Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile, or On Education. Allan Bloom translation. New York: Basic Books: 1979.
1. Why does Rousseau make religion central to his account of sex education?
The longest chapter of the Emile, Book IV consists of three parts. The first concerns what our contemporaries call ‘sex education.’ The third concerns the more refined topic of sensibility, of manners as much as morals, the ways of courtship, marriage, and of social life generally. The second, central section addresses religion. Although Book III is central to the Emile in terms of its structure, being the third of five chapters, the discussion of religion at the core of Book IV is central in terms of the book as a whole, taking up the pages Rousseau has placed in the middle of the volume. Why?
Rousseau has prepared his reader for this discussion, to some extent all along, but particularly in the paragraphs leading up to the introduction of religion. He has reminded us that he rejects “the systematic spirit,” a spirit including that of systematic theology at the least; he is Socratic, not Thomistic or Calvinistic (IV.254). More, “I found myself not on what I have imagined but on what I have seen” (IV.254); he is no visionary, no prophet. He nonetheless recognizes that while “man does not easily begin to think,” “as soon as he begins, he never stops” (IV.254). Having taught Emile how to think—unsystematically and concretely, not comprehensively and abstractly—he will likely begin to think not only of where children come from but where Man comes from.
And if he doesn’t do so spontaneously, his entrance into civil society guarantees he will be so prompted. There, citizens will urge religious doctrines and practices upon him. “Enclosed in a social whirlpool” in which such claims and indeed demands swirl, Rousseau does not want him to “let himself get carried away by either the passions or the opinions of men”; Emile should “see with his eyes” and “feel with his heart,” allowing “no authority” (as for example the Catholic Church) to “govern him beyond that of his own reason” (IV.255)—that is, beyond what he can think of by himself, without being told. Up to now, “the progress natural to the mind is accelerated but not upset” (IV.255). In listening to the opinions of fellow citizens, “nothing is more fit to make a man wise than follies that are seen without being shared, and even he who shares them is still instructed, provided he is not their dupe, and does not bring to them the error of men who commit them” (IV.255). Indeed, if any youth has been readied to hold himself back from hasty generalizations about religious and philosophic doctrines—or their combination, theology—it is Emile.
Human beings do not incline toward grand abstractions derived from sensed reality. “We are limited by our faculties to things which can be sensed, we provide almost no hold for abstract notions of philosophy and purely intellectual ideas” (IV.255). To think abstractly, “we must either separate ourselves from the body—to which we are so strongly attached—or make a gradual and slow climb from object to object, or, finally, clear the gap rapidly and almost at a leap, by a giant step upward of which childhood is not capable and for which even men need many rungs especially made for them” (IV.255). Rousseau has shown how the middle explanation can occur, by the comparison of one sense-impression to another. As for ‘Diotima’s ladder,’ “the first abstract idea is the first of these rungs, but I have great difficulty in seeing how anyone got it into his head to construct it” (IV.255). Yet it must have been done, since human beings have been brought to make mistakes, to depart from their sensuality. In the Platonic version, we have a natural eros, a natural desire to know, a desire analogous to sexual desire in the sense that it too gets us ‘out of ourselves,’ wanting someone or something beyond ourselves. In the Biblical version, Adam and Eve undergo no childhood, and so fall victim to the Serpent’s temptation, his assurance that they won’t die if they eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but they will become like God in obtaining this knowledge. Their shame at their nakedness, their openly displayed bodies, bespeaks an entirely unchildlike concern for seeing themselves as others see them, along with a concern about their own organs of generativity—evidence of a mutual dependency that they now want to conceal from one another. Rousseau, who begins his account of human nature with the infant, cannot approach the problem in either the Platonic or the Biblical way. At the same time, he cannot disregard the problem of religion, the core of the problem of the civil society Emile is about to enter, especially since all religions govern sexual conduct and some attempt to govern sexual longing itself.
2. God, the first ‘abstraction’
There is an “incomprehensible Being who embraces everything, who gives motion to the world and forms the whole system of beings” (IV.255). All-important, this Being is also entirely abstract; “he escapes all our senses,” hidden behind his work (IV.255). “‘What is He? Where is He?'”: when we ask these questions, “our mind is confused and goes astray, and we no longer know what to think,” having departed from our own sensual experience (IV.255). In civil society, this is where we approach the moment of ‘being told.’
Rousseau criticizes Locke’s way of beginning to think about God. “Locke wants to begin by the study of spirits and later go on to that of bodies” (IV.255). This only leads to superstition and error, following neither reason nor “nature in its proper order” (IV.255). It “serves only to establish materialism” (IV.255)—which may of course be why Locke recommends it, but that is another matter.
As Allan Bloom mentions, the passages in Locke Rousseau criticizes are paragraphs 190-192 in Some Thoughts Concerning Education. [1] Here Locke introduces the study of natural philosophy. Natural philosophy is “a speculative science” and therefore probably not a science at all. “I have reason to say, we never shall be able to make a Science of it” (¶190), inasmuch as “the Works of Nature are contrived by a Wisdom, and operate by ways too far surpassing our Faculties to discover, or Capacities to conceive, for us ever to be able to reduce them into a Science” (¶190). Natural philosophy seeks knowledge of “the Principles, Properties, and Operations of Things as they are in themselves,” and it consists two parts, “one comprehending Spirits with their Nature and Qualities”—usually called metaphysics— and “the other Bodies” (¶190). The comprehension of Spirits “ought to go before the study of Matter” because, although it isn’t “a Science that can be methodized into a System,” it can enlarge “our Minds towards a truer and fuller comprehension of the intellectual World, to which we are led both by Reason and Revelation” (¶190). Accordingly, he recommends a distinctive form of Bible study consisting not of reading Scripture itself but of reading “a good History of the Bible, for young People,” as seen in a contemporaneous set of selections from the Book of Proverbs (¶190). Such practical advisements “will be a good Preparation to the study of Bodies” (¶190). Young minds never impressed with “Goblins, Spectres, and Apparitions” will be less likely to be frightened “into a compliance” with the commands of nursemaids, a great convenience to such rulers but “a great inconvenience” to those so spooked “all their Lives after, by subjecting their Minds to Frights, fearful Apprehensions Weakness, and Superstition” (¶191), and thus inapt for real science. [2]
Further, beginning the study of natural science with the study of invisible “spirits” will prepare the mind to think in terms of such natural laws as gravity, which cannot be apprehended by the senses. Locke writes that gravity is “impossible to be explained by any natural Operation of Matter, or any other Law of Motion, but the positive Will of a Superiour Being, so ordering it” (¶192). Whether this correctly states the teaching of Newton’s Principia Mathematica may be doubted, and indeed it may be doubted that Locke himself thought so. But the claim that metaphysics can provide a foundation for physics, and that studying the Bible (edited the Lockean way) gives the Young Gentleman an appealing way to begin to think metaphysically in a way that will support instead of interfere with real science, while (not incidentally) appeasing the worries of the pious, sharply opposes the Rousseauian dicta, “Things! Things! Things!” and “Facts! Facts! Facts!”
“Since our senses are the first instruments of our knowledge, corporeal and sensible beings are the only ones of which we immediately have an idea. The word spirit has no sense for anyone who has not philosophized. To the people and to children, a spirit is only a body,” as seen in their propensity to “imagine spirits who cry out, speak, flutter, and make noise” (IV.255). To try to teach about spirits first is only to accustom people “to say words without understanding them,” after which “it is easy to make them say whatever one wants” (IV.256). Spirit-education is only an instrument of rule by opinion, and thereby of amour-propre.
3. The origin of religions
Accordingly, the first religion was animistic. People “filled the universe with gods that could be sensed” (IV.256), sometimes imagining every thing to be inhabited by a god. Idolatry was the form of worship consistent with this first religion, its intention having been to control or at least appease the gods in things by producing the only things human beings could control, artifacts. Human persons supposed that they could influence the actions of divine persons embodied in all the things around them, whether these threatened or attracted.
Monotheism began to replace polytheism when human beings began to conceive of a first cause, an origin of all these many god-things. It remained anthropomorphic, however: “Once the imagination has seen God, it is very rare that the understanding conceives Him. This is precisely the error to which Locke’s order [of study] leads.” (IV.256). And this is what makes it so difficult for Rousseau to conceive of how impersonal abstractions could have occurred to human minds.
He doesn’t attempt to say. [3] He does point to a problem “the abstract idea of substance” raises: “in order to admit of only one substance, this substance must be assumed to have incompatible qualities, such as thought and extension, which are mutually exclusive since one is essentially divisible and the other excludes all divisibility” (IV.256). How does thought, which cannot be sensually perceived, cohabit with matter? It can only be that “beings in which these two qualities are joined are composed of the two substances to which these two qualities belong”—in other words, Being consists of two primary substances, not one.
Biblical dualism poses a still more difficult-to-understand dualism, the dualism between the two substances joined together and “the divine nature,” between “the incomprehensible idea of the action of our soul on our body and the idea of the action of God on all beings” (IV,.256). Such ideas as “creation, annihilation, ubiquity, eternity, omnipotence”—all the principal divine powers and attributes—can scarcely find a place in the minds of adults, let alone “young minds still busy with the first operations of the senses and able to conceive only what they touch” (IV.257). Speak to children about God’s power and “they will estimate Him to be almost as strong as their father” (IV.257). That being so, although “I foresee how many readers will be surprised at seeing me trace the whole first age of my pupil without speaking to him of religion,” but if “there are mysteries it is impossible for man not only to conceive but to believe… I do not see what is gained by teaching them to children, unless it be that they learn how to lie early” (IV.257).
What about the child’s salvation? “This dogma badly understood is the principle of sanguinary intolerance and the cause of all those vain instructions that strike a fatal blow to human reason in accustoming it to satisfy itself with words” (IV.257)—again, the rule of mere opinion. (It is especially in matters of religion that opinion triumphs” (IV.260). Crucially, “the obligation to believe assumes the possibility of doing so” (IV.257). When it comes to religion, children don’t understand most of what they’re told, and what they’re told is “a question of geography,” a matter of whether he was born in Rome or Mecca (IV.258). Moreover, “when a child says that he believes in God, it is not in God that he believes, it is in Peter or James who tell him that there is something called God” (IV.258). Since “reason tells us that a man can be punished only for the mistakes of his will, and that an invincible ignorance could not be imputed to crime,” children cannot be damned. More, “the only unbelievers who will be punished are those whose heart closes itself to the truth”; “let us refrain from proclaiming the truth to those who are not in a condition to understand it, fort to do this is to want to substitute error for truth” (IV.259).
“We who pretend to shake off the yoke of opinion in everything, we who want to grant nothing to authority, we who want to teach nothing to our Emile which he could not learn by himself in every country, in what religion shall we raise him? To what sect shall we join the man of nature?” (IV.260). None: “we shall put him in a position to choose the one to which the best use of his reason ought to lead him” (IV.260). Recalling “my motto” (borrowed from Juvenal), “Dedicate life to truth,” but also acknowledging that in addressing the question of religious belief and education “I walk on fires covered by deceitful cinders,” Rousseau refrains from engaging in any more controversy in his own name and instead offers an account of “what a man more worthy than I thought”—a man whose sentiments, moreover, Rousseau offers merely “for examination,” not as an argument of his own (V.260). As Professor Jensen observed, Book IV has no frontispiece; Rousseau places the illustration here, near the center of the Emile. The illustration depicts Orpheus with his lyre, bringing religion to the people. Rousseau likes the association of religion with music, and his worthy man offers a natural religion, a religion in harmony with nature—deducible from it and compatible with it. [4] That is, within the story of the upbringing of the frankly imaginary Emile, Rousseau inserts a supposedly true story about another teacher and another pupil. It is the former pupil who tells the story.
4. The Savoyard Vicar
Once upon a time, a “poor Savoyard vicar” rescued a youth—first from a house maintained by the Church for proselytes and then from the life of hunger and indigence into which the lad quickly fell (IV.262). The vicar was motivated by “a natural inclination,” the sentiment of compassion; the narrator makes no mention of charity inspired by the Holy Spirit (IV.262). Seeing the bitterness “opprobrium and contempt” had caused in the youth’s heart—he “had seen that religion served only as the mask of interest and sacred worship only as the safeguard of hypocrisy” and “the sublime original ideas of the divinity disfigured by the fantastic imaginations of men”—the vicar befriended him. In the house for proselytes, the youth had found “that in order to believe in God he had to renounce the judgment he had received from Him”; as a consequence, he returned their contempt, disdaining men who “thought they knew more about these things than he did,” but in fact didn’t know that they knew nothing (IV.263).
The combination of skepticism and bitterness had bad moral effects. “The forgetting of all religion leads to the forgetting of the duties of man” (IV.263). “Incredulity and poverty, stifling his nature little by little, were leading him rapidly to his destruction and heading towards the morals of a tramp and the morality of an atheist” (IV.263). He was Emile’s age, “that happy age when the blood is in fermentation and begins to heat up the soul without enslaving it to the furies of the senses,” still too young to be tempted by the cruder forms of vice but vulnerable to “gentler seductions,” had they been offered. The unnamed youth is Emile without Emile’s governor, without Emile’s childhood education. Rousseau evidently offers him as the means of asking the question, ‘Can a youth who grew up without the attentive care of Rousseau’s governor still be saved after having been exposed to the false education of the Church?’ And can he be guided away from becoming the village atheist, or worse, an Enlightenment philosophe?
The vicar began his own kind of gentle seduction, a seduction to virtue. Where the Church failed, he aimed to succeed in inducing a salutary conversion. “The first thing he did was to gain the proselyte’s confidence by not selling him his benefactions, by not pestering him, by not preaching to him, by always putting himself within his reach, by making himself small in order to be his proselyte’s equal” (IV.263). He let the youth talk, and never criticized the “chatter” (IV.263). The vicar understood that “there is a degree of degradation which takes away life from the soul, and the inner voice cannot make itself heard to someone who thinks only of feeding himself” (IV.264). Seeing him dangerously near the “moral death” to which such involuntary poverty inclines those who suffer it, the vicar began not by lecturing him on humble acceptance of God’s providential judgment but “by awakening amour-propre and self-esteem in him” (IV.264). That is, in conversing with the angry young skeptic he does exactly the opposite of what the governor did with the innocent Emile. Cure of a corrupted youth must differ sharply from the preventative ‘vaccine’ Emile receives, although the heart-winning way of friendship and seeming equality remains the same. The vicar “reanimated a generous ardor in [the youth’s] heart by the account of others’ noble deeds,” awakening in him “the desire to perform like deeds” (IV.264). “He made the boy regain a good enough opinion of himself so as not to believe he was a being useless for anything good and so as not to want any longer to make himself contemptible in his own eyes” (IV.264).
“What struck me the most,” the narrator recalls, “was seeing in my worthy master’s private life virtue without hypocrisy, humanity without weakness, speech that was always straight and simple, and conduct always in conformity with his speech” (IV.264). The vicar thus did not exhibit the failures priests are most excoriated for: the sham virtue scored by Protestant reformers; the milk-and-toast Christianity mocked by Machiavelli; the orotundity of the Ciceronian oratory taught in the schools; the failure to match what one says with what one does, which is a common enough complaint about clergy and indeed anyone in authority, anywhere.
It now becomes evident why Rousseau has introduced us to the Savoyard vicar. This is a portrait of what a priest should be. Rousseau would reform both of the two ruling ‘estates’ of Europe; more realistically, he would show them, and his other readers, what it would take for them to reform themselves. His advice to the Second Estate, the aristocrats, has been constant throughout Emile’s early education, which is really as much an education of aristocrats via a discussion of educating an aristocratic boy. Here he has turned to educating the First Estate, the celibate clergy, showing them how to speak not with children who are typically under the rule of parents and the tutors they hire, but the youths who have been placed on the road to moral ruin by those well-intentioned parents and tutors, themselves badly educated. Aristocrats rule by example and by action; priests rule by example and by speech, by doctrine, by the Word of God as they conceive it. Rousseau intends to teach priests both a different way of teaching and a different doctrine to teach, both consistent with the new and better political regimes that might find a place for priests after replacing the doomed monarchies. In this way, he would ‘save’ the priests, and the Church, from itself.
The vicar increasingly won the youth’s respect; eventually, “so much goodness had entirely won my heart” (IV.265). This aroused his curiosity, as “I was waiting with agitated curiosity for the moment when I would learn the principle on which he founded the uniformity of so singular a life,” a life entirely different from the spirit of “proud misanthropy, a certain bitterness against the rich and happy of the world, as though they were such at my expense and their pretended happiness had been usurped from mine” (IV.265)—the spirit seen in Shakespeare’s character Jaques in All’s Well That Ends Well. In that play, Jaques is finally excluded from the regime of happy lovers. The loveless youth here will be ‘seduced’ into a life of loving rightly, and this is how the central section of Book IV relates to the sections around it. If Adam and Eve become curious about good and evil—already corrupted, in Rousseau’s estimation, by a poorly-conceived ‘verbal’ education, an education undertaken in the mode of commands, of obedience and therefore of potential disobedience instead of loving consent—the youth’s curiosity is piqued by the vicar’s happiness and lovingkindness.
Having balanced the youth’s angry and small-souled pride with a nobler pride—both, however, based on the bad sentiment of amour-propre—the vicar now “prevented it from turning into hardness of soul” (IV.265). He did this by showing the youth how the “vain appearance” offered by priests and human beings in civil society generally covered “real evils”; further, these real evils result from their “errors,” which cause them to endure “miseries”; as a result, he began “to pity them more than to envy them” (IV.265). Amour-propre arises from comparing one’s own lot in life with that of others; having already contracted this vice, this civil-social perversion of natural amour de soi, the youth’s reform must proceed from that bad condition of the soul, that bad sentiment. “Moved with compassion for human weaknesses by the profound sentiment of his own,” the vicar “saw men everywhere groaning under the yoke of the rich and the rich under the yoke of prejudice” or error (IV.265). With this example before him, the youth began to redirect his contempt not for the victims of such errors, who are finally blameless because no one willingly commits an error, but for the errors that cause the harm. As the vicar tells him, “Peace of soul consists in contempt for everything that can trouble it” (IV.265).
Hearing this aphorism, the proud youth willingly humbles himself, rather than having been humiliated by the vicar along the lines of conventional clerical education, which only provokes resistance in a spirited youth, servility in a fearful one. “What is the use of being born?” he cries (IV.265). And “Who knows how to be happy?” (IV.266). It is the moment his teacher has been waiting for. “I do” (IV.266). And—now addressing the youth as “my child,” his child by consent not by birth or by authority—”I shall be glad to tell you” (IV.266).
But still not in the mode of exhortation or of command. The vicar will not pile aphorism upon aphorism. By convention, a priest hears confessions; the vicar instead will teach by the means of his own confession.
5. The vicar’s profession of faith
The confessional mode is the right way to address the youth. It involves neither “learned speeches” nor “profound reasonings,” only the attempt to talk “good sense” by a truthful man (IV.266). “I do not want to argue with you or event attempt to convince you. It is enough for me to reveal to you what I think in the simplicity of my heart. Consult yours during my speech. This is all I ask of you.” (IV.266). Since “reason is common to us,” “if I think well, why would you not think as I do?” IV.266). This further relaxes the amour-propre the vicar had first fanned, then directed.
The vicar confesses that he became a priest too hastily, soon “sens[ing] that in obliging myself not to be a man I had promised more than I could keep” (IV.267). Although the Church teaches that conscience registers the thoughts and sentiments of the Holy Spirit, the vicar evidently thinks not: “remorse always reproaches us feebly for what well-ordered nature permits us, and all the more so for what it prescribes to us” (IV.267), “persist[ing] in following the order of nature against all the laws of men” (IV.267). He will come to discuss the laws of God a bit later.
The youth is at the time of life when he can learn to resist the passions he has before the powerful passions of puberty buffet him, the better to see that order of nature and fit his soul to it. This again directs him away from amour-propre and toward natural self-love. The vicar warns him of the social consequences of doing this, having endured the contempt of his fellows for not joining them in their pursuit of vice.
He found himself, uncorrupted, in much the same mental confusion that the youth has found himself, corrupted. “I was in that frame of mind of uncertainty and doubt that Descartes demands for the quest for truth”—implying that his friend is well-situated to find answers to the questions that torment him. He assures him, “this state is hardly made to last,” being “disturbing and painful”; “my heart was not sufficiently corrupted to enjoy myself in it,” he continues, subtly appealing to the youth’s self-love, again (IV.267). In his perplexity, “I said to myself, ‘I love the truth I seek it and cannot recognize it. Let it be revealed to me, and I shall remain attached to it. Why must it hide itself from the eagerness of a heart made to adore it.” (IV.267-268). That is, the vicar prayed not to God but to himself. The human self will turn out to be the most reliable source of certain knowledge of human nature.
Church teachings were no help. “I was born in a church which decides everything and permits no doubt; therefore, the rejection of a single point made me reject all the rest”; “by being told ‘Believe everything,’ I was prevented from believing anything, and I no longer knew where to stop” (IV.268). If one sets no limits on belief of what one is told, there are no limits to disbelief of what one is told. The Church offers no criterion for judging the teachings it propounds.
Philosophers, who discovered, were no better. “I found them all to be proud, assertive, dogmatic (even in their pretended skepticism), ignorant of nothing, proving nothing, mocking one another; at this last point which was common to all, appeared to me the only one about which they are all right” (IV.268). “If you ponder their reasoning, they turn out to be good only at destructive criticism,” a point recalling what Rousseau said in his own name in the Preface to the Emile, which he describes as a constructive book, unlike the critiques of the philosophes.
His inquiry led him to consider “the insufficiency of the human mind” and the pride of the human soul as the intellectual and moral causes of such diverse and contradictory opinions, respectively. Intellectually, “this immense machine,” the universe, is immeasurable; its “first laws” and its “final cause” are unknown and unknowable to us (IV.268). Nor do we know ourselves. “We believe we possess intelligence for piercing these mysteries, but all we have is imagination” (IV.268). Philosophers take these imaginings and love them not because it is true (how does he know?) but because it is his own. As soon as he compares his imaginings to those of other philosophers, amour-propre kicks in. “Where is the one who in the secrecy of his heart sets himself any other goal than that of distinguishing himself?” (IV.268).
Seeing this, the vicar “learn[ed] to limit my researches to what was immediately related to my interest, to leave myself in a profound ignorance of all the rest” (IV.269). That is, he learned the lesson the governor teaches the child Emile; again, Rousseau would teach the clergy (and with them, now, the intellectual ‘clerisy’ of the Enlightenment) how to think. It begins with the Socratic self-limitation, knowledge of one’s own ignorance.
If I consult “the inner light,” he told himself, “it will lead me astray less than [the opinions] lead me astray; or at least my error will be my own, and I will deprave myself less in following my own illusions than in yielding to [the philosophers’] lies” (IV.269). In this introspection, he soon “found that the first and most common” of his own opinions “was also the simplest and most reasonable” (IV.269). The more systematic and elaborate the set of thoughts the more likely they go wrong. “But what a difference with direct proofs!” And among them, “Must not the only one which explains everything be preferred, if it contains no more difficulties than the others?” (IV.269).
With “the love of truth as my whole philosophy,” and hearkening to his “inner light” as “my whole method,” a method that prevents entanglement in “the vain subtlety of arguments” the vicar “resolved to accept as evident all knowledge which in the sincerity of my heart I cannot refuse my consent” and “to accept as true all that which appears to me to have a necessary connection with this first knowledge” (IV.269-270).
“But who am I? What right have I to judge things, and what determines my judgments?” (IV.270). He must look inward “in order to know the instrument I wish to use and far I can trust its use” (IV.270).
6. The vicar looks within: the mind
Rousseau borrows his introspective method from Descartes but applies it not only to the mind but to the heart. He comes up with somewhat different results. Considering himself, he knows he exists; he knows he has “senses by which I am affected” (IV.270). With this certainty comes his “first doubt”: “Do I have a particular sentiment of my existence, or do I sense it only through my sensations? (IV.270). He judges the question unresolvable. He knows he has sensations inside of him but their cause is outside of him; therefore, the objects of these sensations are “not the same thing” (IV.270). He calls the things outside him, taken together, “matter”; he calls the things outside him, perceived separately, “bodies” (IV.270). By comparing the objects perceived by his sensations he discovers that he infers that he has “a faculty of comparing them” (IV.270). “To perceive is to sense; to compare is to judge. These are not the same thing. By sensation, objects are presented to me separated, isolated, such as they are in nature. By comparison I move them, transport them, and, so to speak, I superimpose them on one another in order to pronounce on their difference or their likeness and generally on all their relations” (IV.271). So, for example, I perceive a large stick and a small stick, but when I compare them and judge that one is longer than the other, I am judging. Sensual perception is passive; judgment active. Judgment requires attention, meditation, reflection; whatever I call it, “it is in me and not in things,” as “I alone produce it, although I produce it only on the occasion of the impression made on me by objects” (IV. 271). Here is where I can make mistakes and also where I exercise intellectual freedom, being “the master of giving more or less examination to what I sense” (IV.272). “I am not simply a sensitive and passive being but an active and intelligent being”; “I dare to pretend to the honor of thinking” (IV.272). I also “know that the truth is in things and not in the mind which judges them, and that the less of myself I put in the judgments I make, the more sure I am of approaching the truth” (IV.272). This again is exactly what Emile had been trained to do in childhood.
“Thus my rule of yielding to sentiment more than to reason is confirmed by reason itself,” in the sense that, by means of comparison, of judgment, of reason, I have determined that my senses are more reliable than judgment. I exist; therefore I sense and judge.
“The first object which presents itself to me for comparison with [objects] is myself” (IV.272). In matter, I see motion and rest. Neither motion nor rest is “essential to matter” but they differ from one another in that motion is the effect of a cause whereas rest is the absence of such a cause (IV.272). Might rest not be the effect of some other cause? No, because rest is only relative; all things are in motion. There are two kinds of motion: “communicated” motion, caused by something external to the body that is moved; “spontaneous” motion, caused by something internal to the body that is moved. I am self-moving; by analogy, so are other animals. Unlike the universe as a whole, which exhibits “regular, uniform” movement and is likely to be “subject to constant laws,” spontaneous motion implies liberty (IV.273). What is the cause of the motion of the universe? “I believe I sense a hand that makes it turn” (IV.273). The introduction of belief suggests that the vicar knows he might be mistaken, unless he is deploying a metaphor. The vicar criticizes philosophers who contend that the universe moves itself. “Let Descartes tell us what physical law made his vortices turn. Let Newton show us the hand which launched the planets on the tangent of their orbits.” (IV.273). [5]
7. The vicar’s three articles of faith
This leads the vicar to his “first principle” or first article of faith: “Every motion not produced by another can only come from a spontaneous, voluntary action. Inanimate bodies act only by motion, and there is no true action without will…. I believe therefore that a will moves the universe and animates nature. This is my first dogma, or my first article of faith.” (IV.273). He does not claim to know how a will produces a physical action but introspection shows that it does. “The will is known to me by its acts, not by it nature” (IV.274). It is, he concedes, “obscure,” but it “makes sense and contains nothing repugnant to reason or to observation” (IV.274). His dualism is superior to the monism of materialism, which would require motion to be inseparable to matter and always “in it to the same degree”; if so, it could not increase or decrease, as it manifestly does (IV.274). Locke’s materialism is mistaken because matter cannot think, a machine cannot think, and matter is not self-moving.
This leads the vicar to his second article of faith, an argument from design for the existence of God. “If moved matter shows me a will, matter moved according to certain laws shows me an intelligence”; “to act, to compare, and to choose”—to give objects one direction and not another—are “operations of an active and thinking being” (IV.275). Listening “to our inner sentiments” we “recognize the harmony of the beings and the admirable concurrences of each piece in the preservation of the others” (IV.275). This harmony is what Orpheus and his lyre symbolize. Consider the opposite hypothesis: “If organized bodies were combined fortuitously in countless ways before taking on constant forms, if at the outset were formed stomachs without mouths, feet without heads, hands without arms, imperfect organs of every kind which have perished for want of being able to reserve themselves, why do none of these unformed attempts strike our glance any longer, why did nature finally prescribe laws to itself to which it was not subjected at the outset? (IV.275). Chance combinations of bodies, even bodies as small as atoms, “will never result in anything but products of the same nature as the elements that are combined” (IV.276). (Here the vicar commits an error, succumbing to the fallacy of composition.)
Whether the world is eternal or created, whether there is a single principle of things, or two, or many of them, and what their nature is, he confesses not to know. Like Emile and his governor, he simply asks “what does it matter to me?” (IV.277). “As soon as this knowledge has something to do with my interests, I shall make an effort to acquire it,” but until then “I renounce idle questions which may agitate my amour-propre but are useless for my conduct and are beyond my reason” (IV.277). Is it useful? What good is it? These are familiar questions from previous chapters.
What is useful and good is some sense of “what rank I occupy in the order of things that the divinity governs and I can explain” (IV.277). My species is “incontestably in the first rank: for by my will and by the instruments in my power for executing it, I have more force for acting on all the bodies surrounding me, for yielding to or eluding their actions as I please, than any of them has for acting on me against by will by physical impulsion alone; and by my intelligence I am the only one that has a view of the whole” (IV.277). “Man is the king of the earth he inhabits”; he arrives at this thought by natural reason, unassisted by the teaching of the Book of Genesis (IV.277). This results in no blasphemy, however. Knowing he cannot be the God who rules the universe, he is grateful to God for making him a man and humbled in knowing he didn’t make himself a man. “I adore the supreme power, and I am moved by its benefactions. I do not need to be taught this worship; it is dictated to me by nature itself,” the natural consequence of self-love, which preserves us and wishes us our good (IV.278). Nature is the Bible of the natural religion.
If so, then, why is the human being so confused and disorderly, as the vicar was and the youth now is? This too may be discovered by introspective consideration of our own nature. “In meditating on the nature of man, I believed I discovered in it two distinct principles: one of which raised him to the study of eternal truths, to the love of justice and moral beauty, and to the regions of the intellectual world whose contemplation is the wise man’s delight; while the other took him basely into himself, subject him to the empire of the senses and to the passions which are their ministers, and by means of these hindered all the sentiment of the former inspired in him” (IV.278). That is, “man is not one”; man is by nature dual. “I want and I do not want; I sense myself enslaved and free at the same time. I see the good, I love it, and I do the bad” (IV.279). This confession, too, amounts to humbling himself to the youth even as he aims at humbling the youth; they share the same reason for humility.
It is at this point that he reassures the youth that “I shall always be of good faith,” even if mistaken about the conscience and the morality it enjoins. It is this moral sense, not reason, that enables us to act for our own good, “but my will is independent of my senses; I consent or I resist; I succumb or I conquer” (IV.280). This “sentiment of my freedom is effaced in me only when I become depraved and finally prevent the voice of the soul from being raised against the law of the body” (280). The will is identical to the judgment, inasmuch as it is judgment that causes the will to will, the judgment that enables us to compare one possible course of action to another. “One chooses the good as he has judged the true; if he judges wrong, he chooses badly” (IV.280). “And what is the cause which determines [man’s] judgment? It is his intelligent faculty, it is his power of judging: the determining cause is in himself” (IV.280).
This is the source of what later philosophers will call ‘autonomy.’ “I am not free not to want my own good; I am not free to want what is bad for me.
But it in precisely this that my freedom consists—my being able to will not only what is suitable to me, or what I deem to be such, without anything external to me determining me” (IV.280). “The principle of every action in in the will of a free being. One cannot go back beyond that.” (V.280). The existence of the will, “an immaterial substance” which causes human action is “my third article of faith” (IV.281). As for “providence,” it “does not will the evil a man does in abusing the freedom it gives him” but neither does it “prevent him from doing it, whether because this evil, coming from a being so weak, is nothing in its eyes”—it “cannot disturb the general order”—or because “it could not prevent it without hindering his freedom and doing a greater evil by degrading his nature” (IV.281). Divine reward would make no sense if we had no power to do evil. As for the evil men suffer, the vicar goes so far as to claim that “pain has little hold over someone who, having reflected little, possesses neither memory nor foresight”—man as he exists in nature (IV.282). “Take away our fatal progress, take away our errors and our vices, take away the work of man, and everything is good” (IV.282). Hence his self-command: “Be just and you will be happy,” at least in the long run (IV.282). Since the soul and the body “are of such different natures, the soul may well survive the body and receive compensation for the afflictions in this life imposed on it by evil men (IV.283); however, he soon adds that the good will itself may not be recompensed, being already good and therefore happy to continue “to exist according to its nature” (IV.284). Nor does he claim that the soul is immortal, as “my limited understanding conceives nothing without limits” (IV.283). As for wicked souls, he doubts that they are condemned to “endless torments” because wicked souls already repay part of their debt in this life, simply by experiencing their own vices (IV.284).
The vicar understands all this not by revelation but by “the inner sentiment that leads me to judge of causes according to my natural lights” (IV.2867). No divine revelation through the Bible is required.
8. The vicar looks within: the heart
What do the natural lights of the natural religion tell us about the right “manner of conduct”? (IV.286). And “what rules ought I to prescribe for myself,” based on these “truths”? (IV.286). Once again, neither the reasoning of philosophers nor the revelation of prophets and priests is necessary, as he finds these rules “written by nature with ineffaceable characters in the depth of my heart” (IV.286). “Conscience is the voice of the soul; the passions are the voice of the body” (IV.286). Conscience “is to the soul what instinct is to the body”; the vicar distinguishes between the passions of the body and its instincts because the latter are unfailingly right, passions often wrong, interfering with conscience.
“All the morality of our actions is in the judgment we ourselves make of them. If it is true that the good is good, it must be so in the depths of our hearts as it is in our works, and the primary reward for justice is to sense that one practices it” (IV.287). If autonomy means giving oneself the law, morality means judging the actions we take by the light of that law. Therefore, “let us return to ourselves, my young friend! Let us examine, all personal interest aside, where our inclinations lead us.” (IV.287). Introspection shows that a good act “is sweeter to do and leaves us with a more agreeable impression after having done it” than a wicked act” (IV.287). “Take this love of the beautiful from our hearts, and you take all the charm from life” (IV.287). The one “whose vile passions have stifled these delicious sentiments in his narrow soul, and who, by dint of self-centeredness, succeeds in loving only himself, has no more transports,” no joy, no sweetness in his life (IV.288). “This unfortunate man no longer feels, no longer lives. He is already dead.” (IV.288). Thus the vicar gently draws the misanthropy out of the youth. “Let us obey nature” (IV.288). It is human opinion that condemns human nature, that makes misanthropes out of men and boys.
We see evidence of this not only in ourselves but “in all the nations of the world” (IV.288). Despite “so many inhuman and bizarre cults,” the “prodigious diversity of morals and characters,” the “same notions of justice and decency,” the “same notions of good and bad” persist (IV.288). The gods of the ancient pagans were “abominable” but the ancient heroes were good; “the chaste Lucretia worshiped the lewd Venus” (IV.288). “The holy voice of nature, stronger than that of the gods, made itself respected on earth and seemed to relegate crime, along with the guilty, to heaven,” thanks to the “innate principle of justice and virtue” that exists “in the depths of soul,” the “principle that I have the name conscience” (Iv.289). Montaigne, who denies this, is mistaken; political economists and others who explain morality in terms of self-interest overlook the fact that self-sacrifice, universally admired as good not only by those who observe it but by those who undertake it, serves ones good, not one’s interest.
9. Moral sentiments
Conscience judges, but the acts of conscience “are not judgments but sentiments. Although all our ideas come to us from outside, the sentiments evaluating them are within us, and it is by them alone that we know the compatibility or incompatibility between us and the things we ought to seek or flee.” (IV.290). If to exist is to sense, if sensibility is anterior to reasoning, sentiments anterior to ideas, then the core of our nature, the core of what is our good, dwells within us. For the individual, the moral sentiments are amour de soi, fear of pain, horror of death, and desire of well-being. For the species, sociability is core moral sentiment, serving the others. “It is from the moral system formed by this double relation to oneself and to one’s fellows that the impulse of conscience is born. To know the good is not to love it; man does not have innate knowledge of it, but as soon as his reason makes him know it, his conscience leads him to love it. It is this sentiment which is innate.” (IV.290).
Just as Rousseau had exclaimed “Things! things!” when educating the young child, just as he had exclaimed “Facts! facts!” when educating the older child, so the vicar exclaims to the youth, “Conscience, conscience!” (IV.290). Conscience is a natural sentiment, and the vicar makes no mention of its direction by a Holy Spirit, or of the conscience as the place wherein such a spirit might dwell. It is “the infallible judge of good and bad,” the thing that makes “the excellence of [man’s] nature and the morality of his actions” (IV.290). Conscience enables men to bypass “the terrifying apparatus of philosophy,” enabling us to “be men without being scholars” (IV.290). It shines as “a more certain guide” than philosophy “in this immense maze of human opinions” (IV.290).
Recognizing the existence of conscience is one thing. One must also “know how to recognize it and to follow it” (IV.291). After all, many do not. “Conscience is timid; it likes refuge and peace. The world and noise scare it.” (IV.291). “Fanaticism dares to counterfeit it and to dictate crime in its name” (IV.291). Ignored, “it “gives up” and “no longer speaks to us” (IV.291). Much of the Emile has been devoted to showing the malign effects of human opinion and of the amour-propre it generates. But because the reward of following conscience is an undeniable good, a good even the wicked, who themselves occasionally yield “to the temptation of doing good,” feeling its naturalness and sweetness when they do, acting according to conscience is worth the effort. The word for this effort is virtue. “Virtue is similar to Proteus in the fable: when one wants to embrace it, it at first takes on countless terrifying forms and finally reveals itself in its own form only to those who did not let go” (IV.291); for whatever reason, the vicar ignores the example of Isaac in the Bible.
If knowledge of the good is not innate, although the capacity to recognize the good is, where does knowledge of the good come from? Once again, from nature. The difference between a good man and a bad one is that “the good man orders himself in relation to the whole, and the wicked one orders the whole in relation to himself. The latter makes himself the center of all things; the former measures his radius and keeps to the circumference. Then he is order in relation to the common center, which is God, and in relation to all the concentric circles, which are the creatures.” (V.292). “This is the natural law” (IV.292). No “felicity is sweeter than sensing that one is ordered in a system in which everything is good” (IV.292).
Concluding his confession of faith, the vicar alludes to the youth’s stage of life—his own, when his own crisis of faith occurred. “There is an age when the heart is still free, but ardent, restless, avid for the happiness it does not know; it seeks it with a curiosity born of incertitude and, deceived by the senses, finally settles on a vain image of happiness and believes it has found it where it is not” (IV.293). The vicar admits that “I recognized them too late and have been unable to destroy them completely,” although even when they “seduce me, they no longer deceive me” “I know them for what they are” and even when “I follow them, I despise them” (IV.293). While waiting for final deliverance from them in death, “I am already happy in this life because I take little account of all its ills,” which are “almost foreign to my being” and because “all the true good that I can get out of [life] depends on me”—not, he tacitly suggests, on God. Indeed, while “I converse” with God, “fill all my faculties with His divine essence,” and “am moved by His benefactions,” blessing Him “for his gifts,” “I do not pray to Him” (IV.293). “If the strength for going farther is lacking of me, of what can I be guilty? It is up to the truth to come near nearer.” (IV.294).
10. The natural religion
The narrator remarks, “To the extent that he spoke to me according to his conscience, mine seemed to confirm what he had told me” (IV.294). He promised to test the vicar’s claims by imitating him, by “carry[ing] your discourse with me in my heart” (IV.294)—indeed the only way it can be tested.
The vicar can ask for no more, claiming no divine inspiration and telling the youth to “attribute to my discourse only the authority of reason,” as this is “natural religion” not revelation (IV.295). The supposedly divine revelations contradict one another. “If one had listened only to what God says to the heart of man, there would never have been more than one religion on earth” (IV.295). There is evidence of this in his researches, in which he “found nothing in natural religion but the element of every religion” (IV.295). This suggests that the differences among religions arose from distortions introduced by men. Sure enough: If we are “sincerely seeking the truth,” “let us grant nothing to the right of birth and to the authority of fathers and pastor, but let us recall for the examination of conscience and reason all that they have taught us from our youth” (IV.297). And if they tell us to subject our reason to what they call revelation, we know that “he who deceives me can say as much. I need reasons for subjecting my reason.” (IV.297). “The God I worship is not a god of shadows. He did not endow me with an understanding in order to forbid me its use.” (IV. 300). This comports with Rousseau’s pervasive critique not only of opinion but especially of aristocratic opinion. And with his call for reform of the clerical aristocracy: “The minister of the truth does not tyrannize reason; he enlightens it,” even as he has attempted to do in his confession (IV.300).
When considering alleged revelation, three criteria apply: “that I was witness to the prophecy; that I was witness to the event; that it was demonstrated to me that this event could not have tallied fortuitously with the prophecy” (IV.301). Since these three criteria, taken together, are impossible to meet, miracles and prophecies “come down to a belief [in] the faith of others, and a subjection of the authority of God, speaking to my reason, to the authority of men” (IV.301). Consistent with the governor’s professed hatred of books, the vicar avers, “I shall never be able to conceive that what every man is obliged to know is confined to books,” which were “written by men” and not, by implication, God (IV.303).
The un-bookish natural religion comprehends what Edmund Burke would call the beautiful and the sublime. “The death of Socrates, philosophizing tranquilly with his friends, is the sweetness one could desire; that of Jesus, expiring in torment, insulted, jeered at and cursed by a whole people, is the most horrible one could fear” (IV.308). “The life and death of Socrates are those of a wise man, the life and death of Jesus are those of a god” (IV.308). Jesus’ “elevated and pure morality of which he alone gave the lessons and the example” should be separated from “the unbelievable things,” the “things repugnant to reason and impossible for any sensible man to conceive or accept” found in the Gospels—miracles being the unstated but obvious examples (IV.308).
The natural religion is not only reasonable but useful, again a teaching consistent with what the governor has impressed upon Emile. As a vicar, “I shall always preach virtue to men,” “exhort them to do good,” attempt to “set a good example,” “strengthen their faith in the truly useful dogmas every man is obliged to believe” (IV.309). Intolerance is not among those dogmas; in the natural religion, no one is damned, a doctrine that “blaspheme[s] divine justice” and “lie[s] about the Holy Spirit” (IV.309). On these terms, “my good friend, I find nothing so fine as being a parish priest” (IV.309). “O if I could ever serve some poor parish of good people in our mountains, I would be happy, for it seems to me that I could be the cause of my parishioners’ happiness. I would not make them rich, but I would share their poverty.” (IV.309). In this portrait of the Savoyard vicar Rousseau guides priests as he had previously guided aristocrats, turning them toward nature and away from convention both in their minds and hearts and also into the countryside, away from the cities where opinion and social hierarchy rule. “I would have them love concord and equality, which often banish poverty and always make it bearable” (IV.310).
No intolerance, then, but what is the basis of toleration? “I would bring [my parishioners] to love one another without distinction and to regard one another as brothers, to respect all religions, and to live in peace, with each observing his own,” awaiting “greater enlightenment” while “protect[ing] public order” (IV.310). With the governor, he expects “everything [to be] shaken” in the regimes of Europe; the natural religion he espouses will, he claims “preserve the trunk at the expense of the branches” (IV.310). “Consciences which are agitated, uncertain, almost extinguished, and in the condition in which I have seen yours”—the condition of many souls in pre-revolutionary France and elsewhere—need “to be reinforced and awakened; and in order to put them back on the foundation of eternal truths, it is necessary to complete the job of ripping out the shaky pillars to which they think they are still attached” (IV.310).
As the governor effectively replaces the pupil’s father, so the vicar replaces the Church fathers from whom he had rescued the youth. He now addresses him as “my son”: “keep your soul in a condition where it always desires that there be a God, and you will never doubt it” (IV.311). If you are “sincere and without pride,” you will “know how to be ignorant” and “deceive neither yourself nor others” (IV.313). “Proud philosophy leads to freethinking as blind devoutness leads to fanaticism,” so “avoid these extremes” (IV.313). “Dare to acknowledge God among the philosophers; dare to preach humanity to the intolerant” (IV.313). In rescuing the youth from the school for proselytes, in proselytizing him in this new way, the vicar prepares him for becoming another priest of the natural religion, even as Rousseau would prepare priests and would-be priests for the new church that will survive the coming revolutions.
Rousseau concludes his discussion of religious education with an apologia. “I have transcribed this writing not as a rule for the sentiments that one ought to follow in religious matters, but as an example of the way one can reason with one’s pupil in order not to diverge from the method I have tried to establish” (IV.313), namely, that of investigation in accordance with sense perception and reasoning uninfluenced by books. “So long as one concedes nothing to the authority of men”—especially priests—or to “the prejudices of the country in which one was born”—the local religion—the “light of reason alone cannot, in the education founded by nature, lead us any farther than natural religion. This is what I limit myself to with my Emile. If he must have another religion, I no longer have the right to be his guide in that. It is up to him alone to choose it.” (IV.313).
Notes
- See Emile, 489 n.32.
- In associating superstition with nursemaids, Locke adroitly appeals to the gentry-class father’s preference for keeping control of his son’s education and to whatever social prejudice Father might entertain—all in an effort to reform the gentry class Father represents by giving its sons a new, Lockean education aimed at utility and commerce instead of honor and war.
- As Peter Emberley so cogently argues, such a silence may be telling. In this introduction to the Savoyard vicar’s confession, and in the confession itself, Rousseau may use dualism as a cloak concealing a more fundamental materialism. See Peter Emberley: “Rousseau versus the Savoyard Vicar: The Profession of Faith Considered.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 14, Numbers 2 & 3, May & September 1986, 299-329.
- For a thorough discussion of the Orpheus story as it relates to the Emile, see Emberley, 310-311.
- As Emberley shows, Rousseau himself elsewhere presents a much more thoroughgoingly materialistic analysis of the ‘self,’ which he explains as a “physiopsychological motion of the body”; see Emberley, 317.
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