Author: Eliphas Levi
Book: "The Key of (to) the Great Mysteries" (1861)

The excerpts I want to show you and comment upon are the following:

(1) "Yes, Proudhon, God is a hypothesis, but a hypothesis so necessary, that without it, all theorems become absurd or doubtful."

Proudhon was an anarchist philosopher. Proudhon coined the expression: "Property is theft" (I have just bought 4 books by: Godwin, Bakunin, Proudhon and Kropotkin) and "God is Pernicious" ("Dumnezeu este Daunator"). In general anarchists are atheists but there are some Christian anarchists. Few - one of them was Tolstoy.

You know, if you do not believe in God... you find out that in the end there is nothing - from a historical view, not momentary view or near future. Utopias for example or even Eutopias can never be achieved but is it not Heaven an Utopia? What is anti-social today, it is social at an historical level. Those "anti-socials" (rational "anti-socials") advance humanity. If conflict would never exist then we would stagnate, so I thought, and thought I was wrong but after I read Kant I accepted this as a truth, if there is no God we can’t reach Utopia but nevertheless we can’t stagnate but if we move -- towards what we move? Is this what all prophets talked about? All philosophers? All men of knowledge and love? Utopia? The place that does not exist? Heaven? I repeat: Is it not Heaven, Utopia? The place in which only love and knowledge exists. Surely I am very fond of a society where knowledge and love is perpetual. I do not ask myself if God exists no longer or if Heaven exists, Nirvana, Hell, Underworld, etc. but I ask myself how it would be --- from what the Bible, from what religious texts tells us --- and analyze this world, interpret it. Marx said: "Philosophers only interpret the world, but we must change it” (or similarly) but philosophers must interpret the world and those that can change it. Philosophers usually are not practical.

(2) “Religion holds a greater place among the realities of life than those who do without religion --- or pretend to do without it --- affect to believe. All ideas that raise man above the animal --- moral love, devotion, honour --- are sentiments essentially religious.”

Eliphas Levi is partially right. True! Moral love, devotion, honor, friendship, compassion are sentiments essentially religious. However, the sentiments that are essentially religious are taken from sentiments that are essentially human – from human nature. A Man who does without religion can… - - no! Has with great certainty the sentiments that are religious as well! Because Men are not from the start homo religious, they are Homo Sapiens Sapiens. In time they - "evolve" into homo religious.


End Note

After I read the book well... I said I would write a whole book myself criticizing Eliphas Levi. It will not happen though. On some of the author’s ideas, I am opposed with all my being and from not only a subjective point of view but from a universal point of view; as you seen in the excerpts above.
I also criticized, though I have not written yet on agonia, Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre. Saint-Yves d’Alveydre searched for an ideal form of government, a political-theological formula. A government composed of three councils, one of them being a metaphysical chamber, bound together and forming an organic society. What I agree on is to find a political formula that will create an “ideal” form of government – ideal and practical – but I do not agree with the metaphysical chamber. Even so, this means synarchism and eliminating this chamber means eliminating the theory, because eliminating the most important elements that create a formula or a theory, means to destroy it. The age of religious-prophets has passed, now is the age of the philosopher-prophets.