Par Victor Monod. I. Étude historique. Foyer Solidariste: Saint-Blaise, près Neuchâtel (Suisse); Roubaix, 123, Boulevard de Belfort. 1910.1
M. Victor Monod is profoundly disturbed by the condition of current opinion upon the nature and activities of God. The idea of God he thinks has perhaps never before been made the object of more intense and widespread study. But the issue of the prolonged debates of recent centuries has been little more than an immense confusion. Nearly every thinking man has formed a different conception of the Divine Being for himself. “In the teaching of the Churches heterogeneous philosophies and contradictory religious aspirations are juxtaposed or superficially amalgamated” (p. 3). The question is raised whether “the Christian doctrine of God is essentially amorphous and irrational or is only compromised to-day by lack of critical spirit and of historical knowledge in some of its adherents” (p. 4). M. Monod’s convictions lie in the line of the latter alternative, and he naturally wishes to do his part to clarify the atmosphere. The task he has undertaken is essentially a dogmatic one. But it has its natural if not necessary historical approach. “To draw out in order,” he explains, “the solutions of the problem of God which have been proposed by the great theologians, to set them in the historical framework which explains them, to indicate how they have been engendered by successive corrections or reactions, to discriminate, in a word, the vital necessity to which the succession of divers theological systems has responded; these have appeared to me the indispensable preliminaries of a methodical study of the question” (p. 4). Accordingly he gives us now this “historical study,” while the dogmatic construction to which it is to lead us up waits a more convenient season. He does not feel bound, however, to pass in review in this “historical study” the whole history of the idea of God, in detailed exposition. He is not writing a history of the idea of God but a historical introduction to his own forthcoming attempt to put together a competent exposition of the idea of God. He therefore confines his survey to the historical antecedents of his own construction.
In point of fact, M. Monod confines his survey of the history of the idea of God to two epochs, the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries; and in these two epochs to two great outstanding movements of thought, the Reformation, or better, the Reformed theology, and the Kantian criticism. The conceptions of God characteristic of these two great movements of thought he sets over against one another in sharp antithesis, discriminating them under the contrasting designations of “God as sovereign” and “God as a moral person.” The antithesis obviously is a false one; the two designations are not mutually exclusive. It is also historically unjust: the Reformed theology throws an emphasis upon the moral personality of God which cannot be exceeded, and the moral personality of God is not the most outstanding feature of the conception of God developed by the Kantian movement. M. Monod himself cites Calvin as declaring that God is good by a necessity as stringent as that by which He is God, and that it would be easier to sever the light of the sun from its heat than to separate God’s power from His righteousness; while the very stress which the Reformed theology places on the will of God is a stress on His personality, since he who says will says person. And M. Monod himself points out how the moral character of God evaporates in, for example, the thought of M. Ch. Secrétan in the face of the demand of “absolute freedom” for Him. The real distinction between the Reformed and the Kantian movements in their relation to the idea of God lies quite apart from the question of His moral personality, although, of course, it concerns very distinctly the question of His sovereignty. The difficulty with Kantian speculation has been indeed to find any place for God at all in its scheme of things. Beginning with calling in God only as a postulate of the moral imperative, it ends by limiting His action in the interest of human freedom. The whole tendency of the Kantian thought is spoken out when M. Secrétan remarks: “There seems no place in the world for both man and God” (p. 146); and M. Monod’s dilemma is from the Kantian standpoint a very real one: Render with Calvin all glory to God and man is reduced to nonentity; vindicate with Kant all man’s liberty and all man’s dignity and you have (with Schleiermacher) no use for God save, perhaps, for the Judgment Day. The issue that is drawn between the Reformed thought of the sixteenth and the Kantian thought of the nineteenth century is not between a sovereign and an ethical God; it is between God and man. And the movement from the one to the other is a veritable revolution by which God is dethroned and man elevated to His place as the center of the universe. M. Monod puts it not unjustly in a passage which we gladly quote entire (p. 108): “Just as for Copernicus the earth so far from being a pivot about which the stars revolve, describes an ellipse around a fixed sun, so for Kant the objects which constitute the external world so far from determining knowledge are subject to laws impressed by the mind. This figure can be adapted to indicate the way in which the Kantian theology sets itself in opposition to the theology of the sixteenth century. God is no longer the central star of the religious domain; He is only a satellite, a postulate of the mind. The point of departure is the thinking subject, his rights and his needs; the nature and the attributes of God can be determined only as functions of the exigencies of the human being. And the whole effort of Kant bears on a point which theologians of the sixteenth century had not thought to investigate: In what is God necessary to man? Is the existence of God legitimated by the needs of reason?” In a word the sixteenth century conceived man as the creation of God, existing for God and serving His ends; men now are prone to think of God as, if not exactly the creation of man, yet as existing for man and serving man’s ends. The center of the universe has shifted; and God has become as has been, perhaps wittily, perhaps bitterly, said, very much a domestic animal which man keeps, as he does his horse or his cow, to meet certain specific needs of his being.