Comte was a keen historian of the faiths and his new religion turned out to be made up largely from some of the best bits of the old ones. He drew most heavily from Catholicism, which he judged to be abhorrent in the majority of its beliefs yet nonetheless well stocked with valuable insights about morality, art and ritual — and also essayed occasional forays into the theology of Judaism, Buddhism and Islam.
Rather than complain about the shortcomings of existing religions, it may sometimes be better just to invent a new one: Auguste Comte, 1798–1857. (illustration credit 10.10)
Comte sought above all else to correct the dangers to which he felt modern atheists were exposed. He believed that capitalism had aggravated people’s competitive, individualistic impulses and distanced them from their communities, their traditions and their sympathies with nature. He criticized the nascent mass media for coarsening sensibilities and closing off chances for self-reflection, seclusion and original thought. In the same breath, he blamed the cult of Romanticism for putting too much strain on the conventional family and for promoting a falsely egoistic understanding of love. He lamented the arbitrary way in which, as soon as people felt they could no longer credit Jesus’s status as a divine being, they also had to forgo all the wisdom promulgated by Christianity. Comte at first hoped that secular schools and universities could become the new educators of the soul, imparting ethical lessons rather than mere information to their students, but he came to realize that capitalism would in the end always favour a skilled, obedient and unintrospective workforce over an inquisitive and emotionally balanced one.
Comte’s overall scheme for his religion began with a plan for an enormous new priesthood, which would employ 100,000 people in France alone. Despite the shared title, these priests were to be very different from those of the Catholic Church: they would be married, well integrated into the community and entirely secular, combining the skills of philosophers, writers and what we would now call psychotherapists. Their mission was to nurture the capacities for happiness and the moral sense of their fellow citizens. They would engage in therapeutic conversations with those plagued by problems at work or in love, deliver secular sermons and write jargon-free philosophical texts on the art of living. Along the way, this new priesthood would provide steady employment for the sort of people (among whose ranks Comte counted himself) who possessed a strong desire to help others and cultural and aesthetic interests, but who had been stymied by an inability to find work in universities and were thus forced to eke out an insecure living by writing for newspapers or peddling books to an indifferent public.
Because Comte appreciated the role that architecture had once played in bolstering the claims of the faiths, he proposed the construction of a network of secular churches — or, as he called them, churches for humanity. These would be paid for by bankers, for in his estimation the emergent banking class contained an unusually high proportion of individuals who were not only extremely wealthy but also intelligent, interested in ideas and capable of being swayed towards goodness. In a gesture of gratitude, the exterior façades of these secular churches would feature prominent busts of their banker-donors, while inside, large halls would be decorated with portraits of the pantheon of the new religion’s secular saints, including Cicero, Pericles, Shakespeare and Goethe, all singled out by the founder for their capacity to inspire and reassure us. Above a west-facing stage, inscribed in large gold letters, an aphorism would sum up Comte’s belief in intellectual self-help: ‘Connais-toi pour t’ameliorer’ (‘Know yourself to improve yourself’). Priests would deliver daily talks on such subjects as the importance of being kind to one’s spouse, patient with one’s colleagues, earnest in one’s work and compassionate towards the less fortunate. Churches would become the locus for a continuous round of festivals of Comte’s own inventive design: in the springtime there would be a celebration in honour of wives and mothers, in the summer, one to mark the momentous contribution of the iron industry to human progress and in the winter a third to offer thanks to domestic and farm animals like dogs, pigs and chickens.
Comte knew that the traditional faiths had cemented their authority by providing their adherents with daily or even hourly schedules of whom or what they ought to think about, rotas which were typically pegged to the commemoration of a holy figure or supernatural incident. So in the religion of humanity, every month would be officially devoted to a specific field of endeavour — from marriage and parenthood to art, science, agriculture and carpentry — and every day within that month to an individual who had made a significant contribution to a field. In November, the month of craft, the 12th, for example, would be the day of Richard Arkwright, the inventor of the industrial cotton-spinning mill, and the 22nd of Bernard Palissy, the French Renaissance potter, a model of endurance who famously tried for sixteen fruitless years to reproduce the glaze on Chinese porcelain.
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Regrettably, Comte’s unusual, complex, sometimes deranged but always thought-provoking project was derailed by a host of practical obstacles. Its author was denounced by both atheists and believers, ignored by the general public and mocked by the newspapers. Towards the end of his life, despairing and frail, he took to writing long and somewhat threatening letters in defence of his religion to monarchs and industrialists across Europe — including Louis Napoleon, Queen Victoria, the Crown Prince of Denmark, the Emperor of Austria, 300 bankers and the head of the Paris sewage system — few of whom even bothered to reply, much less offered their financial support. Without seeing any of his ideas realized, Comte died at the age of fifty-nine, on 5 September 1857, or, according to his own calendar, in the month of philosophy, on the day honouring the achievements of the French astronomer Nicolas Lacaille, who in the eighteenth century had identified more than 10,000 stars in the southern hemisphere and now has a crater named after him on the dark side of the moon.
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Notwithstanding its many oddities, Comte’s religion is hard to dismiss out of hand, for it identified important fields in atheistic society that continue to lie fallow and to invite cultivation and showed a pioneering interest in generating institutional support for ideas. His ability to sympathize with the ambitions of traditional religions, to study their methods and to adapt them to the needs of the modern world reflected a level of creativity, tolerance and inventiveness to which few later critics of religion have been capable of rising.
Comte’s greatest conceptual error was to label his scheme a religion. Those who have given up on faith rarely feel indulgent towards this emotive word, nor are most adult, independent-minded atheists much attracted to the idea of joining a cult. That Comte was not particularly sensitive to such subtleties was made clear when he began to refer to himself as ‘the Great Priest’, a pronouncement which must at a stroke have wiped out his appeal among the more balanced members of his audience.