Christian Morality and the European Revolution - Letters of Tocqueville and Gobineau

Tocqueville about the new social morality of our age

Tocqueville, 5 September 1843

Your letter, monsieur, arrived the day I left for the conseil général. I found it upon my return. I want to answer you at once.

I shall ask you now to put all your books aside for a moment and to make a rapid mental survey of your recent readings and of your earlier studies, so as to answer this question in conversational form: What is there really new in the works or in the discoveries of the modem moral philosophers? By modern I mean not merely those of the last fifty years but those who immediately preceded them, those who belong to that generation which had decisively broken with the Middle Ages. Did they really see the obligations of mankind in such a new light? Did they really discover new motives for human actions? Did they really establish new foundations, or even new explanations, for human duties? Have they placed the sanctions of moral laws elsewhere? Through the darkness all I think I can recognize is this; to me it is Christianity that seems to have accomplished the revolution—you may prefer the word change—in all the ideas that concern duties and rights; ideas which, after all, are the basic matter of all moral knowledge.

Christianity did not exactly create new duties or, to put it in other terms, it did not establish entirely new virtues; but it changed their relative position. Certain rude and half savage virtues had been on the top of the list; Christianity put them on the bottom. The milder virtues, such as neighborly love, pity, leniency, the forgetfulness even of injuries had been on the bottom of the antique list; Christianity placed them above all others. Here was the first change.

The realm of duties had been limited. Christianity broadened it. It had been limited to certain citizenries; Christianity extended it to all men. It had been restricted and confirmed the position of masters; Christianity gave it to the slaves. Thus Christianity put in grand evidence the equality, the unity, the fraternity of all men. Here was the second change.

The sanction of moral laws had existed for this world rather than for the other. Christianity put the ultimate aim of human life beyond this world; it gave thus a finer, purer, less material, less interested, and higher character to morality. Here was the last change.

All of these things had been seen, shown, and preached before it came. But Christianity alone bound them together, making this new morality into a religion, and the minds of men were absorbed therewith.

We have lived with the rule of this morality for a long chain of centuries. Have we added much to it that is essential? This is what I do not see clearly. We may have put a few shades into the colors of the picture, but I do not see that we have added really new colors. The morality of our own time—the way I see it revealed through words and through action and through the ceaseless patter of our loquacious society—our modem morality (and I am leaving aside what is being printed in fat volumes about this subject) may have reverted in some of its facets to the notions of the antiques, yet for the most part it has merely developed and expanded the consequences of Christian morality without affecting the essential principles of the latter. Our society is much more alienated from the theology than it is from the philosophy of Christianity. As our religious beliefs have become less strong and our view of the life hereafter less clear, morality has become more concerned with the legitimacy of material needs and pleasures. This is the idea that I think the followers of Saint-Simon expressed by saying that the flesh must be rehabilitated. It is probably the same tendency that, for some time now, appears in the writings and in the doctrines of our moral philosophers.

For this reason some people have now felt the urge to find the sanctions of moral laws in this life. They could no longer place them with absolute certainty in the life thereafter. From this came the doctrine of benevolent interest, about honesty paying dividends and vice leading to misery. The English Utilitarians are upholders of this new trend of ideas, ideas rather unfamiliar to the Christian moralists of the past.

Christianity and consequently its morality went beyond all political powers and nationalities. Its grand achievement is to have formed a human community beyond national societies. The duties of men among themselves as well as in their capacity of citizens, the duties of citizens to their fatherland, in brief, the public virtues seem to me to have been inadequately defined and considerably neglected within the moral system of Christianity. This seems to me the only weak facet of that admirable moral system, just as this seems the only strong facet of the moral system of the antique nations. Though the Christian idea of human brotherhood may seem to dominate contemporary minds, those public virtues have also advanced in the meantime; and I am convinced that the moralists of the past hundred years are preoccupied with it far more than were their predecessors. This is due to the resurgence of political passions. They are, at the same time, causes and effects of the great changes we are now witnessing. Thus the modem world re-established a part of antique morality and inserted it within the moral principles of Christianity.

But the most noteworthy innovation of our modem moral teaching, to me, consists in the tremendous development and in the new form that is now given to two principles which Christianity had first put in grand evidence: the equal rights of every man to the goods of this world, and the duty of those who have more to help those who have less. The revolutions that displaced the old European ruling class, the general extension of wealth and education which has made individuals more and more alike have given an immense and unexpected impetus to the principle of equality, which Christianity had established in the spiritual rather than in the tangible material sphere. The idea that all men have a right to certain goods, to certain pleasures, and that our primary moral duty is to procure these for them—this idea, as I said above, has now gained immense breadth, and it now appears in an endless variety of aspects. This first innovation led to another. Christianity made charity a personal virtue. Every day now we are making a social duty, a political obligation, a public virtue out of it. And the growing number of those who must be supported, the variety of needs which we are growing accustomed to provide for, the disappearance of great personalities to whom previously one could turn with these problems of succor, now makes every eye turn to the State. Governments now are compelled to redress certain inequalities, to mollify certain hardships, to offer support to all the luckless and helpless. Thus a new kind of social and political morality is being established, a kind which the antique peoples hardly knew but which is, in reality, a combination of some of their political ideas with the moral principles of Christianity.

Here, my dear Gobineau, is all that I can now distinguish through the fog that surrounds me. You see that I speak only of what I see in the habits of people; I am unable to say whether the same signs are registered in books or whether they reappear elsewhere. These reflections of mine are not supposed to give you a foundation or a basic framework, but rather an example of what I think we should search for. We have to find whatever new concepts of morality may exist. I have tried hard, while attempting to keep close to realities. Do my propositions strike you as true? Do you have others to propose? Do these modem moral theories justify them? My own mental habit has made me look exclusively for these newer things which might directly influence the actions of our contemporaries. But I cannot afford to neglect those different moralistic innovations, the new theses, new concepts, new explications which I might be permitted to call sterile fantasies, were it not for my academic affiliation that obliges me to term them ‘Interesting products of the human intellect.”

Only after we shall have outlined whatever there is new in the moral doctrines and tendencies of our age will we begin to follow the consequences of these primary data in some detail. We should ascertain them before all. So, my dear collaborator, put your head in your hands and think about the above. What I ask from you is no longer the work of a student but of a master, yet I am certain that this does not surpass your powers. Once we have this foundation the rest of the work will be easier and at the same time much more interesting.

Should you have something to send me, dispatch it by stagecoach mails to Valognes, Hotel de Louvre.

Farewell, monsieur. Please trust the expression of my very genuine affection.

P.S. Don’t destroy this letter, as I might wish to reread it someday when I finally get down to writing.

Gobineau about the passing of the “mediocre” concept of Christian morality

Paris, 8 September 1843

Monsieur,

You honored me with a letter which I received this morning. I have been now thinking hard about your somewhat arduous questions, and I believe that with their impressions vivid in my mind it will be easier for me to answer now rather than later. Besides, you want my answer to be talkative, which means that you will excuse rambling and even imperfection.

I believe that there most certainly is a new morality in Europe since the last years of the eighteenth century. But one should agree on what this means. The new morality to me is not a solid body of vigorous doctrines which coheres to a central principle as does Christian morality, for example. It is, rather, a still somewhat incoherent compilation of conclusions drawn from principles still largely undefined. This does not mean that it should be disregarded or that it is only in the stage of abstract theory. No; to the contrary, it seems to me more visible in facts than in books.

This new morality undoubtedly springs from the bosom of Christianity, but only in the way in which Christian morality refers back to Socrates, whose ideas, in their turn, had their source in the maxims of an even older wisdom. The defenders of the Church in the very beginning felt a deep sympathy for the ideas of meekness and of social justice because they themselves had come from suppressed classes and because they had known the evil effects of despotic rule. They were glad to defend themselves against violence by proclaiming the obligations of love and gentleness. Surrounded by daily miseries, by woes of every kind afflicting the poor, how could these simple artisans refrain from the desire to restrict the powerful? Was it not the simplest policy to win people by offering them a gentler rule? Here was the point of departure, the basis of Christian morality: personal interest, instinct, sentiment rather than a contemplated and rational conviction of what ought to be.

The great problem was the faith: pagans, philosophers, Christians at all costs had to believe in a body of religious doctrines. The only important thing in life was to know the fate of man after death. The sectarians of Jupiter were no less possessed with this notion than were the Epicureans or those who listened to the Apostles. The entire moral performance of man was summarized in a principle alien to his life on this earth. Still, it cannot be denied that Christianity made great concessions to terrestrial humanity in one sense. It did not seek to destroy men before their time, since it forbade suicide, which the pagan doctrines condemned but feebly. Emulating the Jewish law, Christianity even proposed certain maxims which, like Mosaic hygiene, tended to conserve human life. Finally, through its exhortation to the gentler virtues, Christianity tried to make the fate of humanity more tolerable than it had ever been before. This was an effort, an improvement, but even this is inconsequential when one looks at the facts from this more general viewpoint.

“Suffering is holy”—this axiom the new doctrine proclaimed in a high, strong voice. We were certainly moved by this very sentiment. Yet its consequences were lethal, since it completely justified the existence of suffering. Why would a government try to destroy it? At the most, individual charity sought to attenuate it: establishment of a hospital, some relief to prisoners perfectly satisfied this not very exacting moral ideal. To be good, to be kind towards one’s neighbor, was indeed a minor duty compared to the one of belief. What am I saying! The man who did not believe could not possess any virtue. Here, monsieur, lies to me the vast element of mediocrity in the moral principle of Christianity, Making everything rest on faith, all the other spiritual and mental powers were dismissed as relatively insignificant; deprived of their absolute importance, lost among the brilliance attributed to faith alone, they were easily forgotten or, rather, misused. The great concern has been salvation, and salvation could not be gained anywhere but in cavernous retreats where, without temptations and without social duties, there were few opportunities to be helpful to one’s fellow men. I think it could be said finally with much justice that Christian morality restricts itself more or less to the avoidance of doing harm and that it hardly exceeds this limit. Of course, truly generous institutions will find in the Christian maxims all the possible reasons for their own benevolent acts; but here I am concerned only with the basic factors.

Once these facts are admitted (though they may be found too harsh, or too mild, I think that it is difficult to deny the kernel of truth which they contain) one can no longer doubt that our contemporaries will regard moral problems quite differently than do the founders of Christianity. “Morality today,” the majority will say, “does not belong either to Catholicism or to Protestantism. A Moslem, a pagan may have a moral character as high as the most religious Christian hermit.” You will agree, monsieur, that this now so widespread opinion is very remarkable since it just about completely dislodges those foundations on which morality has been established since the earliest of historical times. It begins by disconnecting the chain which unites men through their beliefs. It sends the creed of the most diverse dogmas back to the closed sanctuary7 of private conscience; it is through this that it gives incontestable sanction to the freedom of religion. As a matter of fact, the different religions never pleaded against each other before the secular power except with mutual accusations to the effect that the doctrines of their adversaries were immoral or dangerous to the social order. As soon as one's beliefs in a future life are recognized as being wholly inconsequential to one’s actions or duties in this life it becomes difficult for a magistrate to find a pretext to intervene in the quarrels of sects. Here we have already a great and fortunate innovation due to the spirit of our age. It is doubly interesting to contemplate it, first because of the effects I mentioned above, and also because it is something quite new in the history of the world. I do not think that it is even comparable to the semi-tolerance of the ancients towards the different cults. In those times the Pantheon could easily welcome a new god, but today people respect only what they see and what they can touch. They have learned by experience and through the long clash of ideas that virtues are not the patrimony of one religion to the detriment of others.

This is not the only change in our ideas. As people have become less preoccupied with their future lives they have been thinking more of their present ones. To be exclusively preoccupied with this earthly life used to be the mark of men of levity or of passionate and vehement ambitions. Any soul blessed with gentleness turned towards matters of worship, and this earth was thus forsaken by the minds of those who were most capable o£ serving it usefully. Of course many of the economists of the last century and many of those utopian philosophers who preceded or succeeded Rousseau border on the ridiculous. Nevertheless, one cannot deny that these often so unduly exalted thinkers have marked their usefulness in history by having helped to establish that clearer order of ideas by which we live today. It was about the middle of the eighteenth century, under the influence of Voltairian ideas, that men began to ask whether it was not possible to give something more than poorhouses to the lower classes. For the first time they studied the exact nature of charity, its eventual purpose and its attainments. Thereafter came those often more enthusiastic than judicious studies about agriculture, about money, about financial circulation, about the nature of wealth, about the sources of its decrease or increase. These early efforts lost much popular esteem since many of the theories were silly, foolish, and pretentious. Yet we ought not forget that they marked the beginning of a new order of things in the world and that a Florian1 was perhaps necessary to help us arrive at the heights of a Goethe. Since the early reign of Louis XVI one could feel the influence of these new ideas. To the different duties already imposed on the government another one was to be added, a more august one, never mentioned before. The State was to look after the poor.

One can understand what Christian ideas would have made out of this. Sloth would have been glad to pay a bribe to charity; the gentle faith of the believers, a little help to neighbors would have dispensed them from further tiresome sacrifices. But this is no longer what people meant by charity. They cared no longer for men, nor was their concern with their particular sufferings. Those external circumstances which evoke pity were passed over; in one sentence, people no longer felt compassionate to Man; they were concerned with Humanity. Seen from this viewpoint, suffering is no longer holy. Like the plague, like every scourge, it must be extirpated. I shall no longer be moved by the sight of a beggar and give him some help in passing. I shall, as a modem citizen, help put the government in a position to destroy misery and to restore the social usefulness of a worker who, in his capacity of a human being, must not remain idle. That is the theory.

Everyone has an equal right to work. Is this not a new maxim, quite different from that of Christ, who said, after Moses: Man is condemned to work? What used to be a painful duty becomes a right, a prerogative in the name of which each member of the social body has the right not to suffer from misery and destitution. The power and dignity which morality has gained by this principle are beyond question. The relation of work to virtue had been sensed by the ancients and confirmed even by Christianity, but this mutual affirmation meant a barren state of inaction. To put into practice this almost transcendental truth was a role reserved for sages and saints. There is more to this. The ancients considered spiritual labor alone to be capable of serving morality. Here the comparison with our new theories is striking; it favors the latter. The manual occupations are no longer excluded; by now it is recognized how, in more than one way, they may be equal to the sublimest efforts of the intellect. Today Plutarch would be ill advised to repeat what he said, I think, in his Life of Camillus, that an exalted soul may admire Phidias’s Jupiter but would not desire to be its author. Indeed, Art is a sort of mediator between Science and Matter, say the Saint-Simonians, and this truth, nowadays generally accepted, puts craftsmen in a much more elevated position than the ancient world had. From this new perception of the occupations of the lower classes results a principle, not entirely unknown to Christianity but one to which our times are giving a much broader and greater application: the right of the poor to education. The necessity to enlighten the masses is today hardly contested at all. And not only the basic principles of religion are to be taught them, but they are to be introduced to scientific and literary progress as far as possible; in brief, they are called forth to share all the fruits of the human intellect.

People have now gone even further in this extension of human welfare. They are concerned with prisoners. It is being said with Voltaire that a man hanged is good for nothing, and people are trying to find a way to make criminals good for something. In this difficult endeavor people have again been led by the strong desire to better the lot of humanity on this earth. The result has been more moral, more kind, more merciful than Christians could ever have been. What have the writers concerned with prison reform done in the last forty years? What they did was to consider and compare the rights of society to punish and the rights of the criminals to be spared. The rights of the criminal! Here is certainly a modem employment of the term rights. Formerly the convicted criminal faced a thousand additional tortures beyond his legal condemnation, sufferings from which no one thought of delivering him and which were regarded the natural consequences of his fault. Nowadays it is thought that a matter as serious as the life of a man, big or small, deserves a more mature consideration. Surely this is an innovation which, though often exaggerated by misguided philanthropists, very favorably proves the progressive nature of morality.

It is easy to conclude from all of the preceding that at the bottom of these new ideas lies self-interest. But, to be sure, this is no longer that self-interest which was the answer of the reformers of the last century to the mocking questions of those who asked them whether virtue did pay. Self-interest, at that time, meant the individual. It told him: Do not steal, for you will be imprisoned; do not kill, for you will be broken upon the wheel; work, for you will reap gains. These fragile arguments were rather vulnerable. If a man found satisfaction in an imperious passion, or if he was certain of impunity, he was suddenly above this principle of self-interest from which all morality was supposed to derive. Today the doctrine of interest has taken a different character. It is no longer limited to the enjoyments, to the material fruits of virtue. Its primary source is enlightened psychology and its scope is not the individual but all of humanity. And there is yet one more decisive factor.

Christianity severely restrained the passions. The present concept of morality is indulgent towards them; it does not renounce the hope to rationalize them since it believes that many of these passions are potentially useful. Thus the love of luxury and of material enjoyments is no longer an evil. To the contrary, if a man works more because he desires to raise his well-being, the urge of well-being in this case becomes a commendable virtue in itself. One may go further to say that any kind of reasonable satisfaction that does, in fact, involve no inconvenience to others is in no way opposed to the morality adopted by our age. Thus you will see, monsieur, how this doctrine of interest is confronted with considerably lesser difficulties now. Anyone motivated by common ideas and living more or less like most people will indeed find it much easier to conform to this morality, which is more indulgent to his natural inclinations than in the past. But we must admit that this new morality is nonetheless severe to everything that would injure someone’s peaceful and normal relations with the other members of the social body.

This, I think, is about what strikes me as new in the type of morality developed by our times. I do not dare to venture too far. I bypass the specialized and, one might say, the rash opinions of the Fourierists and of socialists of every kind. The opinions held by these different sects derive more or less from the common base to which I have just referred. Ideas on marriage, on property, on education, on the proper guidance of individual tastes and passions have been fiercely debated by these philosophical camps. Still, I do not think that they are worth much notice. These very advanced doctrines have few partisans and none of their programs would seem to be able to attract many more followers in the future. I think that if we keep the different points which I have indicated at least for principal landmarks we could advance more safely within the bounds of the now generally admitted concepts of morality.

I must take a few steps backward. I said that self-interest seemed to me to be still at the bottom of everything. I added that philosophical motives now expanded and ennobled this self-interest. To clarify this I must also add that it is unfortunately at this basic point that the present system is weak. It is evident that the ancient religions found it easy to dignify morality by establishing it under the aegis of divinity. Now it has been brought down to earth, and it has not yet been possible to discover its sources. Moreover, many minds do not realize clearly enough that this morality belongs no longer to Christianity, and they still connect it with Protestantism or with Catholicism. Others link it to the narrow principle of pure Voltairianism. For others again it becomes a sort of philanthropy, sentimental rather than reasonable, the kind which easily goes astray. Here is a summary of the contemporary history of morality: an immensely difficult critical study of mankind about itself. On one hand, as you have so justly remarked, the new morality rehabilitates the flesh; on the other hand, it prevents the spirit from suffering in this rehabilitation and from withering once again. The results are evident, and I think we may be rather satisfied. But, as with everything new, its achievements and prospects have not yet been adequately defined. This is a land in the process of being cleared, the limits of which are unknown, its center not yet discovered but which already yields a harvest. You may perhaps conclude from this that the hurried writing of the history of such an endeavor still in its beginning might not be opportune at all, especially since we are to stop at 1830, at a moment when these ideas take such an extraordinary surge forward. But, monsieur, this is the concern of the Académie; and a history for not being complete is nonetheless interesting . . .

Tocqueville about the endurance of Christian morality

Tocqueville, 2 October 1843

I had received, monsieur, your papers on Priestley and Bentham. They are very good papers, and they seem to fit the purposes o£ our planned work better than any of the previous ones you have done for me. I have thought that, beyond his big book on punishments and rewards,1 Bentham may have written something more explicit and more philosophical about his utilitarian doctrines. Am I wrong in this?

I turn now to the long letter which you wrote me three weeks ago. I cannot answer it point by point. A book would be needed for that. I merely wish to point out the problems that now exist between us and to try to direct our work accordingly.

I must tell you that my opinions about Christianity are absolutely opposite to yours. Christianity, to me, is vastly different from what it seems to you. It is vastly different from what had preceded it, and we are much less removed from it than you say. Whenever I read the Gospels I cannot help being overcome by the deepest emotions. Many of its doctrines, and the most important ones, have always struck me as if they were absolutely new, and all of it is something entirely different from that body of philosophical and moral ideas which had previously governed humanity. I cannot understand how, when you read these admirable books, your spirit does not breathe with that superior sense of inner freedom which their pure and grand atmosphere evokes in my own. If one wishes to be critical of Christianity, it is better to keep always two things in mind.

The first is this: Christianity has come to our generation through centuries marked by much rudeness, ignorance, social inequality, and political oppression, during which time it was often a weapon in the hands of kings and of priests. We must consider Christianity itself and separate it from the historic vehicles in which it was often forced to travel toward us. Almost all of those exaggerations and abuses for which you—and often quite properly—reproach Christianity should be attributed to these secondary circumstances—this I could easily prove—and not to the code of Christian morality whose first principle is this simple maxim: love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor like yourself—and remember that every one of its laws and prophecies rests thereon.

The second thing that one should always remember is that Christianity is not a philosophy but a religion. There are, of course, certain doctrines that are necessarily part and parcel of certain religions, and which are not the exclusive attributes of any one of them. Such are the virtue attributed to faith, the utility of faith, the necessity of faith, the inadequacy of deeds without faith—and their consequence is that certain amount of intolerance with the contemporary absence of which you seem so satisfied. These doctrines are inherent in all religions . . . and they are necessarily inseparable from all the good they bring us. Yet I am convinced that the eventual damage to human morality thereby caused is far less than what would result from moral systems that have emancipated themselves from religion altogether. The longer I live the less I think that the peoples of the world can ever separate themselves from a positive religion; and this growing conviction makes me less concerned with these inconveniences that are eventually inherent in every religion, including the best.

Most of those symptoms in which you claim to recognize a new morality seem to me only symptoms that have always accompanied the weakening of religious faith.

When there is no more faith in religion, it is logical that little attention should be paid to its moral precepts and that it will be judged merely by its external acts and forms. When the vision of the next world becomes obscure, it is again natural that people who are still unable to live without moral sanctions will try to find them on this earth and that they will thus create all these systems which may be different but which are all concerned with the doctrine of human interest.

And when the vision of eventual heavenly rewards is accordingly lost, it is again logical that people should be more and more attached to the only prospects that remain before them, to the benefits of this world.

I think that something similar may have happened during the decline of paganism, and that it is typical of the decline of all religions. The mass then comes forth and reveals its instincts, and it will find philosophers who will make doctrines to fit them.

I further tell you that I am not surprised at what is now called the rehabilitation of the flesh. It is possible that Christianity may have pushed the glorification of the spirit to excessive lengths. But this very tendency was a wonderful reaction against the Roman habits and forms of paganism. Don’t you see the incomparable beauty of that rare, open struggle of the spirit against the ruling flesh? Even if Christianity was swept to spiritual excesses, entranced as it may have been by the grandeur of its own doctrines, I do not think that this is a very great danger. The inclinations of the majority of men pull them in a converse direction; they rehabilitate their own flesh without the need of philosophers.

As I am hastily jotting these different thoughts down, I must say that my aim is not to convince you but merely to make you understand where I differ from you. Most of the things that to you seem new apparitions of morality to me seem the natural and logical consequences of a weakened religious faith and of widespread doubts about the existence of the other world. I believe that similar circumstances in the past resulted in similar consequences.

Among these really new apparitions (and I think there may be a few attractive ones among them) the majority seem to derive directly from Christianity. They are only the applications of Christianity to a larger sphere, to other political forms, and to a very different social state. They are, briefly, the new consequences of an old principle.

You, then, consider the revolution of our times more original and more beneficent than I do. But you do see it, and this is the most important thing for the work we are trying to do. Most of the symptoms that you detect I see, too. Thus I think that this sort of epistolary conversation could lead to rather satisfactory results, as it should determine the direction of your future studies and the main characteristics of the books that are noteworthy for our purposes. Christianity is the great source of modem morality. Everything that to you may seem contrary or even different from Christianity in our laws, customs, ideas, philosophies you should put in evidence. This is the first rule. For what I have to present is not contemporary morality but its eventual divergences from the principles of the past. This limited subject is, thus, immensely and desperately large. What, after all, does it not include? To describe the various manifestations may be even more difficult than to demonstrate the new principles themselves. One of these definite manifestations, the changes of civil and criminal justice in the last fifty years, alone could be described in a heavy book. Sometimes I feel that I should curse either the Académie des sciences morales for having confided this work to me or politics for keeping me from its eventual completion.

To come back to you. You say you are going ahead with your study of the British writers. Very good; as I told you earlier, your last studies on these writers seemed excellent. After them I think you would do well to return to your Germanies. In the first place there is a field where my efforts cannot ever equal yours, as I don't know German. In the second place I must say that I am not yet satisfied with the results in that field as they seem inconclusive for my main purpose, which is, above all, to find and show what there is really new and divorced from Christianity in these modem moral systems. Kant seems to me beyond, rather than within, Christianity. Are the more recent German authors different? I should ask you to inform me positively on this subject. I may not ask you to do the French writers as I know the writings which I need most and I can obtain them more easily.

What I need is less information about new ideas than about their different manifestations and applications, especially abroad, for they are often difficult for me to know. Let me take your own ideas for example.

You are right when you say that it is typical of our times to be interested in acts apart from beliefs. This is evident in the modem laws which confirmed equal rights and equal duties to all Christian sects. In France this has been now extended to the Jews. Legislation abroad must surely show less visible but, at any rate, considerable symptoms of the same tendency.

You say that charity has become public instead of private, and that thus it has become more enlightened and less directly involved. I may agree with you in part, but I do not deduce the same consequences therefrom. I see therein less a new principle than a more modern, civil, bureaucratic, and democratic manifestation of Christian doctrine. Evidence thereof lies in the modem practice of governments in accumulating funds to administer to the needs of various miseries, to extend, briefly, the necessary administrations of Christian charity. This charity is legal and direct. Anything similar in Germany should be observed and registered carefully.

Then there is a legal charity that is indirect and consists in offering to the poor facilities to help themselves. Such are savings funds, asylums, and other institutions of this kind. The eventual existence of similar institutions abroad is material of capital importance for me.

The efforts of governments to extend more universal education; the obligations imposed for this purpose; consequently, the laws and regulations that aim to multiply the number of schools and their pupils, and give instruction of a more democratic nature; the books that influenced and pushed governments in that direction particularly belong to our subject. I am leaving prisons and penal laws aside; I should be able to do that myself.3

You say that the right to work is a new principle of our times (and I must interrupt to say that it emphasizes the idea of work less than did the Christian doctrine about all men being condemned, in one way or another, to work on this earth). Which are the modem books, French or foreign, where this idea stands formulated? Has there been any legislative attempt to make this idea into a law?

I could go on much longer about this subject. But it would serve no purpose now when you are not yet through with your study of the contemporary philosophers. When you conclude that, and I hope as soon as possible, we will revert to these more practical subjects. Even if you were to feel you could not enter into them in great detail, your collection of ideas and sources should alone be of great help to me.

I conclude this interminable letter by asking you to trust my indeed sincere affections.

Tocqueville about the superiority of Christianity

Tocqueville, 22 October 1843

My dear Gobineau, you are an amiable, intelligent, and unorthodox adversary with whom I do not want to battle. It is typical of philosophical debates that neither of the participants emerges dissuaded from his original opinions. Thus it is best not to dispute; it saves effort. Particularly useless are philosophical battles waged by the pen. The possibilities of misunderstanding then actually increase. Thus your letter attributes to me ideas that are not mine, a misunderstanding which I could have immediately clarified during a personal conversation. For example: I am supposed to have said that Christianity was absolutely different from everything that had preceded it. I have never thought that and I don’t think I said it. Some of its maxims certainly existed, scattered and inert, in Greek and Oriental books. The other day I found some even in the Laws of Manu, and others probably exist elsewhere. But Christianity chose, developed, ordered, bound together certain maxims and ideas, some part of which had been presented earlier in an isolated or obscure fashion, and made out of the whole an absolutely new regimen of morality. This is the line of my thought.

Another example: that there is nothing new in modern morality. Again you wrongly attribute an idea to me. I only believe that almost all that we call modern principles should be considered as new consequences drawn from the old Christian principles because of our present political and social conditions. I do not deny their existence; I merely contest the extent of their meaning. You will see here, my dear colleague, that my ideas ought not to discourage you. The only difference between you and me is that you have more ambition than I have. I limit myself to finding new consequences where you wish to discover absolutely new principles. You want to change the face of the world, nothing less. I am more modest.

Unfortunately there also exist more profound divisions between ourselves. You seem to contest the social function of religions. Here we assume truly antithetical positions. You say that the fear of God does not stop people from murder. Even if this were true—and I doubt whether it is really true—what is the conclusion? Whether secular or religious, the function of law is not to eliminate crime (which is usually the product of deranged instincts and of such violent passions as will not be halted by the mere existence of laws). The efficacy of laws consists in their impact on society, in their regulation of matters of daily life, and in setting the general temper of habits and ideas. Laws, and especially religious laws, are thus so necessary that there never has been a people of any importance that could do without them. I know that there are many who now think that one day they may be able to do without this regimen, and every morning they keep looking eagerly for this new day. I think they are looking in vain. I should even be more inclined to believe in the coming of some new religion than in the continuation of the prosperity and greatness of modem societies without religion . . .

A last argument. While you are so severe with the religion which, after all, did so much to establish our leadership among the human race, it seems that you have a certain weakness for Islamism. This makes me think of another friend whom I met in Africa, where he had become converted to the Mohammedan religion. I was not impressed by this spectacle. I often studied the Koran when concerned with our relations with the Moslem populations of Algiers and the Orient. I must say that I emerged convinced that there are in the entire world few religions with such morbid consequences as that of Mohammed. To me it is the primary cause of the now visible decadence of the Islamic world, and though it may be less absurd than the polytheism of the antiques and its political and social tendencies are more to be feared, in my opinion, I still regard it as decadent compared to antique paganism. Here is something that I could easily prove if you were ever to entertain the painful thought of having yourself circumcised.

Forgive, my dear Gobineau, this useless banter. I wanted to be very brief, and I am now beginning my fifth page. It was the pleasure of conversing with you rather than a desire to convince you that made me talk so much though I remain grieved about our disagreements. I like you too much to be indifferent as to whether you share some of my beliefs. Yet I find consolation in the knowledge that in the realm of finer sentiments we are and shall remain on the same side.

You ask me whether you should analyze Bentham on usury.1 I do not need a detailed analysis. I think I know his essential thesis, which he pushes to unreasonable extremes, as is the habit of this type of person, though I do agree with some points. It would be enough to indicate briefly his principal premises and conclusions. I don’t see the need to occupy yourself with his book on legislation.2 I can do this easier as I am rather well acquainted with it. I am eagerly awaiting your analysis of the other British writers you mention.

Farewell, monsieur, and believe in my sincere and affectionate sentiments.