Socrates or Buddha?was astonishingly able when it came to giving shape to social
life. So, as his own contribution to the positive stage, he set
about creating a ‘Religion of Humanity’. It came complete
with secular clergy, and Comte himself as the Grand-prêtre de
l’Humanité; liturgies and rites of passage, marking the impor-
tant moments across the course of life; and saints who exem-
plifi ed moral and educative excellence, and commitment.
Followers met in buildings that were part chapel, part temple.
Inside were images of the Great Mother, carrying inscriptions
like ‘The worship of Woman is a preparation for the worship of
Humanity.’ There were also triptychs, showing human fi gures
representing Supreme Being, Supreme Earth, Supreme Destiny.
Some of these temples still stand. The organisation was par-
ticularly infl uential in the creation of modern Brazil: the words
‘Order and Progress’ inscribed on the Brazilian fl ag come from
Comte’s motto, ‘Love as a principle and order as a basis: progress
the goal’. It sounds rather sinister now. And there are historical
reasons for that. Comte’s ideas were infl uential in the formation
of the various totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century
too, which turned to him for insights in how to maintain social
order once the revolutionaries had stripped religious institu-
tions of their infl uence. The iconography of Stalin and Mao are
visible manifestations of the links. Comte’s religious invention
is worth pondering as a political warning. And also because its
failures highlight certain issues still faced by the spiritual but
not religious.
Revealing truth
Thinking of Comte’s iconography, there’s an observation made
by the philosopher Martin Heidegger that’s illuminating. He
drew a distinction between bad and good art. Bad art merely
represents things, or tries too obviously to express truths.
It’s bad because it has a linear relationship to what it seeks
to express: it presumes that the truth of things is relatively
straightforward and can be conveyed without the complexity