RELIGIOUS REVOLUTIONS
1.The importance of the study of Religious Revolutions in respect of the comprehension of the great Political Revolutions.
A portion of this work will be devoted to the French Revolution.
It was full of acts of violence which naturally had their psychological causes.
These exceptional events will always fill us with astonishment, and we even feel them to be inexplicable.They become comprehensible, however, if we consider that the French Revolution, constituting a new religion, was bound to obey the laws which condition the propagation of all beliefs.Its fury and its hecatombs will then become intelligible.
In studying the history of a great religious revolution, that of the Reformation, we shall see that a number of psychological elements which figured therein were equally active during the French Revolution.In both we observe the insignificant bearing of the rational value of a belief upon its propagation, the inefficacy of persecution, the impossibility of tolerance between contrary beliefs, and the violence and the desperate struggles resulting from the conflict of different faiths.We also observe the exploitation of a belief by interests quite independent of that belief.Finally we see that it is impossible to modify the convictions of men without also modifying their existence.
These phenomena verified, we shall see plainly why the gospel of the Revolution was propagated by the same methods as all the religious gospels, notably that of Calvin.It could not have been propagated otherwise.
But although there are close analogies between the genesis of a religious revolution, such as the Reformation, and that of a great political revolution like our own, their remote consequences are very different, which explains the difference of duration which they display.In religious revolutions no experience can reveal to the faithful that they are deceived, since they would have to go to heaven to make the discovery.In political revolutions experience quickly demonstrates the error of a false doctrine and forces men to abandon it.
Thus at the end of the Directory the application of Jacobin beliefs had led France to such a degree of ruin, poverty, and despair that the wildest Jacobins themselves had to renounce their system.Nothing survived of their theories except a few principles which cannot be verified by experience, such as the universal happiness which equality should bestow upon humanity.
2.The beginnings of the Reformation and its first disciples.
The Reformation was finally to exercise a profound influence upon the sentiments and moral ideas of a great proportion of mankind.
Modest in its beginnings, it was at first a simple struggle against the abuses of the clergy, and, from a practical point of view, a return to the prescriptions of the Gospel.It never constituted, as has been claimed, an aspiration towards freedom of thought.Calvin was as intolerant as Robespierre, and all the theorists of the age considered that the religion of subjects must be that of the prince who governed them.Indeed in every country where the Reformation was established the sovereign replaced the Pope of Rome, with the same rights and the same powers.
In France, in default of publicity and means of communication, the new faith spread slowly enough at first.It was about 1520that Luther recruited a few adepts, and only towards 1535 was the new belief sufficiently widespread for men to consider it necessary to burn its disciples.
In conformity with a well-known psychological law, these executions merely favoured the propagation of the Reformation.
Its first followers included priests and magistrates, but were principally obscure artisans.Their conversion was effected almost exclusively by mental contagion and suggestion.
As soon as a new belief extends itself, we see grouped round it many persons who are indifferent to the belief, but who find in it a pretext or opportunity for gratifying their passions or their greed.This phenomenon was observed at the time of the Reformation in many countries, notably in Germany and in England.
Luther having taught that the clergy had no need of wealth, the German lords found many merits in a faith which enabled them to seize upon the goods of the Church.Henry VIII.enriched himself by a similar operation.Sovereigns who were often molested by the Pope could as a rule only look favourably upon a doctrine which added religious powers to their political powers and made each of them a Pope.Far from diminishing the absolutism of rulers, the Reformation only exaggerated it.
3.Rational value of the doctrines of the Reformation.
The Reformation overturned all Europe, and came near to ruining France, of which it made a battle-field for a period of fifty years.Never did a cause so insignificant from the rational point of view produce such great results.
Here is one of the innumerable proofs of the fact that beliefs are propagated independently of all reason.The theological doctrines which aroused men's passions so violently, and notably those of Calvin, are not even worthy of examination in the light of rational logic.
Greatly concerned about his salvation, having an excessive fear of the devil, which his confessor was unable to allay, Luther sought the surest means of pleasing God that he might avoid Hell.
Having commenced by denying the Pope the right to sell indulgences, he presently entirely denied his authority, and that of the Church, condemned religious ceremonies, confession, and the worship of the saints, and declared that Christians should have no rules of conduct other than the Bible.He also considered that no one could be saved without the grace of God.
