Carnal Spirit - Matthew W. Maguire

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… every causal relationship is unconscious.”44

      Furthermore, in their scientific anti-pathos, they no longer spoke freely and rigorously of love, as so many of their freethinking predecessors had. It is this change that makes most sense of Péguy’s remark in 1913, “The world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years,”45 and that, “The free thinkers of that time were more Christian than our devout Christians of today.”46 He perceived a sea change in modern secular notions of human fulfillment.

      While different forms of modern skepticism and progress generally denied the possibility of divine revelation, through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, many Deist and atheist philosophies settled their ethics and philosophical anthropology upon assumptions drawn from Christianity, above all by affirming the ultimate importance of an at once personal and universal love, or charity.

      At the very origins of modern philosophy and philosophies of science, the motives for modern ambitions are said to be charitable ones. The demands of Christian charity explicitly justify Bacon’s scientific investigation and call to complete the conquest of nature,47 just as it is the goodness of God and the care of the body he has created in love that justify Descartes’s claim to acquire medical knowledge above all, since the health of the body is the “first of all human goods” and further, it is “greatly sinning” against the supreme commandment (that is, love of God and one’s neighbor) not to occupy ourselves with medical research.48

      During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, even a vehemently anti-Christian materialist like Julien Offroy de La Mettrie carefully keeps open the possibility of personal immortality in L’Homme machine, as well as emphasizing the possibility of a natural reconciliation with one’s enemies through love and virtue.49 In a different way, Kant argues that practical reason demands that we believe in an ultimate reconciliation of happiness and justice in a world where death is no more, guaranteed by God, in an infinite movement toward the Highest Good.50 When Kant does reflect (with a certain playfulness upon a forbidding theme) upon the possibility of an eschatological end to history, it is possible, he says, only “should Christianity ever reach the point where it ceases to be worthy of love.”51

      The Deist or atheistic desire to relate to a positive infinity, in the sense of a historical horizon that represents the complete fulfillment of human aspiration through benevolence to and love for others, reaches its apogee in the most eminent atheists of the mid-nineteenth century: Auguste Comte and Ludwig Feuerbach.

      Feuerbach declares the advent of a new “religion of humanity,” whose acceptance would inaugurate an age of fully human flourishing, in which justice, creativity, and science would dwell as one upon a newly sacred earth, tended by an ultimately unified humanity freed from its ancient alienations, united by love.52 Similarly, Comte foretold an era of humanist priests attending his own religion of humanity, in which true knowledge of human beings and society would beget universal well-being and fraternal happiness founded upon “altruism,”53 to use Comte’s neologism.

      By the end of the nineteenth century these ordering temporal and humanistic unities—which sustained non-theological but exalted notions of positive, even infinite human flourishing through universal love—were decomposing in philosophy and the more exacting, elite forms of political and cultural criticism. It is not only that Émile Littré could defend Comtean positivism while repudiating Comte’s religion of humanity as an embarrassment. In his notebooks, Nietzsche mocked Feuerbach and others as thinkers who “reeked of theologians and Church Fathers,”54 and elsewhere exhorted his contemporaries not to hold timidly to Christian morality and anthropology without faith in Christ, but to repudiate root and branch Christian notions of self, goodness, people, and purpose as well as Christian faith (even if one built upon their ruins, that is, upon the inward turn of will to power accomplished by Judaism and Christianity).

      In Durkheimian social science, religion was not the gradual entry to some more “total” or “real” universal, even mystical or exalted love, nor did it require comprehensive study of the ongoing history of religion as a whole, as Benjamin Constant, Hegel, or Feuerbach did. It became an object of fascination for prominent sociologists through a meticulous, detached, putatively objective inquiry that methodically disassembled its most “primitive” forms and rejected mysticism.

      Early sociology often occupied itself with religion; Durkheim remarked in a memorable turn of phrase that in the mid-1890s, the study of religion “was a revelation for me.”55 For Durkheim and others, religion disclosed its essence in its most primitive states: it was first and finally a social, entirely immanent phenomenon, that was not on its way to some more perfect and expansive love. For the sociologist, there is no relation of love toward one’s subject, or toward the purpose of the enquiry: the same sort of objective method could be applied to locate elemental religious structures elsewhere, properly cleansed of their particularity, and allow them to be understood as general, social facts and forms. Social facts were common things—and things for Durkheim were “any object of knowledge which is not naturally penetrable by the understanding.” They had to be studied as such in a rigorous science of societies, which would rigorously dispense with all “preconceptions.”56 This science would “avoid” all “mysticism,” with “constant care,” and even those sociologists ambivalent about the more robust Durkheimian assertions did not waver upon this question.57

      It is his study of religion among especially “primitive” peoples—the Aborigines of Australia—that (Durkheim believed) permitted him direct and objective access to the original essence of religious life, that is, as a social phenomenon dealing with the sacred and the profane. For Durkheim, “whenever we try to explain something human viewed at a particular point in time—whether a religious belief, a moral law, a legal precept, an aesthetic practice, or an economic system—we must begin by returning to its simplest and most primitive form.”58

      Whatever the possibilities of primitive religion, the organic, messy contingency of narrative history, with room for meaningful agency and free will, was for many sociologists no less suspect than mysticism or universal love. For example, the sociologist François Simiand (who worked closely with Durkheim) took to the pages of La Revue de synthèse historique in 1903 to criticize the practice of history precisely for its failure to consign events and personal agency to its own disciplinary past. For Simiand, historians should seek regularity and “if possible, laws” along with other “positive sciences.”59 Durkheim and other social scientists agreed.60

      In his essay “Historical Method and Social Science,” Simiand instructs historians that, along with sociologists, we are to “clear our minds of these metaphysical relics” that lead them to assume that there are material facts but not social facts.61 The realm of the objective is that which is “independent of our individual spontaneity,”62 and thus social life can be considered objectively. All sciences use abstractions, but Simiand believes that “fortunate abstractions”63 are those that lead to the establishing of regularities and ultimate laws—of natural science or social life. The notion of individual agency as a cause of change was naïve, and itself a late historical product of “social development”; the historian should be willing to apply an assertive skepticism (it seems almost an assumption of error) to the testimony of individuals in history trying to explain the reasons for their own actions. That is to introduce “explanation by final causes,” which is an “illusion” not acceptable in the “positive sciences.”64

      For Simiand, it may be true that particular historical events or the decisions of individual human beings in time can be unpredictable—and in that sense contingent—but Simiand believes that true history must not tarry over them. He scolds the historian Charles Seignobos for arguing that the political history of France—for example, in an account of the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848—had anything to do with the work of “obscure republicans” and “democratic and socialist agitators,” who, according to Simiand, are present in different nations and historical epochs without revolutions.65 The scientific causes were the “social disintegration accomplished by the [French] Revolution”

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