THE MOVEMENT OF ANTITHEISTIC HUMANISM IN EUROPEAN THOUGHT

AND ITS EFFECT ON MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN OUR TIME

Sometime during the 1570s Montaigne was reading the works of Sextus Empiricus. The writer was one of the princpal historians of Rome. Montaigne saw in the chaos of the last years of the Roman Empire an image of his own times of religiously inspired violence and civil disorder.

The thought of the Roman historian became his own. It was a doctrine called equipollence. It held that all men want peace, but they live in a state of continual warfare because of the claim made by some men to know what is objectively true. It would seem to follow that if each man could argue both sides of any issue equally well, the cause of war would cease, and men could live in peace. The greatest virtue, in this vision of human affairs, would then be toleration, and the greatest vice would be to hold anything as certainly true.

Montaigne's assumption was that we can know only our own subjective perception of reality, not real being as it is outside of our minds. Therefore there can be no proof of God's existence, nor proof of any order of moral absolutes. All is relative to our subjective perceptions, or to the subjective perception of the collectivity. The question of the existence of God is merely a matter of personal opinion. And in the moral order, there is no good or evil, but thinking makes it so.

Yet Montaigne (a believing and practicing Catholic) held that we have a practical need for belief in God, even though we are not able to prove, intellectually, the existence of such a being. Therefore he combines a doctrine of theological fideism, which is the idea that man can come to the truth only be the act of religious faith, and philosophical scepticism accepting the idea that man cannot come to judgments that are either true or false. He says: "Natural reason is incompetent in attaining strict knowledge about reality because it is totally dependent upon the senses, which always distort the materials they receive from the world outside of ourselves. Since the senses reveal nothing reliable about objects but only about our private impressions, reason and all its pretended demonstrations are also held captive within the human subject."

The devotees of reason and of religious faith had long disputed with each other in the centers of European thought (e.g. the university of Paris, and Oxford) this question of whether on not the human mind was capable of truth, on the one hand, or whether revelation by God through the holy scriptures is, indeed, the only reliable sourse of truth for mankind.

It was the fideists at the University of Paris in the 13th century that demanded that the works of Aristotle, the most rational of the Greeks, be condemned as threatening the Christian faith. At the same time and place rationalists were arguing that the act of religious faith was proper to the unenlightened and ignorant, and that in direct proportion to a person's enlightenment, religious faith should be left behind. It was Aquinas who attempted to resolve the dispute, by accepting the testimony of both reason and faith.

Yet the argument continues down to our own time. There are places in our contemporary society where the intellectual life is presented to simple people as the tool of Satan. And there are places where the appeal to a revealed religion as a source of truth is flatly rejected as superstitious rot. In many academic circles the matter of religious belief is considered acceptable for only the most simple and ignorant of persons.

As a matter of fact several generations of European intellectuals have thought the very idea of God to be the the single greatest obstacle to mankind's pursuit of truth, freedom and progress. Frequently modern man is presented with only the two mutually exclusive options of either accepting God's revelation of Himself, or of rejecting religious belief in the name of reason. It is, very frequently, simply presumed that it is impossible to live both the life of faith, and the life of reason, simultaneously.

Bayle (1647-1706) says: "One must necessarily choose between philosophy and the Gospel. If you wish to believe only that which is evident and in conformity with the common notions, take philosophy and leave Christianity. If you wish to believe the incomprehensible mysteries of religion, take Christianity and leave philoosophy. For one cannot possess evidence and incomprehensibility together. the Christian faith implies the obligation to submit oneself to the authority of God and to believe humbly the mysteries which it has pleased Him to reveal to us; however inconceivable they may be and however impossible they may appear to our reason. Let us say also that the most precious faith is that which on the divine testimony, embraces the truths most opposed to reason.

With Voltaire (1694-1778) we have moved up almost to the time of the French Revolution. He teaches a doctrine of scientific theism. Being absolutely opposed to any supernatural revelation and yet opposed to any reduction of his convictions into an atheistic naturalism, he held that god is a useful concept and is excused from evil because creation is internally determined. He says: "The great object, the great interest, it seems to me, is not in arguing metaphysically, but in weighing whether one must, for the common good of us other miserable and thinking animals, admit a rewarding and punsihing god, who serves us both as restraint and as consolation, or rejects this idea in abanonding ourselves to our calamities without hope and our crimes without remorse."

It seems that this mode of thought implies that the concept of God (n.b. not the reality of Dod, but the conept) is useful to man, and that with this conception we have already begun the process of thinking of the reality of God as irrelevant, and divinizing man. It will be of profit for you to follow this last thought through.

From Voltaire, we go on to the Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789), who goes much further than Voltaire. He considers himself to be the personal enemy of God. (I believe that he would more properly state that he is the enemy of the idea of God). He believes that only fools and cowards continue to believe.

He holds that the idea of God proceeds from an ignorant man's fear of natural calamities. Being powerless to control these destructive forces of nature, he longs for a power that will assure him of protection against them. He draws the conclusion from this reflection that God, as a really existing, all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving being, does not exist. The idea is simply a product of the human mind. Driven by fear, man

projects into existence within his own mind, this being whom he calls God.

Consequently man's prayers and sacrifices to this Being becomes one of the way that human beings have of dealing with the threats presented in their daily lives.

Shortly after the turn of the century Feuerbach will be calling this process whereby men, using their imaginations, and being driven by fear into a belief in a benevolent supreme being, Psycho-Genesis. The real, for d'Holbach, is the material totality of matter and motion. Modern Western materialism has begun, and will continue to be a major force in the culture up to the present day.

About this time many of the masters of European thought begin the long process of the divinization of man as a replacement for the Judeo-Christian God. This process will have a profound effect on the gradual rejection of the traditional moral value system that had been in place for centuries in the West.

Almost all of the atheistic-humanists agree on a set of tenets regarding man. These can be stated as follows: 1.- There is a natural equality of human intelligence. 2.- There exists a unilinear movement of progress, reason and industry in an upward mode, and it proceeds inexobably in a mechanistic universe. 3.- Man is naturally good. Evil comes from the societal structures and influences that corrupt him. Therefore man's redemption must come from man and must involve structural revolution.

4.- Since man's participation in evil is by reason of ignorance, education is thought of as a panacea. 5.- The contemplative order is useless, and therefore without value.

The stage is now set for the full flowering of an antitheistic humanism that is absolute, positive and constructive. The 19th century philosophy on the continent will interpret, integrate and give theoretical basis for such antitheistic humanism. We will note this process in the doctrines of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Comte and Freud. These have several convictions in common. They all see an absolute atheism as a liberating doctrine. They are all humanists, and they all see the Christian ideal as a yoke place upon mankind and limiting his freedom. From this time on, in the history of the West, the growing rejection of traditional morality will take place, almost without exception, in the name of freedom.

This idea of freedom, being one of the most precious of all the ideas of Western Civilization, becomes proportionately dangerous when falsely interpreted.

As has been mentioned, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), uses the process he calls psychogenesis to explain the existence of the idea of god in the minds of men, and to argue to the objective non-existence of the same being. He says: "Gods are man's wishes in corporal form. The miseries of actual existence lead man to yearn after a more perfect condition as an ideal essence, and finally, to objectify that essence as an independent infinite God." (THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY, 1841)

Some now deem him an uncrowned prince or unsung prophet of the twentieth century. Those who have felt his impact include Nietzsche, Troeltsch, Scheler, Freud, Berdyaev, Heidegger, Sartre, and contemporary existentialists.

To his own age Feuerbach seemed a Prometheus. The publication of THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY stamped him a Titan who dared to rob the Gods of their treasured secrets. In the eyes of the young Hegelians at the University of Berlin, of whom Marx was one, Feuerbach appeared to have demolished the entrenched orthodoxies and to have prepared the way for the recovery by man of his rightful heritage and of his "alienated essence."

For Feuerbach, the consequence of this psycho-genesis of the idea of God, is a profound alienation of man from his own essence. According to him, this process forces man to attribute goodness to God alone, while attributing sin and evil to man himself. God is love, man is filled with envy and hatred. Self-loathing is the primary fruit of traditional religions of the West.

He says: "Wisdom, will, justice, and love, are so many infinite attributes which constitute man's own being and which nevertheless affect him as if it were another being. Thus he spontaneously projects them beyond himself and objectifies them in a fantastic form, the pure product of his imagination to which he gives the name of God." (ibi.) Again, he says: "The poor man possesses a rich God, or, to be more accurate, he impoverishes himself by enriching his God, in filling whom he empties himself. He affirms in God what he denies in himself. . .Religion is thus transformed into a vampire which feeds upon the substance of mankind, its flesh, and its blood." (ibi.)

This thought leads loghically to the divinization of man. "It is the essence of man that is the supreme being. If the divinity of nature is the basis of all religions, including Christianity, the divinity of man is its final state and aim. The turning point of history will be the moment when man becomes aware that the only god of man is man himself. Homo homini deus est."

Finally he says: "The valid meaning for religion is to devote oneself to the improvement of interpersonal relations of I and Thou among men, based on the exclusively immanent motive of mutual love and sharing in the same essential nature." Thus the practice of religion comes to have nothing to do with any being other than man himself.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) starts by accepting the conclusions of his teacher Feuerbach as a given. The revolt that Marx was to call men to, was a moral revolt against the Hegelian endorsement of power and the so-called Christian world that accepted it.

For Hegel, philosophy was to mirror all that was victorious, imperial, and sure of itself in the period following the French Revolution. It was the Golden Age of Science, capitalism, and nationalism. There was an absolute self-confidence in order and the State, and this self-confidence was guarenteed in heaven by God and by the armies on earth. Maritain says: "No one succeeded better than Hegel in inducing the sleep of the just in the powerful and prosperous who might be tormented by a vague anxiety concerning evil done or consented to." (MORAL PHILOSOPHY, 1960.)

For Hegel the whole of reality evolves in a dialectical movement from thesis, to antithesis, to synthesis, etc. The movement is inexorable, and progressive of its very nature. The failures and tragedies of mankind are but blibs in the upward movement. They are accidental in themselves, but the occasions of further progress. There is no cause for weeping!

The Hegelian man lives up in a state of perfect self-confidence, armed and ready for combat in the actually existing order of things, which will perish tomorrow and be succeeded by another order and then another, all equally blessed by God in their turn, up to the final order to which man will accede when History shall be accomplished. Progress becomes the new god of the West, and all suffering can be overlooked because it is nothing but the occasion of greater progress.

Marx takes his dialectic from Hegel and combines it with the materialism of Feuerbach. Christianity was seen by him as an ineffectual "ought to be" incapable of thrusting itself into being. He says: "When experience teaches that in 1800 years this love has not worked, that it was not able to transform social conditions, to establish its own kingdom, then surely it clearly follows that this love which could not conquer hate does not offer the vigorous energy necessary for social reforms. This love wastes itself in sentimental phrases which cannot do away with any real, factual conditions: it lulls men to sleep by feeding them lukewarm sentimental pap."

The lukewarm sentimental pap of which he speaks was the speciality of the domesticated religion of the Hegelian-Christian State. Consider, for example, the dissertation of the Rev. J. Townsend ON THE POOR LAWS, BY A WELL-WISHER OF MANIIND (1817): "We will always need the stimulus of hunger in the lower classes as a providential disposition necessary to the social order."

Marx, from resentment against this Hegelian-Christian State, chooses to make an act of atheistic faith in the non-existence of this Hegelian God.

The forces of revolution were fierce in this period, and 1848 has been called year of Revolution. To overcome anarchy and political revolution, especially as these are the result of an anarchy of philosophical thought, a science of society must be built upon a scientifically orientated philosophy. This philosophy Auguste Comte (1798-1857) called Positivism. By this he means a philosophy that is to observe measureable realities, and thus be concerned with material, and corporeal facts expressible in mathematical formulas as these allow us to predict and manipulate the interactions of the material order. With this thought comes the doctrine of PROGRESS, as a necessary and irreversible process. Reason and positive observation inevitably replace metaphysical and theological thought. Egoism gradually and inevitably gives way to altruism. He sees the individual personal good as opposed to the common good.

Comte saw Positivism as the world-vision that would come to replace Christianity in the mind of Western man. He says: "I am convinced that before the year 1860 I shall be preaching Positivism at Notre Dame as the only real and complete religion. It is through monotheism (which he considered to be the malady of the West) that the first germs of metaphysical anarchy developed, causing violent disturbances in society and in the mind. It encourages the most dangerous fanaticism."

Comte teaches that having reached its final state of rational positivity the human mind abandons its quest of the absolute. Positivists do not affirm or deny the existence of God because the whole question is without meaning. By driving out all metaphysical abstraction as well as all theological figments of human imagination, we proclaim the hopeless ineffectiveness of the reign of God. That reign was only a regency corresponding to the long minority of mankind. Now that mankind is grownup, the only absolute principle that is real shines forth in all its brilliance, ie.. Everything is relative. God has gone, unquestionably and forever.

Humanity will replace the dismissed god. "Positivism supplies an object for that urge to worship which is at the heart of our nature. It concentrates our feelings, our thoughts and our actions around Humanity, the one truly great Being of which we are wittingly the necessary members. Thus Humanity is finally substituted for God, and, if its cult cannot be really systematised until God has been elimninated, his elimination will at last become a complete certainty. One day, in Notre Dame de Paris, turned into the great temple of the West, the statue of Humanity will have as it pedestal the altar of God, of the vanquished God who has become its footstool. In Humanity we live and move qand have our being."

As with so much of the thought of the 19th century, the nobility of the individual person is absorbed into the abstraction Humanity, and in the name of that abstraction, personalism is dismissed a vicious egoism.

Comte writes: "Man is man only through society. The human functions of intelligence and morality are essentially social things. In other words, the human species must be considered an immense organism resulting from the social consensus and growing through history, into a single immense individual. The human species forms a higher collective unity, an undivided whole. the individual is elevated to human quality be participating in it. Man is man only by his participation in humanity as a social whole and universal subject. The immense organism in question will be transformed into an object of love and adoration. Humanity is far from being perfect, she is not eternal. One day she will end like the planet on which she lives. But she is the noblest thing in the world. We are born and live through humanity. We must love her more than ourselves. We are born in order to serve her. The necessary basis of human order is the entire subordination of man to Humanity."

Finally, in this analysis of an antitheistic humanism developed in the minds of several great thinkers during the 19th century, we come to the thought of Fredrich Neitzsche (1844-1900).

"I regard Christianity as the most fatal and seductive lie that has ever yet existed. . .It is appalling that a small group of wretched outcasts who clustered around Jesus should imagine that the morality of paltry people to be the measure of all things. . . The least qualified people in the New Testament have their say in its pages in regard to the greatest problems of existence.

Nature's injunction is to hate your enemy. . .Christianity commands us to love our enemy. . .All the vital energies of the strong are diluted by routing men's thinking toward God. . . Among men there is always a surplus of defective,diseased, degenerating, infirm, and necessarily suffering individuals. . . .These are the failures which the Judeo-Christian religions seek to keep alive and preseve. . .Christianity succeeded in inverting all love of the earthly and of the supremacy over the earth into hatred of the earth and of earthy things.

It is a deplorable story. . .man seeks a principle in the name of which he can despise man. . .He invents another world in order to be able to slander and besmirch this one. . .In actual fact he never grasps anything but nothingness and makes of that nothingness a God, a Truth, called upon to judge and condemn this present existence. . .Faith in God, especially as inculcated by Christianity, has served to tame man. What is necessary is to raise him by rooting out that faith, so as to enable him in the end to raise himself. Come then, let the death of God be boldly proclaimed. . .It is our preference that decides against Christianity not argument. . .If God is dead, it is we who have killed him. We are the assassins of God. . .This immense happening is still on the way. . .It will take hundreds of years for the shadow of the dead god to disappear from the walls of the cave in which the great mass of human beings vegetated."

Paul Johnson, in his book MODERNA TIMES (1983), writes: "Nietzsche saw God not as an invention but as a casualty, and his demise was in some important sense an historical event, which would have dramatic consequences. He wrote in 1886: 'The greatest event of recent times - that 'God is dead', that the belief in the Christian God is no longer tenable - is beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.' Among the advanced races, the decline and ultiamately the collapse of the religious impulse would leave a huge vacuum. The history of modern times is in great part the history of how that vacuum has been filled. Nietzsche rightly perceived that the most likely candidate would be what he called the 'Will to Power', which offered a far more comprehensive and in the end more plausible explanation of human behaviour than either Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology. Those who had once filled the ranks of the totalitarian clergy would become totalitarian politicians. And, above all, the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by any religious sanctions whatever, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind. The end of the old order, with an unguided world adrift in a relativistic universe, was a summons to such gangster statesmen to emerge. They were not slow to make their appearance."(1)1

Nietzsche died in 1900, but our culture's rejection of its own moral traditions did not cease with his death. Some would say that it is only with the coming of the 20th century that the ideas outlined above come to bear their destructive fruit. Paul Johnson dates the birth of modernity in the year 1920. He points out that on 29th May, 1920, off the African island of Principe, and at Sobral in Brazil, a group of scientist verified Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity which rejects any idea of absolute motion.

Johnson says: "Einstein's theory, and Eddington's much publicized expediton to test it, aroused enormous interest throughout the world in 1919. No exercise in scientific verification, before or since, has ever attracted so many headlines or become a topic of universal conversation. The tension mounted steadily between June and the actual announcement at a packed meeting of the Royal Society in London in September that the theory had been confirmed. To A. N. Whitehead, who was present, it was like a Greek drama. . . . From that moment onward, Einstein was a global hero, in demand at every great university in the world, mobbed wherever he went, his wistful features familiar to hundreds of millions, the archetype of the absracted natural philosopher. The impact of his theory was immediate, and cumulatively immeasurable. . . . At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism. . . .No one was more distressed than Einstein by this public misapprehension. He was bewildered by the relentless publicity and error which his work seemed to promote. He wrote to his colleague Max Born on 9 September 1920: 'Like the man in the fairy-tale who turned everything he touched into gold, so with me everything turns into a fuss in the newspapers.' Einstein was not a practicing Jew, but he acknowledged a God. He believed passionately in absolute standards of right and wrong. . . .He lived to see moral relativism, to him a disease, become a social pandemic, just as he lived to see his fatal equation bring into existence nuclear warfare. There were times, he said at the end of his life, when he wished he had been a simple watchmaker. . . .The public response to relativity was one of the principal formative influences on the course of twentieth-century history. It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture."(2)1

The impact of relativity was especially powerful because it virtually coincided with the public reception of Freudianism. THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS had been published in 1900. In the Freudian analysis, the personal conscience, which stood at the very heart of the Judeo-Christian ethic, and was the principal engine of individualistic achievement, was dismissed as a mere safety-device, collectively created, to protect civilized order from the fearful aggressiveness of human beings. Freudianism was many things, but if it had an essence it was the description of guilt. 'The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is guilt. . . .Civilization obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.' Feelings of guilt were thus a sign not of vice, but of virtue. But persoanl guilt-feelings were an illusion to be dispelled. None of us is individually guilty; we were all guilty.

What is seldom pointed out is the fact that this rejection of the Jewish and Christian moral vision, has been applied to the brilliant moral synthesis of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. It is only recently with the work of such men a Josef Peiper, and Alasdair MacIntyre, that the classical ethical synthesis of the four moral virtues of temperance, fortitude, justice and prudence, has been brought forward to answer the basic tenets of moral scepticism in any of its modern formulations.

Today, in the midst of the closing of the American mind to moral truth, there seems to be an insistance that we return to a rational investigation of how human being ought to live their lives if they are to come fully alive. There is, presently, a clamor asking for medical ethics, bio-medical ethics, legal ethics, business ethics, etc.

Having accepted, perhaps only semiconsciously, the idea that there is no good or evil, but that the thinking of the individual or of the collectivity, makes it so, it becomes logically impossible to answer that clamor by proposing a rational vision of what a life wisely lived demands.

But this is precisely what we hope to do in philosophy 105. We are going to go back to the Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle, and the Summa Theologicae of Aquinas, to find and elaborate the rational ideal of the Four Virtues, as the four pivotal strengths of character upon which a wise living of a person's life is founded.

CONCLUSION

The reason for this brief treatment of the antitheism so powerfully present in 19th century philosophy, is that it makes the erosion of the moral traditions of our civilization, especially in their Jewish and Christian roots,

more comprehensible. This should make it understandable that many, many students, perhaps even the majority, are offended by any claim of either moral truth or falsehood. In describing his students at the University of Chicago, Allen Bloom (THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, 1987), says: "They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. . .Openness - and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings - is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past, men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right, rather it is not to think you are right at all.. . . .The students,of course, cannot defend their opinion. It is something with which they have been indoctrinated The best they can do is point out all the opinions and cultures that are and have been. What right, they ask, do I or anyone else have to say one is better than the others? . . .The purpose of their education is not to make them scholars but to provide them with a moral virtue - openness."(3)1

I think that it is obvious that this type of "openness" makes the pursuit of moral truth impossible. For this reason it is very necessary to consider the intellect's pursuit of moral truth with great care.

(1)1 MODERN TIMES, Paul Johnson, Harper and Row, 1983

(2)

(3)1 THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, Allen Bloom, Simon and Schuster, 1987.