Beschreibung
Produktdetails
Einband
Taschenbuch
Erscheinungsdatum
27.08.2026
Verlag
ArionaBooksSeitenzahl
330
Maße (L/B/H)
22,9/15,2/1,8 cm
Gewicht
480 g
Sprache
Englisch
EAN
9798240887192
find it in certain parts of Oceania. Among some, the religious sentiment de- generated into the shameful scenes of butchery which form the character of the ancient religion of Mexico. Amongst others, especially in Africa, it be- came pure Fetichism, that is, the adoration of a material object, to which were attributed supernatural powers. Like the instinct of love, which at times elevates the most vulgar man above himself, yet sometimes becomes perverted and ferocious, so this divine faculty of religion during a long pe- riod seems only to be a cancer which must be extirpated from the human race, a cause of errors and crimes which the wise ought to endeavor to sup- press. The brilliant civilizations which were developed from a very remote antiq- uity in China, in Babylonia, and in Egypt, caused a certain progress to be made in religion. China arrived very early at a sort of mediocre good sense, which prevented great extravagances. She neither knew the advantages nor the abuses of the religious spirit. At all events, she had not in this way any influence in directing the great current of humanity. The religions of Baby- lonia and Syria were never freed from a substratum of strange sensuality; these religions remained, until their extinction in the fourth and fifth cen- turies of our era, schools of immorality, in which at intervals glimpses of the divine world were obtained by a sort of poetic intuition. Egypt, notwith- standing an apparent kind of Fetichism, had very early metaphysical dogmas and a lofty symbolism. But doubtless these interpretations of a refined the- ology were not primitive. Man has never, in the possession of a clear idea, amused himself by clothing it in symbols: it is oftener after long reflections, and from the impossibility felt by the human mind of resigning itself to the absurd, that we seek ideas under the ancient mystic images whose meaning is lost. Moreover, it is not from Egypt that the faith of humanity has come. The elements which, in the religion of a Christian, passing through a thou- sand transformations, came from Egypt and Syria, are exterior forms of lit- tle consequence, or dross of which the most purified worships always retain some portion. The grand defect of the religions of which we speak was their 4 ERNEST RENAN essentially superstitious character. They only threw into the world millions of amulets and charms. No great moral thought could proceed from races oppressed by a secular despotism, and accustomed to institutions which pre- cluded the exercise of individual liberty. The poetry of the soul-faith, liberty, virtue, devotion-made their appear- ance in the world with the two great races which, in one sense, have made humanity, viz., the Indo-European and the Semitic races. The first religious intuitions of the Indo-European race were essentially naturalistic. But it was a profound and moral naturalism, a loving embrace of Nature by man, a de- licious poetry, full of the sentiment of the Infinite-the principle, in fine, of all that which the Germanic and Celtic genius, of that which a Shakespeare and a Goethe should express in later times. It was neither theology nor moral philosophy-it was a state of melancholy, it was tenderness, it was imagina- tion; it was, more than all, earnestness, the essential condition of morals and
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