2 THE SCIENCE OF RELIGIONS

AT THIS POINT a few remarks may suitably be made concerning what is called 'the science of religions', since it owes its origin precisely to the researches of the Indologists; this fact shows from the outset that the word 'religion' is not used in the exact sense which we have given to it. In fact Burnouf, who seems to have been the first scholar to attach its title to this science, or so-called science, omits to count morals among the elements constituting religion, which are therefore reduced to two, namely doctrine and ritual; and this enables him to include things which in no wise pertain to the religious point of view, for even he admits with justice that the moral outlook is absent from the Veda. Such is the fundamental confusion of thought that is to be found at the starting-point of the 'science of religions', which claims to group under the same name all traditional doctrines, whatever their real nature may be; but many further confusions have been added to the first one, especially since the most up-to-date scholarship began to apply to this field of study its formidable apparatus of exegesis, of 'textual criticism' and 'hypercriticism', more calculated to impress simple minds than to lead to serious results.

The whole of this pretended 'science of religions' rests on a few postulates that are nothing but sheer preconceptions; thus its exponents lay it down that every doctrine must have taken its start in 'naturalism' (whereas on the contrary we, for our part, see nothing in naturalism but a deviation which, at its every appearance, has always been opposed to the primordial and regular tradition); and by continually twisting round texts the real point of which they have missed, they always end by reading into them some interpretation or other that agrees with the 'naturalistic' spirit. In this way a whole theory of 'myths' has been elaborated, of which the best known example is the famous 'solar myth'; one of its chief propagators was Max Müller, whom we have had occasion to mention several times as a typical representative of the orientalist turn of mind. As for the theory of the 'solar myth' itself, it is merely a revival of the astro-mythological theory that was put forward and upheld toward the end of the eighteenth century by Dupuis and Volney.^[1] It is well known that this conception was applied to Christianity as well as to every other doctrine, and we have already pointed out the confusion that it necessarily implies; as soon as a symbolism is seen to correspond with certain natural phenomena, the 'scientists' fly to the conclusion that its only concern is to represent these phenomena, whereas in reality the phenomena themselves merely serve as symbols of something else belonging to quite a different order, while the correspondence that is observable is but an application of the analogies which harmoniously interconnect all the degrees of being. Under such conditions it is not very difficult to discover 'naturalism' everywhere, and it would indeed be surprising if it were not so to be found when symbols, which must of necessity belong to the natural order, are once mistaken for what they represent; fundamentally, the error is the same as that of the 'nominalists', who confound the idea with the word that serves to express it; and it is thus that modern scholars, through their misunderstanding of symbols, and under the influence of the prejudice that encourages them to believe that all civilizations are constructed on the Greco-Roman model, themselves become the inventors of 'myths', this being the only way in which such myths could arise.

It should by now be apparent why we have described a study of this kind as a 'so-called science' and why we find it quite impossible to take it at all seriously; and it must be added that this 'science of religions', while affecting an air of disinterested impartiality and even advertising its ridiculous and indeed positively outrageous claim to 'stand above all the doctrines',^[2] usually serves simply as a weapon of polemic in the hands of people whose real purpose is to employ it against religion—understood this time in its correct and customary sense. Such a use of scholarship in a negative and subversive spirit is natural to the fanatics of the 'historical method'; it is indeed of the very essence of that method, which is by its nature anti-traditional, or at least becomes so as soon as it is allowed to overstep its legitimate bounds; and that is why all those who attach a real importance to religion for its own sake are considered to be disqualified from the service of this science. However, among the specialists of the 'science of religions' there are some who, in appearance at least, do not go so far as that; chief among them are the adherents of the 'liberal Protestant' school of thought, but these people, even though in theory they keep to the ordinary standpoint of religion, seek to reduce it to a simple 'moralism', which amounts to destroying it by the double suppression of dogma and ritual in the name of a rationalism that is nothing but disguised sentimentality. Thus the final result is the same as in the case of avowed unbelievers, supporters of an 'independent morality', although in the former case the real intention is perhaps better concealed; and this, when all is said and done, is but the logical outcome of the tendencies that the Protestant spirit carried within it from the outset. We have even witnessed an attempt, happily frustrated, to introduce this spirit, under the name of 'modernism', into the Catholic church itself. This movement aimed at replacing religion by a shadowy 'religiosity', that is to say by a sentimental aspiration which the 'moral life' would be sufficient to satisfy, and in order to achieve this purpose it had first to try and discredit the dogmas by applying 'criticism' to them, and by bringing out a theory of their 'evolution', that is to say by resorting to the use of that same weapon, the 'science of religions', which perhaps never had any other real purpose.

We have already stated that the 'evolutionist' attitude is inherent in the 'historical method'; to choose one of many examples, an application of it is to be seen in the strange theory according to which religious, or supposedly religious, conceptions must have passed through a series of successive phases, the chief of which are commonly known as fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism. This hypothesis is comparable to another that has appeared in the field of linguistics, according to which languages, in the course of their development, are supposed to have passed through the successive stages of the monosyllabic, agglutinative, and inflected forms: this is a quite gratuitous supposition, borne out by no facts, and indeed flatly contradicted by the facts, since it has never been possible to discover the least evidence of an actual passage from one of these forms to another; what have been taken for three successive phases, on the strength of a preconceived idea, are simply three differing types to which the various linguistic groups are attached, each always remaining true to the type to which it already belongs. The same may be said of another more general hypothesis, which Auguste Comte formulated under the title of the 'law of the three states' and in which he turns into successive states the different provinces of thought; though these can always coexist simultaneously, he insists on discovering an incompatibility between them, because he imagines that every possible kind of knowledge always took natural phenomena as its object, whereas this really applies to scientific knowledge alone. It can be seen that this fanciful conception of Comte's, without being directly 'evolutionary', was partly affected by the same spirit, and is akin to the hypothesis of a primitive 'naturalism', according to which religions can only be premature and provisional experiments, though at the same time an indispensable prelude to what will later on become a scientific explanation; and in the development of the religious phase itself, Comte believed he could distinguish, as so many subdivisions, the same three degrees of fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism. We will not discuss this theory further, as it is in any case widely known, but it seemed advisable to point out the correlation, too often overlooked, between various points of view, all springing from the same tendencies of the modern Western outlook.

In order to clear up the question of these three supposed phases in the 'evolution' of religious conceptions, we will begin by recalling our previous statement that there never has existed any essentially polytheistic doctrine, because polytheism, like the 'myths' that are closely bound up with it, is but a gross distortion arising out of a complete lack of understanding; besides, polytheism and anthropomorphism really never became general except among the Greeks and Romans; everywhere else they remained within the province of individual error. Every genuinely traditional doctrine is then in real-ity monotheistic, or, to be more accurate, it is a 'doctrine of unity' or rather of 'non-duality', becoming monotheistic when it has to be translated into the religious mode; as for the religions properly so called—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—it is quite obvious that they are purely monotheistic. Now as regards fetishism, this word, which is of Portuguese origin, literally means 'sorcery'; what it des-ignates is therefore neither religion nor anything more or less analo-gous to it, but definitely magic and even magic of the lowest kind. Magic is in no wise a form of religion, either of a primitive or of a degenerate kind, neither is it something radically opposed to reli-gion as some have maintained, a species of 'counter-religion', if one may use such an expression; nor lastly is it something from which both religion and science are descended, in accordance with a third opinion which is as unfounded as the two foregoing ones; all these confusions show that people who so glibly talk about magic are none too sure of their ground.

In reality, magic belongs to the sphere of science and, to be more precise, of experimental science: it has to do with the wielding of certain forces which, in the Far East, are called 'wandering influ-ences', and the effects of which, however strange this may seem, are nonetheless natural phenomena governed by laws like other phe-nomena.^[3] This science is certainly capable of being given a tradi-tional basis, but even then it never possesses value beyond that of a contingent and secondary application: in order to be perfectly clear about its degree of importance, it should be added that it is usually despised by the real representatives of the tradition, who, except in a few special cases, abandon it to the itinerant jugglers who turn it to profit by amusing the public. These magicians, such as are often to be met with in India where they are usually given the Arabic name of faqirs—that is to say of 'poor men' or 'mendicants'—are usually people who, through intellectual incapacity, have stopped short on the path of metaphysical realization; they chiefly arouse the interest of foreigners, and they deserve no greater consideration than that accorded to them by their own countrymen. We have no wish to deny the reality of the phenomena produced in this way, although in some cases they are merely copied or simulated in circumstances which nonetheless presuppose remarkable powers of suggestion, compared to which any results obtained by Westerners who have tried to experiment on similar lines appear quite insignificant; what we do deny is the interest of these phenomena, which are quite unconnected with the pure doctrine or the metaphysical realization that is inseparable from it. We here take the opportunity of recalling that nothing that pertains to the experimental field can ever prove anything except in a negative sense, all it can do being to serve as an illustration of a theory; an example constitutes neither an argument nor an explanation, and nothing is more illogical than to make a principle, even a relative one, depend on its own particular applications.

If we have been at pains to explain the true nature of magic, this is because it is made to play an important part in one theory of the 'science of religions', the theory put forward by what is called the 'sociological school'; after trying for a long time to provide a psychological interpretation for 'religious phenomena', there is now an attempt to give them a sociological explanation. We have already mentioned this in connection with the definition of religion; in our opinion, both points of view are equally erroneous and alike incapable of giving a true account of religion and still less of tradition in general. Auguste Comte wished to compare the mentality of the ancients to that of children, which is ridiculous enough; but the theories of the present-day sociologists are hardly less absurd, when they compare it to the mentality of savages, whom they call 'primitives', but whom in many cases one would rather be inclined to regard as degenerate. If the savages had always been found in the state where we now see them, there would be no possible explanation for the fact that they follow a large number of customs which they themselves do not understand, and which cannot be looked on as foreign importations, because they differ too markedly from anything to be met with elsewhere; such customs can only be considered as the traces of lost civilizations which in the long-distant past, even in prehistoric times, must have belonged to peoples of whom the present-day savages are the descendants and last vestiges. We mention this in order to confine ourselves to the province of facts, but without prejudice to other and deeper reasons that seem to us still more decisive, but which are inaccessible to the sociologists and other analytical 'observers'. We will only add that by a judicious application of analogy, and bearing in mind the diversity of adaptations necessitated by the diversity of human mentalities, it is often possible, owing to the essential and basic unity of all traditions, to discover the conceptions to which the customs mentioned above were originally attached before they were reduced to the level of 'superstitions'; in a similar way, this basic unity permits of a large measure of understanding of those civilizations that are only known to us through the inscriptions and symbolic figures engraved on their surviving monuments. This, moreover, is what we had in mind at the outset when speaking of the services that a real knowledge of the East could render to all those who wish to make a serious study of antiquity in the hope of deriving valuable knowledge from it, unlike those others who are content with the quite exterior and superficial point of view of ordinary scholarship.