Ernest Renan

“ The ideal remains the soul of the world, the permanent God, the primordial, efficient, and Final Cause of this universe. This is the basis of eternal religion. We, no more than Spinoza, need, in order to adore God, miracles or self-interested prayers. So long as there be in the human heart one fibre to vibrate at the sound of what is true, just, and honest; so long as the instinctively pure prefer purity to life; so long as there be found friends of truth ready to sacrifice their repose to science; friends of goodness to devote themselves to useful and holy works of mercy ”

“ It is this conviction that has made you decree that his pure and lowly tomb should have its anniversary. It is the common assertion of a free faith in the Infinite that on this day gathers together, in the spot that witnessed so much virtue, the most select assembly that a man of genius could group round him after his death. A sovereign, as distinguished by intellectual as by moral gifts, is among us in spirit. ”

“ What more fatal than to treat as enemies and doom to death men whose only crime is that of thinking independently? The scaffold, which should be the terror of the wicked, is thus turned into the glorious theatre where virtue and toleration shine out in all their lustre, and publicly cover the sovereign majesty with opprobrium. Beyond question there is only one thing to be learned from such a spectacle: to imitate those noble martyrs; or, if one fears death, to become the cowardly flatterers of power. ”

“ Joy, therefore, can never be evil so long as it be regulated by the law of our true utility. A virtuous life is not a sad and sombre one, a life of privations and austerity. How should the Divinity take pleasure in the spectacle of my weakness, or impute to me, as meritorious, tears, sobs, terrors—signs all of an impotent soul? ”

“ But we, who believe that truth is something real, and deserving of supreme respect, how can we dream of obtaining by force an adherence which is valueless except as the fruit of free conviction? We no longer admit sacramental formulas operating by their own virtue independently of the mind of him to whom they are applied. In our eyes, a belief has no worth if it be not gained by the reflection of the individual—if he have not understood and assimilated it. A mental conviction brought about by superior order is as absolute nonsense as love obtained by force or sympathy by command. ”

“ Has that admirable literature lost by being understood in its real aspect rather than relegated outside of the common laws of humanity? Certainly not. The truths revealed by science invariably surpass the dreams that science dispels. The world of Laplace exceeds in beauty, I imagine, that of a Cosmas Indicopleustes, who pictured the universe to himself as a casket, on the lid of which the stars glide along in grooves at a few leagues from us. ”

“ Religion had been utterly absent from those lives not less in revolt against human than divine laws, of which the last example was that of poor Vanini. Here, on the contrary, we have religion producing free thought as a part of piety. Religion in a system such as this is not a portion of life: it is life itself. That which is seen to matter here is not the being in possession of some metaphysical phrases more or less correct: it is the giving to one's life a sure pole, a supreme direction—the ideal. ”

“ Transporting into the domain of pure idealism that kingdom of God with which earth proves incompatible, one moiety of its children founds Christianity, the other carries on, through the tortures of the middle ages, that imperturbable protest: "Hear, O Israel! the Lord thy God is one; holy is his name." This potent tradition of idealism and hope against all hope—this religion, able to obtain from its adherents the most heroic sacrifices, though it be not of its essence to promise them any certainty beyond this life—this was the healthy and bracing medium in which Spinoza developed himself. ”

“ For centuries past it had been supposed that society rested on metaphysical dogmas. Spinoza discerns profoundly that these dogmas, assumed to be necessary to humanity, yet cannot escape discussion; that revelation itself, if there be one, traversing, in order to reach us, the faculties of the human mind, is no less than all else amenable to criticism. I wish I could quote in its entirety that admirable Chapter XX., in which our great publicist establishes with masterly skill that dogma—new then, and still contested in our own day—which styles itself liberty of conscience. ”

“ We wish for nothing more. One cannot impose on others beliefs one does not possess. That the believers of other days made themselves persecutors, proved them tyrannical, but at least consistent; as for us, if we were to act as they did, we should be simply absurd. Our religion is a sentiment capable of clothing itself in numerous forms. These forms are free from being equally good; but not one of them has strength or authority to expel all others. Freedom—this is the last word of Spinoza's religious policy. ”

“ In the same way, the Bible is more beautiful when we have learned to see therein—ranged in order on a canvas of a thousand years—each aspiration, each sigh, each prayer of the most exalted religious consciousness that ever existed, than when we force ourselves to view it as a book unlike any other, composed, preserved, interpreted in direct opposition to all the ordinary rules of the human intellect. ”

“ With that dogmatism we, for our part, must needs dispense; we must dispense with those fixed creeds, sources of so many struggles and divisions, but sources no less of such fervent convictions; we must give up believing that it is our part to hold down others in a faith we no longer share. Spinoza was right in his horror of hypocrisy: hypocrisy is cowardly and dishonest, but, above all, hypocrisy is useless. ”

“ Later—thanks to that noble privilege of a free land so gloriously maintained by your fathers against all opponents!—your Holland became the asylum where the human intellect, sheltered from the tyrannies that overspread Europe, found air to breathe, a public to comprehend it, organs to multiply its voice, then gagged elsewhere.
Deep, assuredly, are the wounds of our age, and cruel are its perplexities. It can never be with impunity that so many problems present themselves all at once before the elements for solving them are in our possession. ”

“ That men will think one way and speak another; that, consequently, good faith—a virtue most necessary to the state—will become corrupted; that adulation—a detestable thing—and perfidy will be had in repute, entailing the decadence of all good and healthy morality. What can be more disastrous to a state than to exile honest citizens as evil-doers, because they do not share the opinions of the crowd and are ignorant of the art of feigning? ”

“ The soul of the wise man, on the other hand, can scarcely be troubled. Possessing by a kind of eternal necessity the consciousness of itself and of God and of things, he never ceases to be, and ever preserves the soul's true peace.
Spinoza could not endure his system to be considered irreligious or subversive. The timid Oldenburg did not conceal from him that some of his opinions seemed to certain readers to tend to the overthrow of piety. "Whatever accords with reason," replied Spinoza, "is in my belief most favorable to the practice of virtue." ”

“ About the same time, however, any one able to track the current of opinion setting in among the professedly enlightened circles of the Pharisaism of that day, would have seen, in singular contrast, the much-loved philosopher of the simple and single-hearted become the bugbear of the narrow orthodoxy which pretended to a monopoly of the truth. A wretch, a pestilence, an imp of hell, the most wicked atheist that ever lived, a man steeped in crime—this was what the solitary of the Pavilioengragt grew to be in the opinion of right-thinking theologians and philosophers! ”

“ Yes, religion is eternal; it answers to the first need of primitive as well as of civilized man; it will only perish with humanity itself—or, rather, its disappearance would be the proof that degenerate humanity was about to reënter the mere animalism out of which it had emerged. And yet no dogma, no worship, no formula, can in these days of ours exhaust the religious sentiment. ”

“ The persistency of the higher classes in unqualifiedly patronizing, in sight of the uncultivated classes, the religious reforms of other days, will have but one effect: that of impairing their own authority at those times of crisis when it is important that the people should still believe in the reason and the virtue of a few.
Honor, then, to Spinoza, who has dared to say: "Reason before all." Reason can never be contrary to the well-understood interests of humanity. ”

“ Miraculous in its own way, the development of the Jewish people ranks side by side with that other miracle—the development of the Greek mind; for if Greece, from the first, realized the ideal of poetry, of science, of philosophy, of art, of profane life, if I may so speak, the Jewish people has made the religion of humanity. ”

“ Spinoza was the greatest of modern Jews, and Judaism exiled him. Nothing more simple; it must have been so, it must be so ever. Finite symbols, prisons of the infinite spirit, will eternally protest against the effort of idealism to enlarge them. The spirit, on its side, struggles eternally for more air and more light. ”

“ To love God is to live in God. Life in God is the best and most perfect because it is the reasonablest, happiest, fullest—in a word, because it gives us more being than any other life, and satisfies most completely the fundamental desire that constitutes our essence.
Spinoza's whole practical life was regulated according to these maxims. That life was a masterpiece of good sense and judgment. It was led with the profound skill of the wise man who desires one thing only, and invariably ends by obtaining it. ”

“ God is thus absolute thought, universal consciousness. The ideal exists, nay, it is the true existence; all else is mere appearance and frivolity. Bodies and souls are mere modes of which God is the substance: it is only the modes that fall within duration ”

“ The more aversion and estrangement from good he may have felt, the more he hopes to be recompensed, and imagines that they who are not restrained by the same fear as himself do what he would do in their case—that is to say, live lawlessly." Spinoza held with reason that this manner of seeking heaven was contrary to reason, and that there is an absurdity in pretending to gain God's favor by owning to him that, did one not dread him, one would not love. ”

“ We are incessantly spoken to of repentance, humility, death; but repentance is not a virtue, but the consequence of a weakness. Nor is humility one, since it springs in man from the idea of his inferiority. As to the thought of death, it is the daughter of fear, and it is in feeble souls that it sets up its home. ”

“ It is Holland that had the glory, more than two hundred years ago, to demonstrate the possibility of these theories by realizing them.
"Must we prove," said Spinoza, "that this freedom of thought gives rise to no serious inconvenience, and that it is competent to keep men, openly diverse in their opinions, reciprocally respectful of each other's rights? Examples abound, nor need we go far to seek them. Let us instance the town of Amsterdam, whose considerable growth—an object of admiration to other nations—is simply the fruit of this freedom. ”

“ His spirit will brood like a guardian angel over the spot where his rapid journey among men came to its end. Woe to him who, in passing-by, should dare to level an insult at that gentle and pensive figure! ”

“ He is no revolutionary, but a moderate; he transforms, explains, but does not destroy. His God is not indeed one who takes pleasure in ceremonies, sacrifices, odor of incense, yet Spinoza has no design whatever to overthrow religion; he entertains a profound veneration for Christianity, a tender and a sincere respect. ”