Text and Notes: Justice in the Revolution and in the Church: Preliminary Address (concluded)

Links:

• New Proudhon Library (project page)

Readings:

• Text and Notes: Justice in the Revolution and in the Church: Prologue / Preliminary Address
• Text and Notes: Justice in the Revolution and in the Church: Preliminary Address (concluded)

This selection concludes the “Preliminary Address.” I have repeated the few paragraphs from the third section that I included at the end of the first installment. 

In general, the two editions are quite similar, with the main differences being a number of slight expansions of the text in 1860. As a result, I haven’t felt the need to provide the 1858 text separately — which will perhaps be applauded as one less distraction.

[1860]

3. — The Church: why, despite its perpetual defeats, does it still persist?

The existence of the Church is no less marvelous in its long duration than that of the Revolution in its beginnings. Always beaten, it has survived all the defeats; it has grown through humiliation, and it has fed, so to speak, on its very adversity.

It is a surprising thing, which no one seems to have noted, that the Church, which loves to talk so much about its triumphs, has in reality lost as many battles as it has fought. It has succumbed in all its struggles: from Jesus Christ to Pius IX, it counts its years by its disasters.

So what gives it life? How can we explain the problem of this strange existence?

The problem of the Church is the same as that of the Revolution, but in an opposite sense: the persistence of one and the embarrassments of the other stem from the same cause.

Formed by a combination of circumstances that will be explained in these Studies, the Church of Christ is nourished, fortified and fattened by the detritus of other churches, the dissolution of which is incessantly brought about by other causes. But it does not triumph over these churches, any more than the tree triumphs over the corpse buried beneath its roots. It cannot, I repeat, boast of having conquered a single one. A church, whatever it may be, never allows itself to be defeated. That is against its nature. It dissolves by itself, or sometimes it merges, or else it is exterminated.

Thus the Church succumbed in its struggle against Judaism: the book of Acts contains the formal admission.

“Since you reject the word,” said Paul and Barnabas to the heads of the Synagogue, “we turn to the Gentiles, convertimur ad gentes.”

A church that crucifies, as false Christ and false prophet, the founder of the rival church; that hunts, stones, casts down the apostles of that rival; that, rather than accepting the messianic interpretation of the Nazarenes, chooses to be exterminated en masse and dies heroically for its faith, has this church been defeated? Titus, and after him Adrian, destroyed Judaic nationality. Many defectors, despairing of Jehovah and Moses, went to swell the Christian ranks; others rallied, some to the Egyptians, some to the Magi: the Synagogue always protested, and still protests.

What I have just said about Judaism applies to all the powers that the Church has had to fight: paganism, Magism, Egyptianism, Druidism, Pythagoreanism, Platonism, Gnosticism, Arianism, Pelagianism, Manichaeism, Mohammedanism, the Greek schism, the Reformation, the Renaissance, ancient and modern philosophy, the third estate, empire, royalty, parliament, science, art, liberty, and finally the Revolution.

The Church has not conquered paganism any more than it had conquered Judaism. According to a statistical calculation quoted by Matter, the Christians, at the accession of Constantine, formed about one-twentieth of the population of the empire. At all points, their brotherhoods were made up of what the general dissolution caused to be lost each day by the local religions, religions struck in their principle by the progress of ideas, and especially by imperial domination. Those who converted to Christianity were already lost to paganism. Far from the Church having conquered paganism, it gradually took from it, as it did from Judaism, all that it could; it has adopted pagan codes, hierarchy, institutions, rites. It was in order to appeal to paganism and to carry off the masses dispossessed of their gods, as much as to obey the logic of its own movement, that the Church posited, in the fourth century, the divinity of its Christ, and that later it consecrated the worship of images.

With the Gnostics, heirs to the ancient doctrines of Egypt, Syria, Persia, India and Greece, the Church only ended up giving a itself a gnosis, much less scholarly than that of Valentin, much less severe than that of Marcion, Cerdon, or Tertullian, and much less poetic than that of the two Bardesanes, but such as was necessary for a coarse multitude, which also wanted to have its perfect ones, to pass for spiritual or pneumatic, and could not tolerate the reproach of psychism addressed to it by the Gnostics.

Now, as the vitality of a Church is directly proportional to the intensity and homogeneity of its faith, which in its turn is inversely proportional to the intellectual activity that it arouses, the Gnostic sects, too given up to dialectics, too metaphysical, too idealistic, too liberal in their government, some too suspect in their morality, died out little by little for lack of recruits, and their remnants, keeping their speculations in petto, came together in the Orthodox group. Force aided in this. Were they defeated? Certainly not. They would present, from the beginning, the spectacle of what awaited the great Church herself, once she found herself coming to grips with reason, taste, liberty, nationality and Justice.

What are, in fact, Arianism, Manichaeism, Mohammedanism, the Greek schism and the Reformation, — apart from some questions of doctrine, which are always foreign to the masses, — if not declarations of incompatibility between Catholic unity and the autonomy of nations and intelligences?

Arianism flourished especially in the East, homeland of Semitic monotheism. With the Greeks, the Romans, the Gauls and the Barbarians, it did not last; but it was reborn in Muhammad and settled within the Arab tent, in the patriarchal life, where Christian dogma would not penetrate.

More questions here about pronouns and personification. The Church who loves to talk should perhaps be “she.” I just haven’t quite talked myself into fully committing to that strategy. And some of my hesitations come from the fact that I am still wrestling with the complexities of Proudhon’s own system of gendering tendencies, ideas, institutions, etc. At this point, I suppose that the key is to recognize the sources of uncertainty.

In Persia, the orthodoxy retreated before the Zoroastrian dualism, revived by Mani. And what demonstrates the truth of this physiology is that the same thing would happen in Persia to Islamism, when it replaced the religion of Christ. In politics, a government recognizes another government; a state triumphs over another state and incorporates it; a race interbreeds and merges into another race. In religion, it is not the same: cult refuses to recognize cult; a church does not incorporate a church, and cannot overcome it. Reason can agree with reason, force can conquer force, whereas faith can do nothing about faith: the Absolute and the Absolute do not make a dent in one another.

In the ninth century, the Greeks, already separated for four centuries by the fact of the imperial partition, consummated their split with the Latins. After the capture of Constantinople in 1453, the patriarchate passed to Saint Petersburg. It would go to Peking rather than reconcile with Rome.

In the sixteenth century, Germany, England, Scotland, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland separated in their turn. What do the theses of the doctors and their variations matter? The confessions of faith of the Reformation were thrown away, while Rome continued to chant its Credo: does it count that as a victory?

What is the empire of Charlemagne, setting itself up in the Middle Ages opposite the papacy, too fortunate to be its client? — It is the political church, which constitutes, together with the spiritual church, the feudal synthesis. The papacy and the empire have not ceased to battle: which of these two churches has vanquished the other? They have both just sunk, at the peace of Villafranca.

What is this organization of laicism, formed under the name of the third estate, separate from the nobility and the clergy, by the establishment of the communes? — The industrial church, which is established in its turn in relation to monasticism, as the emperor and the king of France, the heads of the political church, had established themselves in relation to the Holy See. With regard to the divine absolute, any establishment of the human order is in turn posed as an absolute. The clergy opposed the establishment of the communes as much as they could: did they defeat the third estate?
What is the institution of parliaments? — The church of right formed for the administration of Justice, having its jurisdiction outside the episcopal jurisdiction, its schools outside the seminaries, its right distinct from canon right. The Revolution transformed the parliaments: would the Church claim that this transformation was her own work?

What is this great movement of the Renaissance? — Another formation of churches, for the worship of philosophy, letters, arts, sciences, whose first word is to disregard Christ and his religion. To disregard Christianity! It is the whole thought of Bacon’s Organon; it is the quintessence of Descartes. Raphael, with his virgins beautiful as Venus, protests against Christianity no less than Luther, with his free examination. Under Louis XIV, men of letters, Christians by their baptism and in their prayers, communed with pagan antiquity. Through the resurrection of the ancients and the transfusion of the Greek and Latin muses into our idiom, they founded literary catholicity, a marvelous catholicity, which admits all languages, all styles, all ideas, all geniuses, all races, all epochs, and from so many diverse productions, makes one and the same universal literature! Did the Church triumph over the Renaissance?

According to the laws that govern organized beings, the Church should have perished a thousand times. What remains to it of all that the spontaneity of conscience, the independence of the mind, the sovereignty of nations, the power of emperors and kings could achieve? It has lost everything, and this miserable domain that it once held though the devotion of a princess, this poor heritage of Saint Peter, is also taken from it.

And yet the Church resists all attacks; she survives all schisms, all heresies, all dismemberments, the institutions of Saint Louis as well as the Gallican liberties, Pothier as well as Descartes, Luther as well as Voltaire. It has survived its own immoralities; it had its reforming pontiffs long before the Reformation; and now that the Reformation is but a word, the Council of Trent governs the Orthodox universe uncontested. What did I say? As the churches more advanced than it in philosophy and liberty fall into dissolution, it picks up their scraps and is constantly reformed by its very immobility. It is in this way that, before losing its temporal sovereignty, it enriched itself from the debris of the Gallican church, which will not now come back to life at the voice of the emperor, which will not rise again even at the voice of the king of France. This is how it will succeed all the so-called reformed Churches, unless the reason of humanity concludes definitively against the reason of these Churches, against theology. The Church has nothing but a breath, and this breath is more enduring than all the energies that it has seen born, stronger than all the institutions that have been formed outside of it by imitating it.

Here, then, as in the Revolution, we must admit the presence of a principle that has remained beyond all attack: a principle whose gradual weakening is unquestionable, since wherever the Church presents itself with a certain movement of thought and a superior degree of instruction, as among the Gnostics and the Reformed, it advances towards a rapid dissolution; but a principle that, having preserved its roots in the depths of consciences, suffices to maintain the Church, to constantly bring back to it the debris of dissidence, which would cause it to be reborn from its own ashes, like the phoenix, if it was possible that, this principle always persisting in hearts, the Church that represents its faith should cease to exist.

This principle, creator and preserver of the Church, is Religion.

The Revolution affirms Justice, as I was saying a moment ago; it believes in Humanity: that is why it is invincible, and why it is always advancing.

In the first paragraph here, everything from “In politics…” is new in the 1860 edition. This is a characteristic expansion.

This historical account the development of the Church is in some ways quite straightforward, but the expansion of the notion of “church” to include a “political church,” “industrial church,” “church of right,” etc. — presumably distinct in their qualities from those of political and governmental entities — is, like the expansion of the notion of “faith” in earlier sections, something that needs to be accounted for more fully in any very complete interpretation of the work. The relationship between Church and Revolution is often presented as an opposition, but also sometimes as a kind of progression.

“With regard to the divine absolute, any establishment of the human order is in turn posed as an absolute.”

And then…?

The Church believes in God: it believes in Him more than any sect; it is the purest, the most complete, the most dazzling manifestation of the divine essence, and alone knows how to worship Him. Now, as neither the reason nor the heart of man has been able to free itself from the thought of God, which is proper to the Church, the Church, despite its agitations, has remained indestructible.

Navis Petri non quassatur,
Contra fluctus obfirmatur,
Frustra ventis agitatur,
Non timet naufragium.

says the reading for the feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. And the reading is correct: as long as a glimmer of religious faith remains in society, the ship of Peter can consider itself guaranteed against shipwreck.

In all eras of history, prior to the promulgation of Christianity and since its propagation, mankind has believed, with unanimous consent, that religion was a necessary basis for society, that theological faith was the sine qua non of virtue, and that all justice had its source and its sanction in divinity.

The rare examples of atheistic protest collected in the history of philosophy have only confirmed the common belief, by showing that atheists either denied Justice and morality, or gave only a false theory of them, or replaced the religious guarantee by that of an arbitrary subordination.

Now, the analysis of religious ideas and the logic of their development demonstrate that, notwithstanding the diversity of myths and rites, all cults are basically identical; that consequently there is and can only be one religion, one theology, one Church; finally, that the Catholic Church is the one whose dogmatism, discipline, hierarchy and progress best realize the principle and the theoretical type of religious society, the one, consequently, that has the most right to the government of souls, to speak at first only of that right.

To every objection of free examination, to any outright dismissal of secular authority, the Church can always answer, without the believing soul being able to say anything in reply:

“Do you believe in God?

“Do you believe in the necessity of religion?

“Do you believe, consequently, in the existence of a Church, that is to say of a society established on the very thought of God, inspired by Him, and installing itself above all as an expression of religious duty?

“If so, you are Christian, Catholic, Apostolic, Roman; you confess Christ and all His doctrine; you receive the priesthood that He established; you recognize the infallibility of the councils and of the sovereign pontiff; you place the pulpit of Saint Peter above all the tribunes and all the thrones: you are, in a word, orthodox. — If not, dare to say so: for then it is not only against the Church that you are declaring war, it is against the faith of the human race.”

Between these two alternatives, there is room only for ignorance or bad faith.

It must be confessed that, to this day, no nation has been encountered that says: I possess justice within me; I will make my own mores; I do not need the intervention of a Supreme Being for that, and I can do without religion.

The argument therefore remains; and as, from the religious point of view, the principle of all the churches, Latin Catholicism has remained the one that is most rational and complete, the Church of Rome, despite so many and such formidable defections, is the only legitimate one.

How does it happen, then, that she suffers objections from all sides?
How does it happen that, summarizing in her history and in her dogma all tradition and all religious speculation; as such, being able to claim the initiative and ownership of all that constitutes the social state, as founded on religion, she sees herself slapped by her sons, treated as a prostitute by her daughters, ridiculed by the smallest of her grandchildren, contested even in the matter of the bread that she eats, of the tomb that she has chosen for herself?

Ah! It is because the human soul, although it calls itself religious, in reality believes only in its own will; it is because at base it considers its own Justice more exact and surer than the justice of God; it is because it aspires to govern itself, by its own virtue; it is because it is disgusted by the constitution of any Church, and because its devouring ambition is to walk in its own strength and autonomy.
Faith in Justice itself, setting aside all piety, and even contrary to all piety: this is what, since the beginning of the world, has raised up war against the Church, and what animates the Revolution.

But this also explains the resistance encountered by the latter. Insofar as it represents Justice, the essence of our nature, the Revolution is everything that man in his pride values it is what makes the life and movement of societies, and sometimes rekindles the spark at the heart of Church itself. But as she is freed from the divine idea, the Revolution is suspect; until she has somehow justified herself, her crimes weighs on her, and the world, still religious, still priestly, still hierarchical despite everything, remains hostile to her.

On the part of the peoples, divided in their thought, sympathy and distrust are therefore equally earned by the Church, equally earned by the Revolution. To one, religious consideration; to the other, legal consideration. But to the latter, the horror that the indictment of atheism has always inspired; to the former, the wrath of liberty.

A rough translation:

Peter’s ship is not shaken
Against the waves it perseveres,
Tossed by the vain winds,
He is not afraid of a wreck.

A few paragraphs down is a good example of the personification of the Church, followed by a passage where a similar treatment of the Revolution feels a bit gratuitous. There is obviously a still undiscovered balance to be struck in subsequent revisions.

⁂

“Faith in Justice itself, setting aside all piety, and even contrary to all piety…”

This is perhaps the pivot, where the established pattern of the development of the Church turns on itself.

§ IV. — The issue is between the Revolution and the Church.

A question therefore inevitably arises, which allows for no dismissal:

Are the Revolution and the Church, each representing an element of consciousness, called to a reconciliation?

Or must one be subordinated to the other?

Or will there finally be a point at which one or the other must be eclipsed? This amounts to asking whether Religion and Justice, from the point of view of society, are not incompatible by nature, the former having to be confined within the limits of conscience, at most within the circle of the family, while the second embraces everything?

Fusion, subordination, or elimination: there is no room for a fourth hypothesis.

Now, if we found that the last of these hypotheses was the true one, it would become useless to dwell any longer on the other two. So there is every advantage in asking ourselves at first glance if theological reason is not the very negation of juridical reason, and vice versa; and if, consequently, while the Church accuses the Revolution of modern skepticism and immorality, it is not she who, through her theology, having confounded intelligences for a long time, has altered the sense of right in them and produced the dissolution that kills us.

What is Religion, and what is Justice? What are they to one another, and what are their respective functions in the life of the peoples? This is the problem. It is important to grasp it in its universality, lest we fall into new and more deplorable illusions.

Generally, in the enlightened world, we separate ourselves conspicuously from pure orthodoxy. We smile at revelation, as the Scriptures propose it; prophecies, miracles and all the naiveties of legend are rejected. But we like to call ourselves spiritualistic, theistic; we readily admit an inspiration, a permanent action of Heaven within Humanity; we bow before Providence; the propagation of the Gospel is regarded as a monument of this influence from on high; we are not far from saying with Napoleon that Christ was more than a man.

Is this all common sense? Is revelation and all that follows not implied in the spiritualist hypothesis, the theology determined a priori by the notion of God and his relations with man; and can this theology or theodicy be anything other than Catholicism?

I am simply posing here the question, of which we will find, in the course of these Studies, the irrefutable and entirely new solution.

Now, if Christianity is nothing other than the necessary development, theoretical and practical, of the religious concept, in whatever way and to as a low degree as it may arise, is it not supremely unreasonable, not to say in flagrant bad faith, to bring back, under the pretext of religious purification or rational theology, the spirits of fifteen, twenty or thirty centuries ago and present this retrogression to them as progress?

A number of these mystics, apparently incapable of analyzing the principle of their faith and of following its consequences, have declared themselves against divine right, affirmed the Revolution, calling themselves at the same time followers of a Natural Religion, which, according to them, would be known only through the light of reason, and would not require external worship or priesthood.

But do not all these ideas of God, of Heaven or of the future life, of revelation, of sacraments, of Church, of worship, of priesthood, form, in human understanding as in the practice of nations, an unbreakable chain? And if so, is it not clear that the first link in this chain is as repugnant to the Revolution and to Justice as the last? The proof is that there are, in an embryonic state, who knows how many churches ready to seize the succession from Catholicism, who knows how many popes awaiting the death of Pius IX to take his tiara!

It is especially fashionable to protest against the fundamental dogma of the fall, against hell and the devil, and to do so by virtue of a so-called philosophical theism, a devotion made up entirely of inner feeling. Our poets sing of the end of Satan while blessing God!
Do not all these oppositions give rise to one another from the same Absolute? Is not the dogma of original sin the corollary of the ideas of Religion and Providence, identical and adequate to the psychological principle that makes Justice in us an impression of Divinity, from which it follows that, for revolutionary reason, God and Devil are the same thing?

We grant that Justice is obligatory, even without hope of remuneration here below. But we do not give up the hope of an indemnity in a better world; so that this so-called Duty is basically only a credit that we give to the Sovereign Distributor: what hypocrisy!

We advocate reason, but maintain an even higher esteem for faith, provided, of course, that this faith has nothing in common with that of the priests. We praise Justice, but we put love above it. Our people of letters, women and men, summarize the social philosophy in three words: Believe, Love, Labor. As for me, I affirm labor. But I have all sorts of reservations about love and I reject faith. Love, when it is not a slave to right, is the poison of souls and the devastator of society. As for faith, I repeat, there is none other than that which engendered the Church.

Weary of these disputes, some take a heroic stand: that is to say that there is no other religion than morality; that spiritualism, theism, etc., all of that is useless, and that what matters is to be an honest man.

Good for them! I like this talk, and I draw an excellent omen from it. But then tell us what is morality, what is right, and how it applies to the various relations of life; show where its corruption comes from; prove above all, to these people infatuated with their immortality, that Justice is sufficient unto itself and that if Justice is sufficient, the present life is also sufficient and does not need an extension into eternity.

It is thus that by a higher criticism we are led to recognize, on the one hand, that outside the Church, Christian and Catholic, there is neither God, nor theology, nor religion, nor faith: there, as in logic, morality and languages, the unity of the human spirit bursts forth; — on the other hand, we are led to recognize that society must be founded on pure Justice, the Practical Reason of the human race, the analysis and experience of which agree in demonstrating its incompatibility, in the social order, with the conception of a supernatural world, with Religion.

Hence this decisive conclusion:

That all the previous history of mankind, dominated by the religious principle, forms a clearly characterized period, in which all the political and economic constitutions of the peoples, their legislation and their morals, despite innumerable varieties, are basically similar, amounting to the negation of the rights of man and of the citizen; — and that the French Revolution, making the juridical principle prevail, opens a new period, an entirely contrary order of things, of which it is now a question for us of determining the parts.

Shall I go, then, at this hour, to take up again an exhausted polemic over the choice of a religion; to argue with the sects; to quibble with the Church, the mistress of all of them, over her dogmas and her mysteries; to challenge the authenticity of her Scriptures, remake her history and reveal her origins, her encroachments and her borrowings; to explain these myths, to oppose to her genesis, to her deluge, to her theophanies, astronomy, geology, physics, chronology, philology and political economy, the entire encyclopedia of human knowledge; then to mock her worship, blame her discipline, display her shame, recall her abasement and her revenge?

Shall I ask her to account for her vicariat, as if I cared about this divine ministry; shall I say that she has failed the inspirations of the Most High, as if I were instituting myself as a prophet in her place; shall I pretend, with the author of Terre et Ciel, that the time is right for a renewal of theology, that the need is felt everywhere, and, on this pious pretext, start theologizing in competition with the episcopate?

No, no, I am not one to give in to such whims.

I would never have contested the authority of the Church, if, like so many others who make themselves its competitors, I admitted the necessity of a supernatural guarantee for Justice. I would not have this strange presumption, assuming that the idea of God is indispensable to morality, of believing myself more capable than the Church, more capable than the human race, which has labored for more than sixty centuries, of deducing in theory and realizing in practice such an idea. I would have bowed before such an ancient faith, the fruit of the most learned and the longest elaboration of which the human mind has given the example; I would not have admitted for a moment that insoluble difficulties in the order of science retained the slightest value when it came to my faith; I would have thought that this was precisely what made up the mystery of my religion, and, for having tangled a few metaphysical threads, I would not have thought myself a revelator. Above all, I would have feared to shake in others, by imprudent attacks, a guarantee that I myself would have declared necessary. (A)

This is what, following the logic of my hypothesis, I would never have done, all the less since, after all, as I said just now, such a controversy, calculated to disrupt consciences, could not lead to a solution.

So let us say it again: the Church, invincible in its Absolute, has succumbed each time the debate has been brought onto the field of reason. But, since the Absolute has never been radically eliminated, the Church persists, even if that means signing pragmatic sanctions and concordats, simulating an agreement between reason and faith, adapting its biblical texts to the data of science, putting a little more reserve in its mores and a semblance of tolerance in its government.

Like the reed in the fable, it bends and does not break. The way its inept rivals lead it, it would endure, always bending, another eighteen centuries. In the face of the political power, it bends and it endures; in the face of philosophy, it bends and it endures; in the face of science, it bends and it endures; in the face of the Reformation, it bends and it endures. And it will endure as long as it is not attacked in its stronghold, as long as the Revolution, raising the debate higher, does not rid Justice of this divine sanction that hobbles it and of which the Church is the supreme representative.

The possibility of a continuing space for the Church, within the conscience or within the family, seems particularly important, particularly as the family appears to be, for Proudhon, also an exception when it comes to authority. And all of this is tied up with the role of women, the connections between women and the ideal, between the ideal and the absolute, etc. 

⁂

“As for me, I affirm labor. But I have all sorts of reservations about love and I reject faith.”

The reservations about love relate very directly to the arguments in the Studies on Love and Marriage. The various uses of the notion of “faith” so far in this address also obviously call for some attention moving forward.

5. — Plan of this work.

The reader now knows the plan of this work.

The question for me is quite different from that posed by the mystics. Instead of seeking what is, for the justification and happiness of humanity, the best of religions, I ask myself if Justice is possible with any religion. And as Justice has never been exercised or even conceived in its purity and plenitude, as it has been constantly mixed, penetrated by theologism, I ask again, after having noted how right is corrupted and perishes through its union with faith, what would become of it, abandoned to itself, what would society be like if, by an effort of conscience, it decided to set aside the practice of its religious conceptions, and to follow Justice alone?
So I have not established the controversy on the basis of dogma. I set dogma aside and do not quibble over articles of faith. It may be that all that is said about the essence of God and about the supernatural world is true. What can I know with any certainty? Nothing. On what basis can I deny it? Again, there is none. It may be that deep in my heart beats a secret desire for survival, testimony to an ulterior destiny: I will not take the trouble to either verify or contest it. I place myself alongside belief and allow it all its fantasies for the time being. My criticism refuses to enter the regions of the absolute.

What I challenge in belief is that it comes, with its hypotheses, to support the command of practical, experimental and positive reason, the revelations of which are given to me directly within myself and by the testimony of my fellow men; a reason, as such, endowed with a certainty and a reality that no theology can reach; a reason, finally, which is myself, and which I cannot invalidate without dishonor or abdicate without suicide.

If then, after examination, it is found that belief, which is presented to me as the indispensable pledge of Justice, instead of assuring it, compromises it; if, by a necessary consequence, the Church, organ of religious thought, was at the same time the agent of our temptation; if such were the principle of all human decadence and retrogradation; if it was as a result of this that Justice, vitiated, has remained doubtful to us until this day: then, without further tolerating a perfidious belief, I would have the right and the duty to protest against a dishonest guarantee, to take up, against the Church and against God himself, the cause of Justice, and to establish myself as its guarantor and father.

Anyone who has studied these questions will recognize that in this I am only applying the precepts of the purest orthodoxy. It is the doctrine of the saints that damnation should be preferred to sin, if, by some chance, God imposed the option on us.* Now, what for theology is only a casuistical fiction, has become, through the Revolution, a factual truth. The transcendent Being, conceived and worshiped as the author and support of Justice, is the very negation of Justice; religion and morality, which the consent of the people has made sisters, are heterogeneous and incompatible. It is necessary to choose between the fear of God and the fear of evil, between the risk of damnation and the risk of improbity: that is my thesis.

A veil of mystery is spread over all the things of moral life. To lift this veil will be to demonstrate the genius of the Revolution and hasten the fulfillment of destinies.

What is Justice, or as others say, right and duty? Is it a simple abstraction, an idea, a relation, abstractly conceived, like the general laws of nature and of the mind? First of all, what is this idea? How have we conceived it? How does it impose obligations on the conscience?

What is conscience itself? A prejudice? But a prejudice supposes a fact that determines it… A faculty? Where does it reside? What is its function? What is its mode of exercise? In what is its organism?

What is equality? We circle around this word, we pronounce it with our lips: in reality, we do not want it. The poor don’t care, the rich hate it, the democracy denies it, no one believes in it. — Is equality given by nature or against nature? If equality is given by nature, it is also given by right; how then are we to explain the inequality? If it is against nature, in other words, if it is inequality that is natural, then what does Justice mean?

What is government among men? What is the state and the reason of state? If the reason of state is in conformity with Justice, of what use is it? If it is an exception to Justice, what is a Justice subject to so many exceptions? Is the political order the same as the economic order? Do they blend into each other? How and when? These are formidable questions that academic science would be careful not to raise.

What is liberty? Is it also a prejudice, or more simply, as modern philosophy explains it, a way of conceiving the organic life within us, the fatality of nature and of the mind? Would there be liberty, as some maintain, only in collectivities; and would liberty be reduced, for the man and the citizen, to living under a regular, legal and legitimate state regime?

What is progress? An organic or free evolution? If progress is only the evolution of the forces of humanity, it is pure fatalism: there is no progress, and in this case how are we to explain so many and such terrible declines? If, on the contrary, progress is the work of liberty, how does it accord with the nature of our organism, which is fatal? Are we in progress, at this hour, or in decadence ?

What is marriage? Of what does this union consist, which all peoples distinguish from amorous union? The Church, which claims its consecration, admits that it has not yet understood it. Is it a simple legal concubinage? Should it be classified among the civil or commercial societies? What is paternity? What is the family?… Our moralists, who preach the domestic virtues to us, have forgotten to give us the definitions of all these things.

What is love in the social life of man? What is it worth? What does it deserve? How does it command us to exercise it with Justice?

What is woman, in the family and in society, and why is there this distinction between the sexes among persons? Are women equal to men or not? In the first case, what good is this duplication? In the second, what is it for? Does woman, apart from motherhood, have a meaning, a proper function in the moral world? Does she count there, and for how much?

What is labor? What is property? What is the ideal? What is tolerance? What is punishment?… What do all these things have in common with Justice?

What is death? It causes us enough trouble for us to know something about it. Will we be forever told that it is the cessation of the phenomena that constitute life, as life is the set of phenomena that prevent death? Or, with the priests, that it is the door of eternity? Does death cut through Justice, as it cuts the thread of existence?

What is meant by moral sanction? Is it within humanity or outside humanity? What difficulties in the first case! What doubts in the second!

What is religion? What is prayer? What is God? Is religion eternal or transitory like its forms? Are we moving towards a religious transformation or towards a resorption of religion by Justice? Admitting that religion was only a preparatory form of civilization, it still remains to be said what was its role, function and mandate; and as nothing happens in social life that does not have its roots in the entrails of humanity, we must also say what religion must be reduced to, and what the mode of exercise of this faculty will be in subsequent ages.

Is there a system of society, as all ancient and modern utopians and legislators have understood it? What is this system? How are we to recognize it, to demonstrate it? Is there no system? What then is social order? And when the social system, in all its manifestations and evolutions, is once explained by the principle that is immanent to it, a sovereign, immediate, synthetic principle, both real and formal, a power and an idea, the negation of which implies the supreme contradiction, what will be the influence of this legal demonstration on the general philosophy? Does it contain moral certainty; does it give speculative certainty; would the science of right become the key to the science of nature, and should Justice, finally, be considered as the sovereign reason and reality, the archeus, the God who governs the world of conscience, the world of the mind and the world of things?

It is a grand undertaking, to extract from the mass of human facts the principles that govern them, to clarify a dozen notions that the past has bequeathed to us without understanding them, for which we fight as our fathers fought!

In summary :

What is the fundamental, organic, regulating, sovereign principle of societies; the principle that, subordinating all others, governs, protects, represses and punishes the rebellious elements and, if need be, demands their elimination? Is it religion, the ideal or interest? Is it love, force, necessity or hygiene? There are systems and schools for all these affirmations.

This principle, in my opinion, is Justice.

What is Justice? — The very essence of humanity.

What has it been since the beginning of the world? — Almost nothing.

What should it be? — Everything.

—

I will say little about the execution of this book, a simple commentary, as you can see, on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a kind of framework for a philosophy of the Revolution.

If it is true that Justice is innate in the heart of man, it does not follow that its laws were determined from the outset in the human mind with clarity, and for all categories of application: it is only little by little that we acquire the knowledge of them, and their formula is the prize of a long labor.

The definition of Justice, obtained by an evolution of six or eight thousand years, opens the second age of civilization: the Revolution is its prologue.

Now, just as the physical sciences cannot be built a priori on pure notions, but require the observation of facts, likewise the science of Justice and mores cannot emerge from a dialectical deduction of notions: it must be drawn from the phenomenality that these notions engender, as any physical law emerges from the series of phenomena that express it.

Thus, I am not dogmatizing; I observe, I describe and I compare. I am not going to look for the formulas of right in the fantastic soundings of an illusory psychology; I demand them from the positive manifestations of humanity.

This way of dealing with ethics, when everyone starts it with Jupiter, is the greatest originality of my work. The honor for it goes to natural philosophy, which is the philosophy of common sense.

By this method, the whole secret of which consists in following history, we can explain the aberrations of the moral sense among the ancients, the growing superiority of the moderns, the nature and role of the religious principle, and the longstanding powerlessness of the philosophers, who are fortunate when they do not put their ideology at the service of the reigning interests or of their own secret ambitions, to establish the science of mores on solid bases.

I admit, moreover, that I have not had to incur great scholarly expense. The history has been extensively, deeply excavated; the materials are unearthed, and I have made it a rule to give preference to the most authentic. I have believed that my work, whatever care I took in it, could only be considered an appeal; that to write the Bible of the Revolution nothing less than a vast concourse of minds was needed, beginning afresh the examination of antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern times. I concluded that my only care should be to set my milestones well, sure that in the way in which they would be set and their results indicated, history, revealing itself in a new light, would show, as in a panorama, the thought, the power and all the riches of the Revolution.

Perhaps I will be reproached for not having kept to the facts of history, supported by the evidence of philology and literature, and for having given in my dissertations a certain place to anecdote. — I thought that with the science of mores becoming entirely experimental, experimentation should exclude nothing, lest it mutilate itself and fall short of the truth. Every act of life, public and domestic, collective and individual, is in my eyes the domain of science; and this is seldom the least instructive part.

* The worst part of damnation is the hatred of God. We know the words of Saint Thérèse about Satan: The wretch, he does not love. Now, the love of God is the same thing as the love of moral good and beauty, of which God is the living and eternal image. Whence it follows that it would be better to suffer damnation, that is to say the loss of God and the tortures of hell, than to have deserved them by sin. This in no way contradicts the doctrine of the theologians, reported below, First Study, Chapter IV, on the exclusively divine origin and nature of Justice. It only follows that of two things that, according to theologians, come to us from God, Justice and beatitude, the first, admitting that they can be separated, is the more excellent. [Proudhon’s note.]

I have not been as brief as I would have liked: the time has not come for the Revolution to make Etrennes mignonnes and catechisms. What is needed for a cause threatened in its very existence are demonstrations, facts and science. All of this takes time and space. Let us first philosophize with the breadth that unrecognized truth requires: afterwards, the abbreviators may have their say.

I have given these Studies the form of an epistle or rather of a lecture, which is the Greek homily, because, admitting all tones and all styles, it responds better than any other to the variety of my subject, at the same time as it excludes pedantry, declamation and commonplace.

I address them, these Studies, to an archbishop: first, because of the part that this archbishop played in a so-called biography of my person was the occasion that made me undertake them; then, because the respect for such a serious character is a guarantee to me that, while making use of the greatest liberty of discussion, nothing offensive to the people or outrageous for institutions will escape my pen.

We are treated readily, my co-religionists and I, as atheists; thanks to this epithet, we are, so to speak, placed outside justice and morals.

Although I am not terribly frightened by the indictment of atheism, I cannot, however, allow it to degenerate into calumny and proscription. I have been thinking about God for as long as I have been alive, and do not recognize in anyone a greater right than mine to talk about the subject. I  have thought about it especially from the point of view that I am dealing with today: the reader will judge in what ways this meditation has gone well for me.

If sometimes I happen to talk about myself, the reason will not escape anyone. The facts of my life are less than nothing, and I can defy the whole industry of biographers to squeeze out of my insignificant existence either praise or blame. But I have had the signal honor of being taken as a type. A whole class of citizens are attacked in my person; a tendency is stigmatized; an order of ideas and a category of interests are proscribed. I have the right to follow my adversaries onto the terrain it has pleased them to choose, even in their licenses.

We do not know what will come of these masses created by the Revolution. We imagine that all their eloquence is exhausted in the vote. It is up to me, more than anyone else, to serve as their interpreter. What the people would think if, by a sudden illumination, they could at a glance embrace the philosophical-politico-theological work of forty centuries, what their conscience would experience, what their reason would conclude: these are things that I can say. I have had the rare advantage, if it is one, of being born of the people, of learning what has made the people what they are today, and of remaining one of the people. If my ideas are not new, they at least smell of the soil from which they have sprung.

M. Granier de Cassagnac has written somewhere: Socialism must be suppressed… Others flatter themselves that they have crushed it…

As for me, the last to come and the most mistreated of this great movement that, rightly or wrongly, has been called Socialism, and which is only the development of the Revolution, I do not ask for the suppression or the crushing of anyone. Let the discussion be free and let my adversaries defend themselves: that is all I want. I make war on old ideas, not on old men.

I thought, in 1848, that, after so many catastrophes, all those formulas of the ancient antagonism, by which Aristotle and Machiavelli had not been fooled — monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, bourgeoisie, proletariat, etc. — should no longer have more than a transitional value; that the constitution of the power mattered little, provided that it passed quickly, after having created the economic order; that in the spirit of the new France, politics should be eclipsed like worship and make way for justice, and that granting the same importance as before to theological reason and the reason of state was to mislead the Revolution and to regress.

In days of unrest, I argued this thesis energetically, trading criticism for criticism, sarcasm for sarcasm. I have done no worse than Voltaire, whose battle cry so many people, who were silent then, repeat in a low voice today.

Now the period of demolition is over. The country knows that it no longer believes in anything: 1848 will at least have had the merit of making it see this fact. Are we up to the task, men of the Revolution, of making it believe in something? I dare to hope so. If, after five years of silence, I take up the pen again, it is certainly not to wage war against ghosts to whom the common sense of the public is enough to do justice. Peace to the dying, respect to the dead!

The Revolution had passed into the status of a myth. I come, the first, to present its exegesis.

I do not know if this Revolution, which began gloriously in France, will continue in France. Sixty years of retrograde madness have aged us so much; we have been so thoroughly purged of all liberal ferment that doubt about our right to the hegemony of nations is permitted.

Whatever may become of our weary race, however, posterity will recognize that the third age of humanity has its point of departure in the French Revolution; that the understanding of the new law has been given to us in its fullness; that practice has not completely failed us either; and that to succumb in this sublime childbirth was not, after all, without glory.

At this hour, the Revolution is defined: it therefore lives. The remains no longer think. Will the being who lives and who thinks be suppressed by the corpse?

Etrennes mignonnes are a form of almanac.

APPENDIX.

NOTES AND CLARIFICATIONS.

Note (A).

Religious critique. — Critique of religious ideas definitely tends to take on a new character. In the past, hardly more than a century ago, religion was attacked with ridicule, impiety and licentiousness. People laughed at its miracles and mysteries; the errors committed by its writers in physics, astronomy, chronology and natural history were noted. It was the time of Rabelais and Voltaire.

Then it was understood that religion was a manifestation of the human mind; we endeavored to decipher its symbolism, to make its legends serve as testimony to reason itself, to right and liberty. This critique begins in France with Dupuis’ Origine de tous les Cultes; German philosophy then took hold of it: the work is far from over. The result of this critique has been to reconcile, up to a certain point, the human mind with its work. The objections of the old critique have been treated as trifles; religion has been deemed essential to humanity. Hence a pietistic disposition which, without leading to a complete restoration of the faith, made, for a time, the opinion of the masses and of the governments emerging from the Revolution more favorable to religious beliefs.

Currently, the critique is taking a step further. The question that occupies it is that of the utility and the practical effectiveness of religion, of the legitimacy of its intervention in morality, of the perpetuity of its action in humanity. Strengthened by the conclusions of symbolism, we maintain that Religion has value in the eyes of reason only as a poetic expression of society, an allegory of justice, a mythical conception of the universe and of destiny; and we affirm as a result that, from the day when philosophy is distinguished from theology, science from belief, morality from piety, Religion is without a role; it becomes for man and society a harmful, immoral element.

Among the works belonging to this third critique, which have appeared since the publication of the first edition of Justice, we will cite: La Démocratie, [by Étienne] Vacherot, a work referred to the correctional police by the imperial government; La Métaphysique et la Science, by the same author; L’Église et la Morale, by Dom Jacobus, Brussels, 2 vols. 18mo, a work remarkable for its strong erudition and deep moral feeling. Let us also mention an opuscule by Ferdonand Eenens,  Le Paradis terrestre, although the author has allowed himself to be drawn into critiques that are more of the eighteenth than of the nineteenth century.

As for the works of Larroque, Examen critique des doctrines de la religion chrétienne, and Henri Disdier, Conciliation rationnelle du Droit et du Devoir, they belong, by their deism as much as by their criticism, to the first period. One thing to note: the most acrid detractors of Christianity are either libertines, whom morality upsets even more than faith, or religionists who, under various names, aspire to redo the work of the Church, the work of Divinity!