Thus the true God:— the universal, external, immutable God created by the two-fold action of religious imagination and man's abstractive faculty, was posited for the first time in history. But from the moment that God became known and established, man forgetting or rather not being aware of the action of his own brain which created this God, and not being able to recognize himself any longer in his own creation:— the universal abstraction, began to worship it. Thus the respective roles of man and God underwent a change: the thing created became the presumed and true creator, and man took his place among other miserable creatures, as one of them, though hardly more privileged than the rest.
Once God has been posited, the subsequent progressive development of various theologies can be explained naturally as the reflection of the development of humanity in history. For as soon as the idea of a supernatural and supreme being had got hold of man's imagination and established itself as his religious conviction:— to the extent that the reality of this being appeared to him more certain than that of real things to be seen and touched with his hands, it began to appear natural to him that this idea should become the principal basis of all human experience, and that it should modify, permeate, and dominate it absolutely.
Immediately the Supreme Being appeared to him as the absolute master, as thought, will, the source of everything— as the creator and regulator of all things. Nothing could rival him, and everything had to vanish in his presence since the truth of everything resided in him alone, and every particular being, man included, powerful as it might appear, could exist henceforth only with God's sanction. All that, however, is entirely logical, for otherwise God would not be the Supreme, All-Powerful, Absolute Being; that is to say, he could not exist at all.
...Thus man's reason, the only organ which he possesses for the discernment of truth, in becoming divine reason, ceases to be intelligible and imposes itself upon believers as a revelation of the absurd. It is thus that respect for Heaven is translated into contempt for the earth, and adoration of divinity into disparagement of humanity. Man's love, the immense natural solidarity which interlinks all individuals, all peoples, and, rendering the happiness and liberty of everyone dependent upon the liberty and happiness of others, must unite all of them sooner or later, in spite of differences of race and color, into one brotherly commune— this love, transmuted into divine love and religious charity, forthwith becomes the scourge of humanity. All the millions of human victims immolated for the greater glory of God, bear witness to it....
In religion, man the animal, in emerging from bestiality, makes the first step toward humanity; but so long as he remains religious he will never attain his aim, for every religion condemns him to absurdity, and, misdirecting his steps, makes him seek the divine instead of the human. Through religion, peoples who have scarcely freed themselves form natural slavery, in which other animal species are deeply sunk, forthwith relapse into a new slavery, in to bondage to strong men and castes privileged by divine election.
...But whoever says revelation says revealers, prophets, and priests, and these, once recognized as God's representatives on earth, as teachers and leaders of humanity toward eternal life, receive thereby the mission of directing, governing, and commanding it in its earthly existence. All men owe them faith and absolute obedience. Slaves of god, men must also be slaves of the Church and the State, in so far as the latter is consecrated by the Church.
...And unless we desire slavery, we cannot and should not make the slightest concession to theology, for in this mystical and rigorously consistent alphabet, anyone starting with A must inevitably arrive at Z, and anyone who wants to worship God must renounce his liberty and human dignity.
God exists: hence man is a slave.
Man is intelligent, just, free; hence God does not exist.
We defy anyone to avoid this circle; and now let all choose.
...Religion, as we have said, is the first awakening of human reason in the form of divine unreason. It is the first gleam of human truth through the divine veil of falsehood, the first manifestation of human morality, of justice and right, through the historic iniquities of divine grace. And, finally, it is the apprenticeship of liberty under the humiliating and painful yoke of divinity, a yoke which in the long run will have to be broken in order to conquer in fact reasonable reason, true truth, full justice, and real liberty.
In religion, man —the animal—in emerging from bestiality, makes his first step toward humanity; but so long as he remains religious, he will never attain his aim, for every religion condemns him to absurdity, and, misdirecting his steps, makes him seek the divine instead of the human. Through religion, peoples who have scarcely freed themselves form natural slavery in which other animal species are deeply sunk, forthwith relapse into a new slavery, into bondage to strong men and castes privileged by divine election.
One of the principal attributes of the immortal Gods consists, as we know, in their acting as legislators for human society, as founders of the State. Man—so nearly all religions maintain—were he left to himself, would be incapable of discerning good from evil, the just from the unjust. Thus it was necessary that the Divinity itself, in one or another manner, should descend upon earth to teach man and establish civil and political order in human society. Whence follows this triumphant conclusion: that all laws and established powers consecrated by Heaven must be obeyed, always and at any price.
This is very convenient for the rulers but very inconvenient for the governed. And since we belong with the latter, we have a particular interest in closely examining this old tenet, which was instrumental in imposing slavery upon us, in order to find a way of freeing ourselves from its yoke.
The question has now become exceedingly simple: God not having any existence at all, or being only the creation of our abstractive faculty, united in first wedlock with the religious feeling that has come down to us from our animal stage; God being only a universal abstraction, incapable of movement and action of his own: absolute Non-Being, imagined as absolute being and endowed with life only by religious fantasy; absolutely void of all content and enriched only with the realities of earth; rendering back to man that of which he had robbed him only in a denaturalized, corrupted, divine form—God can neither be good nor wicked, neither just nor unjust. He is not capable of desiring, if establishing anything, for in reality he is nothing, and becomes every thing only by an act of religious credulity.
Consequently, if this credulity discovered in God the ideas of justice and good it was only because it had unconsciously endowed him with it; it gave, while it believed itself to be the recipient. But man cannot endow God with those attributes unless he himself possesses them. Where did he find them? In himself, of course. But whatever man has came down to him form his animal stage—his spirit being simply the unfolding of his animal nature. Thus the idea of justice and good, like all other human things, must have had their root in man's very animality.
The common and basic error of all the idealists, an error which flows logically from their whole system, is to seek the basis of morality in the isolated individual, whereas it is found—an can only be found—in associated individual. In order to prove it, we shall begin by doing justice, once and for all, to the isolated or absolute individual of the idealists.
This solitary and abstract individual is just as much of a fiction as is God. Both were created simultaneously by the fantasy of believers or by childish reason, not by reflective, experimental, and critical reason, but at first by the imaginative reason of the people, later developed, explained, and dogmatized by the theological and metaphysical theorists of the idealist school. Both representing abstractions that are devoid of any content and imcompatible with any kind of reality, they end in mere nothingness.
I believe I have already proved the immorality of the God-fiction. Now I want to analyze the fiction, immoral as it is absurd, of this absolute and abstract human individual whom the moralists of the idealist school take as the basis of their political and social theories.
It will not be very difficult for me to prove that the human individual whom they love and extol is a thoroughly immoral being. It is personified egoism, a being that is pre-eminently anti-social. Since he is endowed with an immortal soul, he is infinite and self-sufficient; consequently, he does not stand in need of anyone, not even God, and all the less of other men. Logically he should not endure, alongside or above him, the existence of and equal or superior individual, immortal and infinite to the same extent or to a larger degree than himself. By right he should be able to declare himself the sole being, the whole world. For infinity, when it meets anything outside of itself, meets a limit, is no more infinity, and when two infinities meet, they cancel each other.
Why do the theologians and metaphysicians, who otherwise have proven themselves subtle logicians, let themselves run into this inconsistency by admitting the existence of many equally immortal men, that is to say, equally infinite, and above them the existence of a God who is immortal and infinite to a still higher degree? They were driven to it by the absolute impossibility of denying the real existence, the mortality as well as the mutual independence of millions of human beings who have lived and still live upon the earth. This is a fact which, much against their will, they cannot deny.
Logically they should have inferred from this fact that souls are not immortal, that by no means do they have a separate existence form their mortal and bodily exterior, and that in limiting themselves and finding themselves in mutual dependence upon one another, in meeting outside of themselves and infinity of diverse objects, human individuals, like everything else existing in this world, are transitory, limited, and finite beings. But in recognizing that, they would have to renounce the very basis of their ideal theories, they would have to raise the banner of pure materialism or experimental and rational science. And they are called upon to do it by the mighty voice of the century.
They remain deaf to that voice. Their nature of inspired men, of prophets, doctrinaires, and priests, and their minds, impelled by the subtle falsehoods of metaphysics, and accustomed to the twilight of idealistic fancies—rebel against frank conclusions and the full daylight of simple truth. They have such a horror of it that they prefer to endure the contradiction which they themselves have created by this absurd fiction of an immortal soul, or hold it their duty to seek its solution in a new absurdity—the fiction of God.
From the point of view of theory, God is in reality nothing else but the last refuge and the supreme expression of all the absurdities and contradictions of idealism. In theology, which represents metaphysics in its childish and naive stage, God appears as the basis and the first cause of the absurd, but in metaphysics, in the proper meaning of the word—that is to say, in a refined and rationalized theology—he, on the contrary, constitutes the last instance and the supreme recourse, in the sense that all the contradictions which seem to be insoluble in the real world, find their explanation in God and through God—that is, through an absurdity enveloped as much as possible in rational appearance.
The existence of a personal God and the immortality of the soul are inseparable fictions; they are two poles of one and the same absolute absurdity, one evoking the other and vainly seeking in the other its explanation and its reason for being. Thus, to the evident contradiction between the assumed infinity of every man and the real fact of the existence of many men, and therefore an infinite number of beings who find themselves outside of one another, thereby necessarily limiting one another; between their mortality and their immortality; between their natural dependence and absolute independence of one another, the idealists have only one answer: God. If this answer does not explain anything to you, if it does not satisfy you, the worse it is for you. They have no other explanation to offer.
The fiction of the immortality of the soul and the fiction of individual morality, which is its necessary consequence, are the negation of all morality. and in this respect one has to render justice to the theologians, who, being more consistent and more logical than the metaphysicians, boldly deny what in the general acceptance is now called independent morality, declaring with much reason that once the immortality of the soul and the existence of God are admitted, one also must recognize that there can be only one single morality, that is, the divine revealed law, religious morality—the bond existing between the immortal soul and God, through God's grace. Outside of this irrational, miraculous, and mystic bond, the only holy and saving bond, and outside of the consequences that it entails for men, all the other bonds are null and insignificant. Divine morality is the absolute negation of human morality.
Divine morality found its perfect expression in the Christian maxim: "Thou shalt love God more than thyself and thou shalt love thy neighbor as much as thyself," which implies the sacrifice of oneself, this being an obvious act of sheer folly, but the sacrifice of one's fellow-man is from the human point of view absolutely immoral. And why am I forced toward this inhuman sacrifice? For the salvation of my own soul. That is the last word of Christianity.
Thus in order to please God and save my soul, I have to sacrifice my fellow-man. This is absolute egoism. This egoism, by no means destroyed or diminished but only disguised in Catholicism by its forced collective character and the authoritarian, hierarchic, and despotic unity of the Church, appears in all its cynical frankness in Protestantism, which is a sort of religious "Let him save himself who can."
The metaphysicians in their turn try to mitigate this egoism, which is the inherent and fundamental principle of all idealistic doctrines, by speaking very little—as little as possible—of man's relations with God, while dealing at length with the relations of men to one another. That is not so nice, candid, or logical on their part. For, once the existence of God is admitted, it becomes necessary to recognize the relations of man to God. And one has to recognize that in the face of those relations to the Absolute and Supreme Being, all other relations necessarily take on the character of mere pretense. Either God is no God at all, or his presence absorbs and destroys everything.
Thus metaphysicians seek morality in the relation of men among themselves, and at the same time they claim that morality is an absolutely individual fact, a divine law written in the heart of every man, independently of his relations with other human individuals. Such is the ineradicable contradiction upon which the moral theory of the idealists is based. Since prior to entering into any relation with society and therefore independently of any influence which society exerts upon me, I already bear within me the moral law inscribed by God himself in my heart,—this moral law must necessarily be strange and indifferent, if not hostile, to my existence in society. It cannot have as its concern my relations with men; it can only determine my relations with God, as it is quite logically affirmed by theology. So far as men are concerned, from the point of view of this law, they are perfect strangers to me. And inasmuch as the moral law is formed and inscribed in my heart apart from my relations with men, it therefore has nothing to do with them.
But, we are told, this law specifically commands us to love people as ourselves because they are our fellow-creatures, and not to do anything to them which we would not like to have done to ourselves; and in our relations with them to observe equality, justice, and identical morality. To this I shall answer that if it is true that the moral law contains such a commandment, I must hence conclude that it was not created nor inscribed in my heart. For it necessarily presupposes an existence preceding in time my relations with other men, my fellow-creatures, and so it did not create those relations, but, having found them already established, it only regulates them, and is in a certain way their developed manifestation, explanation, and product. It follows that the moral law is not an individual but a social fact, a creation of society.
Were it otherwise, the moral law inscribed in my heart would be an absurdity. It would regulate my relations with beings with whom I have no relations and of whose very existence I am completely unaware.
The metaphysicians have an answer to this. They say that every human individual, when he is born, brings with him this law inscribed by God's hand in his heart, but that this law is at first found in a latent state, in a state of mere potentiality, unrealized or unmanifested for the individual himself, who cannot realize it and who succeeds in deciphering it within himself only by developing in the society of his fellow-creatures; in a word, that he becomes conscious of this law which is inherent in him only through his relations with other men.
This plausible, if not judicious, explanation leads us to the doctrine of innate ideas, feelings, and principles. It is an old familiar doctrine. The human soul, immortal and infinite in its essence, but corporeally determined, limited, weighted down, and so to speak blinded and abased in its real existence, contains all those eternal and divine principles, without, however, being consciously aware of them. Since it is immortal, it necessarily had to be eternal in the past as well as in the future. For if it had a beginning, it is inevitably bound to have an end, and therefore can by no means be immortal. What was its nature, what had it been doing during all the time it had left behind it? Only God knows that.
As for the soul itself, it does not remember, it is clearly ignorant of this alleged previous existence. It is a great mystery, full of crying contradictions, and in order to solve it one has to turn to the supreme contradiction, God himself. At any rate, the soul, without being aware of it, carries within some mysterious portion of its being all these divine principles. But, lost in its earthly body, brutalized by the grossly material conditions of its birth and its existence upon the earth, it is no more capable of conceiving them, or even of bringing them back into its memory. It is as if it had never possessed them at all.
Federalism, Socialism and Anti-Theologism.
The Political Philosophy of Bakunin. 1953
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