Of the supernatural,

— We extract from the new work of Mr. Guizot: The Church and Christian society in 1861.

L’église et la société chrétiennes en 1861 — Google Books, the extraordinary chapter concerning the supernatural. It is not, as one might think, a discourse for or against Spiritism, since it does not deal with the new doctrine; but as in the eyes of many people Spiritism is inseparable from the supernatural, which according to some is a superstition and, according to others, a truth, it is interesting to know the opinion of a man of value, like Mr. Guizot. There are in this work observations of incontestable correctness, but, in our opinion, there are also great errors, due to the points of view in which the author places himself. We shall make a thorough examination of it in our next issue. [In what follows.]

— “All the attacks of which Christianity is today the object, however diverse they may be in their nature and in their measure, proceed from one and the same point and tend toward one and the same end: the negation of the supernatural in the destinies of man and of the world, the abolition of the supernatural element in the Christian religion – and in all religions – in its history and in its dogmas.

“Materialists, pantheists, rationalists, skeptics, critics, scholars, some haughtily, others discreetly, all think and speak under the empire of the idea that the world and man, the moral and the physical nature, are governed solely by general, permanent, and necessary laws, whose course no special will has ever come or will ever come to suspend or modify.

“I do not intend here to discuss this question fully, which is the fundamental question of every religion; I wish only to submit to the declared or veiled adversaries of the supernatural two observations or, to put it more exactly, two facts which, in my opinion, decide it.

“It is upon a faith natural to the supernatural, upon an innate instinct of the supernatural, that every religion is founded. I am not referring to every religious idea, but to every positive, practical, powerful, durable, popular religion. In all places, under all climates, in all epochs of History, in all degrees of civilization, man carries within himself this sentiment or, better, this presentiment, that the world he sees, the order within whose bosom he lives, the facts that succeed one another regularly and constantly around him are not everything. In this vast whole, in vain does he make, every day, discoveries and conquests; in vain does he wisely observe and verify the permanent laws that preside over everything: his thought does not enclose itself within this universe surrendered to his science; this spectacle does not suffice for his soul; it casts itself elsewhere; it seeks, it glimpses something else; it aspires to the Universe, to other destinies, and to another master. “Beyond all these heavens the God of the heavens resides,” said Voltaire, and the God who is beyond all the heavens is not personified nature, He is the supernatural in person. It is to Him that religions address themselves; it is to put man in relation with Him that they are founded. Without the instinctive faith of men in the supernatural, without their spontaneous and invincible impulse toward the supernatural, there would be no religion. “Of all the beings of the Earth, the only one that prays is man. Among his moral instincts none is more natural, more universal, more invincible than prayer. The child conducts itself therein with an attentive docility. The old man bends to it as to a refuge against decay and isolation. Prayer rises of itself from the young lips that scarcely babble the name of God, and from the agonizing lips that no longer have the strength to pronounce it. Among all peoples, famous or obscure, civilized or barbarous, one finds at every step acts and formulas of invocation. Everywhere that men live, in certain circumstances, at certain hours, under the empire of certain impressions of the soul, the eyes are lifted, the hands are joined, the knees are bent to implore or to render thanks, to adore or to appease. With rapture or in emotion, publicly or in the intimacy of the heart, it is to prayer that man addresses himself, as a last resort, to fill the void of his soul or to bear the burdens of his destiny; it is in prayer that he seeks, when all is adverse to him, support for his weakness, consolation for his sorrows, hope for his virtue. “No one is unaware of the moral and interior value of prayer, independently of its efficacy with respect to its object. By the simple act of praying, the soul feels relieved, it rises, it calms itself, and it is fortified. Having recourse to God, it experiences that sentiment of a return to health and to repose that takes hold of the body, when it passes from a stormy and heavy environment to a serene and pure atmosphere. God comes to the aid of those who implore Him, before and without their knowing whether He will grant their request.

“Will He grant it to them? What is the exterior and definitive efficacy of prayer? Here is the mystery, the impenetrable mystery of the designs and of the action of God upon each one of us. What we know is that, whether it be a matter of our exterior or interior life, it is not we alone who dispose of it, according to our thought and our own will. All the names we give to this part of our destiny, which does not come from ourselves, such as chance, fortune, star, nature, and fatality, are so many veils cast over our ignorant impiety. When we speak thus, we refuse to see God where He is. Beyond the narrow sphere wherein the power and the action of man are enclosed, it is God who reigns and acts. There is, in the natural and universal act of prayer, a natural and universal faith in this permanent, and ever free, action of God upon man and his destiny: Saint Paul says: “We are workers with God”; workers with God both in the work of the general destinies of Humanity, and in that of our own destiny, present and future. There is what prayer makes us glimpse, in the bond that unites man to God; but there the light stops for us: “The ways of God are not our ways,” we march in them without knowing them. To believe without seeing and to pray without foreseeing the results, here is the condition that God has imposed upon man in this world, for all that surpasses his limits. It is in the consciousness and in the acceptance of this supernatural order that religious faith and life consist. “Thus, Mr. Edmond Scherer is right, when he doubts that “Christian rationalism is or could ever be a religion.” And why did Mr. Jules Simon, who bows before God with so sincere a respect, entitle his book: Natural religion? He should have called it Religious Philosophy. Philosophy pursues and attains some of the great ideas upon which religion is founded; but, by the nature of its processes and by the limits of its domain, it has never founded, nor could it found, a religion. Speaking more precisely, there is no natural religion, for as soon as you abolish the supernatural, religion also disappears.

“Who thinks of denying that this instinctive faith in the supernatural, source of religion, can be and is, also, the source of an infinity of errors and of superstitions which, in their turn, are the source of an infinity of evils? Here, as in everything, it is of the condition of man that good and evil mingle incessantly in his destinies and in his works, as in himself; but, from this incurable mingling it does not follow that our great instincts have no meaning and only deceive us, when they elevate us. Aspiring to this, whatever our deceptions may be, it remains certain that the supernatural is in the natural faith of man and that it is the condition sine qua non, the true object, the very essence of religion.

“Here is a second fact which, I think, deserves all the attention of the adversaries of the supernatural.

“It is recognized and verified by science that our globe was not always in the state in which it finds itself today; that at diverse and indeterminate epochs it underwent revolutions, transformations that altered its face, its physical regime, and its population; that man, in particular, did not always exist and that, in several of the successive states through which this world passed, man could not have existed.

“How did he appear? In what manner and by what power did the human race begin upon the Earth?

“For its origin, there can be only two explanations: either it resulted from the intimate work of the natural forces of matter, or it was the work of a supernatural power, exterior and superior to matter; spontaneous generation or creation: one of these two causes is necessary for the appearance of man upon the Earth.

“But, admitting spontaneous generation, in which I absolutely do not believe, this mode of production could have produced only immature beings, at the first hour and in the first stage of nascent life. I believe that no one has ever said, nor will say, that, by virtue of a spontaneous generation, man, that is, man and woman, the human pair, could have come forth, one day, from the bosom of matter, already formed and grown, in full possession of his stature, of his strength, and of all his faculties, as Greek paganism made Minerva come forth from the brain of Jupiter.

“And yet, it is only under that condition that, appearing for the first time upon the Earth, man could have lived therein, perpetuated himself, and founded the human race. Imagine the first man, being born in the state of early infancy, alive, but inert, devoid of intelligence, powerless, incapable of providing for himself, shivering and moaning, with no mother to hear him and nurse him! For this is precisely the first man that the system of spontaneous generation can give.

“Evidently, the other origin of the human race is the only admissible one, the only possible one. Only the natural fact of creation explains the first appearance of man here upon the Earth.

“Thus, those who would deny and abolish the supernatural would abolish, at the same stroke, every real religion. And it is in vain that they triumph over the supernatural, so often introduced with error into our world and into our history; they are constrained to stop before the supernatural cradle of Humanity, powerless to make man come forth from it without the hand of God.”

Guizot.

OF THE SUPERNATURAL.

(2nd article. – See the issue of December 1861.)

[Review of January 1862.]

In our last issue we published the eloquent and extraordinary chapter of Mr. Guizot, with regard to the supernatural, upon which we proposed to make some critical observations that in no way diminish our admiration for the illustrious and learned writer.

Mr. Guizot believes in the supernatural. On this, as on other points of view, it is important that we come to an understanding as to words. In its proper acceptation, supernatural means that which is above Nature, outside the laws of Nature. The supernatural properly so called is not submitted to laws; it is an exception, a derogation of the laws that govern creation; in a word, it is synonymous with miracle. From the proper sense these two words passed into figurative language, serving to designate everything that is extraordinary, surprising, unusual. It is said of a thing that causes admiration that it is miraculous, as it is said that a great extension is immeasurable, that a great number is incalculable, and that a long duration is eternal, although, strictly speaking, we may measure the one, calculate the other, and foresee a term for the last. For the same reason, that which, at first sight, seems to go beyond the limits of the possible is qualified as supernatural. The common people are always led to take the word literally in that which they do not understand. If by this is meant that which departs from known causes, we are in agreement; but, then, the word no longer has a precise meaning, since that which was supernatural yesterday is no longer so today. How many things, formerly considered as such, has Science not made enter into the domain of natural laws! Whatever progress we may have made, can we boast of knowing all the secrets of God? Has Nature already told us the last word about all things? Daily, do we not have contradictions to that proud pretension? If, then, that which yesterday was supernatural is no longer so today, we may logically infer that the supernatural of today may no longer be so tomorrow. For us, the word supernatural is taken in its most absolute proper sense, that is, to designate any phenomenon contrary to the laws of Nature. The character of the supernatural or miraculous fact is to be exceptional. As soon as it is repeated, it is because it is submitted to a law, known or not, and enters into the general order. If we restrict nature to the material, visible world, it is evident that the things of the invisible world will be supernatural. But the invisible world being, it too, submitted to laws, it seems to us more logical to define Nature as the whole of the works of Creation, governed by the immutable laws of the Divinity. If, as Spiritism demonstrates, the invisible world is one of the forces, one of the powers that react upon matter, it plays an important role in Nature, which is why the Spiritist phenomena, for us, are not supernatural, nor marvelous, nor miraculous. By this one sees that, far from enlarging the circle of the marvelous, Spiritism tends to restrict it and, even, to make it disappear.

We said that Mr. Guizot believes in the supernatural, but in the miraculous sense, which in no way implies the belief in Spirits and in their manifestations. Now, from the fact that, for us, the Spiritist phenomena have nothing abnormal about them, it does not follow that God could not, in certain cases, have derogated from His laws, since He is All-Powerful. Would He have done so? This is not the place to examine the question. For this it would be necessary to discuss, not the problem, but each fact in isolation. Now, placing ourselves from the point of view of Mr. Guizot, that is, of the reality of the miraculous facts, we shall try to combat the consequence that he draws therefrom, namely, that religion is not possible without the supernatural, and, on the contrary, to prove that from his system results the annihilation of religion.

Mr. Guizot starts from the principle that all religions are founded upon the supernatural. This is true if, as such, we understand that which is not understood; but if we go back to the state of human knowledge at the epoch of the founding of all known religions, we shall see how limited was the knowledge of men in astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, physiology, etc. If, in modern times, a good number of phenomena, today perfectly known and explained, passed for marvelous, with all the more reason should it have been so in remote times. Let us add that the figurative, symbolic, and allegorical language, in use among all the peoples of the Orient, lent itself naturally to fictions, whose true meaning ignorance did not permit to discover. Let us add, further, that the founders of religions, men superior to the people and knowing much more than they, had, in order to impress the masses, to surround themselves with a superhuman prestige, which some ambitious men used to exploit credulity. Behold Numa; behold Mohammed and so many others. You will say that they are impostors. So be it! Let us take the religions issued from the Mosaic law: all adopt the creation according to Genesis. Now, will there be, in effect, anything more supernatural than that formation of the Earth, drawn out of nothing, wrenched from chaos, populated by all living beings, men, animals, and plants, all formed and adult, and this in six times twenty-four hours, as by a stroke of magic? Will it not be the most formal derogation of the laws that govern matter and the progression of beings? Certainly God could do it; but did He do it? Only a few years ago this was affirmed as an article of faith; but behold, Science replaces the immense fact of the origin of the world in the order of natural things, proving that everything was realized according to eternal laws. Did religion suffer from no longer having as its basis a fact marvelous par excellence? Incontestably it would have suffered much in its credit had it persisted in denying the evidence, whereas it gained by taking the path of common law. A much less important fact, despite the persecutions to which it gave rise, is Joshua stopping the Sun to prolong the day by two more hours. It does not matter whether it was the Sun or the Earth that stopped: the fact is nonetheless less supernatural for that. It is a derogation of one of the most capital laws, that of the force that drags the worlds along. They thought to escape the difficulty by recognizing that it is the Earth that turns, but they had not taken into account Newton’s apple, the celestial mechanics of Laplace, and the law of gravitation. If the movement of the Earth were suspended, not for two hours, but for a few minutes, the centrifugal force would cease and the Earth would precipitate itself upon the Sun. The equilibrium of the waters on its surface is maintained by the continuity of the movement; this ceasing, everything is thrown into disorder. Now, the history of the world does not mention the least cataclysm at that epoch. We do not contest that God may have favored Joshua, prolonging the brightness of the day. What means would He have employed? We are ignorant of it. Had it been an aurora borealis, a meteor, or some other phenomenon, nothing would have altered the order of things; but assuredly it was not the one taken, during centuries, as an article of faith. That formerly they believed, is very natural; but today this is impossible, unless one renounces Science. Nevertheless, they will say that religion rests upon many other facts, which are neither explained nor explicable. Unexplained, yes; inexplicable is another question. Do we know, perchance, what discoveries and what knowledge the future holds in reserve for us? Do we not already see, under the empire of magnetism, of somnambulism, of Spiritism, reproduced the ecstasies, the visions, the apparitions, the seeing at a distance, the instantaneous cures, the levitations, the oral and other communications, with beings of the invisible world, phenomena known since time immemorial, formerly considered as marvelous and today demonstrated as belonging to the order of natural things, according to the constitutive law of beings? The sacred books are filled with facts qualified as supernatural; since, however, we find them analogous and even more marvelous in all the pagan religions of Antiquity, if the truth of a religion were to depend upon the number and the nature of such facts, we would not very well know which of them would be the most important. As proof of the supernatural Mr. Guizot cites the formation of the first man, who was created adult because, according to him, alone and in the state of infancy he could not have fed himself. But if God made an exception by creating him adult, could He not have made another, by granting the child the means of living, and this without departing from the established order? The animals being anterior to man, could He not have realized, with respect to the first child, the fable of Romulus and Remus?

We say the first child, when we ought to say the first children, since the question of a single stock for the human species is much controverted. In effect, the anthropological laws demonstrate the material impossibility that the posterity of a single man could have, in a few centuries, populated the entire Earth and transformed itself into black, yellow, and red races, for it is demonstrated that these differences are bound to the organic constitution, and not to the climate.

Mr. Guizot sustains a dangerous thesis in affirming that no religion is possible without the supernatural. If he makes the truths of Christianity rest upon the sole basis of the marvelous, he gives it a fragile support, whose stones come loose every day. Let us give it a more solid foundation: the immutable laws of God. This foundation defies time and science, because time and science will come to sanction it. The thesis of Mr. Guizot leads directly to the conclusion that, in a given time, there will be no more religion possible, not even the Christian one, if that which is taken as supernatural is demonstrated to be natural. Is this what he wished to prove? No; but it is the consequence of his argument, and toward it we march with great strides. For, however much one may do, however much one may heap up reasonings, one will not succeed in maintaining the belief that a fact is supernatural, when it has been proven that it is not.

Under this aspect we are much less skeptical than Mr. Guizot, and we say that God is no less worthy of our admiration, of our gratitude, and of our respect for not having derogated from His laws, great, above all, by their immutability, and that there is no need of the supernatural to render Him the worship that is due to Him and, consequently, to have a religion that will find all the fewer unbelievers the more it is, in all points, sanctioned by reason. In our way of seeing, Christianity has nothing to lose by this sanction; it can only gain. If, in the opinion of many, something has prejudiced it, it was precisely the abuse of the marvelous and of the supernatural. Make men see the grandeur and the power of God in all His works; show them His wisdom and His admirable providence, from the germination of the little plant to the mechanism of the Universe: marvels will not be lacking. Substitute in their spirit the idea of a jealous, choleric, vindictive, and implacable God, with that of a sovereignly just, good, and merciful God, who does not condemn to eternal and hopeless torments for temporary faults; let one, from infancy, be nourished by these ideas, which will grow with reason, and you will make of them firmer and more sincere believers than if you lulled them with allegories, imposed literally and which, later repelled, would lead them to doubt everything, and even to total negation. If you wish to maintain religion by the sole prestige of the marvelous, there will be but one means: to keep men in ignorance. See whether that is possible. By dint of showing the action of God only in prodigies and in exceptions, we cease to show it in the marvels that we trample underfoot. Certainly they will object with the miraculous birth of the Christ, which could not be explained by the natural laws, and which is one of the most resounding proofs of His divine character. It is not fitting here to examine this question. But, once more, we do not contest to God the power of derogating from His laws. What we question is the absolute necessity of that derogation for the establishment of any religion whatever.

They will say that magnetism and Spiritism, by reproducing phenomena held to be miraculous, are contrary to the present religion, because they tend to remove from these facts their supernatural character. But, what is to be done, if the facts are real? They will not prevent them, seeing that such facts do not constitute the privilege of one man, but are repeated throughout the whole world. As much could be said of physics, of chemistry, of astronomy, of geology, of meteorology; in a word, of all the sciences. In this regard we will say that the skepticism of many people has no other source than the impossibility, for them, of these exceptional facts. Denying the basis upon which they rest, they deny everything else. Prove to them the possibility and the reality of these facts; reproduce them before their eyes and they will be forced to believe. — But this is to take from the Christ His divine character! — Then you prefer that they believe in nothing rather than believe in something? Then will there be only this means to prove the divinity of the mission of the Christ? Does His character not stand out a hundred times better from the sublimity of His doctrine and from the example He gave of His virtues? If they see that character only in the material acts that He performed, did not others perform similar ones, like Apollonius of Tyana, His contemporary? Why, then, did the Christ surpass him? Because He performed a miracle much greater than transforming water into wine, than feeding four thousand men with five loaves, curing epileptics, restoring sight to the blind, and making the paralytic walk. That miracle is that of having changed the face of the world; it is the revolution operated by the simple word of a man come out of the stable, during three years of preaching, having written nothing, aided only by a few obscure and ignorant fishermen. Here is the true prodigy, the one in which we would have to be blind not to see the hand of God. Let men persuade themselves of this truth, for it is the best manner of converting them into definitive believers. [1]

[See also by the same author:

Méditations sur l’ état actuel de la religion chrétienne — Google Books.]

[2] N. of the T.: First germs of chapter XIII of Genesis: – Characters of miracles – Miracles in the theological sense.