The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. - Arthur Schopenhauer
_Philalethes_. Oh, yes, princes use God as a kind of bogey to frighten
grown-up children to bed with, if nothing else avails: that's why they
attach so much importance to the Deity. Very well. Let me, in passing,
recommend our rulers to give their serious attention, regularly twice
every year, to the fifteenth chapter of the First Book of Samuel, that
they may be constantly reminded of what it means to prop the throne on
the altar. Besides, since the stake, that _ultima ration theologorum_,
has gone out of fashion, this method of government has lost its
efficacy. For, as you know, religions are like glow-worms; they shine
only when it is dark. A certain amount of general ignorance is the
condition of all religions, the element in which alone they can exist.
And as soon as astronomy, natural science, geology, history, the
knowledge of countries and peoples have spread their light broadcast,
and philosophy finally is permitted to say a word, every faith founded
on miracles and revelation must disappear; and philosophy takes its
place. In Europe the day of knowledge and science dawned towards the end
of the fifteenth century with the appearance of the Renaissance
Platonists: its sun rose higher in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries so rich in results, and scattered the mists of the Middle Age.
Church and Faith were compelled to disappear in the same proportion; and
so in the eighteenth century English and French philosophers were able
to take up an attitude of direct hostility; until, finally, under
Frederick the Great, Kant appeared, and took away from religious belief
the support it had previously enjoyed from philosophy: he emancipated
the handmaid of theology, and in attacking the question with German
thoroughness and patience, gave it an earnest instead of a frivolous
tone. The consequence of this is that we see Christianity undermined in
the nineteenth century, a serious faith in it almost completely gone; we
see it fighting even for bare existence, whilst anxious princes try to
set it up a little by artificial means, as a doctor uses a drug on a
dying patient. In this connection there is a passage in Condorcet's
"_Des Progres de l'esprit humain_" which looks as if written as a
warning to our age: "the religious zeal shown by philosophers and great
men was only a political devotion; and every religion which allows
itself to be defended as a belief that may usefully be left to the
people, can only hope for an agony more or less prolonged." In the whole
course of the events which I have indicated, you may always observe that
faith and knowledge are related as the two scales of a balance; when the
one goes up, the other goes down. So sensitive is the balance that it
indicates momentary influences. When, for instance, at the beginning of
this century, those inroads of French robbers under the leadership of
Bonaparte, and the enormous efforts necessary for driving them out and
punishing them, had brought about a temporary neglect of science and
consequently a certain decline in the general increase of knowledge, the
Church immediately began to raise her head again and Faith began to show
fresh signs of life; which, to be sure, in keeping with the times, was
partly poetical in its nature. On the other hand, in the more than
thirty years of peace which followed, leisure and prosperity furthered
the building up of science and the spread of knowledge in an
extraordinary degree: the consequence of which is what I have indicated,
the dissolution and threatened fall of religion. Perhaps the time is
approaching which has so often been prophesied, when religion will take
her departure from European humanity, like a nurse which the child has
outgrown: the child will now be given over to the instructions of a
tutor. For there is no doubt that religious doctrines which are founded
merely on authority, miracles and revelations, are only suited to the
childhood of humanity. Everyone will admit that a race, the past
duration of which on the earth all accounts, physical and historical,
agree in placing at not more than some hundred times the life of a man
of sixty, is as yet only in its first childhood.
_Demopheles_. Instead of taking an undisguised pleasure in prophesying
the downfall of Christianity, how I wish you would consider what a
measureless debt of gratitude European humanity owes to it, how greatly
it has benefited by the religion which, after a long interval, followed
it from its old home in the East. Europe received from Christianity
ideas which were quite new to it, the Knowledge, I mean, of the
fundamental truth that life cannot be an end-in-itself, that the true
end of our existence lies beyond it. The Greeks and Romans had placed
this end altogether in our present life, so that in this sense they may
certainly be called blind heathens. And, in keeping with this view of
life, all their virtues can be reduced to what is serviceable to the
community, to what is useful in fact. Aristotle says quite naively,
_Those virtues must necessarily be the greatest which are the most
useful to others_. So the ancients thought patriotism the highest
virtue, although it is really a very doubtful one, since narrowness,
prejudice, vanity and an enlightened self-interest are main elements in
it. Just before the passage I quoted, Aristotle enumerates all the
virtues, in order to discuss them singly. They are _Justice, Courage,
Temperance, Magnificence, Magnanimity, Liberality, Gentleness, Good
Sense_ and _Wisdom_. How different from the Christian virtues! Plato
himself, incomparably the most transcendental philosopher of
pre-Christian antiquity, knows no higher virtue than _Justice_; and he
alone recommends it unconditionally and for its own sake, whereas the
rest make a happy life, _vita beata_, the aim of all virtue, and moral
conduct the way to attain it. Christianity freed European humanity from
this shallow, crude identification of itself with the hollow, uncertain
existence of every day,
coelumque tueri
Jussit, et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus.
Christianity, accordingly, does not preach mere Justice, but _the Love
of Mankind, Compassion, Good Works, Forgiveness, Love of your Enemies,
Patience, Humility, Resignation, Faith_ and _Hope_. It even went a step
further, and taught that the world is of evil, and that we need
deliverance. It preached despisal of the world, self-denial, chastity,
giving up of one's will, that is, turning away from life and its
illusory pleasures. It taught the healing power of pain: an instrument
of torture is the symbol of Christianity. I am quite ready to admit that
this earnest, this only correct view of life was thousands of years
previously spread all over Asia in other forms, as it is still,
independently of Christianity; but for European humanity it was a new
and great revelation. For it is well known that the population of Europe
consists of Asiatic races driven out as wanderers from their own homes,
and gradually settling down in Europe; on their wanderings these races
lost the original religion of their homes, and with it the right view of
life: so, under a new sky, they formed religions for themselves, which
were rather crude; the worship of Odin, for instance, the Druidic or the
Greek religion, the metaphysical content of which was little and
shallow. In the meantime the Greeks developed a special, one might
almost say, an instinctive sense of beauty, belonging to them alone of
all the nations who have ever existed on the earth, peculiar, fine and
exact: so that their mythology took, in the mouth of their poets, and in
the hands of their artists, an exceedingly beautiful and pleasing shape.
On the other hand, the true and deep significance of life was lost to
the Greeks and Romans. They lived on like grown-up children, till
Christianity came and recalled them to the serious side of existence.
_Philalethes_. And to see the effects one need only compare antiquity
with the Middle Age; the time of Pericles, say, with the fourteenth
century. You could scarcely believe you were dealing with the same kind
of beings. There, the finest development of humanity, excellent
institutions, wise laws, shrewdly apportioned offices, rationally
ordered freedom, all the arts, including poetry and philosophy, at their
best; the production of works which, after thousands of years, are
unparalleled, the creations, as it were, of a higher order of beings,
which we can never imitate; life embellished by the noblest fellowship,
as portrayed in Xenophen's _Banquet_. Look on the other picture, if you
can; a time at which the Church had enslaved the minds, and violence the
bodies of men, that knights and priests might lay the whole weight of
life upon the common beast of burden, the third estate. There, you have
might as right, Feudalism and Fanaticism in close alliance, and in their
train abominable ignorance and darkness of mind, a corresponding
intolerance, discord of creeds, religious wars, crusades, inquisitions
and persecutions; as the form of fellowship, chivalry, compounded of
savagery and folly, with its pedantic system of ridiculous false
pretences carried to an extreme, its degrading superstition and apish
veneration for women. Gallantry is the residue of this veneration,
deservedly requited as it is by feminine arrogance; it affords continual
food for laughter to all Asiatics, and the Greeks would have joined in
it. In the golden Middle Age the practice developed into a regular and
methodical service of women; it imposed deeds of heroism, _cours
d'amour_, bombastic Troubadour songs, etc.; although it is to be
observed that these last buffooneries, which had an intellectual side,
were chiefly at home in France; whereas amongst the material sluggish
Germans, the knights distinguished themselves rather by drinking and
stealing; they were good at boozing and filling their castles with
plunder; though in the courts, to be sure, there was no lack of insipid
love songs. What caused this utter transformation? Migration and
Christianity.
_Demopheles_. I am glad you reminded me of it. Migration was the source
of the evil; Christianity the dam on which it broke. It was chiefly by
Christianity that the raw, wild hordes which came flooding in were
controlled and tamed. The savage man must first of all learn to kneel,
to venerate, to obey; after that he can be civilized. This was done in
Ireland by St. Patrick, in Germany by Winifred the Saxon, who was a
genuine Boniface. It was migration of peoples, the last advance of
Asiatic races towards Europe, followed only by the fruitless attempts of
those under Attila, Zenghis Khan, and Timur, and as a comic afterpiece,
by the gipsies,--it was this movement which swept away the humanity of
the ancients. Christianity was precisely the principle which set itself
to work against this savagery; just as later, through the whole of the
Middle Age, the Church and its hierarchy were most necessary to set
limits to the savage barbarism of those masters of violence, the princes
and knights: it was what broke up the icefloes in that mighty deluge.
Still, the chief aim of Christianity is not so much to make this life
pleasant as to render us worthy of a better. It looks away over this
span of time, over this fleeting dream, and seeks to lead us to eternal
welfare. Its tendency is ethical in the highest sense of the word, a
sense unknown in Europe till its advent; as I have shown you, by putting
the morality and religion of the ancients side by side with those of
Christendom.
_Philalethes_. You are quite right as regards theory: but look at the
practice! In comparison with the ages of Christianity the ancient world
was unquestionably less cruel than the Middle Age, with its deaths by
exquisite torture, its innumerable burnings at the stake. The ancients,
further, were very enduring, laid great stress on justice, frequently
sacrificed themselves for their country, showed such traces of every
kind of magnanimity, and such genuine manliness, that to this day an
acquaintance with their thoughts and actions is called the study of
Humanity. The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries,
crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives in America, and the
introduction of African slaves in their place; and among the ancients
there is nothing analogous to this, nothing that can be compared with
it; for the slaves of the ancients, the _familia_, the _vernae_, were a
contented race, and faithfully devoted to their masters' service, and as
different from the miserable negroes of the sugar plantations, which are
a disgrace to humanity, as their two colors are distinct. Those special
moral delinquencies for which we reproach the ancients, and which are
perhaps less uncommon now-a-days than appears on the surface to be the
case, are trifles compared with the Christian enormities I have
mentioned. Can you then, all considered, maintain that mankind has been
really made morally better by Christianity?
_Demopheles_. If the results haven't everywhere been in keeping with the
purity and truth of the doctrine, it may be because the doctrine has
been too noble, too elevated for mankind, that its aim has been placed
too high. It was so much easier to come up to the heathen system, or to
the Mohammedan. It is precisely what is noble and dignified that is most
liable everywhere to misuse and fraud: _abusus optimi pessimus_. Those
high doctrines have accordingly now and then served as a pretext for the
most abominable proceedings, and for acts of unmitigated wickedness. The
downfall of the institutions of the old world, as well as of its arts
and sciences, is, as I have said, to be attributed to the inroad of
foreign barbarians. The inevitable result of this inroad was that
ignorance and savagery got the upper hand; consequently violence and
knavery established their dominion, and knights and priests became a
burden to mankind. It is partly, however, to be explained by the fact
that the new religion made eternal and not temporal welfare the object
of desire, taught that simplicity of heart was to be preferred to
knowledge, and looked askance at all worldly pleasure. Now the arts and
sciences subserve worldly pleasure; but in so far as they could be made
serviceable to religion they were promoted, and attained a certain
degree of perfection.
_Philalethes_. In a very narrow sphere. The sciences were suspicious
companions, and as such, were placed under restrictions: on the other
hand, darling ignorance, that element so necessary to a system of faith,
was carefully nourished.
_Demopheles_. And yet mankind's possessions in the way of knowledge up
to that period, which were preserved in the writings of the ancients,
were saved from destruction by the clergy, especially by those in the
monasteries. How would it have fared if Christianity hadn't come in just
before the migration of peoples.
_Philalethes_. It would really be a most useful inquiry to try and make,
with the coldest impartiality, an unprejudiced, careful and accurate
comparison of the advantages and disadvantages which may be put down to
religion. For that, of course, a much larger knowledge of historical and
psychological data than either of us command would be necessary.
Academies might make it a subject for a prize essay.
_Demopheles_. They'll take good care not to do so.
_Philalethes_. I'm surprised to hear you say that: it's a bad look out
for religion. However, there are academies which, in proposing a subject
for competition, make it a secret condition that the prize is to go to
the man who best interprets their own view. If we could only begin by
getting a statistician to tell us how many crimes are prevented every
year by religious, and how many by other motives, there would be very
few of the former. If a man feels tempted to commit a crime, you may
rely upon it that the first consideration which enters his head is the
penalty appointed for it, and the chances that it will fall upon him:
then comes, as a second consideration, the risk to his reputation. If I
am not mistaken, he will ruminate by the hour on these two impediments,
before he ever takes a thought of religious considerations. If he gets
safely over those two first bulwarks against crime, I think religion
alone will very rarely hold him back from it.
_Demopheles_. I think that it will very often do so, especially when its
influence works through the medium of custom. An atrocious act is at
once felt to be repulsive. What is this but the effect of early
impressions? Think, for instance, how often a man, especially if of
noble birth, will make tremendous sacrifices to perform what he has
promised, motived entirely by the fact that his father has often
earnestly impressed upon him in his childhood that "a man of honor" or
"a gentleman" or a "a cavalier" always keeps his word inviolate.
_Philalethes_. That's no use unless there is a certain inborn
honorableness. You mustn't ascribe to religion what results from innate
goodness of character, by which compassion for the man who would suffer
by his crime keeps a man from committing it. This is the genuine moral
motive, and as such it is independent of all religions.
_Demopheles_. But this is a motive which rarely affects the multitude
unless it assumes a religious aspect. The religious aspect at any rate
strengthens its power for good. Yet without any such natural foundation,
religious motives alone are powerful to prevent crime. We need not be
surprised at this in the case of the multitude, when we see that even
people of education pass now and then under the influence, not indeed of
religious motives, which are founded on something which is at least
allegorically true, but of the most absurd superstition, and allow
themselves to be guided by it all their life long; as, for instance,
undertaking nothing on a Friday, refusing to sit down thirteen at a
table, obeying chance omens, and the like. How much more likely is the
multitude to be guided by such things. You can't form any adequate idea
of the narrow limits of the mind in its raw state; it is a place of
absolute darkness, especially when, as often happens, a bad, unjust and
malicious heart is at the bottom of it. People in this condition--and
they form the great bulk of humanity--must be led and controlled as well
as may be, even if it be by really superstitious motives; until such
time as they become susceptible to truer and better ones. As an instance
of the direct working of religion, may be cited the fact, common enough,
in Italy especially, of a thief restoring stolen goods, through the
influence of his confessor, who says he won't absolve him if he doesn't.
Think again of the case of an oath, where religion shows a most decided
influence; whether it be that a man places himself expressly in the
position of a purely _moral being_, and as such looks upon himself as
solemnly appealed to, as seems to be the case in France, where the
formula is simply _je le jure_, and also among the Quakers, whose solemn
_yea_ or _nay_ is regarded as a substitute for the oath; or whether it
be that a man really believes he is pronouncing something which may
affect his eternal happiness,--a belief which is presumably only the
investiture of the former feeling. At any rate, religious considerations
are a means of awakening and calling out a man's moral nature. How often
it happens that a man agrees to take a false oath, and then, when it
comes to the point, suddenly refuses, and truth and right win the day.
_Philalethes_. Oftener still false oaths are really taken, and truth and
right trampled under foot, though all witnesses of the oath know it
well! Still you are quite right to quote the oath as an undeniable
example of the practical efficacy of religion. But, in spite of all
you've said, I doubt whether the efficacy of religion goes much beyond
this. Just think; if a public proclamation were suddenly made announcing
the repeal of all the criminal laws; I fancy neither you nor I would
have the courage to go home from here under the protection of religious
motives. If, in the same way, all religions were declared untrue, we
could, under the protection of the laws alone, go on living as before,
without any special addition to our apprehensions or our measures of
precaution. I will go beyond this, and say that religions have very
frequently exercised a decidedly demoralizing influence. One may say
generally that duties towards God and duties towards humanity are in
inverse ratio.
It is easy to let adulation of the Deity make amends for lack of proper
behavior towards man. And so we see that in all times and in all
countries the great majority of mankind find it much easier to beg their
way to heaven by prayers than to deserve to go there by their actions.
In every religion it soon comes to be the case that faith, ceremonies,
rites and the like, are proclaimed to be more agreeable to the Divine
will than moral actions; the former, especially if they are bound up
with the emoluments of the clergy, gradually come to be looked upon as a
substitute for the latter. Sacrifices in temples, the saying of masses,
the founding of chapels, the planting of crosses by the roadside, soon
come to be the most meritorious works, so that even great crimes are
expiated by them, as also by penance, subjection to priestly authority,
confessions, pilgrimages, donations to the temples and the clergy, the
building of monasteries and the like. The consequence of all this is
that the priests finally appear as middlemen in the corruption of the
gods. And if matters don't go quite so far as that, where is the
religion whose adherents don't consider prayers, praise and manifold
acts of devotion, a substitute, at least in part, for moral conduct?
Look at England, where by an audacious piece of priestcraft, the
Christian Sunday, introduced by Constantine the Great as a subject for
the Jewish Sabbath, is in a mendacious way identified with it, and takes
its name,--and this in order that the commands of Jehovah for the
Sabbath (that is, the day on which the Almighty had to rest from his six
days' labor, so that it is essentially the last day of the week), might
be applied to the Christian Sunday, the _dies solis_, the first day of
the week which the sun opens in glory, the day of devotion and joy. The
consequence of this fraud is that "Sabbath-breaking," or "the
desecration of the Sabbath," that is, the slightest occupation, whether
of business or pleasure, all games, music, sewing, worldly books, are on
Sundays looked upon as great sins. Surely the ordinary man must believe
that if, as his spiritual guides impress upon him, he is only constant
in "a strict observance of the holy Sabbath," and is "a regular
attendant at Divine Service," that is, if he only invariably idles away
his time on Sundays, and doesn't fail to sit two hours in church to hear
the same litany for the thousandth time and mutter it in tune with the
others, he may reckon on indulgence in regard to those little
peccadilloes which he occasionally allows himself. Those devils in human
form, the slave owners and slave traders in the Free States of North
America (they should be called the Slave States) are, as a rule,
orthodox, pious Anglicans who would consider it a grave sin to work on
Sundays; and having confidence in this, and their regular attendance at
church, they hope for eternal happiness. The demoralizing tendency of
religion is less problematical than its moral influence. How great and
how certain that moral influence must be to make amends for the
enormities which religions, especially the Christian and Mohammedan
religions, have produced and spread over the earth! Think of the
fanaticism, the endless persecutions, the religious wars, that
sanguinary frenzy of which the ancients had no conception! think of the
crusades, a butchery lasting two hundred years and inexcusable, its war
cry "_It is the will of God_," its object to gain possession of the
grave of one who preached love and sufferance! think of the cruel
expulsion and extermination of the Moors and Jews from Spain! think of
the orgies of blood, the inquisitions, the heretical tribunals, the
bloody and terrible conquests of the Mohammedans in three continents, or
those of Christianity in America, whose inhabitants were for the most
part, and in Cuba entirely, exterminated. According to Las Cases,
Christianity murdered twelve millions in forty years, of course all _in
majorem Dei gloriam_, and for the propagation of the Gospel, and because
what wasn't Christian wasn't even looked upon as human! I have, it is
true, touched upon these matters before; but when in our day, we hear of
_Latest News from the Kingdom of God_ [Footnote: A missionary paper, of
which the 40th annual number appeared in 1856], we shall not be weary of
bringing old news to mind. And above all, don't let us forget India, the
cradle of the human race, or at least of that part of it to which we
belong, where first Mohammedans, and then Christians, were most cruelly
infuriated against the adherents of the original faith of mankind. The
destruction or disfigurement of the ancient temples and idols, a
lamentable, mischievous and barbarous act, still bears witness to the
monotheistic fury of the Mohammedans, carried on from Marmud, the
Ghaznevid of cursed memory, down to Aureng Zeb, the fratricide, whom the
Portuguese Christians have zealously imitated by destruction of temples
and the _auto de fe_ of the inquisition at Goa. Don't let us forget the
chosen people of God, who after they had, by Jehovah's express command,
stolen from their old and trusty friends in Egypt the gold and silver
vessels which had been lent to them, made a murderous and plundering
inroad into "the Promised Land," with the murderer Moses at their head,
to tear it from the rightful owners,--again, by the same Jehovah's
express and repeated commands, showing no mercy, exterminating the
inhabitants, women, children and all (Joshua, ch. 9 and 10). And all
this, simply because they weren't circumcised and didn't know Jehovah,
which was reason enough to justify every enormity against them; just as
for the same reason, in earlier times, the infamous knavery of the
patriarch Jacob and his chosen people against Hamor, King of Shalem, and
his people, is reported to his glory because the people were
unbelievers! (Genesis xxxiii. 18.) Truly, it is the worst side of
religions that the believers of one religion have allowed themselves
every sin again those of another, and with the utmost ruffianism and
cruelty persecuted them; the Mohammedans against the Christians and
Hindoos; the Christians against the Hindoos, Mohammedans, American
natives, Negroes, Jews, heretics, and others.