…how the human spirit could doubt heaven in seeing the earth, and how could it reject the terrestrial law in seeing heaven? You are astonished that Humanity could remain so long imprisoned in this formidable circle; ah! I am even more surprised that he could leave it.

The following translated passage from the French philosopher and socialist Pierre Leroux’s Trois discours sur la situation actuelle de la société et de l’esprit humain (1847), offers a rich and Romantic interpretation of the French Revolution, Christianity and secular consciousness and hermeneutics, and an early sociological perspective over world history. First, Leroux creates a ‘universal history’ from Roman Empire and the “infancy” of humankind up until the vast poverty and discontent that, in Leroux’s conception, culminated in the French Revolution. Second, Leroux references a hermeneutical “compass” of Christian, and then increasingly secular, interpretations of life and purpose. Leroux argues that disenchantment, and the loss of a religious compass “towards eternal destiny,” meant society was existentially abandoned since it was impossible to turn to the divine or even the past for inspiration. Even more, without a predestined divine plan, humankind was “reduced to its own forces,” and by consequence, came to even “silently” abandon itself without direction. The reason for this translation, therefore, is to introduce readers to early Idealist and socialist French thought, with particular reference to inequality, existential purpose, and the 19th century debate over religious versus secular, “modern” life.

Translation

                It is not vain to call “Revolution” the series of events that commenced in 1789, to mark by this word that nothing similar had taken place until then in our history, that not one of the previous crises exceeded the limits of the social and religious order of the Middles Ages, and that, for the first time, this order would be overthrown. Travel the dozen centuries of European history since the movement where the Christian Church rose from the rumble of the Roman Empire, invaded by barbarians, up until the moment when Philosophy posed its bold problems, and you will recognize in an unmistakable manner a common character throughout this epoch. You will see, during these dozen centuries, the same human spirit, so to speak, and by consequence the same social constitution, having its accidents, its crises, its transformations, as all that has life, but conserves all the same conditions of existence; always one, though diverse and mutable in its development. There, as in all living beings, life is an uninterrupted series of changes; but childhood, virility, old age, forms a continuous series that comes to terminate at death. That life is reborn from death, this is certain; but death is a term after which the conditions of existence are changed.

                The fundamental conditions of existence did not change for society through all the Middle Ages; because this society of the Middle Ages, that had its infancy, its youth, its virility, its old age, and that is dead today, can be understood, despite its diverse periods, in a singular formula that is: “The earth, given to evil, was considered as a place of tests, and as a vestibule of heaven where the evil is mended.” This belief lasted throughout all the Middle Ages, and was not definitively destroyed until the last century. Therefore, that what I call the conditions of existence of society were not changed during all of the Middle Ages.

                There was, throughout all the Middle Ages, a man, that is to say the man, who believed that the earth was only a place of tests leading to hell, or to paradise. And this man lived according to his faith; and society was the consequence of this man thus limited; and when this faith withered, society withered; and when this faith extinguished, society was extinguished. 

It is not true that physiologists, in agreement with the vulgar, distinguish four ages or periods in human life, infancy, youth, virility, and old age? I would freely divide the history of Europe, throughout the dozen centuries in which I speak, in four corresponding ages to these four ages of man. The first infancy, then the barbarians submitted to the belief of paradise and of hell: this age of monks and papacy, from the sixth to the eleventh century. Then youth, where lay society commences to form, and begins to reflect, to imagine: this is the age of feudalism and of the scholastic, but it is also the age of heresies, from the twelfth century to the fifteenth. Then the virility, when society produces successively the Renaissance, the Reform, Philosophy: this is the age of the monarchy, but it is also the age of savants, of artists and of philosophers; is the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the age of Raphael and of Luther, of Shakespeare and of Galilei, of Molière and of Leibnitz: art, poetry, science, philosophy, nothing of the sort of the very ostensible conceptions of the earth considered as a place of tests mediating hell or paradise; and however who does not sense that we are already touching the limit of this idea? Finally comes old age, where society abdicates the thought under the empire of which he himself has arisen and lives: they laugh of dreams of infancy, of ideas of his middle age; they laugh of hell and paradise! It is therefore to know, following his virility, the germ of the new society which must replace him. Do you want to be reborn like the butterfly that emerges from the chrysalid? “To die, to be reborn said Shakespeare, here is the problem!” What is certain, what it abdicates is constitutive thought, and it strives to erase it as an error and a lie. This is the age of the destruction of Christianity and Feudalism, of the overthrow of kings, of nobles and priests; it is the eighteenth century, it is the age of Voltaire.

                Indeed, through all the successive phases and the milieu of all facts that marked them; through that first nebulous epoch where the Church subdued the barbarians with the fear of hell and hope of paradise, forcing them to put their framing at the service of this idea; to traverse the internal struggles of feudalism, or the struggles of the monarchy and of the bourgeoisie against the nobility first and then also among them; through the insurrection of temporal power against the papacy, and of lay society against the monastic orders; through the wars of provinces and of monarchies, and the bloody debates of religious sects among themselves; through the milieu, I have said, of many prodigious risings and of many falls no less remarkable, always (among those who understand how the human spirit engenders and renews society), society always is, in this great space of time, fundamentally the same. Many commotions, no doubt, and innumerable changes have taken place in this space of time so long; the morals, the laws, the beliefs, they were modified ceaselessly: but all the evolutions accomplished in the breast of the same social and religious order; and, while they accomplished that same system, in their essence, remained immutable and always lived the same life. Because the circumference of the human spirit remains the same; the earth and the heavens do not change; the earth left to consensual inequality, the heaven open to each according to his merits.

                Throughout this immense period, in fact, the prejudice of the races existed; every man thought it right to belong to his fathers; all believed in the nobility, to the superiority of rank; the equality of man on the work was not even suspected. But all firmly believed in this equality before God and the Church. Also, the Church and the future life that it announced, and the way it taught, was the completion or reparation of the secular life and of the terrestrial life. For the heart and the spirit, the Christian law was sovereign; and if it didn’t administer the material world, it directed and dominated it. There was not one unbeliever in a million men. To the afflicted, to the unfortunate, there remained (even after everything that failed them) one belief that nothing could trouble, a belief that this way was not only a passage towards eternal life. The just and the injust were defined: when a man violated the law, they did not ask with anxiety if society was not the cause or accomplice of his crime; they called him wicked, and punished him. In a word, all the souls had faith in a political and religious order; and this faith manifested in all poetry, that is to say the symbols, that could bear for the sight or the ears: the cathedrals, the paintings, the poems. Thus the whole man was filled; all the problems of that his spirit could raise had their solution; all the maladies of his soul, their remedy.

                And it should not be thought that I want to make of the Middle Ages a pleasant and false picture. I would say, on the contrary, that which made them imagine these great and sublime fables of Christianity, was the horrible suffering of man in this epoch. The worse the conditions of man, the greater his faith in the equitable heaven became. The heaven and earth corresponded and supplemented each other; the one was the consequence, the sentimental and logical deduction of the other: both were, so to speak, the products of a unique thought; and both disappeared and fell at the same time.

                Admire, in fact, the logic of the human spirit throughout the Middle Ages, or, to put it better, since the coming of Christ until the French Revolution. What man did not have and did not conceive possible on earth, equality, justice, the good, he placed into the, and he enjoyed it in anticipation. Thus human consciousness and intelligence were satisfied.

                But, in order to understand how this system was completed, one must compare the dogma of paradise and the dogma of the fall. Inequality of birth and of race exist on earth; one was predestined by the father of sons; the sons suffered because of his father: why this inequity? Formidable problem, the solution of which is: It is that all Humanity arose from Adam, and has sinned with him.

                Then again new problem and new solution; because they asked how Humanity could be saved. Between the original fall and paradise, it was necessary to have a link that unites them, that serves as a bridge to Humanity: hence the dogma of the incarnation of Jesus Christ and his passion.

                They could then say to man: “You complain of suffering; at the just par excellence, the Son of Man, the Son of God, did he not suffer more, did he not suffer more than you? Look at his cross! And has he not come to redeem you, you and all those that suffer? Has he not opened, by his death, the door of an abode where pain is banished, and where you are rewarded according to your merit and for your very suffering?” I ask them, how the human spirit could doubt heaven in seeing the earth, and how could it reject the terrestrial law in seeing heaven? You are astonished that Humanity could remain so long imprisoned in this formidable circle; ah! I am even more surprised that he could leave it.

                Indeed, I understand it clearly, all the work of edification of Christianity lies within the germ of thought I have just enunciated. Why does Humanity attach itself, by so much work and with so much submission and love, to old traditions of Judaism? It is that they alone could give him explication of his origins, and at the same time, the prophecy of his destiny, by teaching him both the unity of God and the unity of the human race. Why was Aryanism defeated? It is because it was impossible to conceive that man, punished and condemned by God, could be saved by himself: therefore the Savior was God.

                Past, present, and future of Humanity; Adam, Jesus, the Kingdom of God, these are the terms of a series where everything is clear, linked, enchained; series where the real world then, the world of inequality and of evil, finds itself explained, among a past that produced it, and a mendable future. Past in the present, therefore crime in the past, but hope and justice in the future: this is how the human heart feels, how the human spirit reasons; and, collecting with joy from the entire universe all the vestiges of his history, inspired by the earth, the heavens, and all the phenomena as such that man then conceives, Humanity has built the immense edifice of Christianity, and has lived in it.

                Do not therefore separate religion from society; is it like if you separated the head of man from his body, and showing me this cadaver, you dared to say to me: here is man. Society without religion, is a pure abstraction that you made, because it is an absurd chimera that does not exist. Human thought is one, and it is both social and religious, that is to say it has two faces that correspond and generate mutually. As earth responds to heaven; reciprocally, the heaven being given, the earth follows.

                This truth could be demonstrated by all the periods of development of Humanity, like during the Christian period. But it could be tempting to doubt in seeing what is happening today, as if the present was not, on the contrary, the most striking demonstration that there is no society without religion. You would ask where today religion is, and I ask you where society is today. Do you not see that the social order is destroyed, like the religious order? The ruin of the one joins the ruin of the other. Once again, the human edifice is both heaven and earth, that rises, endures, and falls at the same time.

            You will love God with all your love and your neighbor as yourself. Man once sinned, and here is why the terrestrial life is a valley of tears. But it is only a passage: there will be another life; because Jesus, by his death, had redeemed men from sin. With this, all men had, so to speak, a compass for all the events of his life. Poor or rich, happy or unhappy, he had the sufficient reason for everything. Thus marked out forward and backward, he only had to harmonize his life with this point of departure and aim. His birth, his condition, was a fact that must have been accepted such as it was given. Happiness, must only appear to him as one occasion more favorable of the advance towards eternal destiny by his merits towards his brothers; unhappily, he did not have the right to whisper about it. The inequality of conditions, the incessant rigor of fate for the many, the scandal of riches with all the vices of a few, the inequality, the tryanny of governors and masters, all this chaos in short that weighs atrociously on our love and imagination, to us that the Philosophy of eighteen centuries and the Revolution had emancipated from the past in spirit, but not in fact; this chaos, I say, does not exist for man who carried engraved in his heart, from his first steps in life, the Christian solution. With this solution, there was not even on the earth some absolute evil, since all evil was amply repaired. All, on the contrary, was a trial and an opportunity for salvation, for this other life absorbed souls. Add that the institutions responded on all sides to this education, and that each instant one takes to strengthen and clarify your faith, to re-temper it, to re-engrave it in yourself, by addressing yourself to the Church, which, incessantly, day and night, and by all kinds of ways, called everyone to come and purify themselves and rest for an instant in its breast or confide in it forever.

            Now, I ask them, where are the principles that you would give as a compass to our young generation?

            Do you believe, by chance, that it is not needed, that this is a superfluous thing and therefore the men will pass over from here on? Do you believe that man, after always making a solution of the human and divine problem, has arrived, little by little, to an epoch where he lives on the earth, like an animal, without consciousness and without concern for the general destiny? And do you regard the last term of enlightenment and reason to reduce thirty two million men to an existence purely phenomenal? Then, do you conceive society without any recognized base? To enjoy, some say; to suffer, others say; chance, fatality, says the chorus. But do you understand those that cry in murmur: why do we all suffer?

            Stoicism and Epicureanism could be, as Montaigne doubtlessly said of Epicureanism, a soft pillow sufficient for some, because the calm pride of the Stoic sweetens the pain. But it is only an exception, a particular case infinitely rare. The immense majority of human heads are incapable of relaxing on this pillow. In order to rest on it, very particular innate dispositions are necessary. The Epicurean that lives calm in his virtuous limits is a prodigy; the Stoic that suffers religiously is another. Leaving therefore the prodigies, the exceptions, and considering the great number, the multitude, in face of which the exceptions are as if they don’t exist.

            Now, without even speaking of the immense multitude, abandoned, as a vile troupe, at the instinct of his passions to taking by necessity and social chance, what today is education for the small number that receive it? It is the struggle of passed traditions with modern science, the struggle of Christian dogmas, which society lives in infancy (as if the scum of mature men were good enough for infancy), and of philosophy, that he still knows to destroy; it is a heterogeneous mix of all sorts of principles that are not only principles, but truths and errors mixed purposely. The new synthesis, not being made, leaves in large part an immense void; and, by filling the void, they put to purpose the error, as if it could take the place of truth, and as if the error and truth could not fight, in such a way that all becomes hollow and void. Thus fragile characters are formed, full of trouble and incoherence, or of sterile and ungrateful natures, having no other rule than egoism. And once life has commenced as such, it continues to misstep and misstep. The infant becomes man, husband and father; he sees elevate around him cradles and tombs; and, in time, his heart atrophies and tightens, or becomes desolate and he laments bitterly; because the more his thought becomes grave, the more isolated he feels, the more the misery of man, reduced to his own forces, in the solitude of society gone painful and frightful. Of all the great mysteries that holds human life, as on all the duties of this life, society silently abandons itself: without one lesson, without advice, without support. If his eye plunges into the profoundness of his heart, if he refers to memories of his infancy by seeking the principles that society gives him, in order to prepare his laws, what would he find there? Childishness, lies, that later society itself erases and mocks. They play with the most holy of the world, the naïvete of the human soul arriving at knowledge and life. His imagination traces him to primitive man that took his malleable and credulous infancy, and they engraved in his head superstitious ideas or fragments of ancient truths which themselves no longer have meaning. These are those that told him something about general destiny, on the why of life, on the past, on the future; these are those that spoke to him of God; and later other educators, savants, philosophers, the world, they took it in their turn, and erased it. Oh the pain of the human soul, soiled first by superstitions of the past, at the age where he is tender and naïve, and then deceived and abandoned. The Scythes, they said, gouged the eyes of their slaves: by the same fashion we have to our infants; we raise them first with the dogmas of Christianity, so they remain then all their lives deprived of sight. Thus isolated to the milieu of Humanity of the nineteenth century, man is poorer in science, in certainty, in morality, than he ever was in ages less advanced in Humanity. Already life, already death besieged their mysteries; to who were they addressed? Will they return to their educators, the primitive men? Will they have it consecrated, by these pariahs of society that he despises, his holy union with a woman, and his newborn children? And will he not feel a mortal cold and a profound horror to hear their paid prayers resound on the coffins of those he has loved? Like Young in a foreign land, he is obliged to bury himself the remains of those who are dear to him; but he does not, like him, remember the rites of his country and his religion; he is in the midst of men, he is in his native land, and he is alone in Spirit on earth. As the heritage of humanity, is it not entitled to a share in your wealth? Science of Humanity, should you not support and enlighten it? Art of Humanity, should you not make a few drops of enthusiasm flow into his heart? Why have you lived and suffered, generous souls who in all ages have thought of posterity? Was it then so that Humanity might end up with every man alone in spirit on earth?