Society And its Purpose
Book 4 - Psychological Laws and the End of Civil Societies
CHAPTER 23
Continuation
723. I realise that a great number of objections will present themselves at this point. It will help, I think, if we pause to examine two which, because of their apparent special difficulty, could make my readers uncertain of the path we are taking.
724. The first objection is this: `According to the most ancient history we have of the human race, and the most constant, universal traditions, the first human beings to inhabit our planet were not left solely to the impressions made upon them by nature. They also received knowledge of, and communicated with, the first Being from whom the universe had originated. But if knowledge of divine things has the power to open an infinite capacity in the human spirit, this capacity must have been present before Christianity.’ The second objection is: `If the infinite capacity of the spirit is opened through knowledge and experience of divine things, those who abandon religious beliefs inevitably restrict the capacity of their desire. They no longer acknowledge anything infinite and, as we know, desire cannot be conceived without its object.’
I will reply to the first objection in this chapter, and to the second in the next.
725. The first objection requires me to examine the degree of development possible to the capacity of spirit in nations that preceded Christianity. What I have to say about this point will, I hope, answer the objection and at the same time throw new light on the way in which the capacity of the human spirit is enlarged, and on the various stages it must experience at different periods in mankind’s existence.
726. Let us grant, therefore, that from the beginning human beings already had knowledge and experience of two kinds of totally distinct beings, that is, of natural beings and of the sovereign Being, the source of all natural beings. From the very beginning, in fact, human desire, finding itself aroused by a twofold stimulus, would have begun to open its capacity in a finite way to finite, natural good, and in an indefinite way to God, whose protection could only be considered as a good. We must not believe, however, that this capacity had already reached the limit of its development.
727. First, the same object is desired at different moments with varying degrees of intensity. The thrust of the capacity, therefore, could always be made more intense. Moreover, the first human beings, considered in the state in which they were found when they began to father succeeding generations, did not have simultaneous knowledge and experience of all natural good. Similarly, we have to believe that their knowledge and perception of the good present for them in their Creator could be increased. We must grant, therefore, a successive development in the capacity of human desire for every natural good and for infinite good. Let us begin with natural good.(318)
728. Human beings first of all perceive real good. Later, they form abstract ideas of good. For the sake of brevity, I shall use the phrase, `faculty of thought’, to indicate that group of powers of the human spirit which refers to real beings and real good;(319) The phrase, `faculty of abstraction’, indicates the other group of powers referring to abstract ideas, that is, to ideal, generic and incomplete beings. As long as human beings have not reached the degree of development in which they have formed abstract, generic ideas of good, their desires can have as guide only the faculty of thought, which is the first to spring into activity. This faculty presents only real objects to human desire, as we said, and guides it to find them only through the full ideas of such objects. This is the first stage in human capacity. As long as no further development takes place, human beings are easily contented. They can only desire real, attainable things. They have not yet manufactured for themselves chimerical objects, the later result of the use of their faculty of abstraction.
729. The further back we go into the ancient memories of humanity, the more we find that the eudaimonological state of human beings approaches the first period during which only the faculty of thought is brought into movement, and spirits are seen to be for the most part placid and content. We have to note carefully that in this period people do not give an ideal value to physical objects. Increasing the value of physical objects by adding ideal values to them requires the prior formation of many abstractions.(320)
Physical objects are considered for what they are, and nothing more; people do not go searching madly to satisfy their spiritual needs by bodily good, as they would later. Bodily good has the power to really satisfy corporal needs; nothing more is claimed for it during this early period when it satisfies people. This explains the nature of extremely simple golden ages during which there was no artificial wealth; everything was natural. People, I have to repeat, did not want to satiate with physical good the voracity of spirit aspiring to things outside the confines of reality.
730. The memory of this first contentment, formed of few, simple objects, and the later experience of something similar by temperate persons, suggested the following philosophical teaching: `nature contents itself with little; true wealth is poverty adjusted in accord with natural laws.’(321) The faculty of abstraction, however, soon began its activity. At this point, the human will found itself faced with both the real good presented to it by nature and merely abstract good; the second stage of human capacity, immensely broadened through the formation of ideal, abstract objects, now began.
731. This is also the beginning of mankind’s fatal deception, and of the self-induced, mortal anguish that results from a search for the impossible. Human beings now begin to take their chimerical ideas for realities; they give flesh to abstractions; they now decide to pursue not that which physical beings can truly provide, but all the good human thought has succeeded in producing in an ideal formed by the spirit’s power of passing from the incomplete to the complete, not only in the order of reality but also in the order of ideas.(322) As soon as we have come to desire some good by means of a concept aroused through intellectual make-belief,(323) we want to realise it, that is, we want to experience it in reality.
With this in view, we become unjust towards things around us by requiring from them the satisfaction of our desire, and claiming that they should fulfil our immense capacity. But the natural things surrounding us cannot do this; they do not possess in themselves the ideal good that is asked of them. Hence our lack of tranquillity, our restlessness, the irritation caused by our passions, the repeated attempts to find in physical good the happiness that is absolutely not there to be found. Our experiences, faced with cold reality, shake our ardent illusions for an instant, but are incapable of preventing their immediate resurgence in more terrible, ferocious forms. This is certainly what occurred in people who lived before the Christian epoch, but does it follow that the capacity of these people was truly broadened to the infinite?
732. I have to reply, as always, that the breadth of this capacity could never exceed the idea of the good to which it referred. It is certain, however, that the ideal of good which human beings make for themselves is never equally perfect, but only an approximation that accords with the varying development of our intellective faculties and the varying suitability of materials available for constructing the ideal. It is clear also that the greatest plausible good imaginable to human beings in material states is far less than that which a cultured, spiritual person could imagine and construct for himself.
Moreover, human beings acquire prejudices about good and form arbitrary opinions which largely modify the idea of happiness. By introducing heterogeneous elements repugnant to the idea, they prevent it from reaching perfection. It is true that every abstract idea contains something unlimited. Consequently, an individual who has reached something abstract has reached what is unlimited. This does not prove, however, that the abstract idea of happiness attained by antiquity was completely true and perfect, and contained all the elements of an absolute good. What we said in the previous chapter proves the contrary; all the efforts of philosophers were insufficient to provide a truly exact and sufficiently complete concept of human happiness. Only Christianity has done this. The development of the intellective powers, therefore, and of the capacities of the human spirit corresponding to them was infinitely less, before Christ, than that produced in the world after the appearance of Christianity.
733. We can go further than this, however, and point to the waywardness, obscurantism and diminution of the understanding in ancient nations as it threatened to die out under the weight of sensual corruption. Clearly, with sensuality prevailing to such terrible effect, the objects considered best would finally be those pertaining to corporeal pleasure. What other ideal of good could humanity fabricate with such materials alone or with other available materials, if humanity considered corporeal good as best of all? The formation of an ideal of good is a sublime work of the understanding. How could this be carried out successfully by people whose neglect or mockery of intellective things meant that their life was more animal than human? The ever-growing prevalence of the spirit of sense over the spirit of intelligence was, on the one hand, a wound inflicted on capacity of spirit by the sharp edge of passion, which intensified and inflamed the capacity; on the other hand, it restricted rather than enlarged the capacity precisely because it continually diminished its object.
734. The objection will be pressed, however: religion continued in the world; consequently ideas about the divinity were never lacking. In other words, the infinite object of human desire did not diminish in human understanding. I grant this to a certain extent. Elsewhere, I noted yet another profound and extremely solemn, constant fact in the whole history of humanity: always and everywhere human beings had need of God. This need is inherent to human nature and independent of the will, so that whatever force human beings have used, they have never been able to free themselves from their mysterious need of religious beliefs — even involuntarily, they have been unable to do without recourse to the divine things which they have willingly abandoned and denied.
When the first human beings lost the knowledge of God through their wayward heart and the abuse of their senses, they soon turned to idolatry, at first sight an apparently inexplicable fact. They claimed to create of themselves the divinity they lacked, the divinity of which they could not remain deprived. Driven by a fury similar to insanity and madness, they divinised everything — all the beings, good and bad, small and great, ridiculous and powerful which they encountered in nature. There was no limit to the idols created by their delirious, corrupt imagination; they made idols of their faculties, their passions, their virtues and vices, themselves and the universe. As impious people stripped God of his nature and denied him, they fell into the reprehensible contradiction of bestowing the divine nature upon themselves and thus proving how impossible it was to prescind from the divinity.(324)
This very important fact shows clearly, from the first origins of our race, the presence in the human heart of an open capacity of desire which aspires to divine things. At the same time, it shows again that this capacity, deprived of its object, leaves human beings restless, unhappy and in continual movement, searching vainly for something they never find. The movement drawing mankind to create imaginary divinities ended by connecting extreme depravation of morals to the worship of God. Consequently, as civil society perished in sensual corruption, religion also perished and gave way to the despairing, monstrous impiety that made the final period of the Roman empire so shameful.
735. There is no difficulty in granting all this, but can we therefore infer that the capacity of the human heart before Christianity had already been expanded to the infinite degree to which it later expanded? To establish such a paradox, it would be necessary to demonstrate two impossible things (impossible because they are obviously false): 1. the idea people had of God before the coming of Christ was as perfect as that which they had after the preaching of the Gospel; 2. this idea which mankind had of the divine nature contained the concept of God as infinite, absolute good.
736. Surely it is obvious that the tremendous fact of idolatry, found in all the nations of the world, proves the extreme imperfection of knowledge of the divine nature in human minds? Polytheism excludes a truly infinite God precisely because a true infinite excludes all multiplicity and requires perfect unity of nature. Let us grant that there was a notion of a supreme, good God above all the gods. It does not follow that the concept of this God provided the mind with an infinite nature which must, in every case, be unique. All that the human mind possessed was the concept of some indefinite greatness which surpassed the limit of known things, nothing more.
Philosophers themselves were unable to bring together the true concept of the divinity; often they assembled it from the perfections proper to natural things which they aggrandised without realising that the divine nature possesses nothing similar to contingent nature. The greatest effort made by philosophers in their endeavour to fabricate the idea of God seems to be that of Socrates and Plato. Yet Socrates, who according to the Oracle was the wisest man who ever lived, and according to Plato the most just, died simply for the sake of a God-idea. Certainly, passing from the concept of God-necessity to that of God-idea did entail progress. Nevertheless, the Gentiles never took the third step which would have led them from God-idea to God-holiness.
737. People were also ignorant of the fact that the divine nature constituted an infinite good which alone could bring bliss to human beings. Gifts and graces were indeed awaited from the gods, but no one ever thought that the divinity would give itself to mankind, or that human beings could possess and enjoy the divine nature given to them in an ineffable manner totally transcending all that the imagination could visualise. It was therefore impossible that the concept of God possessed by pagan nations could have caused the capacity of the human heart to expand to the breadth unfolded by the Good News. The Gospel communicated to human beings the concept and the much more important hidden experience of a truly infinite, holy and beatifying God.
738. The objection may be pressed by insisting that the Hebrews at least had the true concept and some kind of experience of the divine nature. Needless to say, I do not deny that there was in the Hebrew Church a true concept of God and an experience proportioned to that concept. I want to insist, however, that the Hebrew concept of God, although true, was nevertheless extremely imperfect when compared with that received by Christians through Gospel teaching. I pass over the lack of an exact, expressed concept of God amongst the mass of the Hebrew people who could only refer to the concept possessed by a few great names amongst the nation. This would explain why we read of the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob; it is a reference to the true concept, held by these Patriarchs, of the divine nature, but too difficult for the people’s understanding. Hence the people’s almost incredible tendency to idolatry, and the need of prodigies and punishment to protect them from such a gross error. I will mention, however, the true, pure concept which the ancient Church always had of God, and insist that finally it is only a seed in comparison with the great concept possessed by the new Church.
739. In the ancient writings, God Almighty appears as an extremely powerful, just sovereign of the world he has created, One who rewards good and punishes evil. The good promised to those who observe his law is however temporal good; spiritual good, although not totally lacking, was almost obscured by the shadow of temporal good. `I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit’, says the God of the old law.(325) These are the ancient promises. It is true that he also promises to give himself to the Hebrews, but the promise is obscure: `And I will make my abode among you, and my soul shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you shall be my people. I am the Lord your God, who brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that you should not be their slaves; and I have broken the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect.’(326) Christians accept these words in a spiritual sense and see in them an allegory of the graces bestowed upon the soul. Their literal, material sense — the sense in which they were understood by the Hebrews — mentions only the temporal benefits received from God when he freed them from slavery; this meaning shows us God Almighty as a king who leads his people and protects them from their enemies.(327)
740. Most of what we read in the old Scripture is hidden; it is reserved for the time of the Messiah. Without wanting to uphold (with Warburton and others) that Moses never speaks of the immortality of the soul and of the future life in his books (I think this is false), we can however affirm with certainty that the ancient scrolls do not present us with a clear, distinct vision of God which must form the bliss reserved for mankind in the other life.(328) Enabling us to know God in his fullness as our Beatifier was reserved for the great Prophet, the new Legislator, the Messiah.
For the same reason, it was the Messiah’s task to form true adorers who would worship the Father in spirit and in truth.(329) True worshippers, however, cannot be such unless they perceive the object of their bliss. Again for the same reason the ancient scrolls describe in a very obscure manner the state of souls separated from bodies. When there is a question of the reward awaiting these souls, we find that mention is made of the resurrection (always the hope of antiquity), not of the divine vision.(330) In fact, antiquity certainly did not lack hope in a resurrection, that is, of a reunion of the soul with its body, and consequently of a happy life enjoyed after the resurrection by the just. But they had no idea how the soul, separated from the body, could live blissfully. In fact, the bliss of souls separated from their bodies is entirely the work of the Messiah who had to operate a kind of resurrection for the souls of antiquity which lay as it were asleep in limbo. He does the same for the souls of the just as they go on dying.(331)
741. The imperfection with which the Hebrews knew God as the object of bliss explains why the capacity of their desire was infinitely less broad than that of Christians. Having received the holy Spirit, Christians come to know clearly and to feel how the soul finds its unique bliss even separated from the body by adhering, through the union of an ineffable communication called vision, to the essential Being from whom all other beings take their origin. This Being is the principle of all reality, ideality and sanctity. This sublime teaching — from the height of which human beings see the universe as smaller than a grain of dust — this supernatural belief is the cause of the infinite capacity and infinite activity of Christian generations.
Notes
(318) The successive broadening of human capacity relative to natural good has been explained in AMS, 612 ss.
(319) The faculty of thought contains: 1. intellective perception, through which the human being puts himself in communication with real beings; 2. the specific idea of things, especially the full idea, as we have called it, which shows us something furnished with all its knowable qualities, although still within the order of possibilities (Cf. what I have said about the nature of these full ideas in OT, 518, 646–659). The faculty of thought does not contain persuasion amongst its constitutive powers. Persuasion is the activity with which the spirit affirms that a thing exists; it can be truthful or fallacious. When we affirm irrationally that something exists, we activate intellective creation, which is a function of persuasion (Cf. the Synoptic Schema of the Faculties of the Human Spirit, AMS, pp. 414–415). The faculty of thought never makes a mistake because there can be no error in our intellective perception of real things, nor in our direct formation of the specific ideas of real things (CE).
(320) This explains why spiritual love, which has had such a tender effect on Christian literature, seems unknown to pagan letters.
(321) Cf. Sen. Ep. 27. This first period, in which the will has no other object than the real or at least determined things presented to it by the faculty of thought must be divided into two lesser periods: that in which sense and understanding work in perfect harmony and seem a single power, and that in which the understanding separates itself from sense and works in opposition to it (Cf. AMS, 612–635).
It is not in fact necessary for the human being to act in accordance with the dictates of the understanding in order that the understanding begin to separate itself from sense; the human being does not have to forsake the invitations of feeling which urge him to rebel against the understanding. It is sufficient to have formed a judgment opposed to the sensuous instinct, a judgment declaring that a certain pleasure must be avoided or some pain must be endured, even if the will does not conform its operation to this intellectual dictate. The formation of such a judgment takes place as soon as the sense invites human beings to anything opposed to the rules of utility, decency or decorum known by the understanding. By this fact alone, the understanding and the sense have already separated and taken opposite different directions. Remorse is a sign of this.
(322) Cf. OT, 649–643.
(323) I call `intellectual make-belief' (fictio intellectualis) the function of the intellect with which the reason discovers the types and archetypes of things.
(324) Cf. Frammenti d'una Storia dell'Empietà (Milan, Pogliani, 1834), where I have analysed at length this extraordinary fact and its causes.
(325) Lev 26: [4].
(326) Lev 26: [11–13].
(327) Almighty God is represented in the Scriptures by an angel who precedes and guides the Hebrew people. This further distances the thought of a God who beatifies.
(328) We find the belief well rooted in the Hebrews that the sight of God would bring death: `No one who sees God will live.' It was the `terrible God' who revealed himself; the lovableness of this terrible God would be revealed in its fullness only at the time of the Messiah.
(329) `I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ); when he comes, he will show us all things' (Jn 4: [25]).
(330) For example, in the second book of Maccabees, c. 12, Juda offers sacrifices for the dead. His reason for doing this is hope in the resurrection: `For if he were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead.' All the hope the Hebrews had was concerned with the good that the just would enjoy after the resurrection of the body.
(331) Hence the Messiah himself said: `I am the resurrection and the life' and insisted that the one who `lives [believes] in me, though he die, shall live' (Jn 11: [25]). This is Jesus' way of speaking about the effect of the separation of the soul from the body. It would fall into a state similar to that of death, that is, into a kind of inaction, if Christ did not revivify it in some wonderful way.