe him must have let itself be influenced by the opinions it adopted; however, if it saw in the moving of boundary stones only an offense against the gods, the question was reduced either to finding a way to seize the property without moving the boundary stones, or to convincing oneself that stones were not gods.

Thus, when a principle of morality is founded on an error, it collapses as soon as that error is dissipated, for one no longer sees any reason to observe it. And when one makes all of morality depend on belief in a particular opinion, one authorizes and encourages, in a way, not only unbelievers but also all those with different religious opinions to have nothing but bad morals. A Roman priest, for example, may well make it a crime for a Muslim, a Jew, or even a Protestant not to believe in the infallibility of the pope; but he cannot reproach them for a lack of probity, of good faith, of temperance, or of any other virtue; for, once unbelief is admitted, there can no longer be any reason for them to exercise social virtues.

The tendency of the ministers of a religion to have their particular belief considered as the exclusive foundation of morality or legislation is all the stronger as the precepts of that religion are more numerous. Indeed, the more provident the founder of a religion has been, the more he has restricted the field upon which men have been able to exercise their intelligence. The fear of seeing precepts baneful to men discovered becomes, moreover, stronger as the number of these precepts multiplies. From this it follows that the religions that contain the most errors, or that exclude the most truths, are also those that least tolerate the exercise of intelligence. One must not be surprised, therefore, if the peoples whose morals, laws, and simple customs have been regulated by religious precepts have been arrested in the career of civilization.

To judge the general effects of the system we are examining here, one must not limit oneself to examining the consequences it produces when applied to a particular religion: one must see its consequences in the entire world; one must consider that this system holds in barbarism the peoples of Asia and Africa, and even a part of those of Europe; one must consider that, even among the Christian sects, those that authorize without reserve the use of human intelligence form only an infinitely small fraction of the human race.

However, if it is true that there exists no dogma recognized by peoples that forbids either examining the consequences of our habits and our institutions, or destroying vicious habits or institutions by means other than those that would be drawn from this or that religion, on what could one found such a system? Could one establish, by facts, that good laws or good morals have existed only where such a special belief has been admitted, and that, wherever the same belief has been received, morals and laws have been good? Could one establish that all means taken outside this belief to establish good laws or good habits have been baneful to nations? These propositions are so contradicted by the facts that no one has yet dared to sustain them; no one has been found who, after having affirmed that his religious opinions were the sole foundation of morality, has dared to add that good morals have never existed except among individuals who had adopted the same belief, and that all those who had admitted it had good morals and good laws.

Unable to sustain a proposition so obviously contradicted by the facts, one agrees that no particular belief is the exclusive basis of morality or laws. One even goes so far as to say that it matters little which religious opinion one adopts, provided that one really adopts one. This doctrine has a great number of partisans in all countries, and particularly in England. We care little, they say, whether men profess this or that belief; whether they be Jews, Catholics, or even Muslims, it matters little: the essential thing is that they have a positive religion and that they follow it. They reproach the French nation, not for being Catholic, not for adopting false opinions, but for not being sufficiently religious, that is, for not holding strongly enough to dogmas taught by any clergy whatsoever. There are priests, in certain creeds, who are not far from sharing this point of view; they would willingly agree that the doctrines they teach are doubtful or false, if one would grant them that they are necessary. Their efforts tend much less to prove their truth than to persuade men that they are indispensable for the maintenance of order and good morals. These doctrines, which they present as necessary, are not those that are common to all religions, and which relate to the precepts of morality; they are, on the contrary, the special doctrines that belong to each of them.

This system, reduced to its simplest expression, can be rendered in these terms: men need good morals and good laws, but they can obtain or preserve them only by adopting a certain number of agreed-upon errors, and by charging a large body with teaching them. Thus, you Muslims, you must believe the doctrines of your prophet; you, Hindus, you must believe those of yours, however false they may be; for, if you do not believe them, your wives will be unfaithful, your children will mock you, and your servants will seize your goods. It is true that we, who have no faith in your prophets and who consider them impostors, have honest servants, chaste wives, and submissive children; but this is because we have adopted another belief that you consider a tissue of errors and lies.

What is remarkable in this system is that those who wish to establish it speak only in the name of a God of truth, a God who is an enemy of falsehood and imposture; they present this God as the founder of morality; they admit at the same time that all religions and all sects, save one, are errors or impostures; and they then claim that this morality which God himself has founded could not sustain itself if the errors on which it rests were to be destroyed.

I have spoken, in this chapter, of the system that makes a positive religion the exclusive foundation of morality or legislation; and I have observed at the same time that this system was but the work of men. One must not conclude from what I have said that no religion can produce a salutary influence on morals. I have spoken only of the system that excludes the use of intelligence from the study of morality or the study of laws. The Christian religion does not exclude reasoning from either of these two sciences: it does not even contain any legislative provision, any principle of government. Several of the sects of this religion exist only by the use that men have made of their understanding; and if, in other sects, this use is condemned, it is not so by any precept drawn from the foundation of the religion itself.

To condemn the use of reasoning, one bases oneself on the fact that such dogmas or such precepts have been established by the divinity itself. But, admitting that it is the divinity that created man, it is at least as clear that human intelligence is its work as it is clear that such a precept or such a dogma was given or established by it. It is up to this or that individual to present his particular opinions as dogmas or precepts established by the divinity; but it is not in anyone's power to change the nature of the human race. In studying this nature, we may be mistaken, but we have to fear only our own errors; in wishing to adopt opinions that are transmitted to us, we have to fear at once our personal errors and the errors or lies of the men who have preceded us.

The method that rests the sciences of legislation and morality on observation can have no other force than that which belongs to truth; it excludes nothing that is true, but also it can be combated only by systems that contain something other than the truth.