Monday, April 6, 2020

Rousseau's incoherent religion

Guyénot proposes that Robespierre is Rousseau's heir - and not Voltaire's. In theology, there shines no daylight between the two French Rs and such English thinkers as Locke. (Locke differed only in how to enact this theology into politics.)

For Rousseau:

The dogmas of civil religion ought to be few, simple, and exactly worded, without explanation or commentary. The existence of a mighty, intelligent and beneficent Divinity, possessed of foresight and providence, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws: these are its positive dogmas. Its negative dogmas I confine to one, intolerance, which is a part of the cults we have rejected.

By "intolerance" Rousseau meant the dogma extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, common to Catholics and Calvinists.

I cannot figure to what extent someone who rejected, say, the soul's immortality could be tolerated in a Rousseau régime. The Enragé anti-theists saw correctly that they lived outside Robespierre's dispensation.

Every religion must set up an Ecclesia of some bounds. If you don't accept a state's theology, you must go find a new state, or else unseat the state you got. If you deny the Church, you must found a new one (good luck with that).

To deny extra Ecclesiam nulla salus is humbug. If some thinker claims to deny it, he lies. If some state founds itself on that principle, it has no legitimacy. As Vox Day implies, Robespierre's national theology could lead nowhere but to national damnation.

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