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Title: The Secular Priestly Spirit
Author: Georges Palante
Date: 1909
Language: en
Topics: egoist, ideology, individualist, religion, secularism
Source: http://www.marxists.org/archive/palante/1909/secular-priest.htm
Notes: Source: Mercure de France, September 1, 1909;  Translated: by Mitch Abidor for marxists.org;  CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2006.

Georges Palante

The Secular Priestly Spirit

This is what I call the remnants of the priestly spirit within our

modern spirit, which thinks itself a- or anti-religious. But is

“remnants” really the proper word? This word implies the idea of a

sentiment in retreat, when in fact the priestly spirit is advancing. We

would at least think this if we were to consider the expansion of the

surface occupied by the priestly spirit. The priestly spirit was once

the privilege of a caste; today it has spread, diffused, been diluted in

our ruling classes, in those intellectual, political, administrative

elites that form our democratic aristocracy.

Examples of this spirit are easy to find in our language and mores. We

can cite the rage to confer a sacred character on one’s profession, to

turn it into a priesthood. Whenever you hear a gentleman apply this word

to his profession or that of others you have before you a man more or

less imbued with the priestly spirit. It is especially in regard to

careers in education or the magistracy that priesthood is spoken of, but

we can extend this word to all of civil service, to all hierarchies, in

conformity with the etymology of this last word [1]. In this sense any

functionary would be a priest or a semi-priest. We also speak of the

priesthood of the lawyer or the doctor. When it’s a question of a lawyer

or doctor who is also a politician the priesthood is doubled, and is

carried in a way to the second power.

Another remnant of the priestly spirit is the qualification of renegade

that is used to insult the man who changes his opinion. The epithet of

renegade has a religious origin, which doesn’t prevent anti-clericals

from using it like everyone else. We all know a gentleman who calls

himself a free-thinker, who loudly proclaims the right for all to

change, to evolve, etc. If need be he’ll quote you the well-known verse:

“The absurd man is he who never changes.”

But if he were to learn of the about-face of one of his political

friends, then he gets indignant and calls his former fellow-believer the

harsh and feared epithet of “renegade.” Why feared? Because we are

imbued with the priestly spirit, because we all tremble before anathema

and excommunication. And yet, if we admit freedom of thought, we must

admit it in its entirety. There is no such thing as a renegade. Everyone

is free at every instant to shake off yesterday’s belief. But most

people don’t see things in this way. A party is a church, and it claims

to hold its people under its power; it wants to prevent defections and

schisms, and terrifies the potential renegade with the gesture of

anathema.

Another clerical expression is the very word of secular that is used on

all occasions. Secular morality! Secular consciousness! Secular beliefs!

These expressions take us back to the times of the papal bull “Clericis

Laicos,” where clerics were opposed to the laity. This is a pure

distillation of the Middle Ages. In a society where clerics no longer

exist or count — at least intellectually — it can no longer be a

question of secular ideas. A spirit indifferent to theological

controversies will not attach an intellectually meaningful significance

to this expression. One would have to be pontiff, to want to oppose one

church to another.

Secular holidays are also spoken of. Recently festivals of Love, Youth,

Spring, Labor have been instituted, along with the appropriate program:

reading of apposite verses by gentlemen in black suits, processions of

young couples celebrating love, workers carrying their tools and

celebrating labor, etc. At the heart of these secular ceremonies can

easily be found a religious, a clerical concern: that of having men

commune with the same idea, in a same faith. For anyone with a religious

spirit a sentiment, joy, memory, or hope only have value on condition of

being held in common, of being solemnized and consecrated by the group.

Another religious and evangelical expression is that of “going to the

people,” so fashionable a few years ago among young Tolstoyans and

adepts of PU’s.[2]

Of the same order is the expression social obligation, especially when

it’s pronounced in a certain way and with a certain showy compunction.

The group spirit in all its forms, esprit de corps, esprit de chapelle

all easily take on a religious nuance. We heard a young engineer,

freshly graduated from the Ecole Polytechqnique speak with devotion of

the Polytechnicians’ esprit de corps as if it were a religion of

initiates, unintelligible to the profane. This same sentiment was often

expressed by soldiers at the time of the Dreyfus Affair.

If you will, none of this is either very serious or very profound. At

the very most it’s capable of annoying those horrified by the “religious

nuance,” as Stendhal called it. The priestly spirit is only skin deep;

it has lost in depth what it has gained in extent. It no longer has the

depth of psychology, the shadowy will to power, the implacable

perseverance in ressentiment that conferred a somber majesty on the

sacerdotal soul of the past and that Nietzsche so potently describes in

his “Genealogy of Morals.” We are witnessing a bourgeoisification and a

democratization of the priestly spirit: we see nothing but priests

around us. But what humble, what modest pontiffs compared to those great

ascetic figures who dedicated themselves to what Nietzsche called the

“sacerdotal medication of humanity,” and who pursued a centuries old

labor of total spiritual and temporal domination. The secular priestly

spirit is the heir and the pale imitator of the other. It borrows from

Catholicism its mise en scene, its impressive décor and even its sacred

music, which have been widely used for Pantheonizations and other

religio-secular ceremonies, such as the statufying of secular pontiffs,

civil marriages decorated with secular and worldly pomp, etc. Let us see

what it has retained of its psychology.

It should first be noted that the priestly spirit must be distinguished

from the religious spirit. This is so true that at all times there has

been a flourishing of the religious spirit that has nothing in common

with the priestly spirit. This is mysticism, which is a kind of

religious individualism.

The priestly spirit is the religious spirit socialized, clericalized.

It’s the religious spirit in the hands of a clergy charged with

officially representing it. Consequently, the priestly sprit is a caste

spirit, or at the very least an esprit de corps with all the sentiments

that are attached to it; a spirit of spiritual and temporal domination,

or at the very least pride and vanity of caste or corps, a sentiment of

moral and social superiority, of an authority to be exercised, of a

certain decorum to be maintained, of certain rites to be observed. These

sentiments, which are at their height in a clergy, can exist in a more

or less diffused and attenuated state in the diverse corporations and

social categories which, with whatever right, aspire to represent a

moral idea, to fulfill an apostolate or a social mission, to posit

themselves as models (honest men), to set the tone and the example, to

imprint a moral direction on the rest of society: in short, to exercise

a priesthood.

It should be added that the priestly spirit can be tied to the religious

sentiment or be separate from it. In its superior forms it is vivified

by a religious, or at least philosophical or moral belief. But at its

lowest and poorest degree it tends to be emptied of all intellectual or

ideal content, to be reduced to a simple external formalism, a pure

phariseeism. The secular priestly spirit, like the other, in this regard

presents many degrees and nuances.

At its highest degree, as it is encountered among our intellectuals —

philosophers, moralists, sociologists, professors of the spiritual life

and of moral action — the secular priestly spirit can be found tied to a

certain concept of philosophy understood as the servant of an ethical

finalism and a secular moral faith.

Believe and make people believe, says M. Jules de Gaultier. This is the

goal of the greatest number of philosophers, after and before “The

Critique of Pure Reason.” Bacon stated that in his time they were taught

in universities to believe, and this is still true in our time.

But it’s not only in universities that these teachings are dispensed,

it’s in any book able to find a public. What men demand of philosophy is

that it give them something to believe in, to give them a first

principle to which they can affix their conduct, a goal which they can

have the illusion of heading towards, since the number of spirits for

whom the joy of understanding on its own suffices can only ever be

insignificant and negligible. [3]

In this the secular priestly spirit makes itself the servant of an idea.

Like the Catholic priestly spirit it presupposes a doctrinal credo, an

ideology of which it is the guardian. The difference is that in one case

the credo is revealed by God, while in the other it is revealed by

reason. But the resemblances between the two ideologies are many. As was

perfectly demonstrated by M. Jules de Gaultier the rationalist ideology

is nothing but the prolongation of Christian ideology: it is a veritable

secular religion. A Marxist writer, M. Edouard Berth brings the two

ideologies together under the same sign of intellectual laziness and

authoritarian routine, and opposes to them the fever of labor and

innovation that agitates industrial circles. “Most men do not feel this

need for the new that is felt by the industrialist; they prefer a nice

routine where you can live peacefully, without cares, worries or effort.

Intellectualist systems are appropriate for the mass of the lazy that

are man. They form a kind of bureaucracy of the intellect where one is

comfortably installed for the rest of one’s life, where you are

comfortably seated so as to watch the immutable spectacle of things. The

church is horrified by the thought of the new, and thus of freedom. This

is the case as well, I repeat, for all forms of intellectualism, and in

the modern world there are many varieties of this. Many people remain

foreign to the practices of industry: the world, bureaucracy, the

university, the so-called liberal professions constitute the social

circles that industrial thought has as little penetrated as the Church

[4]. The “countless varieties of intellectualism” more or less imbued

with the secular priestly spirit hold the “factories where the ideal is

produced.” They monopolize the individuals of respect; they produce

ideological and phraseological values whose prices are established

according to completely different laws than those of manufactured goods.

It is thus not without reason that M. Berth compares the Catholic church

and the modern secular churches, and he opposes to the dogmatic and

routine priestly spirit the living, active, and ever new industrial

spirit.

It is only fair to recognize that the secular priestly spirit has

evolved a bit in France in the last fifty years. We can distinguish two

forms corresponding to two periods of official philosophy on France. The

secular church of Victor Cousin, dominated by the Greco-Latin literary

tradition and by the Roman Catholic religious tradition, is very close

to the Catholicism it wants to supplant. Like it, it is authoritarian

and narrowly conservative concerning traditional institutions: religion,

family, and property, imbued like it with that ecclesiastical prudence

that makes social usefulness the criterion for all beliefs, that divides

doctrines into harmful and healthy, and that refutes a philosophy based

on its moral and social consequences, a type of refutation that Taine

ridiculed in so amusing a fashion in his “Philosophes Classiques en

France.” The new secular church, dominated by the Kantian Protestant and

rationalist tradition, rejects the Catholic pragmatism of a Brunetière,

extends its social ideal in the direction of socialism and

humanitarianism, and tends towards a religion ever more intellectual,

ever more abstract, and finally universal and human; a religion of

reason, of science, of justice and of universal consciousness. Among its

highest representatives it recalls the generous dreams that Renan

symbolized in his “Pretre de Némi.”

Another transformation: the ancient Catholic and ascetic ideal has

evolved into a progressive ideal, optimistic, eudemonistic, and

humanitarian, aspiring to universal happiness and secular paradise

(humanity’s salvation through science, through reason.)

The two currents we find in all religions, the rationalist and the

mystical, can be found in this modern secular religion: a Renan

represents scientistic intellectualism; a Quinet, a Michelet, a Guyau,

apostles of love, represent democratic and revolutionary mysticism.

We should add that the rationalist, scientistic, and humanitarian faith

can be more or less dogmatic. It is at its height of dogmatism in Renan

in his “L’Avenir de la Science,” and in Guyau in his “L’Irreligion de

l’Avenir.” In Renan’s latest books the rationalist and scientistic faith

is diminished by uncertainties, is attenuated with question marks: will

humanity succeed? Will it fail in its voyage towards the divine?

Whatever the case, despite all nuances in thought, it can be said that

Renan has remained faithful to the end to his scientistic faith. In

“L’Eau de Jouvence” the old Prospero, dying like Faust, weighed down

with years and labor, symbolizes the ideal of science and strength that

remain the culminating point of Renanian thought.

Whatever the school or nuances in thought, there is a second trait

common to all the representatives of the modern secular religion: faith

in the power of ideas. Every religious spirit is disposed to accord an

enormous influence to transmitted faith, to a taught morality. All

priests believe in the effectiveness of their preaching. The famous:

“You are a goldsmith, Monsieur Josse,” finds here its application here.

A comic example of this naïve faith can be found in Shaw’s play

“Candida” in the person of Pastor Morrell. Unbeknownst to him, this

pastor, a handsome and well-spoken man, inspires passion among many of

his listeners. All of them, even the young woman who works as his

typist, are in love with him. Because he is innocence itself Pastor

Morell attributes to the virtue of the holy word the number of young

women at his sermons and is struck dumb when his wife reveals to him the

ill that has his fervent listeners in its grip:

CANDIDA: They’re all in love with you. And you are in love with

preaching because you do it so beautifully. And you think it’s all

enthusiasm for the kingdom of Heaven on earth; and so do they. You dear

silly!

MORELL: Candida, what dreadful, what soul-destroying cynicism!

Our pseudo-priests, philosophers, professors of the spiritual life,

moralists, sociologists, preachers of all kinds fall into the same

illusion as Pastor Morel without, incidentally, always obtaining so

flattering a success. All are flagrantly Platonists, believers in the

idea and in love with their preaching. For them it is blasphemy to place

in doubt the virtue of the idea, as several hardly priestly great

spirits have done, like Bayle or the Comte de Gobineau. Their teacher

Renan himself scandalized more than one when he put in the mouth of his

Prospero these slightly skeptical words:

“When I say these things I feel that none of my listeners will be so

struck by my proofs that it will lead him to deprive himself of any

sweet sensation. Without this I would have scruples about having been

the cause that brave men would have diminished the total of joys they

could have tasted because they took my reasoning too seriously.”[5]

This cult of the word is easily explained. As is proved by the example

of Shaw’s pastor, the priestly spirit is generally associated with the

oratory spirit, I mean the faculty to mouth philosophical commonplaces.

The representative types: Victor Cousin and today M. Jaurès. M. Jaurès

is the Victor Cousin of the socialist church. We can apply to him the

ingenious comparison of Taine à propos of the Grand Pontiff of the

eclectic school: “Like a colored powerful beacon which receives five or

six lights and transmits its splendor. It makes shine on the

philosophical horizon their slightly deviated rays.” [6]

The secular priestly spirit, like the Catholic priestly spirit, hates

doubters, skeptics, and dilettantes. Victor Cousin cast his sacerdotal

thunder against skepticism. Michelet doesn’t like Montaigne, casting him

aside as unhealthy and debilitating. “As for me,” he says, “my profound

literary admiration for that exquisite writer doesn’t prevent me from

saying that I find in him, at every moment, a certain nauseating taste,

as in a sick room, where the stale air is heavy with the sad perfumes of

the pharmacy. The delicate, the disgusted, the tired (and all were) hold

to Pindar’s phrase translated and commented on by Montaigne: “Totus

mundus exercet histrionem:” the world is performing a play, the world is

an actor.” [7]

The secular priestly spirit also hates precise spirits, like Stendhal,

who aren’t fooled by the noble style and the eloquence of the pulpit.

Another trait common to the Catholic priestly spirit and the secular

priestly spirit is the hatred and contempt of the individual as such.

The most insightful analyst of the sacerdotal soul, Stirner, noted this.

In the eyes of the priest the individual means egoism, means evil. The

individual is that which is the most contemptible. It only becomes a

little clean, a little presentable and a little interesting from the

moment it becomes the servant of the moral, i.e., the priestly, idea.

All our official and moralizing sociologists are at this point. All are

tiny Brunetières, for whom individualism is the enemy. For them as well

religion and sociology are synonymous. What sociology offers is, like

religion, to unite souls (religare) to compose a great spiritual whole.

The secular priest considers himself a laborer in a disinterested task.

Nothing selfish must be mixed in with his mission. He works for the pure

idea; at least he claims so, and sometimes even believes it. Nietzsche

noted devotion to truth among our free-thinkers and atheists, the final

incarnation of the ascetic ideal.

Modern secular faith is not a dead faith, it’s a faith in action.

Charles Péguy said: “The enrolling of young people is the oldest, the

dearest ambition, the most secret ecclesiastical envy.” [8] It’s that of

the secular priest. He aspires to govern over consciences, to moral

unity and works to realize this through the dual paths of pedagogy and

politics.

It’s a well known law that all spiritual powers tend to be backed up by

a temporal power, and that inversely all temporal powers fell the need

to crown themselves with the halo of a moral idea, to set themselves up

as the rulers of reason and truth. This dual aspiration is incarnated in

the pedantocratic party that Charles Péguy called “the modern

intellectual party,” and which he so vigorously and subtly described.

It is still incarnated (and in truth it’s all the same thing) in the

modern religion of the state.

This religion is not new. It is a legacy of the Ancien Régime

transmitted by the men of 1789, many of whom, as was said by M. Georges

Sorel, were former men of the law, who had remained fanatics for

legality and the state. Today, the idea of the state maintains all its

prestige in intellectual circles where the secular priestly spirit

reigns, notably among adepts of parliamentary socialism a la Jaurès. A

few years ago the parliamentary debate on the monopoly over education

set against each other professorial politicians, pure adepts of the

statist pedantocracy, like MM. Jaurès and Lintilhac and the less

sacerdotal politicians, more liberated from the pedantocratic ideology,

like M. Clémenceau. [9]

The idea of the state is a demanding, jealous, and fearsome idol. Its

high priests of 1793, Robespierre and Saint Just, believed themselves to

be the executors of a metaphysical and moral mandate in service to which

they deployed a terrible zeal. Their example verifies Stirner’s phrase:

Moral faith is as fanatical as religious faith. The statist priestly

spirit is naturally inclined to cruelty. When circumstances demand it it

takes satisfaction in a cold, theoretical, implacable violence.

M. Georges Sorel believes that proletarian violence will not be as

vindictive or cruel as Jacobin violence because it will be neither

statist nor sacerdotal. “The more syndicalism develops by abandoning the

old superstitions that come from the Ancien Regime and the church —

through the channel of men of letters, philosophy professors, and

historians of the revolution — the more social conflicts will take on a

character of pure struggle resembling that of armies on campaign. We

cannot execrate enough those men who teach the people that they must

execute I don’t know what superlatively idealist mandate of a justice on

the march towards the future. These men work at maintaining ideas on the

state that provoked all the bloody scenes of 1793, while the notion of

class struggle tends to purify the notion of violence.” [10] This is not

so certain. We fear that on this point M. Sorel is deluding himself. He

takes examples from war stories to show that the morality of war exclude

coldly cruel violence. This means forgetting that was has also had its

fanatics and mystics. We should remember Moltke saluting the fall of

Paris in 1793, “receptacle of all the vices of the universe.” The

proletarian movement will obviously have, like all the others, its

prophets and its fanatics.

It remains for us to say a word about the most vulgar, the worst, the

crudest forms in which the secular priestly sprit garbs itself. These

are those it wears among those people whose social situation or whose

own stupidity give them the illusion of a superior dignity,

respectability, and morality. We find here the tribe of honest men

infatuated with the oral pose, pontificating philistines, functionaries

crystallized in their vocation. Here of course, the secular priestly

spirit is emptied of all its intellectual or ideal content. It is

reduced to a flat phariseeism, an idiotic fetishism and a tabooism. Here

too examples abound. We know a functionary, a likable young man and not

given to posing when we meet him in a café or at a club. But he visibly

changes when he goes out to visit in company with his wife and his

daughters. He puts on a special look, which he wears like a holy

sacrament. We feel as if he were going to officiate as a priest of the

religion of the family and the religion of high society, those two

religions sacrosanct in the eyes of certain people.

These two religions are tabooist. They render taboo certain things,

certain rites, certain persons, certain ideas. Thus, in a civil service

office marriage renders you taboo. A married functionary, if he is

caught doing wrong, is less severely penalized than another; for

example, he won’t be transferred. The observance of the rites of high

society also renders one taboo. The most important grade for a

functionary is a grade given by society. A functionary whose dossier

bears this note: “Excellent relations in town,” (which means he visits

in the world of the civil servant) is taboo.

The follower of the religion of high society, like that of the religion

of the state, is generally intolerant and vindictive. Don’t lay a finger

on his idols. Don’t attack him, for through him you attack morality,

society, and other respectable things. In all social categories we find

these “pillars of society,” as Ibsen said, these moral Tartuffes:

“All the more dangerous, in their anger

Because they take up against you the arms we revere

And their passion, for which we are grateful,

Assassinate you with sacred steel.”

The secular priestly spirit, in its different forms, spreads across our

era that seriousness and boredom predicted by Stendhal and pointed out

by him as the characteristic of the future bourgeoisocracy. Usually the

secular priest has this “Geneva character” which Stendhal spoke of and

which “calculates, and never laughs.” Stendhal consoled himself with the

thought that if he had arrived fifty years later he would have had to

live in the company of secular priests, of churchwardens of the puritan

church.”

In summary, we see that the secular priestly spirit has occupied a large

place over the course of the nineteenth century, and that it still has

great influence at the beginning of ours. Lammenais deplored the

indifference of his contemporaries on questions of religion. He was

wrong. The nineteenth century was a century of faith: scientific faith,

social faith, moral faith. There were cults for all kinds of things:

cult of the people (Michelet, Quinet), cult of the hero (Carlyle), cult

of the woman, cult of the family, cult of science, of progress,

humanity, great principles, etc... — above all cult of the word, which

remains the master of the world.

It’s not that the spirit that it is antithesis of the priestly spirit —

the spirit of disbelief, of irony and disrespect, the sprit of

skepticism and immoralism — has lacked for representatives. It has given

life to vigorous, profound, and subtle works. It was incarnated in the

anti-sacerdotal verve of a Stirner, in the diatribes of a Nietzsche

against the “traffickers of the ideal,” in the lucid and disdainful

immoralism of a Stendhal, in the smiling irony of an Anatole France. But

this spirit has no hold on the credulous mass; it hasn’t penetrated the

bourgeois soul or the popular soul, over which the might of the

respectful and pontifical spirit have maintained all their power. What

makes for the force of the secular priestly spirit is that it escapes

from ridicule. It escapes ridicule because it is generalized. What is

more, it isn’t very apparent; the secular priest goes unnoticed, having

no special costume. The raillery of Voltaire, so fearful to the priests

of his time would be disarmed against those of ours. The secular priest

is legion: this is what renders him intangible.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be regretted. Perhaps the priestly spirit is tied

to the most essential conditions of human society. Perhaps man is a

religious animal, just as he is a social animal. In any event, the

secular priestly spirit gives no appearance of disappearing. It doesn’t

lack for believers to honor it, nor pontiffs to cultivate it.

[1] Stirner remarks that the word hierarchy mans sacerdotal or sacred

organization.

[2] Popular Universities

[3] Jules de Gaultier, De Kant à Nietzsche, p.178

[4] Edouard berth, Anarchisme individualiste et Marxisme orthodoxe.

Mouvement Socialiste. May Day 1905

[5] L’Eau de Jouvence, act III.

[6] Hyppolite Taine, Les Philosophes Classiques en France au XIXéme

siècle.

[7] Michelet, Historie de France.

[8] Charles Péguy, De La Situation faite au Parti intellectual dans le

Monde moderne, p. 48.

[9] See Clemenceau, Discours pour la Liberté, Cahiers de la Quinzaine.

[10] Georges Sorel, Réflexions sur la Violence, p. 81.