The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tragic Sense Of Life, by Miguel de Unamuno
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Tragic Sense Of Life
Author: Miguel de Unamuno
Release Date: January 8, 2005 [EBook #14636]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE ***
Produced by David Starner, Martin Pettit and the PG Online Distributed
Proofreading Team
TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO
translator, J.E. CRAWFORD FLITCH
DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC
New York
This Dover edition, first published in 1954, is an unabridged and
unaltered republication of the English translation originally published
by Macmillan and Company, Ltd., in 1921. This edition is published by
special arrangement with Macmillan and Company, Ltd.
The publisher is grateful to the Library of the University of
Pennsylvania for supplying a copy of this work for the purpose of
reproduction.
_Standard Book Number: 486-20257-7 Library of Congress Catalog Card
Number: 54-4730_
Manufactured in the United States of America
Dover Publications, Inc.
180 Varick Street
New York, N.Y. 10014
CONTENTS
PAGES
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY xi-xxxii
AUTHOR'S PREFACE xxxiii-xxxv
I
THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE
Philosophy and the concrete man--The man Kant, the man Butler, and
the man Spinoza--Unity and continuity of the person--Man an end not
a means--Intellectual necessities and necessities of the heart and
the will--Tragic sense of life in men and in peoples 1-18
II
THE STARTING-POINT
Tragedy of Paradise--Disease an element of progress--Necessity of
knowing in order to live--Instinct of preservation and instinct of
perpetuation--The sensible world and the ideal world--Practical
starting-point of all philosophy--Knowledge an end in itself?--The
man Descartes--The longing not to die 19-37
III
THE HUNGER OF IMMORTALITY
Thirst of being--Cult of immortality--Plato's "glorious
risk"--Materialism--Paul's discourse to the Athenians--Intolerance
of the intellectuals--Craving for fame--Struggle for survival 38-57
IV
THE ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM
Immortality and resurrection--Development of idea of immortality in
Judaic and Hellenic religions--Paul and the dogma of the
resurrection--Athanasius--Sacrament of the
Eucharist--Lutheranism--Modernism--The Catholic
ethic--Scholasticism--The Catholic solution 58-78
V
THE RATIONALIST DISSOLUTION
Materialism--Concept of substance--Substantiality of the
soul--Berkeley--Myers--Spencer--Combat of life with
reason--Theological advocacy--_Odium anti-theologicum_--The
rationalist attitude--Spinoza--Nietzsche--Truth and consolation
79-105
VI
IN THE DEPTHS OF THE ABYSS
Passionate doubt and Cartesian doubt--Irrationality of the problem
of immortality--Will and intelligence--Vitalism and
rationalism--Uncertainty as basis of faith--The ethic of
despair--Pragmatical justification of despair--Summary of preceding
criticism 106-131
VII
LOVE, SUFFERING, PITY, AND PERSONALITY
Sexual love--Spiritual love--Tragic love--Love and
pity--Personalizing faculty of love--God the Personalization of the
All--Anthropomorphic tendency--Consciousness of the Universe--What
is Truth?--Finality of the Universe 132-155
VIII
FROM GOD TO GOD
Concept and feeling of Divinity--Pantheism--Monotheism--The
rational God--Proofs of God's existence--Law of necessity--Argument
from _Consensus gentium_--The living God--Individuality and
personality--God a multiplicity--The God of Reason--The God of
Love--Existence of God 156-185
IX
FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY
Personal element in faith--Creative power of faith--Wishing that
God may exist--Hope the form of faith--Love and suffering--The
suffering God--Consciousness revealed through
suffering--Spiritualization of matter 186-215
X
RELIGION, THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE BEYOND, AND THE APOCATASTASIS
What is religion?--The longing for immortality--Concrete
representation of a future life--Beatific vision--St.
Teresa--Delight requisite for happiness--Degradation of
energy--Apocatastasis--Climax of the tragedy--Mystery of the Beyond
216-259
XI
THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM
Conflict as basis of conduct--Injustice of annihilation--Making
ourselves irreplaceable--Religious value of the civil
occupation--Business of religion and religion of business--Ethic of
domination--Ethic of the cloister--Passion and culture--The Spanish
soul 260-296
CONCLUSION
DON QUIXOTE IN THE CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN TRAGI-COMEDY
Culture--Faust--The modern Inquisition--Spain and the scientific
spirit--Cultural achievement of Spain--Thought and language--Don
Quixote the hero of Spanish thought--Religion a transcendental
economy--Tragic ridicule--Quixotesque philosophy--Mission of Don
Quixote to-day 297-330
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
DON MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO
I sat, several years ago, at the Welsh National Eisteddfod, under the
vast tent in which the Bard of Wales was being crowned. After the small
golden crown had been placed in unsteady equilibrium on the head of a
clever-looking pressman, several Welsh bards came on the platform and
recited little epigrams. A Welsh bard is, if young, a pressman, and if
of maturer years, a divine. In this case, as England was at war, they
were all of the maturer kind, and, while I listened to the music of
their ditties--the sense thereof being, alas! beyond my reach--I was
struck by the fact that all of them, though different, closely resembled
Don Miguel de Unamuno. It is not my purpose to enter into the wasp-nest
of racial disquisitions. If there is a race in the world over which more
sense and more nonsense can be freely said for lack of definite
information than the Welsh, it is surely this ancient Basque people,
whose greatest contemporary figure is perhaps Don Miguel de Unamuno. I
am merely setting down that intuitional fact for what it may be worth,
though I do not hide my opinion that such promptings of the inner,
untutored man are worth more than cavefuls of bones and tombfuls of
undecipherable papers.
This reminiscence, moreover, which springs up into the light of my
memory every time I think of Don Miguel de Unamuno, has to my mind a
further value in that in it the image of Don Miguel does not appear as
evoked by one man, but by many, though many of one species, many who in
depth are but one man, one type, the Welsh divine. Now, this unity
underlying a multiplicity, these many faces, moods, and movements,
traceable to one only type, I find deeply connected in my mind with
Unamuno's person and with what he signifies in Spanish life and letters.
And when I further delve into my impression, I first realize an
undoubtedly physical relation between the many-one Welsh divines and the
many-one Unamuno. A tall, broad-shouldered, bony man, with high cheeks,
a beak-like nose, pointed grey beard, and a complexion the colour of the
red hematites on which Bilbao, his native town, is built, and which
Bilbao ruthlessly plucks from its very body to exchange for gold in the
markets of England--and in the deep sockets under the high aggressive
forehead prolonged by short iron-grey hair, two eyes like gimlets
eagerly watching the world through spectacles which seem to be purposely
pointed at the object like microscopes; a fighting expression, but of
noble fighting, above the prizes of the passing world, the contempt for
which is shown in a peculiar attire whose blackness invades even that
little triangle of white which worldly men leave on their breast for the
necktie of frivolity and the decorations of vanity, and, blinding it,
leaves but the thinnest rim of white collar to emphasize, rather than
relieve, the priestly effect of the whole. Such is Don Miguel de
Unamuno.
Such is, rather, his photograph. For Unamuno himself is ever changing. A
talker, as all good Spaniards are nowadays, but a talker in earnest and
with his heart in it, he is varied, like the subjects of his
conversation, and, still more, like the passions which they awake in
him. And here I find an unsought reason in intellectual support of that
intuitional observation which I noted down in starting--that Unamuno
resembles the Welsh in that he is not ashamed of showing his
passions--a thing which he has often to do, for he is very much alive
and feels therefore plenty of them. But a word of caution may here be
necessary, since that term, "passion," having been diminished--that is,
made meaner--by the world, an erroneous impression might be conveyed by
what precedes, of the life and ways of Unamuno. So that it may not be
superfluous to say that Don Miguel de Unamuno is a Professor of Greek in
the University of Salamanca, an ex-Rector of it who left behind the
reputation of being a strong ruler; a father of a numerous family, and a
man who has sung the quiet and deep joys of married life with a
restraint, a vigour, and a nobility which it would be difficult to match
in any literature. _Yet_ a passionate man--or, as he would perhaps
prefer to say, _therefore_ a passionate man. But in a major, not in a
minor key; of strong, not of weak passions.
The difference between the two lies perhaps in that the man with strong
passions lives them, while the man with weak passions is lived by them,
so that while weak passions paralyze the will, strong passions urge man
to action. It is such an urge towards life, such a vitality ever awake,
which inspires Unamuno's multifarious activities in the realm of the
mind. The duties of his chair of Greek are the first claim upon his
time. But then, his reading is prodigious, as any reader of this book
will realize for himself. Not only is he familiar with the
stock-in-trade of every intellectual worker--the Biblical, Greek, Roman,
and Italian cultures--but there is hardly anything worth reading in
Europe and America which he has not read, and, but for the Slav
languages, in the original. Though never out of Spain, and seldom out of
Salamanca, he has succeeded in establishing direct connections with most
of the intellectual leaders of the world, and in gathering an
astonishingly accurate knowledge of the spirit and literature of foreign
peoples. It was in his library at Salamanca that he once explained to
an Englishman the meaning of a particular Scotticism in Robert Burns;
and it was there that he congratulated another Englishman on his having
read _Rural Rides_, "the hall-mark," he said, "of the man of letters who
is no mere man of letters, but also a man." From that corner of Castile,
he has poured out his spirit in essays, poetry, criticism, novels,
philosophy, lectures, and public meetings, and that daily toil of press
article writing which is the duty rather than the privilege of most
present-day writers in Spain. Such are the many faces, moods, and
movements in which Unamuno appears before Spain and the world. And yet,
despite this multiplicity and this dispersion, the dominant impression
which his personality leaves behind is that of a vigorous unity, an
unswerving concentration both of mind and purpose. Bagaria, the national
caricaturist, a genius of rhythm and character which the war revealed,
but who was too good not to be overshadowed by the facile art of
Raemaekers (imagine Goya overshadowed by Reynolds!), once represented
Unamuno as an owl. A marvellous thrust at the heart of Unamuno's
character. For all this vitality and ever-moving activity of mind is
shot through by the absolute immobility of two owlish eyes piercing the
darkness of spiritual night. And this intense gaze into the mystery is
the steel axis round which his spirit revolves and revolves in
desperation; the unity under his multiplicity; the one fire under his
passions and the inspiration of his whole work and life.
* * * * *
It was Unamuno himself who once said that the Basque is the alkaloid of
the Spaniard. The saying is true, so far as it goes. But it would be
more accurate to say "one of the two alkaloids." It is probable that if
the Spanish character were analyzed--always provided that the
Mediterranean aspect of it be left aside as a thing apart--two main
principles would be recognized in it--_i.e._, the Basque, richer in
concentration, substance, strength; and the Andalusian, more given to
observation, grace, form. The two types are to this day socially
opposed. The Andalusian is a people which has lived down many
civilizations, and in which even illiterate peasants possess a kind of
innate education. The Basques are a primitive people of mountaineers and
fishermen, in which even scholars have a peasant-like roughness not
unlike the roughness of Scotch tweeds--or character. It is the even
balancing of these two elements--the force of the Northerner with the
grace of the Southerner--which gives the Castilian his admirable poise
and explains the graceful virility of men such as Fray Luis de León and
the feminine strength of women such as Queen Isabel and Santa Teresa. We
are therefore led to expect in so forcible a representative of the
Basque race as Unamuno the more substantial and earnest features of the
Spanish spirit.
Our expectation is not disappointed. And to begin with it appears in
that very concentration of his mind and soul on the mystery of man's
destiny on earth. Unamuno is in earnest, in dead earnest, as to this
matter. This earnestness is a distinct Spanish, nay, Basque feature in
him. There is something of the stern attitude of Loyola about his
"tragic sense of life," and on this subject--under one form or another,
his only subject--he admits no joke, no flippancy, no subterfuge. A true
heir of those great Spanish saints and mystics whose lifework was
devoted to the exploration of the kingdoms of faith, he is more human
than they in that he has lost hold of the firm ground where they had
stuck their anchor. Yet, though loose in the modern world, he refuses to
be drawn away from the main business of the Christian, the saving of his
soul, which, in his interpretation, means the conquest of his
immortality, his own immortality.
An individualist. Certainly. And he proudly claims the title. Nothing
more refreshing in these days of hoggish communistic cant than this
great voice asserting the divine, the eternal rights of the individual.
But it is not with political rights that he is concerned. Political
individualism, when not a mere blind for the unlimited freedom of civil
privateering, is but the outcome of that abstract idea of man which he
so energetically condemns as pedantic--that is, inhuman. His opposition
of the individual to society is not that of a puerile anarchist to a no
less puerile socialist. There is nothing childish about Unamuno. His
assertion that society is for the individual, not the individual for
society, is made on a transcendental plane. It is not the argument of
liberty against authority--which can be easily answered on the
rationalistic plane by showing that authority is in its turn the liberty
of the social or collective being, a higher, more complex, and
longer-living "individual" than the individual pure and simple. It is
rather the unanswerable argument of eternity against duration. Now that
argument must rest on a religious basis. And it is on a religious basis
that Unamuno founds his individualism. Hence the true Spanish flavour of
his social theory, which will not allow itself to be set down and
analyzed into principles of ethics and politics, with their inevitable
tendency to degenerate into mere economics, but remains free and fluid
and absolute, like the spirit.
Such an individualism has therefore none of the features of that
childish half-thinking which inspires most anarchists. It is, on the
contrary, based on high thinking, the highest of all, that which refuses
to dwell on anything less than man's origin and destination. We are here
confronted with that humanistic tendency of the Spanish mind which can
be observed as the dominant feature of her arts and literature. All
races are of course predominantly concerned with man. But they all
manifest their concern with a difference. Man is in Spain a concrete
being, the man of flesh and bones, and the whole man. He is neither
subtilized into an idea by pure thinking nor civilized into a gentleman
by social laws and prejudices. Spanish art and letters deal with
concrete, tangible persons. Now, there is no more concrete, no more
tangible person for every one of us than ourself. Unamuno is therefore
right in the line of Spanish tradition in dealing predominantly--one
might almost say always--with his own person. The feeling of the
awareness of one's own personality has seldom been more forcibly
expressed than by Unamuno. This is primarily due to the fact that he is
himself obsessed by it. But in his expression of it Unamuno derives also
some strength from his own sense of matter and the material--again a
typically Spanish element of his character. Thus his human beings are as
much body as soul, or rather body and soul all in one, a union which he
admirably renders by bold mixtures of physical and spiritual metaphors,
as in _gozarse uno la carne del alma_ (to enjoy the flesh of one's own
soul).
In fact, Unamuno, as a true Spaniard which he is, refuses to surrender
life to ideas, and that is why he runs shy of abstractions, in which he
sees but shrouds wherewith we cover dead thoughts. He is solely
concerned with his own life, nothing but his life, and the whole of his
life. An egotistical position? Perhaps. Unamuno, however, can and does
answer the charge. We can only know and feel humanity in the one human
being which we have at hand. It is by penetrating deep into ourselves
that we find our brothers in us--branches of the same trunk which can
only touch each other by seeking their common origin. This searching
within, Unamuno has undertaken with a sincerity, a fearlessness which
cannot be excelled. Nowhere will the reader find the inner
contradictions of a modern human being, who is at the same time healthy
and capable of thought set down with a greater respect for truth. Here
the uncompromising tendency of the Spanish race, whose eyes never turn
away from nature, however unwelcome the sight, is strengthened by that
passion for life which burns in Unamuno. The suppression of the
slightest thought or feeling for the sake of intellectual order would
appear to him as a despicable worldly trick. Thus it is precisely
because he does sincerely feel a passionate love of his own life that he
thinks out with such scrupulous accuracy every argument which he finds
in his mind--his own mind, a part of his life--against the possibility
of life after death; but it is also because he feels that, despite such
conclusive arguments, his will to live perseveres, that he refuses to
his intellect the power to kill his faith. A knight-errant of the
spirit, as he himself calls the Spanish mystics, he starts for his
adventures after having, like Hernán Cortés, burnt his ships. But, is it
necessary to enhance his figure by literary comparison? He is what he
wants to be, a man--in the striking expression which he chose as a title
for one of his short stories, _nothing less than a whole man_. Not a
mere thinking machine, set to prove a theory, nor an actor on the world
stage, singing a well-built poem, well built at the price of many a
compromise; but a whole man, with all his affirmations and all his
negations, all the pitiless thoughts of a penetrating mind that denies,
and all the desperate self-assertions of a soul that yearns for eternal
life.
This strife between enemy truths, the truth thought and the truth felt,
or, as he himself puts it, between veracity and sincerity, is Unamuno's
_raison d'être_. And it is because the "_Tragic Sense of Life_" is the
most direct expression of it that this book is his masterpiece. The
conflict is here seen as reflected in the person of the author. The book
opens by a definition of the Spanish man, the "man of flesh and bones,"
illustrated by the consideration of the real living men who stood behind
the bookish figures of great philosophers and consciously or
unconsciously shaped and misshaped their doctrines in order to satisfy
their own vital yearnings. This is followed by the statement of the will
to live or hunger for immortality, in the course of which the usual
subterfuges with which this all-important issue is evaded in philosophy,
theology, or mystic literature, are exposed and the real, concrete,
"flesh and bones" character of the immortality which men desire is
reaffirmed. The Catholic position is then explained as the _vital_
attitude in the matter, summed up in Tertullian's _Credo quia absurdum_,
and this is opposed to the critical attitude which denies the
possibility of individual survival in the sense previously defined. Thus
Unamuno leads us to his inner deadlock: his reason can rise no higher
than scepticism, and, unable to become vital, dies sterile; his faith,
exacting anti-rational affirmations and unable therefore to be
apprehended by the logical mind, remains incommunicable. From the bottom
of this abyss Unamuno builds up his theory of life. But is it a theory?
Unamuno does not claim for it such an intellectual dignity. He knows too
well that in the constructive part of his book his vital self takes the
leading part and repeatedly warns his reader of the fact, lest critical
objections might be raised against this or that assumption or
self-contradiction. It is on the survival of his will to live, after all
the onslaughts of his critical intellect, that he finds the basis for
his belief--or rather for his effort to believe. Self-compassion leads
to self-love, and this self-love, founded as it is on a universal
conflict, widens into love of all that lives and therefore wants to
survive. So, by an act of love, springing from our own hunger for
immortality, we are led to give a conscience to the Universe--that is,
to create God.
Such is the process by which Unamuno, from the transcendental pessimism
of his inner contradiction, extracts an everyday optimism founded on
love. His symbol of this attitude is the figure of Don Quixote, of whom
he truly says that his creed "can hardly be called idealism, since he
did not fight for ideas: it was spiritualism, for he fought for the
spirit." Thus he opposes a synthetical to an analytical attitude; a
religious to an ethico-scientific ideal; Spain, his Spain--_i.e._, the
spiritual manifestation of the Spanish race--to Europe, his
Europe--_i.e._, the intellectual manifestation of the white race, which
he sees in Franco-Germany; and heroic love, even when comically
unpractical, to culture, which, in this book, written in 1912, is
already prophetically spelt Kultura.
This courageous work is written in a style which is the man--for
Buffon's saying, seldom true, applies here to the letter. It is written
as Carlyle wrote, not merely with the brain, but with the whole soul and
the whole body of the man, and in such a vivid manner that one can
without much effort imagine the eager gesticulation which now and then
underlines, interprets, despises, argues, denies, and above all asserts.
In his absolute subservience to the matter in hand this manner of
writing has its great precedent in Santa Teresa. The differences, and
they are considerable, are not of art, absent in either case, but of
nature. They are such deep and obvious differences as obtain between the
devout, ignorant, graceful nun of sixteenth-century Avila and the
free-thinking, learned, wilful professor of twentieth-century Salamanca.
In the one case, as in the other, the language is the most direct and
simple required. It is also the least literary and the most popular.
Unamuno, who lives in close touch with the people, has enriched the
Spanish literary language by returning to it many a popular term. His
vocabulary abounds in racy words of the soil, and his writings gain from
them an almost peasant-like pith and directness which suits his own
Basque primitive nature. His expression occurs simultaneously with the
thoughts and feelings to be expressed, the flow of which, but loosely
controlled by the critical mind, often breaks through the meshes of
established diction and gives birth to new forms created under the
pressure of the moment. This feature Unamuno has also in common with
Santa Teresa, but what in the Saint was a self-ignorant charm becomes in
Unamuno a deliberate manner inspired, partly by an acute sense of the
symbolical and psychological value of word-connections, partly by that
genuine need for expansion of the language which all true original
thinkers or "feelers" must experience, but partly also by an acquired
habit of juggling with words which is but natural in a philologist
endowed with a vigorous imagination. Unamuno revels in words. He
positively enjoys stretching them beyond their usual meaning, twisting
them, composing, opposing, and transposing them in all sorts of possible
ways. This game--not wholly unrewarded now and then by striking
intellectual finds--seems to be the only relaxation which he allows his
usually austere mind. It certainly is the only light feature of a style
the merit of which lies in its being the close-fitting expression of a
great mind earnestly concentrated on a great idea.
* * * * *
The earnestness, the intensity, and the oneness of his predominant
passion are the main cause of the strength of Unamuno's philosophic
work. They remain his main asset, yet become also the principal cause of
his weakness, as a creative artist. Great art can only flourish in the
temperate zone of the passions, on the return journey from the torrid.
Unamuno, as a creator, has none of the failings of those artists who
have never felt deeply. But he does show the limitations of those
artists who cannot cool down. And the most striking of them is that at
bottom he is seldom able to put himself in a purely esthetical mood. In
this, as in many other features, Unamuno curiously resembles
Wordsworth--whom, by the way, he is one of the few Spaniards to read
and appreciate.[1] Like him, Unamuno is an essentially purposeful and
utilitarian mind. Of the two qualities which the work of art requires
for its inception--earnestness and detachment--both Unamuno and
Wordsworth possess the first; both are deficient in the second. Their
interest in their respective leading thought--survival in the first,
virtue in the second--is too direct, too pressing, to allow them the
"distance" necessary for artistic work. Both are urged to work by a
lofty utilitarianism--the search for God through the individual soul in
Unamuno, the search for God through the social soul in Wordsworth--so
that their thoughts and sensations are polarized and their spirit loses
that impartial transparence for nature's lights without which no great
art is possible. Once suggested, this parallel is too rich in sidelights
to be lightly dropped. This single-mindedness which distinguishes them
explains that both should have consciously or unconsciously chosen a
life of semi-seclusion, for Unamuno lives in Salamanca very much as
Wordsworth lived in the Lake District--
in a still retreat
Sheltered, but not to social duties lost,
hence in both a certain proclivity towards ploughing a solitary furrow
and becoming self-centred. There are no doubt important differences. The
Englishman's sense of nature is both keener and more concrete; while the
Spaniard's knowledge of human nature is not barred by the subtle
inhibitions and innate limitations which tend to blind its more
unpleasant aspects to the eye of the Englishman. There is more courage
and passion in the Spaniard; more harmony and goodwill in the
Englishman; the one is more like fire, the other like light. For
Wordsworth, a poem is above all an essay, a means for conveying a lesson
in forcible and easily remembered terms to those who are in need of
improvement. For Unamuno, a poem or a novel (and he holds that a novel
is but a poem) is the outpouring of a man's passion, the overflow of the
heart which cannot help itself and lets go. And it may be that the
essential difference between the two is to be found in this difference
between their respective purposes: Unamuno's purpose is more intimately
personal and individual; Wordsworth's is more social and objective. Thus
both miss the temperate zone, where emotion takes shape into the moulds
of art; but while Wordsworth is driven by his ideal of social service
this side of it, into the cold light of both moral and intellectual
self-control, Unamuno remains beyond, where the molten metal is too near
the fire of passion, and cannot cool down into shape.
Unamuno is therefore not unlike Wordsworth in the insufficiency of his
sense of form. We have just seen the essential cause of this
insufficiency to lie in the nonesthetical attitude of his mind, and we
have tried to show one of the roots of such an attitude in the very
loftiness and earnestness of his purpose. Yet, there are others, for
living nature is many-rooted as it is many-branched. It cannot be
doubted that a certain refractoriness to form is a typical feature of
the Basque character. The sense of form is closely in sympathy with the
feminine element in human nature, and the Basque race is strongly
masculine. The predominance of the masculine element--strength without
grace--is as typical of Unamuno as it is of Wordsworth. The literary
gifts which might for the sake of synthesis be symbolized in a smile are
absent in both. There is as little humour in the one as in the other.
Humour, however, sometimes occurs in Unamuno, but only in his
ill-humoured moments, and then with a curious bite of its own which adds
an unconscious element to its comic effect. Grace only visits them in
moments of inspiration, and then it is of a noble character, enhanced as
it is by the ever-present gift of strength. And as for the sense for
rhythm and music, both Unamuno and Wordsworth seem to be limited to the
most vigorous and masculine gaits. This feature is particularly
pronounced in Unamuno, for while Wordsworth is painstaking,
all-observant, and too good a "teacher" to underestimate the importance
of pleasure in man's progress, Unamuno knows no compromise. His aim is
not to please but to strike, and he deliberately seeks the naked, the
forceful, even the brutal word for truth. There is in him, however, a
cause of formlessness from which Wordsworth is free--namely, an
eagerness for sincerity and veracity which brushes aside all
preparation, ordering or planning of ideas as suspect of "dishing up,"
intellectual trickery, and juggling with spontaneous truths.
* * * * *
Such qualities--both the positive and the negative--are apparent in his
poetry. In it, the appeal of force and sincerity is usually stronger
than that of art. This is particularly the case in his first volume
(_Poesías_, 1907), in which a lofty inspiration, a noble attitude of
mind, a rich and racy vocabulary, a keen insight into the spirit of
places, and above all the overflowing vitality of a strong man in the
force of ripeness, contend against the still awkward gait of the Basque
and a certain rebelliousness of rhyme. The dough of the poetic language
is here seen heavily pounded by a powerful hand, bent on reducing its
angularities and on improving its plasticity. Nor do we need to wait for
further works in order to enjoy the reward of such efforts, for it is
attained in this very volume more than once, as for instance in _Muere
en el mar el ave que voló del nido_, a beautiful poem in which emotion
and thought are happily blended into exquisite form.
In his last poem, _El Cristo de Velázquez_ (1920), Unamuno undertakes
the task of giving a poetical rendering of his tragic sense of life, in
the form of a meditation on the Christ of Velázquez, the beautiful and
pathetic picture in the Prado. Why Velázquez's and not Christ himself?
The fact is that, though in his references to actual forms, Unamuno
closely follows Velázquez's picture, the spiritual interpretation of it
which he develops as the poem unfolds itself is wholly personal. It
would be difficult to find two great Spaniards wider apart than Unamuno
and Velázquez, for if Unamuno is the very incarnation of the masculine
spirit of the North--all strength and substance--Velázquez is the image
of the feminine spirit of the South--all grace and form. Velázquez is a
limpid mirror, with a human depth, yet a mirror. That Unamuno has
departed from the image of Christ which the great Sevillian reflected on
his immortal canvas was therefore to be expected. But then Unamuno has,
while speaking of Don Quixote, whom he has also freely and personally
interpreted,[2] taken great care to point out that a work of art is, for
each of us, all that we see in it. And, moreover, Unamuno has not so
much departed from Velázquez's image of Christ as delved into its
depths, expanded, enlarged it, or, if you prefer, seen in its limpid
surface the immense figure of his own inner Christ. However free and
unorthodox in its wide scope of images and ideas, the poem is in its
form a regular meditation in the manner approved by the Catholic Church,
and it is therefore meet that it should rise from a concrete, tangible
object as it is recommended to the faithful. To this concrete character
of its origin, the poem owes much of its suggestiveness, as witness the
following passage quoted here, with a translation sadly unworthy of the
original, as being the clearest link between the poetical meditation
and the main thought that underlies all the work and the life of
Unamuno.
NUBE NEGRA
O es que una nube negra de los cielos
ese negror le dió a tu cabellera
de nazareno, cual de mustio sauce
de una noche sin luna sobre el río?
¿Es la sombra del ala sin perfiles
del ángel de la nada negadora,
de Luzbel, que en su caída inacabable
--fondo no puede dar--su eterna cuita
clava en tu frente, en tu razón? ¿Se vela,
el claro Verbo en Ti con esa nube,
negra cual de Luzbel las negras alas,
mientras brilla el Amor, todo desnudo,
con tu desnudo pecho por cendal?
BLACK CLOUD
Or was it then that a black cloud from heaven
Such blackness gave to your Nazarene's hair,
As of a languid willow o'er the river
Brooding in moonless night? Is it the shadow
Of the profileless wing of Luzbel, the Angel
Of denying nothingness, endlessly falling--
Bottom he ne'er can touch--whose grief eternal
He nails on to Thy forehead, to Thy reason?
Is the clear Word in Thee with that cloud veiled
--A cloud as black as the black wings of Luzbel--
While Love shines naked within Thy naked breast?
The poem, despite its length, easily maintains this lofty level
throughout, and if he had written nothing else Unamuno would still
remain as having given to Spanish letters the noblest and most sustained
lyrical flight in the language. It abounds in passages of ample beauty
and often strikes a note of primitive strength in the true Old Testament
style. It is most distinctively a poem in a major key, in a group with
_Paradise Lost_ and _The Excursion_, but in a tone halfway between the
two; and, as coming from the most Northern-minded and substantial poet
that Spain ever had, wholly free from that tendency towards
grandiloquence and Ciceronian drapery which blighted previous similar
efforts in Spain. Its weakness lies in a certain monotony due to the
interplay of Unamuno's two main limitations as an artist: the absolute
surrender to one dominant thought and a certain deficiency of form
bordering here on contempt. The plan is but a loose sequence of
meditations on successive aspects of Christ as suggested by images or
advocations of His divine person, or even of parts of His human body:
Lion, Bull, Lily, Sword, Crown, Head, Knees. Each meditation is treated
in a period of blank verse, usually of a beautiful texture, the
splendour of which is due less to actual images than to the inner vigour
of ideas and the eagerness with which even the simplest facts are
interpreted into significant symbols. Yet, sometimes, this blank verse
becomes hard and stony under the stubborn hammering of a too insistent
mind, and the device of ending each meditation with a line accented on
its last syllable tends but to increase the monotony of the whole.
Blank verse is never the best medium for poets of a strong masculine
inspiration, for it does not sufficiently correct their usual deficiency
in form. Such poets are usually at their best when they bind themselves
to the discipline of existing forms and particularly when they limit the
movements of their muse to the "sonnet's scanty plot of ground."
Unamuno's best poetry, as Wordsworth's, is in his sonnets. His _Rosario
de Sonetos Líricos_, published in 1911, contains some of the finest
sonnets in the Spanish language. There is variety in this volume--more
at least than is usual in Unamuno: from comments on events of local
politics (sonnet lii.) which savour of the more prosaic side of
Wordsworth, to meditations on space and time such as that sonnet
xxxvii., so reminiscent of Shelley's _Ozymandias of Egypt_; from a
suggestive homily to a "Don Juan of Ideas" whose thirst for knowledge is
"not love of truth, but intellectual lust," and whose "thought is
therefore sterile" (sonnet cvii.), to an exquisitely rendered moonlight
love scene (sonnet civ.). The author's main theme itself, which of
course occupies a prominent part in the series, appears treated under
many different lights and in genuinely poetical moods which truly do
justice to the inherent wealth of poetical inspiration which it
contains. Many a sonnet might be quoted here, and in particular that
sombre and fateful poem _Nihil Novum sub Sole_ (cxxiii.), which defeats
its own theme by the striking originality of its inspiration.
So active, so positive is the inspiration of this poetry that the
question of outside influences does not even arise. Unamuno is probably
the Spanish contemporary poet whose manner owes least, if anything at
all, to modern developments of poetry such as those which take their
source in Baudelaire and Verlaine. These over-sensitive and over-refined
artists have no doubt enriched the sensuous, the formal, the
sentimental, even the intellectual aspects of verse with an admirable
variety of exquisite shades, lacking which most poetry seems
old-fashioned to the fastidious palate of modern men. Unamuno is too
genuine a representative of the spiritual and masculine variety of
Spanish genius, ever impervious to French, and generally, to
intellectual, influences, to be affected by the esthetic excellence of
this art. Yet, for all his disregard of the modern resources which it
adds to the poetic craft, Unamuno loses none of his modernity. He is
indeed more than modern. When, as he often does, he strikes the true
poetic note, he is outside time. His appeal is not in complexity but in
strength. He is not refined: he is final.
* * * * *
In the Preface to his _Tres Novelas Ejemplares y un Prólogo_ (1921)
Unamuno says: " ... novelist--that is, poet ... a novel--that is, a
poem." Thus, with characteristic decision, he sides with the lyrical
conception of the novel. There is of course an infinite variety of
types of novels. But they can probably all be reduced to two
classes--_i.e._, the dramatic or objective, and the lyrical or
subjective, according to the mood or inspiration which predominates in
them. The present trend of the world points towards the dramatic or
objective type. This type is more in tune with the detached and
scientific character of the age. The novel is often nowadays considered
as a document, a "slice of life," a piece of information, a literary
photograph representing places and people which purse or time prevents
us from seeing with our own eyes. It is obvious, given what we now know
of him, that such a view of the novel cannot appeal to Unamuno. He is a
utilitarian, but not of worldly utilities. His utilitarianism transcends
our daily wants and seeks to provide for our eternal ones. He is,
moreover, a mind whose workings turn in spiral form towards a central
idea and therefore feels an instinctive antagonism to the dispersive
habits of thought and sensation which such detailed observation of life
usually entails. For at bottom the opposition between the lyrical and
the dramatic novel may be reduced to that between the poet and the
dramatist. Both the dramatist and the poet create in order to link up
their soul and the world in one complete circle of experience, but this
circle is travelled in opposite directions. The poet goes inwards first,
then out to nature full of his inner experience, and back home. The
dramatist goes outwards first, then comes back to himself, his harvest
of wisdom gathered in reality. It is the recognition of his own lyrical
inward-looking nature which makes Unamuno pronounce the identity of the
novel and the poem.
Whatever we may think of it as a general theory, there is little doubt
that this opinion is in the main sound in so far as it refers to
Unamuno's own work. His novels are created within. They are--and their
author is the first to declare it so--novels which happen in the
kingdom of the spirit. Outward points of reference in time and space
are sparingly given--in fact, reduced to a bare minimum. In some of
them, as for instance _Niebla_ (1914), the name of the town in which the
action takes place is not given, and such scanty references to the
topography and general features as are supplied would equally apply to
any other provincial town of Spain. Action, in the current sense of the
word, is correspondingly simplified, since the material and local
elements on which it usually exerts itself are schematized, and in their
turn made, as it were, spiritual. Thus a street, a river of colour for
some, for others a series of accurately described shops and dwellings,
becomes in Unamuno (see _Niebla_) a loom where the passions and desires
of men and women cross and recross each other and weave the cloth of
daily life. Even the physical description of characters is reduced to a
standard of utmost simplicity. So that, in fine, Unamuno's novels, by
eliminating all other material, appear, if the boldness of the metaphor
be permitted, as the spiritual skeletons of novels, conflicts between
souls.
Nor is this the last stage in his deepening and narrowing of the
creative furrow. For these souls are in their turn concentrated so that
the whole of their vitality burns into one passion. If a somewhat
fanciful comparison from another art may throw any light on this feature
of his work we might say that his characters are to those of Galdós, for
instance, as counterpoint music to the complex modern symphony. Joaquín
Monegro, the true hero of his _Abel Sánchez_ (1917), is the
personification of hatred. Raquel in _Dos Madres_[1] and Catalina in _El
Marqués de Lumbría_[1] are two widely different but vigorous, almost
barbarous, "maternities." Alejandro, the hero of his powerful _Nada
Menos que Todo un Hombre_,[3] is masculine will, pure and unconquerable,
save by death. Further still, in most if not all of his main
characters, we can trace the dominant passion which is their whole being
to a mere variety of the one and only passion which obsesses Unamuno
himself, the hunger for life, a full life, here and after. Here is, for
instance, _Abel Sánchez_, a sombre study of hatred, a modern paraphrase
of the story of Cain. Joaquín Monegro, the Cain of the novel, has been
reading Byron's poem, and writes in his diary: "It was when I read how
Lucifer declared to Cain that he, Cain, was immortal, that I began in
terror to wonder whether I also was immortal and whether in me would be
also immortal my hatred. 'Have I a soul?' I said to myself then. 'Is
this my hatred soul?' And I came to think that it could not be
otherwise, that such a hatred cannot be the function of a body.... A
corruptible organism could not hate as I hated."
Thus Joaquín Monegro, like every other main character in his work,
appears preoccupied by the same central preoccupation of Unamuno. In one
word, all Unamuno's characters are but incarnations of himself. But that
is what we expected to find in a lyrical novelist.
There are critics who conclude from this observation that these
characters do not exist, that they are mere arguments on legs,
personified ideas. Here and there, in Unamuno's novels, there are
passages which lend some colour of plausibility to this view. Yet, it is
in my opinion mistaken. Unamuno's characters may be schematized,
stripped of their complexities, reduced to the mainspring of their
nature; they may, moreover, reveal mainsprings made of the same steel.
But that they are alive no one could deny who has a sense for life. The
very restraint in the use of physical details which Unamuno has made a
feature of his creative work may have led his critics to forget the
intensity of those--admirably chosen--which are given. It is significant
that the eyes play an important part in his description of characters
and in his narrative too. His sense of the interpenetration of body and
soul is so deep that he does not for one moment let us forget how bodily
his "souls" are, and how pregnant with spiritual significance is every
one of their words and gestures. No. These characters are not arguments
on legs. They truly are men and women of "flesh and bones," human,
terribly human.
In thus emphasizing a particular feature in their nature, Unamuno
imparts to his creations a certain deformity which savours of romantic
days. Yet Unamuno is not a romanticist, mainly because Romanticism was
an esthetic attitude, and his attitude is seldom purely esthetic. For
all their show of passion, true Romanticists seldom gave their real
selves to their art. They created a stage double of their own selves for
public exhibitions. They sought the picturesque. Their form was lyrical,
but their substance was dramatic. Unamuno, on the contrary, even though
he often seeks expression in dramatic form, is essentially lyrical. And
if he is always intense, he never is exuberant. He follows the Spanish
tradition for restraint--for there is one, along its opposite tradition
for grandiloquence--and, true to the spirit of it, he seeks the maximum
of effect through the minimum of means. Then, he never shouts. Here is
an example of his quiet method, the rhythmical beauty of which is
unfortunately almost untranslatable:
"Y así pasaron días de llanto y de negrura hasta que las lágrimas fueron
yéndose hacia adentro y la casa fué derritiendo los negrores" (_Niebla_)
(And thus, days of weeping and mourning went by, till the tears began to
flow inward and the blackness to melt in the home).
* * * * *
Miguel de Unamuno is to-day the greatest literary figure of Spain.
Baroja may surpass him in variety of external experience, Azorín in
delicate art, Ortega y Gasset in philosophical subtlety, Ayala in
intellectual elegance, Valle Inclán in rhythmical grace. Even in
vitality he may have to yield the first place to that over-whelming
athlete of literature, Blasco Ibáñez. But Unamuno is head and shoulders
above them all in the highness of his purpose and in the earnestness and
loyalty with which, Quixote-like, he has served all through his life his
unattainable Dulcinea. Then there is another and most important reason
which explains his position as first, _princeps_, of Spanish letters,
and it is that Unamuno, by the cross which he has chosen to bear,
incarnates the spirit of modern Spain. His eternal conflict between
faith and reason, between life and thought, between spirit and
intellect, between heaven and civilization, is the conflict of Spain
herself. A border country, like Russia, in which East and West mix their
spiritual waters, Spain wavers between two life-philosophies and cannot
rest. In Russia, this conflict emerges in literature during the
nineteenth century, when Dostoievsky and Tolstoy stand for the East
while Turgeniev becomes the West's advocate. In Spain, a country less
articulate, and, moreover, a country in which the blending of East and
West is more intimate, for both found a common solvent in centuries of
Latin civilization, the conflict is less clear, less on the surface.
To-day Ortega y Gasset is our Turgeniev--not without mixture. Unamuno is
our Dostoievsky, but painfully aware of the strength of the other side
within him, and full of misgivings. Nor is it sure that when we speak of
East in this connection we really mean East. There is a third country in
Europe in which the "Eastern" view is as forcibly put and as deeply
understood as the "Western," a third border country--England. England,
particularly in those of her racial elements conventionally named
Celtic, is closely in sympathy with the "East." Ireland is almost purely
"Eastern" in this respect. That is perhaps why Unamuno feels so strong
an attraction for the English language and its literature, and why, even
to this day, he follows so closely the movements of English thought.[4]
For his own nature, of a human being astride two enemy ideals, draws him
instinctively towards minds equally placed in opposition, yet a
co-operating opposition, to progress. Thus Unamuno, whose literary
qualities and defects make him a genuine representative of the more
masculine variety of the Spanish genius, becomes in his spiritual life
the true living symbol of his country and his time. And that he is great
enough to bear this incarnation is a sufficient measure of his
greatness.
S. DE MADARIAGA.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In what follows, I confess to refer not so much to the generally
admitted opinion on Wordsworth as to my own views on him and his poetry,
which I tried to explain in my essay: "The Case of Wordsworth" (_Shelley
and Calderón, and other Essays_, Constable and Co., 1920).
[2] _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, explicada y comentada_, por M. de
Unamuno: Madrid, Fernando Fé, 1905.
[3] These three novels appeared together as _Tres Novelas y un Prólogo_
Calpe, Madrid, 1921.
[4] "Me va interesando ese Dean Inge," he wrote to me last year.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
I intended at first to write a short Prologue to this English
translation of my _Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida_, which has been
undertaken by my friend Mr. J.E. Crawford Flitch. But upon further
consideration I have abandoned the idea, for I reflected that after all
I wrote this book not for Spaniards only, but for all civilized and
Christian men--Christian in particular, whether consciously so or
not--of whatever country they may be.
Furthermore, if I were to set about writing an Introduction in the light
of all that we see and feel now, after the Great War, and, still more,
of what we foresee and forefeel, I should be led into writing yet
another book. And that is a thing to be done with deliberation and only
after having better digested this terrible peace, which is nothing else
but the war's painful convalescence.
As for many years my spirit has been nourished upon the very core of
English literature--evidence of which the reader may discover in the
following pages--the translator, in putting my _Sentimiento Trágico_
into English, has merely converted not a few of the thoughts and
feelings therein expressed back into their original form of expression.
Or retranslated them, perhaps. Whereby they emerge other than they
originally were, for an idea does not pass from one language to another
without change.
The fact that this English translation has been carefully revised here,
in my house in this ancient city of Salamanca, by the translator and
myself, implies not merely some guarantee of exactitude, but also
something more--namely, a correction, in certain respects, of the
original.
The truth is that, being an incorrigible Spaniard, I am naturally given
to a kind of extemporization and to neglectfulness of a filed niceness
in my works. For this reason my original work--and likewise the Italian
and French translations of it--issued from the press with a certain
number of errors, obscurities, and faulty references. The labour which
my friend Mr. J.E. Crawford Flitch fortunately imposed upon me in making
me revise his translation obliged me to correct these errors, to clarify
some obscurities, and to give greater exactitude to certain quotations
from foreign writers. Hence this English translation of my _Sentimiento
Trágico_ presents in some ways a more purged and correct text than that
of the original Spanish. This perhaps compensates for what it may lose
in the spontaneity of my Spanish thought, which at times, I believe, is
scarcely translatable.
It would advantage me greatly if this translation, in opening up to me a
public of English-speaking readers, should some day lead to my writing
something addressed to and concerned with this public. For just as a new
friend enriches our spirit, not so much by what he gives us of himself,
as by what he causes us to discover in our own selves, something which,
if we had never known him, would have lain in us undeveloped, so it is
with a new public. Perhaps there may be regions in my own Spanish
spirit--my Basque spirit, and therefore doubly Spanish--unexplored by
myself, some corner hitherto uncultivated, which I should have to
cultivate in order to offer the flowers and fruits of it to the peoples
of English speech.
And now, no more.
God give my English readers that inextinguishable thirst for truth which
I desire for myself.
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO.
SALAMANCA,
_April, 1921._
* * * * *
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
Footnotes added by the Translator, other than those which merely
supplement references to writers or their works mentioned in the text,
are distinguished by his initials.
I
THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE
_Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto_, said the Latin playwright.
And I would rather say, _Nullum hominem a me alienum puto_: I am a man;
no other man do I deem a stranger. For to me the adjective _humanus_ is
no less suspect than its abstract substantive _humanitas_, humanity.
Neither "the human" nor "humanity," neither the simple adjective nor the
substantivized adjective, but the concrete substantive--man. The man of
flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies--above all, who
dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and
wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.
For there is another thing which is also called man, and he is the
subject of not a few lucubrations, more or less scientific. He is the
legendary featherless biped, the _zôon politikhon_ of Aristotle,
the social contractor of Rousseau, the _homo economicus_ of the
Manchester school, the _homo sapiens_ of Linnæus, or, if you like, the
vertical mammal. A man neither of here nor there, neither of this age
nor of another, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in brief,
merely an idea. That is to say, a no-man.
The man we have to do with is the man of flesh and bone--I, you, reader
of mine, the other man yonder, all of us who walk solidly on the earth.
And this concrete man, this man of flesh and bone, is at once the
subject and the supreme object of all philosophy, whether certain
self-styled philosophers like it or not.
In most of the histories of philosophy that I know, philosophic systems
are presented to us as if growing out of one another spontaneously, and
their authors, the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts. The inner
biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a
secondary place. And yet it is precisely this inner biography that
explains for us most things.
It behoves us to say, before all, that philosophy lies closer to poetry
than to science. All philosophic systems which have been constructed as
a supreme concord of the final results of the individual sciences have
in every age possessed much less consistency and life than those which
expressed the integral spiritual yearning of their authors.
And, though they concern us so greatly, and are, indeed, indispensable
for our life and thought, the sciences are in a certain sense more
foreign to us than philosophy. They fulfil a more objective end--that is
to say, an end more external to ourselves. They are fundamentally a
matter of economics. A new scientific discovery, of the kind called
theoretical, is, like a mechanical discovery--that of the steam-engine,
the telephone, the phonograph, or the aeroplane--a thing which is useful
for something else. Thus the telephone may be useful to us in enabling
us to communicate at a distance with the woman we love. But she,
wherefore is she useful to us? A man takes an electric tram to go to
hear an opera, and asks himself, Which, in this case, is the more
useful, the tram or the opera?
Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete and unitary
conception of the world and of life, and as a result of this conception,
a feeling which gives birth to an inward attitude and even to outward
action. But the fact is that this feeling, instead of being a
consequence of this conception, is the cause of it. Our
philosophy--that is, our mode of understanding or not understanding the
world and life--springs from our feeling towards life itself. And life,
like everything affective, has roots in subconsciousness, perhaps in
unconsciousness.
It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it
is our optimism or our pessimism, of physiological or perhaps
pathological origin, as much the one as the other, that makes our ideas.
Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been
defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which
differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason.
More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps
or laughs inwardly--but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves
equations of the second degree.
And thus, in a philosopher, what must needs most concern us is the man.
Take Kant, the man Immanuel Kant, who was born and lived at Königsberg,
in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the
nineteenth. In the philosophy of this man Kant, a man of heart and
head--that is to say, a man--there is a significant somersault, as
Kierkegaard, another man--and what a man!--would have said, the
somersault from the _Critique of Pure Reason_ to the _Critique of
Practical Reason_. He reconstructs in the latter what he destroyed in
the former, in spite of what those may say who do not see the man
himself. After having examined and pulverized with his analysis the
traditional proofs of the existence of God, of the Aristotelian God, who
is the God corresponding to the _zôon politikon_, the abstract
God, the unmoved prime Mover, he reconstructs God anew; but the God of
the conscience, the Author of the moral order--the Lutheran God, in
short. This transition of Kant exists already in embryo in the Lutheran
notion of faith.
The first God, the rational God, is the projection to the outward
infinite of man as he is by definition--that is to say, of the abstract
man, of the man no-man; the other God, the God of feeling and volition,
is the projection to the inward infinite of man as he is by life, of the
concrete man, the man of flesh and bone.
Kant reconstructed with the heart that which with the head he had
overthrown. And we know, from the testimony of those who knew him and
from his testimony in his letters and private declarations, that the man
Kant, the more or less selfish old bachelor who professed philosophy at
Königsberg at the end of the century of the Encyclopedia and the goddess
of Reason, was a man much preoccupied with the problem--I mean with the
only real vital problem, the problem that strikes at the very root of
our being, the problem of our individual and personal destiny, of the
immortality of the soul. The man Kant was not resigned to die utterly.
And because he was not resigned to die utterly he made that leap, that
immortal somersault,[5] from the one Critique to the other.
Whosoever reads the _Critique of Practical Reason_ carefully and without
blinkers will see that, in strict fact, the existence of God is therein
deduced from the immortality of the soul, and not the immortality of the
soul from the existence of God. The categorical imperative leads us to a
moral postulate which necessitates in its turn, in the teleological or
rather eschatological order, the immortality of the soul, and in order
to sustain this immortality God is introduced. All the rest is the
jugglery of the professional of philosophy.
The man Kant felt that morality was the basis of eschatology, but the
professor of philosophy inverted the terms.
Another professor, the professor and man William James, has somewhere
said that for the generality of men God is the provider of immortality.
Yes, for the generality of men, including the man Kant, the man James,
and the man who writes these lines which you, reader, are reading.
Talking to a peasant one day, I proposed to him the hypothesis that
there might indeed be a God who governs heaven and earth, a
Consciousness[6] of the Universe, but that for all that the soul of
every man may not be immortal in the traditional and concrete sense. He
replied: "Then wherefore God?" So answered, in the secret tribunal of
their consciousness, the man Kant and the man James. Only in their
capacity as professors they were compelled to justify rationally an
attitude in itself so little rational. Which does not mean, of course,
that the attitude is absurd.
Hegel made famous his aphorism that all the rational is real and all the
real rational; but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel,
continue to believe that the real, the really real, is irrational, that
reason builds upon irrationalities. Hegel, a great framer of
definitions, attempted with definitions to reconstruct the universe,
like that artillery sergeant who said that cannon were made by taking a
hole and enclosing it with steel.
Another man, the man Joseph Butler, the Anglican bishop who lived at the
beginning of the eighteenth century and whom Cardinal Newman declared to
be the greatest man in the Anglican Church, wrote, at the conclusion of
the first chapter of his great work, _The Analogy of Religion_, the
chapter which treats of a future life, these pregnant words: "This
credibility of a future life, which has been here insisted upon, how
little soever it may satisfy our curiosity, seems to answer all the
purposes of religion, in like manner as a demonstrative proof would.
Indeed a proof, even a demonstrative one, of a future life, would not be
a proof of religion. For, that we are to live hereafter, is just as
reconcilable with the scheme of atheism, and as well to be accounted for
by it, as that we are now alive is: and therefore nothing can be more
absurd than to argue from that scheme that there can be no future
state."
The man Butler, whose works were perhaps known to the man Kant, wished
to save the belief in the immortality of the soul, and with this object
he made it independent of belief in God. The first chapter of his
_Analogy_ treats, as I have said, of the future life, and the second of
the government of God by rewards and punishments. And the fact is that,
fundamentally, the good Anglican bishop deduces the existence of God
from the immortality of the soul. And as this deduction was the good
Anglican bishop's starting-point, he had not to make that somersault
which at the close of the same century the good Lutheran philosopher had
to make. Butler, the bishop, was one man and Kant, the professor,
another man.
To be a man is to be something concrete, unitary, and substantive; it is
to be a thing--_res_. Now we know what another man, the man Benedict
Spinoza, that Portuguese Jew who was born and lived in Holland in the
middle of the seventeenth century, wrote about the nature of things. The
sixth proposition of Part III. of his _Ethic_ states: _unaquoeque res,
quatenus in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur_--that is,
Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its
own being. Everything in so far as it is in itself--that is to say, in
so far as it is substance, for according to him substance is _id quod in
se est et per se concipitur_--that which is in itself and is conceived
by itself. And in the following proposition, the seventh, of the same
part, he adds: _conatus, quo unaquoeque res in suo esse perseverare
conatur, nihil est proeter ipsius rei actualem essentiam_--that is, the
endeavour wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being is
nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself. This means that your
essence, reader, mine, that of the man Spinoza, that of the man Butler,
of the man Kant, and of every man who is a man, is nothing but the
endeavour, the effort, which he makes to continue to be a man, not to
die. And the other proposition which follows these two, the eighth,
says: _conatus, quo unaquoeque res in suo esse perseverare conatur,
nullum tempus finitum, sed indefinitum involvit_--that is, The endeavour
whereby each individual thing endeavours to persist involves no finite
time but indefinite time. That is to say that you, I, and Spinoza wish
never to die and that this longing of ours never to die is our actual
essence. Nevertheless, this poor Portuguese Jew, exiled in the mists of
Holland, could never attain to believing in his own personal
immortality, and all his philosophy was but a consolation which he
contrived for his lack of faith. Just as other men have a pain in hand
or foot, heart-ache or head-ache, so he had God-ache. Unhappy man! And
unhappy fellow-men!
And man, this thing, is he a thing? How absurd soever the question may
appear, there are some who have propounded it. Not long ago there went
abroad a certain doctrine called Positivism, which did much good and
much ill. And among other ills that it wrought was the introduction of a
method of analysis whereby facts were pulverized, reduced to a dust of
facts. Most of the facts labelled as such by Positivism were really only
fragments of facts. In psychology its action was harmful. There were
even scholastics meddling in literature--I will not say philosophers
meddling in poetry, because poet and philosopher are twin brothers, if
not even one and the same--who carried this Positivist psychological
analysis into the novel and the drama, where the main business is to
give act and motion to concrete men, men of flesh and bone, and by dint
of studying states of consciousness, consciousness itself disappeared.
The same thing happened to them which is said often to happen in the
examination and testing of certain complicated, organic, living chemical
compounds, when the reagents destroy the very body which it was proposed
to examine and all that is obtained is the products of its
decomposition.
Taking as their starting-point the evident fact that contradictory
states pass through our consciousness, they did not succeed in
envisaging consciousness itself, the "I." To ask a man about his "I" is
like asking him about his body. And note that in speaking of the "I," I
speak of the concrete and personal "I," not of the "I" of Fichte, but of
Fichte himself, the man Fichte.
That which determines a man, that which makes him one man, one and not
another, the man he is and not the man he is not, is a principle of
unity and a principle of continuity. A principle of unity firstly in
space, thanks to the body, and next in action and intention. When we
walk, one foot does not go forward and the other backward, nor, when we
look, if we are normal, does one eye look towards the north and the
other towards the south. In each moment of our life we entertain some
purpose, and to this purpose the synergy of our actions is directed.
Notwithstanding the next moment we may change our purpose. And in a
certain sense a man is so much the more a man the more unitary his
action. Some there are who throughout their whole life follow but one
single purpose, be it what it may.
Also a principle of continuity in time. Without entering upon a
discussion--an unprofitable discussion--as to whether I am or am not he
who I was twenty years ago, it appears to me to be indisputable that he
who I am to-day derives, by a continuous series of states of
consciousness, from him who was in my body twenty years ago. Memory is
the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of
the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by
memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our
memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past
to transform itself into our future.
All this, I know well, is sheer platitude; but in going about in the
world one meets men who seem to have no feeling of their own
personality. One of my best friends with whom I have walked and talked
every day for many years, whenever I spoke to him of this sense of one's
own personality, used to say: "But I have no sense of myself; I don't
know what that is."
On a certain occasion this friend remarked to me: "I should like to be
So-and-so" (naming someone), and I said: "That is what I shall never be
able to understand--that one should want to be someone else. (To want to
be someone else is to want to cease to be he who one is.) I understand
that one should wish to have what someone else has, his wealth or his
knowledge; but to be someone else, that is a thing I cannot comprehend."
It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes
prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be
someone else without them. For unfortunate men, when they preserve their
normality in their misfortune--that is to say, when they endeavour to
persist in their own being--prefer misfortune to non-existence. For
myself I can say that as a youth, and even as a child, I remained
unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then
nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a
furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as
one of our ascetics has put it.[7]
To propose to a man that he should be someone else, that he should
become someone else, is to propose to him that he should cease to be
himself. Everyone defends his own personality, and only consents to a
change in his mode of thinking or of feeling in so far as this change is
able to enter into the unity of his spirit and become involved in its
continuity; in so far as this change can harmonize and integrate itself
with all the rest of his mode of being, thinking and feeling, and can at
the same time knit itself with his memories. Neither of a man nor of a
people--which is, in a certain sense, also a man--can a change be
demanded which breaks the unity and continuity of the person. A man can
change greatly, almost completely even, but the change must take place
within his continuity.
It is true that in certain individuals there occur what are called
changes of personality; but these are pathological cases, and as such
are studied by alienists. In these changes of personality, memory, the
basis of consciousness, is completely destroyed, and all that is left to
the sufferer as the substratum of his individual continuity, which has
now ceased to be personal, is the physical organism. For the subject who
suffers it, such an infirmity is equivalent to death--it is not
equivalent to death only for those who expect to inherit his fortune, if
he possesses one! And this infirmity is nothing less than a revolution,
a veritable revolution.
A disease is, in a certain sense, an organic dissociation; it is a
rebellion of some element or organ of the living body which breaks the
vital synergy and seeks an end distinct from that which the other
elements co-ordinated with it seek. Its end, considered in itself--that
is to say, in the abstract--may be more elevated, more noble, more
anything you like; but it is different. To fly and breathe in the air
may be better than to swim and breathe in the water; but if the fins of
a fish aimed at converting themselves into wings, the fish, as a fish,
would perish. And it is useless to say that it would end by becoming a
bird, if in this becoming there was not a process of continuity. I do
not precisely know, but perhaps it may be possible for a fish to
engender a bird, or another fish more akin to a bird than itself; but a
fish, this fish, cannot itself and during its own lifetime become a
bird.
Everything in me that conspires to break the unity and continuity of my
life conspires to destroy me and consequently to destroy itself. Every
individual in a people who conspires to break the spiritual unity and
continuity of that people tends to destroy it and to destroy himself as
a part of that people. What if some other people is better than our own?
Very possibly, although perhaps we do not clearly understand what is
meant by better or worse. Richer? Granted. More cultured? Granted
likewise. Happier? Well, happiness ... but still, let it pass! A
conquering people (or what is called conquering) while we are conquered?
Well and good. All this is good--but it is something different. And that
is enough. Because for me the becoming other than I am, the breaking of
the unity and continuity of my life, is to cease to be he who I am--that
is to say, it is simply to cease to be. And that--no! Anything rather
than that!
Another, you say, might play the part that I play as well or better?
Another might fulfil my function in society? Yes, but it would not be I.
"I, I, I, always I!" some reader will exclaim; "and who are you?" I
might reply in the words of Obermann, that tremendous man Obermann: "For
the universe, nothing--for myself, everything"; but no, I would rather
remind him of a doctrine of the man Kant--to wit, that we ought to think
of our fellow-men not as means but as ends. For the question does not
touch me alone, it touches you also, grumbling reader, it touches each
and all. Singular judgments have the value of universal judgments, the
logicians say. The singular is not particular, it is universal.
Man is an end, not a means. All civilization addresses itself to man, to
each man, to each I. What is that idol, call it Humanity or call it what
you like, to which all men and each individual man must be sacrificed?
For I sacrifice myself for my neighbours, for my fellow-countrymen, for
my children, and these sacrifice themselves in their turn for theirs,
and theirs again for those that come after them, and so on in a
never-ending series of generations. And who receives the fruit of this
sacrifice?
Those who talk to us about this fantastic sacrifice, this dedication
without an object, are wont to talk to us also about the right to live.
What is this right to live? They tell me I am here to realize I know not
what social end; but I feel that I, like each one of my fellows, am here
to realize myself, to live.
Yes, yes, I see it all!--an enormous social activity, a mighty
civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of
morality, and afterwards, when we have filled the world with industrial
marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums, and libraries, we
shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist--for
whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?
"Why!" the reader will exclaim again, "we are coming back to what the
Catechism says: '_Q_. For whom did God create the world? _A_. For man.'"
Well, why not?--so ought the man who is a man to reply. The ant, if it
took account of these matters and were a person, would reply "For the
ant," and it would reply rightly. The world is made for consciousness,
for each consciousness.
A human soul is worth all the universe, someone--I know not whom--has
said and said magnificently. A human soul, mind you! Not a human life.
Not this life. And it happens that the less a man believes in the
soul--that is to say in his conscious immortality, personal and
concrete--the more he will exaggerate the worth of this poor transitory
life. This is the source from which springs all that effeminate,
sentimental ebullition against war. True, a man ought not to wish to
die, but the death to be renounced is the death of the soul. "Whosoever
will save his life shall lose it," says the Gospel; but it does not say
"whosoever will save his soul," the immortal soul--or, at any rate,
which we believe and wish to be immortal.
And what all the objectivists do not see, or rather do not wish to see,
is that when a man affirms his "I," his personal consciousness, he
affirms man, man concrete and real, affirms the true humanism--the
humanism of man, not of the things of man--and in affirming man he
affirms consciousness. For the only consciousness of which we have
consciousness is that of man.
The world is for consciousness. Or rather this _for_, this notion of
finality, and feeling rather than notion, this teleological feeling, is
born only where there is consciousness. Consciousness and finality are
fundamentally the same thing.
If the sun possessed consciousness it would think, no doubt, that it
lived in order to give light to the worlds; but it would also and above
all think that the worlds existed in order that it might give them light
and enjoy itself in giving them light and so live. And it would think
well.
And all this tragic fight of man to save himself, this immortal craving
for immortality which caused the man Kant to make that immortal leap of
which I have spoken, all this is simply a fight for consciousness. If
consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a
flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing
more execrable than existence.
Some may espy a fundamental contradiction in everything that I am
saying, now expressing a longing for unending life, now affirming that
this earthly life does not possess the value that is given to it.
Contradiction? To be sure! The contradiction of my heart that says Yes
and of my head that says No! Of course there is contradiction. Who does
not recollect those words of the Gospel, "Lord, I believe, help thou my
unbelief"? Contradiction! Of course! Since we only live in and by
contradictions, since life is tragedy and the tragedy is perpetual
struggle, without victory or the hope of victory, life is contradiction.
The values we are discussing are, as you see, values of the heart, and
against values of the heart reasons do not avail. For reasons are only
reasons--that is to say, they are not even truths. There is a class of
pedantic label-mongers, pedants by nature and by grace, who remind me of
that man who, purposing to console a father whose son has suddenly died
in the flower of his years, says to him, "Patience, my friend, we all
must die!" Would you think it strange if this father were offended at
such an impertinence? For it is an impertinence. There are times when
even an axiom can become an impertinence. How many times may it not be
said--
_Para pensar cual tú, sólo es preciso
no tener nada mas que inteligencia_.[8]
There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain, or
with whatever may be the specific thinking organ; while others think
with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of
the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the
life. And the people who think only with the brain develop into
definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought. And you
know what a professional is? You know what a product of the
differentiation of labour is?
Take a professional boxer. He has learnt to hit with such economy of
effort that, while concentrating all his strength in the blow, he only
brings into play just those muscles that are required for the immediate
and definite object of his action--to knock out his opponent. A blow
given by a non-professional will not have so much immediate, objective
efficiency; but it will more greatly vitalize the striker, causing him
to bring into play almost the whole of his body. The one is the blow of
a boxer, the other that of a man. And it is notorious that the Hercules
of the circus, the athletes of the ring, are not, as a rule, healthy.
They knock out their opponents, they lift enormous weights, but they die
of phthisis or dyspepsia.
If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is
above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man. The
cultivation of any branch of science--of chemistry, of physics, of
geometry, of philology--may be a work of differentiated specialization,
and even so only within very narrow limits and restrictions; but
philosophy, like poetry, is a work of integration and synthesis, or else
it is merely pseudo-philosophical erudition.
All knowledge has an ultimate object. Knowledge for the sake of
knowledge is, say what you will, nothing but a dismal begging of the
question. We learn something either for an immediate practical end, or
in order to complete the rest of our knowledge. Even the knowledge that
appears to us to be most theoretical--that is to say, of least immediate
application to the non-intellectual necessities of life--answers to a
necessity which is no less real because it is intellectual, to a reason
of economy in thinking, to a principle of unity and continuity of
consciousness. But just as a scientific fact has its finality in the
rest of knowledge, so the philosophy that we would make our own has also
its extrinsic object--it refers to our whole destiny, to our attitude in
face of life and the universe. And the most tragic problem of philosophy
is to reconcile intellectual necessities with the necessities of the
heart and the will. For it is on this rock that every philosophy that
pretends to resolve the eternal and tragic contradiction, the basis of
our existence, breaks to pieces. But do all men face this contradiction
squarely?
Little can be hoped from a ruler, for example, who has not at some time
or other been preoccupied, even if only confusedly, with the first
beginning and the ultimate end of all things, and above all of man, with
the "why" of his origin and the "wherefore" of his destiny.
And this supreme preoccupation cannot be purely rational, it must
involve the heart. It is not enough to think about our destiny: it must
be felt. And the would-be leader of men who affirms and proclaims that
he pays no heed to the things of the spirit, is not worthy to lead them.
By which I do not mean, of course, that any ready-made solution is to be
required of him. Solution? Is there indeed any?
So far as I am concerned, I will never willingly yield myself, nor
entrust my confidence, to any popular leader who is not penetrated with
the feeling that he who orders a people orders men, men of flesh and
bone, men who are born, suffer, and, although they do not wish to die,
die; men who are ends in themselves, not merely means; men who must be
themselves and not others; men, in fine, who seek that which we call
happiness. It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice one generation of
men to the generation which follows, without having any feeling for the
destiny of those who are sacrificed, without having any regard, not for
their memory, not for their names, but for them themselves.
All this talk of a man surviving in his children, or in his works, or in
the universal consciousness, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only
those who suffer from affective stupidity, and who, for the rest, may be
persons of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess
great talent, or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid as
regards the feelings and even morally imbecile. There have been
instances.
These clever-witted, affectively stupid persons are wont to say that it
is useless to seek to delve in the unknowable or to kick against the
pricks. It is as if one should say to a man whose leg has had to be
amputated that it does not help him at all to think about it. And we all
lack something; only some of us feel the lack and others do not. Or they
pretend not to feel the lack, and then they are hypocrites.
A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him,
"Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?" And the sage answered
him, "Precisely for that reason--because it does not avail." It is
manifest that weeping avails something, even if only the alleviation of
distress; but the deep sense of Solon's reply to the impertinent
questioner is plainly seen. And I am convinced that we should solve many
things if we all went out into the streets and uncovered our griefs,
which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and joined
together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the heavens and calling
upon God. And this, even though God should hear us not; but He would
hear us. The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to
which men go to weep in common. A _miserere_ sung in common by a
multitude tormented by destiny has as much value as a philosophy. It is
not enough to cure the plague: we must learn to weep for it. Yes, we
must learn to weep! Perhaps that is the supreme wisdom. Why? Ask Solon.
There is something which, for lack of a better name, we will call the
tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of life
itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy more or less formulated,
more or less conscious. And this sense may be possessed, and is
possessed, not only by individual men but by whole peoples. And this
sense does not so much flow from ideas as determine them, even though
afterwards, as is manifest, these ideas react upon it and confirm it.
Sometimes it may originate in a chance illness--dyspepsia, for example;
but at other times it is constitutional. And it is useless to speak, as
we shall see, of men who are healthy and men who are not healthy. Apart
from the fact there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved
that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And further, man, by the
very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison
with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.
Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those
who possess this tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St.
Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, _René, Obermann_, Thomson,[9] Leopardi,
Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard--men burdened with
wisdom rather than with knowledge.
And there are, I believe, peoples who possess this tragic sense of life
also.
It is to this that we must now turn our attention, beginning with this
matter of health and disease.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] "_Salto inmortal_." There is a play here upon the term _salto
mortal_, used to denote the dangerous aerial somersault of the acrobat,
which cannot be rendered in English.--J.E.C.F.
[6] "_Conciencia_." The same word is used in Spanish to denote both
consciousness and conscience. If the latter is specifically intended,
the qualifying adjective "_moral_" or "_religiosa_" is commonly
added.--J.E.C.F.
[7] San Juan de los Angeles.
[8] To be lacking in everything but intelligence is the necessary
qualification for thinking like you.
[9] James Thomson, author of _The City of Dreadful Night_.
II.
THE STARTING-POINT
To some, perhaps, the foregoing reflections may seem to possess a
certain morbid character. Morbid? But what is disease precisely? And
what is health?
May not disease itself possibly be the essential condition of that which
we call progress and progress itself a disease?
Who does not know the mythical tragedy of Paradise? Therein dwelt our
first parents in a state of perfect health and perfect innocence, and
Jahwé gave them to eat of the tree of life and created all things for
them; but he commanded them not to taste of the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil. But they, tempted by the serpent--Christ's
type of prudence--tasted of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil, and became subject to all diseases, and to death, which
is their crown and consummation, and to labour and to progress. For
progress, according to this legend, springs from original sin. And thus
it was the curiosity of Eve, of woman, of her who is most thrall to the
organic necessities of life and of the conservation of life, that
occasioned the Fall and with the Fall the Redemption, and it was the
Redemption that set our feet on the way to God and made it possible for
us to attain to Him and to be in Him.
Do you want another version of our origin? Very well then. According to
this account, man is, strictly speaking, merely a species of gorilla,
orang-outang, chimpanzee, or the like, more or less hydrocephalous. Once
on a time an anthropoid monkey had a diseased offspring--diseased from
the strictly animal or zoological point of view, really diseased; and
this disease, although a source of weakness, resulted in a positive gain
in the struggle for survival. The only vertical mammal at last succeeded
in standing erect--man. The upright position freed him from the
necessity of using his hands as means of support in walking; he was
able, therefore, to oppose the thumb to the other four fingers, to seize
hold of objects and to fashion tools; and it is well known that the
hands are great promoters of the intelligence. This same position gave
to the lungs, trachea, larynx, and mouth an aptness for the production
of articulate speech, and speech is intelligence. Moreover, this
position, causing the head to weigh vertically upon the trunk,
facilitated its development and increase of weight, and the head is the
seat of the mind. But as this necessitated greater strength and
resistance in the bones of the pelvis than in those of species whose
head and trunk rest upon all four extremities, the burden fell upon
woman, the author of the Fall according to Genesis, of bringing forth
larger-headed offspring through a harder framework of bone. And Jahwé
condemned her, for having sinned, to bring forth her children in sorrow.
The gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-outang, and their kind, must look
upon man as a feeble and infirm animal, whose strange custom it is to
store up his dead. Wherefore?
And this primary disease and all subsequent diseases--are they not
perhaps the capital element of progress? Arthritis, for example, infects
the blood and introduces into it scoriæ, a kind of refuse, of an
imperfect organic combustion; but may not this very impurity happen to
make the blood more stimulative? May not this impure blood promote a
more active cerebration precisely because it is impure? Water that is
chemically pure is undrinkable. And may not also blood that is
physiologically pure be unfit for the brain of the vertical mammal that
has to live by thought?
The history of medicine, moreover, teaches us that progress consists
not so much in expelling the germs of disease, or rather diseases
themselves, as in accommodating them to our organism and so perhaps
enriching it, in dissolving them in our blood. What but this is the
meaning of vaccination and all the serums, and immunity from infection
through lapse of time?
If this notion of absolute health were not an abstract category,
something which does not strictly exist, we might say that a perfectly
healthy man would be no longer a man, but an irrational animal.
Irrational, because of the lack of some disease to set a spark to his
reason. And this disease which gives us the appetite of knowing for the
sole pleasure of knowing, for the delight of tasting of the fruit of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil, is a real disease and a tragic
one.
_Pantes anthrôpoi ton eidenai oregontai phusei_, "all men
naturally desire to know." Thus Aristotle begins his Metaphysic, and it
has been repeated a thousand times since then that curiosity or the
desire to know, which according to Genesis led our first mother to sin,
is the origin of knowledge.
But it is necessary to distinguish here between the desire or appetite
for knowing, apparently and at first sight for the love of knowledge
itself, between the eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of
knowledge, and the necessity of knowing for the sake of living. The
latter, which gives us direct and immediate knowledge, and which in a
certain sense might be called, if it does not seem too paradoxical,
unconscious knowledge, is common both to men and animals, while that
which distinguishes us from them is reflective knowledge, the knowing
that we know.
Man has debated at length and will continue to debate at length--the
world having been assigned as a theatre for his debates--concerning the
origin of knowledge; but, apart from the question as to what the real
truth about this origin may be, which we will leave until later, it is
a certainly ascertained fact that in the apparential order of things, in
the life of beings who are endowed with a certain more or less cloudy
faculty of knowing and perceiving, or who at any rate appear to act as
if they were so endowed, knowledge is exhibited to us as bound up with
the necessity of living and of procuring the wherewithal to maintain
life. It is a consequence of that very essence of being, which according
to Spinoza consists in the effort to persist indefinitely in its own
being. Speaking in terms in which concreteness verges upon grossness, it
may be said that the brain, in so far as its function is concerned,
depends upon the stomach. In beings which rank in the lowest scale of
life, those actions which present the characteristics of will, those
which appear to be connected with a more or less clear consciousness,
are actions designed to procure nourishment for the being performing
them.
Such then is what we may call the historical origin of knowledge,
whatever may be its origin from another point of view. Beings which
appear to be endowed with perception, perceive in order to be able to
live, and only perceive in so far as they require to do so in order to
live. But perhaps this stored-up knowledge, the utility in which it had
its origin being exhausted, has come to constitute a fund of knowledge
far exceeding that required for the bare necessities of living.
Thus we have, first, the necessity of knowing in order to live, and
next, arising out of this, that other knowledge which we might call
superfluous knowledge or knowledge _de luxe_, which may in its turn come
to constitute a new necessity. Curiosity, the so-called innate desire of
knowing, only awakes and becomes operative after the necessity of
knowing for the sake of living is satisfied; and although sometimes in
the conditions under which the human race is actually living it may not
so befall, but curiosity may prevail over necessity and knowledge over
hunger, nevertheless the primordial fact is that curiosity sprang from
the necessity of knowing in order to live, and this is the dead weight
and gross matter carried in the matrix of science. Aspiring to be
knowledge for the sake of knowledge, to know the truth for the sake of
the truth itself, science is forced by the necessities of life to turn
aside and put it itself at their service. While men believe themselves
to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in
truth. The variations of science depend upon the variations of human
needs, and men of science are wont to work, willingly or unwillingly,
wittingly or unwittingly, in the service of the powerful or in that of a
people that demands from them the confirmation of its own desires.
But is this really a dead weight that impedes the progress of science,
or is it not rather its innermost redeeming essence? It is in fact the
latter, and it is a gross stupidity to presume to rebel against the very
condition of life.
Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity of life and
primarily in the service of the instinct of personal preservation. This
necessity and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge
and given them such capacity as they possess. Man sees, hears, touches,
tastes, and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear,
touch, taste, and smell in order to preserve his life. The decay or the
loss of any of these senses increases the risks with which his life is
environed, and if it increases them less in the state of society in
which we are actually living, the reason is that some see, hear, touch,
and smell for others. A blind man, by himself and without a guide, could
not live long. Society is an additional sense; it is the true common
sense.
Man, then, in his quality of an isolated individual, only sees, hears,
touches, tastes, and smells in so far as is necessary for living and
self-preservation. If he does not perceive colours below red or above
violet, the reason perhaps is that the colours which he does perceive
suffice for the purposes of self-preservation. And the senses themselves
are simplifying apparati which eliminate from objective reality
everything that it is not necessary to know in order to utilize objects
for the purpose of preserving life. In complete darkness an animal, if
it does not perish, ends by becoming blind. Parasites which live in the
intestines of other animals upon the nutritive juices which they find
ready prepared for them by these animals, as they do not need either to
see or hear, do in fact neither see nor hear; they simply adhere, a kind
of receptive bag, to the being upon whom they live. For these parasites
the visible and audible world does not exist. It is enough for them that
the animals, in whose intestines they live, see and hear.
Knowledge, then, is primarily at the service of the instinct of
self-preservation, which is indeed, as we have said with Spinoza, its
very essence. And thus it may be said that it is the instinct of
self-preservation that makes perceptible for us the reality and truth of
the world; for it is this instinct that cuts out and separates that
which exists for us from the unfathomable and illimitable region of the
possible. In effect, that which has existence for us is precisely that
which, in one way or another, we need to know in order to exist
ourselves; objective existence, as we know it, is a dependence of our
own personal existence. And nobody can deny that there may not exist,
and perhaps do exist, aspects of reality unknown to us, to-day at any
rate, and perhaps unknowable, because they are in no way necessary to us
for the preservation of our own actual existence.
But man does not live alone; he is not an isolated individual, but a
member of society. There is not a little truth in the saying that the
individual, like the atom, is an abstraction. Yes, the atom apart from
the universe is as much an abstraction as the universe apart from the
atom. And if the individual maintains his existence by the instinct of
self-preservation, society owes its being and maintenance to the
individual's instinct of perpetuation. And from this instinct, or rather
from society, springs reason.
Reason, that which we call reason, reflex and reflective knowledge, the
distinguishing mark of man, is a social product.
It owes its origin, perhaps, to language. We think articulately--_i.e._,
reflectively--thanks to articulate language, and this language arose out
of the need of communicating our thought to our neighbours. To think is
to talk with oneself, and each one of us talks with himself, thanks to
our having had to talk with one another. In everyday life it frequently
happens that we hit upon an idea that we were seeking and succeed in
giving it form--that is to say, we obtain the idea, drawing it forth
from the mist of dim perceptions which it represents, thanks to the
efforts which we make to present it to others. Thought is inward
language, and the inward language originates in the outward. Hence it
results that reason is social and common. A fact pregnant with
consequences, as we shall have occasion to see.
Now if there is a reality which, in so far as we have knowledge of it,
is the creation of the instinct of personal preservation and of the
senses at the service of this instinct, must there not be another
reality, not less real than the former, the creation, in so far as we
have knowledge of it, of the instinct of perpetuation, the instinct of
the species, and of the senses at the service of this instinct? The
instinct of preservation, hunger, is the foundation of the human
individual; the instinct of perpetuation, love, in its most rudimentary
and physiological form, is the foundation of human society. And just as
man knows that which he needs to know in order that he may preserve his
existence, so society, or man in so far as he is a social being, knows
that which he needs to know in order that he may perpetuate himself in
society.
There is a world, the sensible world, that is the child of hunger, and
there is another world, the ideal world, that is the child of love. And
just as there are senses employed in the service of the knowledge of the
sensible world, so there are also senses, at present for the most part
dormant, for social consciousness has scarcely awakened, employed in the
service of the knowledge of the ideal world. And why must we deny
objective reality to the creations of love, of the instinct of
perpetuation, since we allow it to the creations of hunger or the
instinct of preservation? For if it be said that the former creations
are only the creations of our imagination, without objective value, may
it not equally be said of the latter that they are only the creations of
our senses? Who can assert that there is not an invisible and intangible
world, perceived by the inward sense that lives in the service of the
instinct of perpetuation?
Human society, as a society, possesses senses which the individual, but
for his existence in society, would lack, just as the individual, man,
who is in his turn a kind of society, possesses senses lacking in the
cells of which he is composed. The blind cells of hearing, in their dim
consciousness, must of necessity be unaware of the existence of the
visible world, and if they should hear it spoken of they would perhaps
deem it to be the arbitrary creation of the deaf cells of sight, while
the latter in their turn would consider as illusion the audible world
which the hearing cells create.
We have remarked before that the parasites which live in the intestines
of higher animals, feeding upon the nutritive juices which these animals
supply, do not need either to see or hear, and therefore for them the
visible and audible world does not exist. And if they possessed a
certain degree of consciousness and took account of the fact that the
animal at whose expense they live believed in a world of sight and
hearing, they would perhaps deem such belief to be due merely to the
extravagance of its imagination. And similarly there are social
parasites, as Mr. A.J. Balfour admirably observes,[10] who, receiving
from the society in which they live the motives of their moral conduct,
deny that belief in God and the other life is a necessary foundation for
good conduct and for a tolerable life, society having prepared for them
the spiritual nutriment by which they live. An isolated individual can
endure life and live it well and even heroically without in any sort
believing either in the immortality of the soul or in God, but he lives
the life of a spiritual parasite. What we call the sense of honour is,
even in non-Christians, a Christian product. And I will say further,
that if there exists in a man faith in God joined to a life of purity
and moral elevation, it is not so much the believing in God that makes
him good, as the being good, thanks to God, that makes him believe in
Him. Goodness is the best source of spiritual clear-sightedness.
I am well aware that it may be objected that all this talk of man
creating the sensible world and love the ideal world, of the blind cells
of hearing and the deaf cells of sight, of spiritual parasites, etc., is
merely metaphor. So it is, and I do not claim to discuss otherwise than
by metaphor. And it is true that this social sense, the creature of
love, the creator of language, of reason, and of the ideal world that
springs from it, is at bottom nothing other than what we call fancy or
imagination. Out of fancy springs reason. And if by imagination is
understood a faculty which fashions images capriciously, I will ask:
What is caprice? And in any case the senses and reason are also
fallible.
We shall have to enquire what is this inner social faculty, the
imagination which personalizes everything, and which, employed in the
service of the instinct of perpetuation, reveals to us God and the
immortality of the soul--God being thus a social product.
But this we will reserve till later.
And now, why does man philosophize?--that is to say, why does he
investigate the first causes and ultimate ends of things? Why does he
seek the disinterested truth? For to say that all men have a natural
tendency to know is true; but wherefore?
Philosophers seek a theoretic or ideal starting-point for their human
work, the work of philosophizing; but they are not usually concerned to
seek the practical and real starting-point, the purpose. What is the
object in making philosophy, in thinking it and then expounding it to
one's fellows? What does the philosopher seek in it and with it? The
truth for the truth's own sake? The truth, in order that we may subject
our conduct to it and determine our spiritual attitude towards life and
the universe comformably with it?
Philosophy is a product of the humanity of each philosopher, and each
philosopher is a man of flesh and bone who addresses himself to other
men of flesh and bone like himself. And, let him do what he will, he
philosophizes not with the reason only, but with the will, with the
feelings, with the flesh and with the bones, with the whole soul and the
whole body. It is the man that philosophizes.
I do not wish here to use the word "I" in connection with
philosophizing, lest the impersonal "I" should be understood in place of
the man that philosophizes; for this concrete, circumscribed "I," this
"I" of flesh and bone, that suffers from tooth-ache and finds life
insupportable if death is the annihilation of the personal
consciousness, must not be confounded with that other counterfeit "I,"
the theoretical "I" which Fichte smuggled into philosophy, nor yet with
the Unique, also theoretical, of Max Stirner. It is better to say "we,"
understanding, however, the "we" who are circumscribed in space.
Knowledge for the sake of knowledge! Truth for truth's sake! This is
inhuman. And if we say that theoretical philosophy addresses itself to
practical philosophy, truth to goodness, science to ethics, I will ask:
And to what end is goodness? Is it, perhaps, an end in itself? Good is
simply that which contributes to the preservation, perpetuation, and
enrichment of consciousness. Goodness addresses itself to man, to the
maintenance and perfection of human society which is composed of men.
And to what end is this? "So act that your action may be a pattern to
all men," Kant tells us. That is well, but wherefore? We must needs seek
for a wherefore.
In the starting-point of all philosophy, in the real starting-point, the
practical not the theoretical, there is a wherefore. The philosopher
philosophizes for something more than for the sake of philosophizing.
_Primum vivere, deinde philosophari_, says the old Latin adage; and as
the philosopher is a man before he is a philosopher, he must needs live
before he can philosophize, and, in fact, he philosophizes in order to
live. And usually he philosophizes either in order to resign himself to
life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract himself and forget
his griefs, or for pastime and amusement. A good illustration of this
last case is to be found in that terrible Athenian ironist, Socrates, of
whom Xenophon relates in his _Memorabilia_ that he discovered to
Theodata, the courtesan, the wiles that she ought to make use of in
order to lure lovers to her house so aptly, that she begged him to act
as her companion in the chase, _sunthêratês_, her pimp, in a
word. And philosophy is wont, in fact, not infrequently to convert
itself into a kind of art of spiritual pimping. And sometimes into an
opiate for lulling sorrows to sleep.
I take at random a book of metaphysics, the first that comes to my hand,
_Time and Space, a Metaphysical Essay_, by Shadworth H. Hodgson. I open
it, and in the fifth paragraph of the first chapter of the first part I
read:
"Metaphysics is, properly speaking, not a science but a philosophy--that
is, it is a science whose end is in itself, in the gratification and
education of the minds which carry it on, not in external purpose, such
as the founding of any art conducive to the welfare of life." Let us
examine this. We see that metaphysics is not, properly speaking, a
science--that is, it is a science whose end is in itself. And this
science, which, properly speaking, is not a science, has its end in
itself, in the gratification and education of the minds that cultivate
it. But what are we to understand? Is its end in itself or is it to
gratify and educate the minds that cultivate it? Either the one or the
other! Hodgson afterwards adds that the end of metaphysics is not any
external purpose, such as that of founding an art conducive to the
welfare of life. But is not the gratification of the mind of him who
cultivates philosophy part of the well-being of his life? Let the reader
consider this passage of the English metaphysician and tell me if it is
not a tissue of contradictions.
Such a contradiction is inevitable when an attempt is made to define
humanly this theory of science, of knowledge, whose end is in itself, of
knowing for the sake of knowing, of attaining truth for the sake of
truth. Science exists only in personal consciousness and thanks to it;
astronomy, mathematics, have no other reality than that which they
possess as knowledge in the minds of those who study and cultivate them.
And if some day all personal consciousness must come to an end on the
earth; if some day the human spirit must return to the nothingness--that
is to say, to the absolute unconsciousness--from whence it sprang; and
if there shall no more be any spirit that can avail itself of all our
accumulated knowledge--then to what end is this knowledge? For we must
not lose sight of the fact that the problem of the personal immortality
of the soul involves the future of the whole human species.
This series of contradictions into which the Englishman falls in his
desire to explain the theory of a science whose end is in itself, is
easily understood when it is remembered that it is an Englishman who
speaks, and that the Englishman is before everything else a man. Perhaps
a German specialist, a philosopher who had made philosophy his
speciality, who had first murdered his humanity and then buried it in
his philosophy, would be better able to explain this theory of a science
whose end is in itself and of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
Take the man Spinoza, that Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland; read his
_Ethic_ as a despairing elegiac poem, which in fact it is, and tell me
if you do not hear, beneath the disemburdened and seemingly serene
propositions _more geometrico_, the lugubrious echo of the prophetic
psalms. It is not the philosophy of resignation but of despair. And when
he wrote that the free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and
that his wisdom consists in meditating not on death but on life--homo
liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat et eius sapientia non
mortis, sed vitæ meditatio est (_Ethic_, Part IV., Prop. LXVII.)--when
he wrote that, he felt, as we all feel, that we are slaves, and he did
in fact think about death, and he wrote it in a vain endeavour to free
himself from this thought. Nor in writing Proposition XLII. of Part V.,
that "happiness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself," did he
feel, one may be sure, what he wrote. For this is usually the reason why
men philosophize--in order to convince themselves, even though they fail
in the attempt. And this desire of convincing oneself--that is to say,
this desire of doing violence to one's own human nature--is the real
starting-point of not a few philosophies.
Whence do I come and whence comes the world in which and by which I
live? Whither do I go and whither goes everything that environs me? What
does it all mean? Such are the questions that man asks as soon as he
frees himself from the brutalizing necessity of labouring for his
material sustenance. And if we look closely, we shall see that beneath
these questions lies the wish to know not so much the "why" as the
"wherefore," not the cause but the end. Cicero's definition of
philosophy is well known--"the knowledge of things divine and human and
of the causes in which these things are contained," _rerum divinarum et
humanarum, causarumque quibus hæ res continentur_; but in reality these
causes are, for us, ends. And what is the Supreme Cause, God, but the
Supreme End? The "why" interests us only in view of the "wherefore." We
wish to know whence we came only in order the better to be able to
ascertain whither we are going.
This Ciceronian definition, which is the Stoic definition, is also found
in that formidable intellectualist, Clement of Alexandria, who was
canonized by the Catholic Church, and he expounds it in the fifth
chapter of the first of his _Stromata_. But this same Christian
philosopher--Christian?--in the twenty-second chapter of his fourth
_Stroma_ tells us that for the gnostic--that is to say, the
intellectual--knowledge, _gnosis_, ought to suffice, and he adds: "I
will dare aver that it is not because he wishes to be saved that he, who
devotes himself to knowledge for the sake of the divine science itself,
chooses knowledge. For the exertion of the intellect by exercise is
prolonged to a perpetual exertion. And the perpetual exertion of the
intellect is the essence of an intelligent being, which results from an
uninterrupted process of admixture, and remains eternal contemplation, a
living substance. Could we, then, suppose anyone proposing to the
gnostic whether he would choose the knowledge of God or everlasting
salvation, and if these, which are entirely identical, were separable,
he would without the least hesitation choose the knowledge of God?" May
He, may God Himself, whom we long to enjoy and possess eternally,
deliver us from this Clementine gnosticism or intellectualism!
Why do I wish to know whence I come and whither I go, whence comes and
whither goes everything that environs me, and what is the meaning of it
all? For I do not wish to die utterly, and I wish to know whether I am
to die or not definitely. If I do not die, what is my destiny? and if I
die, then nothing has any meaning for me. And there are three solutions:
(_a_) I know that I shall die utterly, and then irremediable despair, or
(_b_) I know that I shall not die utterly, and then resignation, or
(_c_) I cannot know either one or the other, and then resignation in
despair or despair in resignation, a desperate resignation or a resigned
despair, and hence conflict.
"It is best," some reader will say, "not to concern yourself with what
cannot be known." But is it possible? In his very beautiful poem, _The
Ancient Sage_, Tennyson said:
Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,
Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,
Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Thou canst not prove that thou art spirit alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:
Nor canst thou prove thou art immortal, no,
Nor yet that thou art mortal--nay, my son,
Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in converse with thyself,
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
Cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!
Yes, perhaps, as the Sage says, "nothing worthy proving can be proven,
nor yet disproven"; but can we restrain that instinct which urges man to
wish to know, and above all to wish to know the things which may conduce
to life, to eternal life? Eternal life, not eternal knowledge, as the
Alexandrian gnostic said. For living is one thing and knowing is
another; and, as we shall see, perhaps there is such an opposition
between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational,
not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And
this is the basis of the tragic sense of life.
The defect of Descartes' _Discourse of Method_ lies not in the
antecedent methodical doubt; not in his beginning by resolving to doubt
everything, a merely intellectual device; but in his resolution to begin
by emptying himself of himself, of Descartes, of the real man, the man
of flesh and bone, the man who does not want to die, in order that he
might be a mere thinker--that is, an abstraction. But the real man
returned and thrust himself into the philosophy.
"_Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée_." Thus begins the
_Discourse of Method_, and this good sense saved him. He continues
talking about himself, about the man Descartes, telling us among other
things that he greatly esteemed eloquence and loved poetry; that he
delighted above all in mathematics because of the evidence and certainty
of its reasons, and that he revered our theology and claimed as much as
any to attain to heaven--_et prétendais autant qu'aucun autre à gagner
le ciel_. And this pretension--a very laudable one, I think, and above
all very natural--was what prevented him from deducing all the
consequences of his methodical doubt. The man Descartes claimed, as much
as any other, to attain to heaven, "but having learned as a thing very
sure that the way to it is not less open to the most ignorant than to
the most learned, and that the revealed truths which lead thither are
beyond our intelligence, I did not dare submit them to my feeble
reasonings, and I thought that to undertake to examine them and to
succeed therein, I should want some extraordinary help from heaven and
need to be more than man." And here we have the man. Here we have the
man who "did not feel obliged, thank God, to make a profession
(_métier_) of science in order to increase his means, and who did not
pretend to play the cynic and despise glory." And afterwards he tells us
how he was compelled to make a sojourn in Germany, and there, shut up in
a stove (_poêle_) he began to philosophize his method. But in Germany,
shut up in a stove! And such his discourse is, a stove-discourse, and
the stove a German one, although the philosopher shut up in it was a
Frenchman who proposed to himself to attain to heaven.
And he arrives at the _cogito ergo sum_, which St. Augustine had already
anticipated; but the _ego_ implicit in this enthymeme, _ego cogito, ergo
ego sum_, is an unreal--that is, an ideal--_ego_ or I, and its _sum_,
its existence, something unreal also. "I think, therefore I am," can
only mean "I think, therefore I am a thinker"; this being of the "I am,"
which is deduced from "I think," is merely a knowing; this being is
knowledge, but not life. And the primary reality is not that I think,
but that I live, for those also live who do not think. Although this
living may not be a real living. God! what contradictions when we seek
to join in wedlock life and reason!
The truth is _sum, ergo cogito_--I am, therefore I think, although not
everything that is thinks. Is not consciousness of thinking above all
consciousness of being? Is pure thought possible, without consciousness
of self, without personality? Can there exist pure knowledge without
feeling, without that species of materiality which feeling lends to it?
Do we not perhaps feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the act
of knowing and willing? Could not the man in the stove have said: "I
feel, therefore I am"? or "I will, therefore I am"? And to feel oneself,
is it not perhaps to feel oneself imperishable? To will oneself, is it
not to wish oneself eternal--that is to say, not to wish to die? What
the sorrowful Jew of Amsterdam called the essence of the thing, the
effort that it makes to persist indefinitely in its own being,
self-love, the longing for immortality, is it not perhaps the primal and
fundamental condition of all reflective or human knowledge? And is it
not therefore the true base, the real starting-point, of all philosophy,
although the philosophers, perverted by intellectualism, may not
recognize it?
And, moreover, it was the _cogito_ that introduced a distinction which,
although fruitful of truths, has been fruitful also of confusions, and
this distinction is that between object, _cogito_, and subject, _sum_.
There is scarcely any distinction that does not also lead to confusion.
But we will return to this later.
For the present let us remain keenly suspecting that the longing not to
die, the hunger for personal immortality, the effort whereby we tend to
persist indefinitely in our own being, which is, according to the tragic
Jew, our very essence, that this is the affective basis of all knowledge
and the personal inward starting-point of all human philosophy, wrought
by a man and for men. And we shall see how the solution of this inward
affective problem, a solution which may be but the despairing
renunciation of the attempt at a solution, is that which colours all the
rest of philosophy. Underlying even the so-called problem of knowledge
there is simply this human feeling, just as underlying the enquiry into
the "why," the cause, there is simply the search for the "wherefore,"
the end. All the rest is either to deceive oneself or to wish to deceive
others; and to wish to deceive others in order to deceive oneself.
And this personal and affective starting-point of all philosophy and all
religion is the tragic sense of life. Let us now proceed to consider
this.
FOOTNOTE:
[10] _The Foundations of Belief, being Notes Introductory to the Study
of Theology_, by the Right Hon. Arthur James Balfour London, 1895: "So
it is with those persons who claim to show by their example that
naturalism is practically consistent with the maintenance of ethical
ideals with which naturalism has no natural affinity. Their spiritual
life is parasitic: it is sheltered by convictions which belong, not to
them, but to the society of which they form a part; it is nourished by
processes in which they take no share. And when those convictions decay,
and those processes come to an end, the alien life which they have
maintained can scarce be expected to outlast them" (Chap. iv.).
III
THE HUNGER OF IMMORTALITY
Let us pause to consider this immortal yearning for immortality--even
though the gnostics or intellectuals may be able to say that what
follows is not philosophy but rhetoric. Moreover, the divine Plato, when
he discussed the immortality of the soul in his _Phædo_, said that it
was proper to clothe it in legend, _muthologein_.
First of all let us recall once again--and it will not be for the last
time--that saying of Spinoza that every being endeavours to persist in
itself, and that this endeavour is its actual essence, and implies
indefinite time, and that the soul, in fine, sometimes with a clear and
distinct idea, sometimes confusedly, tends to persist in its being with
indefinite duration, and is aware of its persistency (_Ethic_, Part
III., Props. VI.-X.).
It is impossible for us, in effect, to conceive of ourselves as not
existing, and no effort is capable of enabling consciousness to realize
absolute unconsciousness, its own annihilation. Try, reader, to imagine
to yourself, when you are wide awake, the condition of your soul when
you are in a deep sleep; try to fill your consciousness with the
representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility
of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.
We cannot conceive ourselves as not existing.
The visible universe, the universe that is created by the instinct of
self-preservation, becomes all too narrow for me. It is like a cramped
cell, against the bars of which my soul beats its wings in vain. Its
lack of air stifles me. More, more, and always more! I want to be
myself, and yet without ceasing to be myself to be others as well, to
merge myself into the totality of things visible and invisible, to
extend myself into the illimitable of space and to prolong myself into
the infinite of time. Not to be all and for ever is as if not to be--at
least, let me be my whole self, and be so for ever and ever. And to be
the whole of myself is to be everybody else. Either all or nothing!
All or nothing! And what other meaning can the Shakespearean "To be or
not to be" have, or that passage in _Coriolanus_ where it is said of
Marcius "He wants nothing of a god but eternity"? Eternity,
eternity!--that is the supreme desire! The thirst of eternity is what is
called love among men, and whosoever loves another wishes to eternalize
himself in him. Nothing is real that is not eternal.
From the poets of all ages and from the depths of their souls this
tremendous vision of the flowing away of life like water has wrung
bitter cries--from Pindar's "dream of a shadow," _skias onar_, to
Calderón's "life is a dream" and Shakespeare's "we are such stuff as
dreams are made on," this last a yet more tragic sentence than
Calderón's, for whereas the Castilian only declares that our life is a
dream, but not that we ourselves are the dreamers of it, the Englishman
makes us ourselves a dream, a dream that dreams.
The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and
heart-penetrating notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which
neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling
of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing
that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills
life again and eternalizes it. In appearance at any rate, for in
reality.... And love, above all when it struggles against destiny,
overwhelms us with the feeling of the vanity of this world of
appearances and gives us a glimpse of another world, in which destiny is
overcome and liberty is law.
Everything passes! Such is the refrain of those who have drunk, lips to
the spring, of the fountain of life, of those who have tasted of the
fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
To be, to be for ever, to be without ending! thirst of being, thirst of
being more! hunger of God! thirst of love eternalizing and eternal! to
be for ever! to be God!
"Ye shall be as gods!" we are told in Genesis that the serpent said to
the first pair of lovers (Gen. iii. 5). "If in this life only we have
hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable," wrote the Apostle (1
Cor. xv. 19); and all religion has sprung historically from the cult of
the dead--that is to say, from the cult of immortality.
The tragic Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam wrote that the free man thinks of
nothing less than of death; but this free man is a dead man, free from
the impulse of life, for want of love, the slave of his liberty. This
thought that I must die and the enigma of what will come after death is
the very palpitation of my consciousness. When I contemplate the green
serenity of the fields or look into the depths of clear eyes through
which shines a fellow-soul, my consciousness dilates, I feel the
diastole of the soul and am bathed in the flood of the life that flows
about me, and I believe in my future; but instantly the voice of mystery
whispers to me, "Thou shalt cease to be!" the angel of Death touches me
with his wing, and the systole of the soul floods the depths of my
spirit with the blood of divinity.
Like Pascal, I do not understand those who assert that they care not a
farthing for these things, and this indifference "in a matter that
touches themselves, their eternity, their all, exasperates me rather
than moves me to compassion, astonishes and shocks me," and he who feels
thus "is for me," as for Pascal, whose are the words just quoted, "a
monster."
It has been said a thousand times and in a thousand books that
ancestor-worship is for the most part the source of primitive religions,
and it may be strictly said that what most distinguishes man from the
other animals is that, in one form or another, he guards his dead and
does not give them over to the neglect of teeming mother earth; he is an
animal that guards its dead. And from what does he thus guard them? From
what does he so futilely protect them? The wretched consciousness
shrinks from its own annihilation, and, just as an animal spirit, newly
severed from the womb of the world, finds itself confronted with the
world and knows itself distinct from it, so consciousness must needs
desire to possess another life than that of the world itself. And so the
earth would run the risk of becoming a vast cemetery before the dead
themselves should die again.
When mud huts or straw shelters, incapable of resisting the inclemency
of the weather, sufficed for the living, tumuli were raised for the
dead, and stone was used for sepulchres before it was used for houses.
It is the strong-builded houses of the dead that have withstood the
ages, not the houses of the living; not the temporary lodgings but the
permanent habitations.
This cult, not of death but of immortality, originates and preserves
religions. In the midst of the delirium of destruction, Robespierre
induced the Convention to declare the existence of the Supreme Being and
"the consolatory principle of the immortality of the soul," the
Incorruptible being dismayed at the idea of having himself one day to
turn to corruption.
A disease? Perhaps; but he who pays no heed to his disease is heedless
of his health, and man is an animal essentially and substantially
diseased. A disease? Perhaps it may be, like life itself to which it is
thrall, and perhaps the only health possible may be death; but this
disease is the fount of all vigorous health. From the depth of this
anguish, from the abyss of the feeling of our mortality, we emerge into
the light of another heaven, as from the depth of Hell Dante emerged to
behold the stars once again--
_e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle._
Although this meditation upon mortality may soon induce in us a sense of
anguish, it fortifies us in the end. Retire, reader, into yourself and
imagine a slow dissolution of yourself--the light dimming about you--all
things becoming dumb and soundless, enveloping you in silence--the
objects that you handle crumbling away between your hands--the ground
slipping from under your feet--your very memory vanishing as if in a
swoon--everything melting away from you into nothingness and you
yourself also melting away--the very consciousness of nothingness,
merely as the phantom harbourage of a shadow, not even remaining to you.
I have heard it related of a poor harvester who died in a hospital bed,
that when the priest went to anoint his hands with the oil of extreme
unction, he refused to open his right hand, which clutched a few dirty
coins, not considering that very soon neither his hand nor he himself
would be his own any more. And so we close and clench, not our hand, but
our heart, seeking to clutch the world in it.
A friend confessed to me that, foreseeing while in the full vigour of
physical health the near approach of a violent death, he proposed to
concentrate his life and spend the few days which he calculated still
remained to him in writing a book. Vanity of vanities!
If at the death of the body which sustains me, and which I call mine to
distinguish it from the self that is I, my consciousness returns to the
absolute unconsciousness from which it sprang, and if a like fate
befalls all my brothers in humanity, then is our toil-worn human race
nothing but a fatidical procession of phantoms, going from nothingness
to nothingness, and humanitarianism the most inhuman thing known.
And the remedy is not that suggested in the quatrain that runs--
_Cada vez que considero
que me tengo de morir,
tiendo la capa en el suelo
y no me harto de dormir._[11]
No! The remedy is to consider our mortal destiny without flinching, to
fasten our gaze upon the gaze of the Sphinx, for it is thus that the
malevolence of its spell is discharmed.
If we all die utterly, wherefore does everything exist? Wherefore? It is
the Wherefore of the Sphinx; it is the Wherefore that corrodes the
marrow of the soul; it is the begetter of that anguish which gives us
the love of hope.
Among the poetic laments of the unhappy Cowper there are some lines
written under the oppression of delirium, in which, believing himself to
be the mark of the Divine vengeance, he exclaims--
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter.
This is the Puritan sentiment, the preoccupation with sin and
predestination; but read the much more terrible words of Sénancour,
expressive of the Catholic, not the Protestant, despair, when he makes
his Obermann say, "L'homme est périssable. Il se peut; mais périssons en
résistant, et, si le néant nous est réservé, ne faisons pas que ce soit
une justice." And I must confess, painful though the confession be, that
in the days of the simple faith of my childhood, descriptions of the
tortures of hell, however terrible, never made me tremble, for I always
felt that nothingness was much more terrifying. He who suffers lives,
and he who lives suffering, even though over the portal of his abode is
written "Abandon all hope!" loves and hopes. It is better to live in
pain than to cease to be in peace. The truth is that I could not
believe in this atrocity of Hell, of an eternity of punishment, nor did
I see any more real hell than nothingness and the prospect of it. And I
continue in the belief that if we all believed in our salvation from
nothingness we should all be better.
What is this _joie de vivre_ that they talk about nowadays? Our hunger
for God, our thirst of immortality, of survival, will always stifle in
us this pitiful enjoyment of the life that passes and abides not. It is
the frenzied love of life, the love that would have life to be unending,
that most often urges us to long for death. "If it is true that I am to
die utterly," we say to ourselves, "then once I am annihilated the world
has ended so far as I am concerned--it is finished. Why, then, should it
not end forthwith, so that no new consciousnesses, doomed to suffer the
tormenting illusion of a transient and apparential existence, may come
into being? If, the illusion of living being shattered, living for the
mere sake of living or for the sake of others who are likewise doomed to
die, does not satisfy the soul, what is the good of living? Our best
remedy is death." And thus it is that we chant the praises of the
never-ending rest because of our dread of it, and speak of liberating
death.
Leopardi, the poet of sorrow, of annihilation, having lost the ultimate
illusion, that of believing in his immortality--
_Peri l'inganno estremo
ch'eterno io mi credei_,
spoke to his heart of _l'infinita vanitá del tutto_, and perceived how
close is the kinship between love and death, and how "when love is born
deep down in the heart, simultaneously a languid and weary desire to die
is felt in the breast." The greater part of those who seek death at
their own hand are moved thereto by love; it is the supreme longing for
life, for more life, the longing to prolong and perpetuate life, that
urges them to death, once they are persuaded of the vanity of this
longing.
The problem is tragic and eternal, and the more we seek to escape from
it, the more it thrusts itself upon us. Four-and-twenty centuries ago,
in his dialogue on the immortality of the soul, the serene Plato--but
was he serene?--spoke of the uncertainty of our dream of being immortal
and of the _risk_ that the dream might be vain, and from his own soul
there escaped this profound cry--Glorious is the risk!--_kalos
gar o kindunos_, glorious is the risk that we are able to run of our
souls never dying--a sentence that was the germ of Pascal's famous
argument of the wager.
Faced with this risk, I am presented with arguments designed to
eliminate it, arguments demonstrating the absurdity of the belief in the
immortality of the soul; but these arguments fail to make any impression
upon me, for they are reasons and nothing more than reasons, and it is
not with reasons that the heart is appeased. I do not want to die--no; I
neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for
ever and ever and ever. I want this "I" to live--this poor "I" that I am
and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore the problem of
the duration of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me.
I am the centre of my universe, the centre of the universe, and in my
supreme anguish I cry with Michelet, "Mon moi, ils m'arrachent mon moi!"
What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own
soul? (Matt. xvi. 26). Egoism, you say? There is nothing more universal
than the individual, for what is the property of each is the property of
all. Each man is worth more than the whole of humanity, nor will it do
to sacrifice each to all save in so far as all sacrifice themselves to
each. That which we call egoism is the principle of psychic gravity, the
necessary postulate. "Love thy neighbour as thyself," we are told, the
presupposition being that each man loves himself; and it is not said
"Love thyself." And, nevertheless, we do not know how to love ourselves.
Put aside the persistence of your own self and ponder what they tell
you. Sacrifice yourself to your children! And sacrifice yourself to them
because they are yours, part and prolongation of yourself, and they in
their turn will sacrifice themselves to their children, and these
children to theirs, and so it will go on without end, a sterile
sacrifice by which nobody profits. I came into the world to create my
self, and what is to become of all our selves? Live for the True, the
Good, the Beautiful! We shall see presently the supreme vanity and the
supreme insincerity of this hypocritical attitude.
"That art thou!" they tell me with the Upanishads. And I answer: Yes, I
am that, if that is I and all is mine, and mine the totality of things.
As mine I love the All, and I love my neighbour because he lives in me
and is part of my consciousness, because he is like me, because he is
mine.
Oh, to prolong this blissful moment, to sleep, to eternalize oneself in
it! Here and now, in this discreet and diffused light, in this lake of
quietude, the storm of the heart appeased and stilled the echoes of the
world! Insatiable desire now sleeps and does not even dream; use and
wont, blessed use and wont, are the rule of my eternity; my disillusions
have died with my memories, and with my hopes my fears.
And they come seeking to deceive us with a deceit of deceits, telling us
that nothing is lost, that everything is transformed, shifts and
changes, that not the least particle of matter is annihilated, not the
least impulse of energy is lost, and there are some who pretend to
console us with this! Futile consolation! It is not my matter or my
energy that is the cause of my disquiet, for they are not mine if I
myself am not mine--that is, if I am not eternal. No, my longing is not
to be submerged in the vast All, in an infinite and eternal Matter or
Energy, or in God; not to be possessed by God, but to possess Him, to
become myself God, yet without ceasing to be I myself, I who am now
speaking to you. Tricks of monism avail us nothing; we crave the
substance and not the shadow of immortality.
Materialism, you say? Materialism? Without doubt; but either our spirit
is likewise some kind of matter or it is nothing. I dread the idea of
having to tear myself away from my flesh; I dread still more the idea of
having to tear myself away from everything sensible and material, from
all substance. Yes, perhaps this merits the name of materialism; and if
I grapple myself to God with all my powers and all my senses, it is that
He may carry me in His arms beyond death, looking into these eyes of
mine with the light of His heaven when the light of earth is dimming in
them for ever. Self-illusion? Talk not to me of illusion--let me live!
They also call this pride--"stinking pride" Leopardi called it--and they
ask us who are we, vile earthworms, to pretend to immortality; in virtue
of what? wherefore? by what right? "In virtue of what?" you ask; and I
reply, In virtue of what do we now live? "Wherefore?"--and wherefore do
we now exist? "By what right?"--and by what right are we? To exist is
just as gratuitous as to go on existing for ever. Do not let us talk of
merit or of right or of the wherefore of our longing, which is an end in
itself, or we shall lose our reason in a vortex of absurdities. I do not
claim any right or merit; it is only a necessity; I need it in order to
live.
And you, who are you? you ask me; and I reply with Obermann, "For the
universe, nothing; for myself, everything!" Pride? Is it pride to want
to be immortal? Unhappy men that we are! 'Tis a tragic fate, without a
doubt, to have to base the affirmation of immortality upon the insecure
and slippery foundation of the desire for immortality; but to condemn
this desire on the ground that we believe it to have been proved to be
unattainable, without undertaking the proof, is merely supine. I am
dreaming ...? Let me dream, if this dream is my life. Do not awaken me
from it. I believe in the immortal origin of this yearning for
immortality, which is the very substance of my soul. But do I really
believe in it ...? And wherefore do you want to be immortal? you ask me,
wherefore? Frankly, I do not understand the question, for it is to ask
the reason of the reason, the end of the end, the principle of the
principle.
But these are things which it is impossible to discuss.
It is related in the book of the Acts of the Apostles how wherever Paul
went the Jews, moved with envy, were stirred up to persecute him. They
stoned him in Iconium and Lystra, cities of Lycaonia, in spite of the
wonders that he worked therein; they scourged him in Philippi of
Macedonia and persecuted his brethren in Thessalonica and Berea. He
arrived at Athens, however, the noble city of the intellectuals, over
which brooded the sublime spirit of Plato--the Plato of the gloriousness
of the risk of immortality; and there Paul disputed with Epicureans and
Stoics. And some said of him, "What doth this babbler (_spermologos_)
mean?" and others, "He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods"
(Acts xvii. 18), "and they took him and brought him unto Areopagus,
saying, May we know what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest, is?
for thou bringest certain strange things to our ears; we would know,
therefore, what these things mean" (verses 19-20). And then follows that
wonderful characterization of those Athenians of the decadence, those
dainty connoisseurs of the curious, "for all the Athenians and strangers
which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or
to hear some new thing" (verse 21). A wonderful stroke which depicts for
us the condition of mind of those who had learned from the _Odyssey_
that the gods plot and achieve the destruction of mortals in order that
their posterity may have something to narrate!
Here Paul stands, then, before the subtle Athenians, before the
_græuli_, men of culture and tolerance, who are ready to welcome and
examine every doctrine, who neither stone nor scourge nor imprison any
man for professing these or those doctrines--here he stands where
liberty of conscience is respected and every opinion is given an
attentive hearing. And he raises his voice in the midst of the Areopagus
and speaks to them as it was fitting to speak to the cultured citizens
of Athens, and all listen to him, agog to hear the latest novelty. But
when he begins to speak to them of the resurrection of the dead their
stock of patience and tolerance comes to an end, and some mock him, and
others say: "We will hear thee again of this matter!" intending not to
hear him. And a similar thing happened to him at Cæsarea when he came
before the Roman prætor Felix, likewise a broad-minded and cultured man,
who mitigated the hardships of his imprisonment, and wished to hear and
did hear him discourse of righteousness and of temperance; but when he
spoke of the judgement to come, Felix said, terrified (_emphobos
genomenos_): "Go thy way for this time; when I have a convenient season
I will call for thee" (Acts xxiv. 22-25). And in his audience before
King Agrippa, when Festus the governor heard him speak of the
resurrection of the dead, he exclaimed: "Thou art mad, Paul; much
learning hath made thee mad" (Acts xxvi. 24).
Whatever of truth there may have been in Paul's discourse in the
Areopagus, and even if there were none, it is certain that this
admirable account plainly shows how far Attic tolerance goes and where
the patience of the intellectuals ends. They all listen to you, calmly
and smilingly, and at times they encourage you, saying: "That's
strange!" or, "He has brains!" or "That's suggestive," or "How fine!" or
"Pity that a thing so beautiful should not be true!" or "this makes one
think!" But as soon as you speak to them of resurrection and life after
death, they lose their patience and cut short your remarks and exclaim,
"Enough of this! we will talk about this another day!" And it is about
this, my poor Athenians, my intolerant intellectuals, it is about this
that I am going to talk to you here.
And even if this belief be absurd, why is its exposition less tolerated
than that of others much more absurd? Why this manifest hostility to
such a belief? Is it fear? Is it, perhaps, spite provoked by inability
to share it?
And sensible men, those who do not intend to let themselves be deceived,
keep on dinning into our ears the refrain that it is no use giving way
to folly and kicking against the pricks, for what cannot be is
impossible. The manly attitude, they say, is to resign oneself to fate;
since we are not immortal, do not let us want to be so; let us submit
ourselves to reason without tormenting ourselves about what is
irremediable, and so making life more gloomy and miserable. This
obsession, they add, is a disease. Disease, madness, reason ... the
everlasting refrain! Very well then--No! I do not submit to reason, and
I rebel against it, and I persist in creating by the energy of faith my
immortalizing God, and in forcing by my will the stars out of their
courses, for if we had faith as a grain of mustard seed we should say to
that mountain, "Remove hence," and it would remove, and nothing would be
impossible to us (Matt. xvii. 20).
There you have that "thief of energies," as he[12] so obtusely called
Christ who sought to wed nihilism with the struggle for existence, and
he talks to you about courage. His heart craved the eternal all while
his head convinced him of nothingness, and, desperate and mad to defend
himself from himself, he cursed that which he most loved. Because he
could not be Christ, he blasphemed against Christ. Bursting with his own
self, he wished himself unending and dreamed his theory of eternal
recurrence, a sorry counterfeit of immortality, and, full of pity for
himself, he abominated all pity. And there are some who say that his is
the philosophy of strong men! No, it is not. My health and my strength
urge me to perpetuate myself. His is the doctrine of weaklings who
aspire to be strong, but not of the strong who are strong. Only the
feeble resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire
for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for
perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance
of life overflows upon the other side of death.
Before this terrible mystery of mortality, face to face with the Sphinx,
man adopts different attitudes and seeks in various ways to console
himself for having been born. And now it occurs to him to take it as a
diversion, and he says to himself with Renan that this universe is a
spectacle that God presents to Himself, and that it behoves us to carry
out the intentions of the great Stage-Manager and contribute to make the
spectacle the most brilliant and the most varied that may be. And they
have made a religion of art, a cure for the metaphysical evil, and
invented the meaningless phrase of art for art's sake.
And it does not suffice them. If the man who tells you that he writes,
paints, sculptures, or sings for his own amusement, gives his work to
the public, he lies; he lies if he puts his name to his writing,
painting, statue, or song. He wishes, at the least, to leave behind a
shadow of his spirit, something that may survive him. If the _Imitation
of Christ_ is anonymous, it is because its author sought the eternity of
the soul and did not trouble himself about that of the name. The man of
letters who shall tell you that he despises fame is a lying rascal. Of
Dante, the author of those three-and-thirty vigorous verses (_Purg._ xi.
85-117) on the vanity of worldly glory, Boccaccio says that he relished
honours and pomps more perhaps than suited with his conspicuous virtue.
The keenest desire of his condemned souls is that they may be remembered
and talked of here on earth, and this is the chief solace that lightens
the darkness of his Inferno. And he himself confessed that his aim in
expounding the concept of Monarchy was not merely that he might be of
service to others, but that he might win for his own glory the palm of
so great prize (_De Monarchia_, lib. i., cap. i.). What more? Even of
that holy man, seemingly the most indifferent to worldly vanity, the
Poor Little One of Assisi, it is related in the _Legenda Trium Sociorum_
that he said: _Adhuc adorabor per totum mundum!_--You will see how I
shall yet be adored by all the world! (II. _Celano_, i. 1). And even of
God Himself the theologians say that He created the world for the
manifestation of His glory.
When doubts invade us and cloud our faith in the immortality of the
soul, a vigorous and painful impulse is given to the anxiety to
perpetuate our name and fame, to grasp at least a shadow of immortality.
And hence this tremendous struggle to singularize ourselves, to survive
in some way in the memory of others and of posterity. It is this
struggle, a thousand times more terrible than the struggle for life,
that gives its tone, colour, and character to our society, in which the
medieval faith in the immortal soul is passing away. Each one seeks to
affirm himself, if only in appearance.
Once the needs of hunger are satisfied--and they are soon satisfied--the
vanity, the necessity--for it is a necessity--arises of imposing
ourselves upon and surviving in others. Man habitually sacrifices his
life to his purse, but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity. He boasts
even of his weaknesses and his misfortunes, for want of anything better
to boast of, and is like a child who, in order to attract attention,
struts about with a bandaged finger. And vanity, what is it but
eagerness for survival?
The vain man is in like case with the avaricious--he takes the means for
the end; forgetting the end he pursues the means for its own sake and
goes no further. The seeming to be something, conducive to being it,
ends by forming our objective. We need that others should believe in our
superiority to them in order that we may believe in it ourselves, and
upon their belief base our faith in our own persistence, or at least in
the persistence of our fame. We are more grateful to him who
congratulates us on the skill with which we defend a cause than we are
to him who recognizes the truth or the goodness of the cause itself. A
rabid mania for originality is rife in the modern intellectual world and
characterizes all individual effort. We would rather err with genius
than hit the mark with the crowd. Rousseau has said in his _Émile_ (book
iv.): "Even though philosophers should be in a position to discover the
truth, which of them would take any interest in it? Each one knows well
that his system is not better founded than the others, but he supports
it because it is his. There is not a single one of them who, if he came
to know the true and the false, would not prefer the falsehood that he
had found to the truth discovered by another. Where is the philosopher
who would not willingly deceive mankind for his own glory? Where is he
who in the secret of his heart does not propose to himself any other
object than to distinguish himself? Provided that he lifts himself above
the vulgar, provided that he outshines the brilliance of his
competitors, what does he demand more? The essential thing is to think
differently from others. With believers he is an atheist; with atheists
he would be a believer." How much substantial truth there is in these
gloomy confessions of this man of painful sincerity!
This violent struggle for the perpetuation of our name extends backwards
into the past, just as it aspires to conquer the future; we contend
with the dead because we, the living, are obscured beneath their shadow.
We are jealous of the geniuses of former times, whose names, standing
out like the landmarks of history, rescue the ages from oblivion. The
heaven of fame is not very large, and the more there are who enter it
the less is the share of each. The great names of the past rob us of our
place in it; the space which they fill in the popular memory they usurp
from us who aspire to occupy it. And so we rise up in revolt against
them, and hence the bitterness with which all those who seek after fame
in the world of letters judge those who have already attained it and are
in enjoyment of it. If additions continue to be made to the wealth of
literature, there will come a day of sifting, and each one fears lest he
be caught in the meshes of the sieve. In attacking the masters,
irreverent youth is only defending itself; the iconoclast or
image-breaker is a Stylite who erects himself as an image, an _icon_.
"Comparisons are odious," says the familiar adage, and the reason is
that we wish to be unique. Do not tell Fernandez that he is one of the
most talented Spaniards of the younger generation, for though he will
affect to be gratified by the eulogy he is really annoyed by it; if,
however, you tell him that he is the most talented man in Spain--well
and good! But even that is not sufficient: one of the worldwide
reputations would be more to his liking, but he is only fully satisfied
with being esteemed the first in all countries and all ages. The more
alone, the nearer to that unsubstantial immortality, the immortality of
the name, for great names diminish one another.
What is the meaning of that irritation which we feel when we believe
that we are robbed of a phrase, or a thought, or an image, which we
believed to be our own, when we are plagiarized? Robbed? Can it indeed
be ours once we have given it to the public? Only because it is ours we
prize it; and we are fonder of the false money that preserves our
impress than of the coin of pure gold from which our effigy and our
legend has been effaced. It very commonly happens that it is when the
name of a writer is no longer in men's mouths that he most influences
his public, his mind being then disseminated and infused in the minds of
those who have read him, whereas he was quoted chiefly when his thoughts
and sayings, clashing with those generally received, needed the
guarantee of a name. What was his now belongs to all, and he lives in
all. But for him the garlands have faded, and he believes himself to
have failed. He hears no more either the applause or the silent tremor
of the heart of those who go on reading him. Ask any sincere artist
which he would prefer, whether that his work should perish and his
memory survive, or that his work should survive and his memory perish,
and you will see what he will tell you, if he is really sincere. When a
man does not work merely in order to live and carry on, he works in
order to survive. To work for the work's sake is not work but play. And
play? We will talk about that later on.
A tremendous passion is this longing that our memory may be rescued, if
it is possible, from the oblivion which overtakes others. From it
springs envy, the cause, according to the biblical narrative, of the
crime with which human history opened: the murder of Abel by his brother
Cain. It was not a struggle for bread--it was a struggle to survive in
God, in the divine memory. Envy is a thousand times more terrible than
hunger, for it is spiritual hunger. If what we call the problem of life,
the problem of bread, were once solved, the earth would be turned into a
hell by the emergence in a more violent form of the struggle for
survival.
For the sake of a name man is ready to sacrifice not only life but
happiness--life as a matter of course. "Let me die, but let my fame
live!" exclaimed Rodrigo Arias in _Las Mocedades del Cid_ when he fell
mortally wounded by Don Ordóñez de Lara. "Courage, Girolamo, for you
will long be remembered; death is bitter, but fame eternal!" cried
Girolamo Olgiati, the disciple of Cola Montano and the murderer,
together with his fellow-conspirators Lampugnani and Visconti, of
Galeazzo Sforza, tyrant of Milan. And there are some who covet even the
gallows for the sake of acquiring fame, even though it be an infamous
fame: _avidus malæ famæ_, as Tacitus says.
And this erostratism, what is it at bottom but the longing for
immortality, if not for substantial and concrete immortality, at any
rate for the shadowy immortality of the name?
And in this there are degrees. If a man despises the applause of the
crowd of to-day, it is because he seeks to survive in renewed minorities
for generations. "Posterity is an accumulation of minorities," said
Gounod. He wishes to prolong himself in time rather than in space. The
crowd soon overthrows its own idols and the statue lies broken at the
foot of the pedestal without anyone heeding it; but those who win the
hearts of the elect will long be the objects of a fervent worship in
some shrine, small and secluded no doubt, but capable of preserving them
from the flood of oblivion. The artist sacrifices the extensiveness of
his fame to its duration; he is anxious rather to endure for ever in
some little corner than to occupy a brilliant second place in the whole
universe; he prefers to be an atom, eternal and conscious of himself,
rather than to be for a brief moment the consciousness of the whole
universe; he sacrifices infinitude to eternity.
And they keep on wearying our ears with this chorus of Pride! stinking
Pride! Pride, to wish to leave an ineffaceable name? Pride? It is like
calling the thirst for riches a thirst for pleasure. No, it is not so
much the longing for pleasure that drives us poor folk to seek money as
the terror of poverty, just as it was not the desire for glory but the
terror of hell that drove men in the Middle Ages to the cloister with
its _acedia_. Neither is this wish to leave a name pride, but terror of
extinction. We aim at being all because in that we see the only means of
escaping from being nothing. We wish to save our memory--at any rate,
our memory. How long will it last? At most as long as the human race
lasts. And what if we shall save our memory in God?
Unhappy, I know well, are these confessions; but from the depth of
unhappiness springs new life, and only by draining the lees of spiritual
sorrow can we at last taste the honey that lies at the bottom of the cup
of life. Anguish leads us to consolation.
This thirst for eternal life is appeased by many, especially by the
simple, at the fountain of religious faith; but to drink of this is not
given to all. The institution whose primordial end is to protect this
faith in the personal immortality of the soul is Catholicism; but
Catholicism has sought to rationalize this faith by converting religion
into theology, by offering a philosophy, and a philosophy of the
thirteenth century, as a basis for vital belief. This and its
consequences we will now proceed to examine.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] Each time that I consider that it is my lot to die, I spread my
cloak upon the ground and am never surfeited with sleeping.
[12] Nietzsche.
IV
THE ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM
Let us now approach the Christian, Catholic, Pauline, or Athanasian
solution of our inward vital problem, the hunger of immortality.
Christianity sprang from the confluence of two mighty spiritual
streams--the one Judaic, the other Hellenic--each of which had already
influenced the other, and Rome finally gave it a practical stamp and
social permanence.
It has been asserted, perhaps somewhat precipitately, that primitive
Christianity was an-eschatological, that faith in another life after
death is not clearly manifested in it, but rather a belief in the
proximate end of the world and establishment of the kingdom of God, a
belief known as chiliasm. But were they not fundamentally one and the
same thing? Faith in the immortality of the soul, the nature of which
was not perhaps very precisely defined, may be said to be a kind of
tacit understanding or supposition underlying the whole of the Gospel;
and it is the mental orientation of many of those who read it to-day, an
orientation contrary to that of the Christians from among whom the
Gospel sprang, that prevents them from seeing this. Without doubt all
that about the second coming of Christ, when he shall come among the
clouds, clothed with majesty and great power, to judge the quick and the
dead, to open to some the kingdom of heaven and to cast others into
Gehenna, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, may be
understood in a chiliastic sense; and it is even said of Christ in the
Gospel (Mark ix. I), that there were with him some who should not taste
of death till they had seen the kingdom of God--that is, that the
kingdom should come during their generation. And in the same chapter,
verse 10, it is said of Peter and James and John, who went up with Jesus
to the Mount of Transfiguration and heard him say that he would rise
again from the dead, that "they kept that saying within themselves,
questioning one with another what the rising from the dead should mean."
And at all events the Gospel was written when this belief, the basis and
_raison d'être_ of Christianity, was in process of formation. See Matt.
xxii. 29-32; Mark xii. 24-27; Luke xvi. 22-31; xx. 34-37; John v. 24-29;
vi. 40, 54, 58; viii. 51; xi. 25, 56; xiv. 2, 19. And, above all, that
passage in Matt. xxvii. 52, which tells how at the resurrection of
Christ "many bodies of the saints which slept arose."
And this was not a natural resurrection. No; the Christian faith was
born of the faith that Jesus did not remain dead, but that God raised
him up again, and that this resurrection was a fact; but this did not
presuppose a mere immortality of the soul in the philosophical sense
(see Harnack, _Dogmengeschichte_, Prolegomena, v. 4). For the first
Fathers of the Church themselves the immortality of the soul was not a
thing pertaining to the natural order; the teaching of the Divine
Scriptures, as Nimesius said, sufficed for its demonstration, and it
was, according to Lactantius, a gift--and as such gratuitous--of God.
But more of this later.
Christianity sprang, as we have said, from two great spiritual
streams--the Judaic and the Hellenic--each one of which had arrived on
its account, if not at a precise definition of, at any rate at a
definite yearning for, another life. Among the Jews faith in another
life was neither general nor clear; but they were led to it by faith in
a personal and living God, the formation of which faith comprises all
their spiritual history.
Jahwé, the Judaic God, began by being one god among many others--the
God of the people of Israel, revealed among the thunders of the tempest
on Mount Sinai. But he was so jealous that he demanded that worship
should be paid to him alone, and it was by way of monocultism that the
Jews arrived at monotheism. He was adored as a living force, not as a
metaphysical entity, and he was the god of battles. But this God of
social and martial origin, to whose genesis we shall have to return
later, became more inward and personal in the prophets, and in becoming
more inward and personal he thereby became more individual and more
universal. He is the Jahwé who, instead of loving Israel because Israel
is his son, takes Israel for a son because he loves him (Hosea xi. 1).
And faith in the personal God, in the Father of men, carries with it
faith in the eternalization of the individual man--a faith which had
already dawned in Pharisaism even before Christ.
Hellenic culture, on its side, ended by discovering death; and to
discover death is to discover the hunger of immortality. This longing
does not appear in the Homeric poems, which are not initial, but final,
in their character, marking not the start but the close of a
civilization. They indicate the transition from the old religion of
Nature, of Zeus, to the more spiritual religion of Apollo--of
redemption. But the popular and inward religion of the Eleusinian
mysteries, the worship of souls and ancestors, always persisted
underneath. "In so far as it is possible to speak of a Delphic theology,
among its more important elements must be counted the belief in the
continuation of the life of souls after death in its popular forms, and
in the worship of the souls of the dead."[13] There were the Titanic and
the Dionysiac elements, and it was the duty of man, according to the
Orphic doctrine, to free himself from the fetters of the body, in which
the soul was like a captive in a prison (see Rohde, _Psyche_, "Die
Orphiker," 4). The Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence is an Orphic
idea. But the idea of the immortality of the soul was not a
philosophical principle. The attempt of Empedocles to harmonize a
hylozoistic system with spiritualism proved that a philosophical natural
science cannot by itself lead to a corroboration of the axiom of the
perpetuity of the individual soul; it could only serve as a support to a
theological speculation. It was by a contradiction that the first Greek
philosophers affirmed immortality, by abandoning natural philosophy and
intruding into theology, by formulating not an Apollonian but a
Dionysiac and Orphic dogma. But "an immortality of the soul as such, in
virtue of its own nature and condition as an imperishable divine force
in the mortal body, was never an object of popular Hellenic belief"
(Rohde, _op. cit._).
Recall the _Phædo_ of Plato and the neo-platonic lucubrations. In them
the yearning for personal immortality already shows itself--a yearning
which, as it was left totally unsatisfied by reason, produced the
Hellenic pessimism. For, as Pfleiderer very well observes
(_Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtliche Grundlage_, 3. Berlin, 1896),
"no people ever came upon the earth so serene and sunny as the Greeks in
the youthful days of their historical existence ... but no people
changed so completely their idea of the value of life. The Hellenism
which ended in the religious speculations of neo-pythagorism and
neo-platonism viewed this world, which had once appeared to it so joyous
and radiant, as an abode of darkness and error, and earthly existence as
a period of trial which could never be too quickly traversed." Nirvana
is an Hellenic idea.
Thus Jews and Greeks each arrived independently at the real discovery
of death--a discovery which occasions, in peoples as in men, the
entrance into spiritual puberty, the realization of the tragic sense of
life, and it is then that the living God is begotten by humanity. The
discovery of death is that which reveals God to us, and the death of the
perfect man, Christ, was the supreme revelation of death, being the
death of the man who ought not to have died yet did die.
Such a discovery--that of immortality--prepared as it was by the Judaic
and Hellenic religious processes, was a specifically Christian
discovery. And its full achievement was due above all to Paul of Tarsus,
the hellenizing Jew and Pharisee. Paul had not personally known Jesus,
and hence he discovered him as Christ. "It may be said that the theology
of the Apostle Paul is, in general, the first Christian theology. For
him it was a necessity; it was, in a certain sense, his substitution for
the lack of a personal knowledge of Jesus," says Weizsäcker (_Das
apostolische Zeitalter der christlichen Kirche_. Freiburg-i.-B., 1892).
He did not know Jesus, but he felt him born again in himself, and thus
he could say, "Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in
me."[14] And he preached the Cross, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and
unto the Greeks foolishness (I Cor. i. 23), and the central doctrine for
the converted Apostle was that of the resurrection of Christ. The
important thing for him was that Christ had been made man and had died
and had risen again, and not what he did in his life--not his ethical
work as a teacher, but his religious work as a giver of immortality. And
he it was who wrote those immortal words: "Now if Christ be preached
that He rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no
resurrection from the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead,
then is Christ not risen; and if Christ be not risen, then is our
preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.... Then they also which are
fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope
in Christ, we are of all men most miserable" (I Cor. xv. 12-19).
And it is possible to affirm that thenceforward he who does not believe
in the bodily resurrection of Christ may be Christophile but cannot be
specifically Christian. It is true that a Justin Martyr could say that
"all those are Christians who live in accordance with reason, even
though they may be deemed to be atheists, as, among the Greeks, Socrates
and Heraclitus and other such"; but this martyr, is he a martyr--that is
to say a witness--of Christianity? No.
And it was around this dogma, inwardly experienced by Paul, the dogma of
the resurrection and immortality of Christ, the guarantee of the
resurrection and immortality of each believer, that the whole of
Christology was built up. The God-man, the incarnate Word, came in order
that man, according to his mode, might be made God--that is, immortal.
And the Christian God, the Father of Christ, a God necessarily
anthropomorphic, is He who--as the Catechism of Christian Doctrine which
we were made to learn by heart at school says--created the world for
man, for each man. And the end of redemption, in spite of appearances
due to an ethical deflection of a dogma properly religious, was to save
us from death rather than from sin, or from sin in so far as sin implies
death. And Christ died, or rather rose again, for _me_, for each one of
us. And a certain solidarity was established between God and His
creature. Malebranche said that the first man fell _in order that_
Christ might redeem us, rather than that Christ redeemed us _because_
man had fallen.
After the death of Paul years passed, and generations of Christianity
wrought upon this central dogma and its consequences in order to
safeguard faith in the immortality of the individual soul, and the
Council of Nicæa came, and with it the formidable Athanasius, whose
name is still a battle-cry, an incarnation of the popular faith.
Athanasius was a man of little learning but of great faith, and above
all of popular faith, devoured by the hunger of immortality. And he
opposed Arianism, which, like Unitarian and Socinian Protestantism,
threatened, although unknowingly and unintentionally, the foundation of
that belief. For the Arians, Christ was first and foremost a teacher--a
teacher of morality, the wholly perfect man, and therefore the guarantee
that we may all attain to supreme perfection; but Athanasius felt that
Christ cannot make us gods if he has not first made himself God; if his
Divinity had been communicated, he could not have communicated it to us.
"He was not, therefore," he said, "first man and then became God; but He
was first God and then became man in order that He might the better
deify us (_theopoiêsê_)" (_Orat._ i. 39). It was not the Logos of
the philosophers, the cosmological Logos, that Athanasius knew and
adored;[15] and thus he instituted a separation between nature and
revelation. The Athanasian or Nicene Christ, who is the Catholic Christ,
is not the cosmological, nor even, strictly, the ethical Christ; he is
the eternalizing, the deifying, the religious Christ. Harnack says of
this Christ, the Christ of Nicene or Catholic Christology, that he is
essentially docetic--that is, apparential--because the process of the
divinization of the man in Christ was made in the interests of
eschatology. But which is the real Christ? Is it, indeed, that so-called
historical Christ of rationalist exegesis who is diluted for us in a
myth or in a social atom?
This same Harnack, a Protestant rationalist, tells us that Arianism or
Unitarianism would have been the death of Christianity, reducing it to
cosmology and ethics, and that it served only as a bridge whereby the
learned might pass over to Catholicism--that is to say, from reason to
faith. To this same learned historian of dogmas it appears to be an
indication of a perverse state of things that the man Athanasius, who
saved Christianity as the religion of a living communion with God,
should have obliterated the Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus,
whom neither Paul nor Athanasius knew personally, nor yet Harnack
himself. Among Protestants, this historical Jesus is subjected to the
scalpel of criticism, while the Catholic Christ lives, the really
historical Christ, he who lives throughout the centuries guaranteeing
the faith in personal immortality and personal salvation.
And Athanasius had the supreme audacity of faith, that of asserting
things mutually contradictory: "The complete contradiction that exists
in the _homoousios_ carried in its train a whole army of
contradictions which increased as thought advanced," says Harnack. Yes,
so it was, and so it had to be. And he adds: "Dogma took leave for ever
of clear thinking and tenable concepts, and habituated itself to the
contra-rational." In truth, it drew closer to life, which is
contra-rational and opposed to clear thinking. Not only are judgements
of worth never rationalizable--they are anti-rational.
At Nicæa, then, as afterwards at the Vatican, victory rested with the
idiots--taking this word in its proper, primitive, and etymological
sense--the simple-minded, the rude and headstrong bishops, the
representatives of the genuine human spirit, the popular spirit, the
spirit that does not want to die, in spite of whatever reason may say,
and that seeks a guarantee, the most material possible, for this desire.
_Quid ad æternitatem?_ This is the capital question. And the Creed ends
with that phrase, _resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi
sæculi_--the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
In the cemetery of Mallona, in my native town of Bilbao, there is a
tombstone on which this verse is carved:
_Aunque estamos en polvo convertidos,
en Ti, Señor, nuestra esperanza fía,
que tornaremos a vivir vestidos
con la carne y la piel que nos cubria._[16]
"With the same bodies and souls that they had," as the Catechism says.
So much so, that it is orthodox Catholic doctrine that the happiness of
the blessed is not perfectly complete until they recover their bodies.
They lament in heaven, says our Brother Pedro Malón de Chaide of the
Order of St. Augustine, a Spaniard and a Basque,[17] and "this lament
springs from their not being perfectly whole in heaven, for only the
soul is there; and although they cannot suffer, because they see God, in
whom they unspeakably delight, yet with all this it appears that they
are not wholly content. They will be so when they are clothed with their
own bodies."
And to this central dogma of the resurrection in Christ and by Christ
corresponds likewise a central sacrament, the axis of popular Catholic
piety--the Sacrament of the Eucharist. In it is administered the body of
Christ, which is the bread of immortality.
This sacrament is genuinely realist--_dinglich_, as the Germans would
say--which may without great violence be translated "material." It is
the sacrament most genuinely _ex opere operato_, for which is
substituted among Protestants the idealistic sacrament of the word.
Fundamentally it is concerned with--and I say it with all possible
respect, but without wishing to sacrifice the expressiveness of the
phrase--the eating and drinking of God, the Eternalizer, the feeding
upon Him. Little wonder then if St. Teresa tells us that when she was
communicating in the monastery of the Incarnation and in the second year
of her being Prioress there, on the octave of St. Martin, and the
Father, Fr. Juan de la Cruz, divided the Host between her and another
sister, she thought that it was done not because there was any want of
Hosts, but because he wished to mortify her, "for I had told him how
much I delighted in Hosts of a large size. Yet I was not ignorant that
the size of the Host is of no moment, for I knew that our Lord is whole
and entire in the smallest particle." Here reason pulls one way, feeling
another. And what importance for this feeling have the thousand and one
difficulties that arise from reflecting rationally upon the mystery of
this sacrament? What is a divine body? And the body, in so far as it is
the body of Christ, is it divine? What is an immortal and immortalizing
body? What is substance separated from the accidents? Nowadays we have
greatly refined our notion of materiality and substantiality; but there
were even some among the Fathers of the Church to whom the immateriality
of God Himself was not a thing so clear and definite as it is for us.
And this sacrament of the Eucharist is the immortalizing sacrament _par
excellence_, and therefore the axis of popular Catholic piety, and if it
may be so said, the most specifically religious of sacraments.
For what is specific in the Catholic religion is immortalization and not
justification, in the Protestant sense. Rather is this latter ethical.
It was from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of
him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions--namely,
that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in
Catholicism.
The preoccupation of sin has never been such a matter of anguish, or at
any rate has never displayed itself with such an appearance of anguish,
among Catholics. The sacrament of Confession contributes to this. And
there persists, perhaps, among Catholics more than among Protestants
the substance of the primitive Judaic and pagan conception of sin as
something material and infectious and hereditary, which is cured by
baptism and absolution. In Adam all his posterity sinned, almost
materially, and his sin was transmitted as a material disease is
transmitted. Renan, whose education was Catholic, was right, therefore,
in calling to account the Protestant Amiel who accused him of not giving
due importance to sin. And, on the other hand, Protestantism, absorbed
in this preoccupation with justification, which in spite of its
religious guise was taken more in an ethical sense than anything else,
ends by neutralizing and almost obliterating eschatology; it abandons
the Nicene symbol, falls into an anarchy of creeds, into pure religious
individualism and a vague esthetic, ethical, or cultured religiosity.
What we may call "other-worldliness" (_Jenseitigkeit_) was obliterated
little by little by "this-worldliness" (_Diesseitigkeit_); and this in
spite of Kant, who wished to save it, but by destroying it. To its
earthly vocation and passive trust in God is due the religious
coarseness of Lutheranism, which was almost at the point of expiring in
the age of the Enlightenment, of the _Aufklärung_, and which pietism,
infusing into it something of the religious sap of Catholicism, barely
succeeded in galvanizing a little. Hence the exactness of the remarks of
Oliveira Martins in his magnificent _History of Iberian Civilization_,
in which he says (book iv., chap, iii.) that "Catholicism produced
heroes and Protestantism produced societies that are sensible, happy,
wealthy, free, as far as their outer institutions go, but incapable of
any great action, because their religion has begun by destroying in the
heart of man all that made him capable of daring and noble
self-sacrifice."
Take any of the dogmatic systems that have resulted from the latest
Protestant dissolvent analysis--that of Kaftan, the follower of Ritschl,
for example--and note the extent to which eschatology is reduced. And
his master, Albrecht Ritschl, himself says: "The question regarding the
necessity of justification or forgiveness can only be solved by
conceiving eternal life as the direct end and aim of that divine
operation. But if the idea of eternal life be applied merely to our
state in the next life, then its content, too, lies beyond all
experience, and cannot form the basis of knowledge of a scientific kind.
Hopes and desires, though marked by the strongest subjective certainty,
are not any the clearer for that, and contain in themselves no guarantee
of the completeness of what one hopes or desires. Clearness and
completeness of idea, however, are the conditions of comprehending
anything--_i.e._, of understanding the necessary connection between the
various elements of a thing, and between the thing and its given
presuppositions. The Evangelical article of belief, therefore, that
justification by faith establishes or brings with it assurance of
eternal life, is of no use theologically, so long as this purposive
aspect of justification cannot be verified in such experience as is
possible now" (_Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung_, vol. iii., chap. vii.,
52). All this is very rational, but ...
In the first edition of Melanchthon's _Loci Communes_, that of 1521, the
first Lutheran theological work, its author omits all Trinitarian and
Christological speculations, the dogmatic basis of eschatology. And Dr.
Hermann, professor at Marburg, the author of a book on the Christian's
commerce with God (_Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott_)--a book the
first chapter of which treats of the opposition between mysticism and
the Christian religion, and which is, according to Harnack, the most
perfect Lutheran manual--tells us in another place,[18] referring to
this Christological (or Athanasian) speculation, that "the effective
knowledge of God and of Christ, in which knowledge faith lives, is
something entirely different. Nothing ought to find a place in Christian
doctrine that is not capable of helping man to recognize his sins, to
obtain the grace of God, and to serve Him in truth. Until that
time--that is to say, until Luther--the Church had accepted much as
_doctrina sacra_ which cannot absolutely contribute to confer upon man
liberty of heart and tranquillity of conscience." For my part, I cannot
conceive the liberty of a heart or the tranquillity of a conscience that
are not sure of their perdurability after death. "The desire for the
soul's salvation," Hermann continues, "must at last have led men to the
knowledge and understanding of the effective doctrine of salvation." And
in his book on the Christian's commerce with God, this eminent Lutheran
doctor is continually discoursing upon trust in God, peace of
conscience, and an assurance of salvation that is not strictly and
precisely certainty of everlasting life, but rather certainty of the
forgiveness of sins.
And I have read in a Protestant theologian, Ernst Troeltsch, that in the
conceptual order Protestantism has attained its highest reach in music,
in which art Bach has given it its mightiest artistic expression. This,
then, is what Protestantism dissolves into--celestial music![19] On the
other hand we may say that the highest artistic expression of
Catholicism, or at least of Spanish Catholicism, is in the art that is
most material, tangible, and permanent--for the vehicle of sounds is
air--in sculpture and painting, in the Christ of Velasquez, that Christ
who is for ever dying, yet never finishes dying, in order that he may
give us life.
And yet Catholicism does not abandon ethics. No! No modern religion can
leave ethics on one side. But our religion--although its doctors may
protest against this--is fundamentally and for the most part a
compromise between eschatology and ethics; it is eschatology pressed
into the service of ethics. What else but this is that atrocity of the
eternal pains of hell, which agrees so ill with the Pauline
apocatastasis? Let us bear in mind those words which the _Theologica
Germanica_, the manual of mysticism that Luther read, puts into the
mouth of God: "If I must recompense your evil, I must recompense it with
good, for I am and have none other." And Christ said: "Father, forgive
them, for they know not what they do," and there is no man who perhaps
knows what he does. But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the
social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and
hence hell. Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly
eschatological, Protestantism predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is
a compromise between the two, although with the eschatological element
preponderating. The most authentic Catholic ethic, monastic asceticism,
is an ethic of eschatology, directed to the salvation of the individual
soul rather than to the maintenance of society. And in the cult of
virginity may there not perhaps be a certain obscure idea that to
perpetuate ourselves in others hinders our own personal perpetuation?
The ascetic morality is a negative morality. And, strictly, what is
important for a man is not to die, whether he sins or not. It is not
necessary to take very literally, but as a lyrical, or rather
rhetorical, effusion, the words of our famous sonnet--
_No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte
el cielo que me tienes prometido,_[20]
and the rest that follows.
The real sin--perhaps it is the sin against the Holy Ghost for which
there is no remission--is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for
oneself. The saying has been heard before now, here in Spain, that to be
a liberal--that is, a heretic--is worse than being an assassin, a thief,
or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose
infallibility protects us from reason.
And why be scandalized by the infallibility of a man, of the Pope? What
difference does it make whether it be a book that is infallible--the
Bible, or a society of men--the Church, or a single man? Does it make
any essential change in the rational difficulty? And since the
infallibility of a book or of a society of men is not more rational than
that of a single man, this supreme offence in the eyes of reason had to
be posited.
It is the vital asserting itself, and in order to assert itself it
creates, with the help of its enemy, the rational, a complete dogmatic
structure, and this the Church defends against rationalism, against
Protestantism, and against Modernism. The Church defends life. It stood
up against Galileo, and it did right; for his discovery, in its
inception and until it became assimilated to the general body of human
knowledge, tended to shatter the anthropomorphic belief that the
universe was created for man. It opposed Darwin, and it did right, for
Darwinism tends to shatter our belief that man is an exceptional animal,
created expressly to be eternalized. And lastly, Pius IX., the first
Pontiff to be proclaimed infallible, declared that he was irreconcilable
with the so-called modern civilization. And he did right.
Loisy, the Catholic ex-abbé, said: "I say simply this, that the Church
and theology have not looked with favour upon the scientific movement,
and that on certain decisive occasions, so far as it lay in their power,
they have hindered it. I say, above all, that Catholic teaching has not
associated itself with, or accommodated itself to, this movement.
Theology has conducted itself, and conducts itself still, as if it were
self-possessed of a science of nature and a science of history,
together with that general philosophy of nature and history which
results from a scientific knowledge of them. It might be supposed that
the domain of theology and that of science, distinct in principle and
even as defined by the Vatican Council, must not be distinct in
practice. Everything proceeds almost as if theology had nothing to learn
from modern science, natural or historical, and as if by itself it had
the power and the right to exercise a direct and absolute control over
all the activities of the human mind" (_Autour d'un Petit Livre_, 1903,
p. 211).
And such must needs be, and such in fact is, the Church's attitude in
its struggle with Modernism, of which Loisy was the learned and leading
exponent.
The recent struggle against Kantian and fideist Modernism is a struggle
for life. Is it indeed possible for life, life that seeks assurance of
survival, to tolerate that a Loisy, a Catholic priest, should affirm
that the resurrection of the Saviour is not a fact of the historical
order, demonstrable and demonstrated by the testimony of history alone?
Read, moreover, the exposition of the central dogma, that of the
resurrection of Jesus, in E. Le Roy's excellent work, _Dogme et
Critique_, and tell me if any solid ground is left for our hope to build
on. Do not the Modernists see that the question at issue is not so much
that of the immortal life of Christ, reduced, perhaps, to a life in the
collective Christian consciousness, as that of a guarantee of our own
personal resurrection of body as well as soul? This new psychological
apologetic appeals to the moral miracle, and we, like the Jews, seek for
a sign, something that can be taken hold of with all the powers of the
soul and with all the senses of the body. And with the hands and the
feet and the mouth, if it be possible.
But alas! we do not get it. Reason attacks, and faith, which does not
feel itself secure without reason, has to come to terms with it. And
hence come those tragic contradictions and lacerations of
consciousness. We need security, certainty, signs, and they give us
_motiva credibilitatis_--motives of credibility--upon which to establish
the _rationale obsequium_, and although faith precedes reason (_fides
præcedit rationem_), according to St. Augustine, this same learned
doctor and bishop sought to travel by faith to understanding (_per fidem
ad intellectum_), and to believe in order to understand (_credo ut
intelligam_). How far is this from that superb expression of
Tertullian--_et sepultus resurrexit, certum est quia impossibile
est!_--"and he was buried and rose again; it is certain because it is
impossible!" and his sublime _credo quia absurdum!_--the scandal of the
rationalists. How far from the _il faut s'abêtir_ of Pascal and from the
"human reason loves the absurd" of our Donoso Cortés, which he must have
learned from the great Joseph de Maistre!
And a first foundation-stone was sought in the authority of tradition
and the revelation of the word of God, and the principle of unanimous
consent was arrived at. _Quod apud multos unum invenitur, non est
erratum, sed traditum_, said Tertullian; and Lamennais added, centuries
later, that "certitude, the principle of life and intelligence ... is,
if I may be allowed the expression, a social product."[21] But here, as
in so many cases, the supreme formula was given by that great Catholic,
whose Catholicism was of the popular and vital order, Count Joseph de
Maistre, when he wrote: "I do not believe that it is possible to show a
single opinion of universal utility that is not true."[22] Here you have
the Catholic hall-mark--the deduction of the truth of a principle from
its supreme goodness or utility. And what is there of greater, of more
sovereign utility, than the immortality of the soul? "As all is
uncertain, either we must believe all men or none," said Lactantius; but
that great mystic and ascetic, Blessed Heinrich Seuse, the Dominican,
implored the Eternal Wisdom for one word affirming that He was love, and
when the answer came, "All creatures proclaim that I am love," Seuse
replied, "Alas! Lord, that does not suffice for a yearning soul." Faith
feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with tradition,
nor with authority. It seeks the support of its enemy, reason.
And thus scholastic theology was devised, and with it its
handmaiden--_ancilla theologiæ_--scholastic philosophy, and this
handmaiden turned against her mistress. Scholasticism, a magnificent
cathedral, in which all the problems of architectonic mechanism were
resolved for future ages, but a cathedral constructed of unbaked bricks,
gave place little by little to what is called natural theology and is
merely Christianity depotentialized. The attempt was even made, where it
was possible, to base dogmas upon reason, to show at least that if they
were indeed super-rational they were not contra-rational, and they were
reinforced with a philosophical foundation of Aristotelian-Neoplatonic
thirteenth-century philosophy. And such is the Thomism recommended by
Leo XIII. And now the question is not one of the enforcement of dogma
but of its philosophical, medieval, and Thomist interpretation. It is
not enough to believe that in receiving the consecrated Host we receive
the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ; we must needs negotiate all
those difficulties of transubstantiation and substance separated from
accidents, and so break with the whole of the modern rational conception
of substantiality.
But for this, implicit faith suffices--the faith of the coalheaver,[23]
the faith of those who, like St. Teresa (_Vida_, cap. xxv. 2), do not
wish to avail themselves of theology. "Do not ask me the reason of
that, for I am ignorant; Holy Mother Church possesses doctors who will
know how to answer you," as we were made to learn in the Catechism. It
was for this, among other things, that the priesthood was instituted,
that the teaching Church might be the depositary--"reservoir instead of
river," as Phillips Brooks said--of theological secrets. "The work of
the Nicene Creed," says Harnack (_Dogmengeschichte_, ii. 1, cap. vii.
3), "was a victory of the priesthood over the faith of the Christian
people. The doctrine of the Logos had already become unintelligible to
those who were not theologians. The setting up of the Niceno-Cappadocian
formula as the fundamental confession of the Church made it perfectly
impossible for the Catholic laity to get an inner comprehension of the
Christian Faith, taking as their guide the form in which it was
presented in the doctrine of the Church. The idea became more and more
deeply implanted in men's minds that Christianity was the revelation of
the unintelligible." And so, in truth, it is.
And why was this? Because faith--that is, Life--no longer felt sure of
itself. Neither traditionalism nor the theological positivism of Duns
Scotus sufficed for it; it sought to rationalize itself. And it sought
to establish its foundation--not, indeed, over against reason, where it
really is, but upon reason--that is to say, within reason--itself. The
nominalist or positivist or voluntarist position of Scotus--that which
maintains that law and truth depend, not so much upon the essence as
upon the free and inscrutable will of God--by accentuating its supreme
irrationality, placed religion in danger among the majority of believers
endowed with mature reason and not mere coalheavers. Hence the triumph
of the Thomist theological rationalism. It is no longer enough to
believe in the existence of God; but the sentence of anathema falls on
him who, though believing in it, does not believe that His existence is
demonstrable by rational arguments, or who believes that up to the
present nobody by means of these rational arguments has ever
demonstrated it irrefutably. However, in this connection the remark of
Pohle is perhaps capable of application: "If eternal salvation depended
upon mathematical axioms, we should have to expect that the most odious
human sophistry would attack their universal validity as violently as it
now attacks God, the soul, and Christ."[24]
The truth is, Catholicism oscillates between mysticism, which is the
inward experience of the living God in Christ, an intransmittible
experience, the danger of which, however, is that it absorbs our own
personality in God, and so does not save our vital longing--between
mysticism and the rationalism which it fights against (see Weizsäcker,
_op. cit._); it oscillates between religionized science and
scientificized religion. The apocalyptic enthusiasm changed little by
little into neo-platonic mysticism, which theology thrust further into
the background. It feared the excesses of the imagination which was
supplanting faith and creating gnostic extravagances. But it had to sign
a kind of pact with gnosticism and another with rationalism; neither
imagination nor reason allowed itself to be completely vanquished. And
thus the body of Catholic dogma became a system of contradictions, more
or less successfully harmonized. The Trinity was a kind of pact between
monotheism and polytheism, and humanity and divinity sealed a peace in
Christ, nature covenanted with grace, grace with free will, free will
with the Divine prescience, and so on. And it is perhaps true, as
Hermann says (_loc. cit._), that "as soon as we develop religious
thought to its logical conclusions, it enters into conflict with other
ideas which belong equally to the life of religion." And this it is that
gives to Catholicism its profound vital dialectic. But at what a cost?
At the cost, it must needs be said, of doing violence to the mental
exigencies of those believers in possession of an adult reason. It
demands from them that they shall believe all or nothing, that they
shall accept the complete totality of dogma or that they shall forfeit
all merit if the least part of it be rejected. And hence the result, as
the great Unitarian preacher Channing pointed out,[25] that in France
and Spain there are multitudes who have proceeded from rejecting Popery
to absolute atheism, because "the fact is, that false and absurd
doctrines, when exposed, have a natural tendency to beget scepticism in
those who received them without reflection. None are so likely to
believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much." Here
is, indeed, the terrible danger of believing too much. But no! the
terrible danger comes from another quarter--from seeking to believe with
the reason and not with life.
The Catholic solution of our problem, of our unique vital problem, the
problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of the individual soul,
satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life; but the attempt to
rationalize it by means of dogmatic theology fails to satisfy the
reason. And reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life. It
is no use seeking to force ourselves to consider as super-rational what
clearly appears to us to be contra-rational, neither is it any good
wishing to become coalheavers when we are not coalheavers.
Infallibility, a notion of Hellenic origin, is in its essence a
rationalistic category.
Let us now consider the rationalist or scientific solution--or, more
properly, dissolution--of our problem.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] Erwin Rohde, _Psyche_, "Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der
Griechen." Tübingen, 1907. Up to the present this is the leading work
dealing with the belief of the Greeks in the immortality of the soul.
[14] Gal. ii. 20.
[15] On all relating to this question see, among others, Harnack,
_Dogmengeschichte_, ii., Teil i., Buch vii., cap. i.
[16]
Though we are become dust,
In thee, O Lord, our hope confides,
That we shall live again clad
In the flesh and skin that once covered us.
[17] _Libra de la Conversión de la Magdelena_, part iv., chap. ix.
[18] In his exposition of Protestant dogma in _Systematische christliche
Religion_, Berlin, 1909, one of the series entitled _Die Kultur der
Gegenwart_, published by P. Hinneberg.
[19] The common use of the expression _música celestial_ to denote
"nonsense, something not worth listening to," lends it a satirical
byplay which disappears in the English rendering.--J.E.C.F.
[20] It is not Thy promised heaven, my God, that moves me to love Thee.
(Anonymous, sixteenth or seventeenth century. See _Oxford Book of
Spanish Verse_, No. 106.)
[21] _Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion_, part iii., chap.
i.
[22] _Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg_, x^{me} entretien.
[23] The allusion is to the traditional story of the coalheaver whom the
devil sought to convince of the irrationality of belief in the Trinity.
The coalheaver took the cloak that he was wearing and folded it in three
folds. "Here are three folds," he said, "and the cloak though threefold
is yet one." And the devil departed baffled.--J.E.C.F.
[24] Joseph Pohle, "Christlich Katolische Dogmatik," in _Systematische
Christliche Religion_, Berlin, 1909. _Die Kultur der Gegenwart_ series.
[25] "Objections to Unitarian Christianity Considered," 1816, in _The
Complete Works of William Ellery Channing, D.D._, London, 1884.
V
THE RATIONALIST DISSOLUTION
The great master of rationalist phenomenalism, David Hume, begins his
essay "On the Immortality of the Soul" with these decisive words: "It
appears difficult by the mere light of reason to prove the immortality
of the soul. The arguments in favour of it are commonly derived from
metaphysical, moral, or physical considerations. But it is really the
Gospel, and only the Gospel, that has brought to light life and
immortality." Which is equivalent to denying the rationality of the
belief that the soul of each one of us is immortal.
Kant, whose criticism found its point of departure in Hume, attempted to
establish the rationality of this longing for immortality and the belief
that it imports; and this is the real origin, the inward origin, of his
_Critique of Practical Reason_, and of his categorical imperative and of
his God. But in spite of all this, the sceptical affirmation of Hume
holds good. There is no way of proving the immortality of the soul
rationally. There are, on the other hand, ways of proving rationally its
mortality.
It would be not merely superfluous but ridiculous to enlarge here upon
the extent to which the individual human consciousness is dependent upon
the physical organism, pointing out how it comes to birth by slow
degrees according as the brain receives impressions from the outside
world, how it is temporarily suspended during sleep, swoons, and other
accidents, and how everything leads us to the rational conjecture that
death carries with it the loss of consciousness. And just as before our
birth we were not, nor have we any personal pre-natal memory, so after
our death we shall cease to be. This is the rational position.
The designation "soul" is merely a term used to denote the individual
consciousness in its integrity and continuity; and that this soul
undergoes change, that in like manner as it is integrated so it is
disintegrated, is a thing very evident. For Aristotle it was the
substantial form of the body--the entelechy, but not a substance. And
more than one modern has called it an epiphenomenon--an absurd term. The
appellation phenomenon suffices.
Rationalism--and by rationalism I mean the doctrine that abides solely
by reason, by objective truth--is necessarily materialist. And let not
idealists be scandalized thereby.
The truth is--it is necessary to be perfectly explicit in this
matter--that what we call materialism means for us nothing else but the
doctrine which denies the immortality of the individual soul, the
persistence of personal consciousness after death.
In another sense it may be said that, as we know what matter is no more
than we know what spirit is, and as matter is for us merely an idea,
materialism is idealism. In fact, and as regards our problem--the most
vital, the only really vital problem--it is all the same to say that
everything is matter as to say that everything is idea, or that
everything is energy, or whatever you please. Every monist system will
always seem to us materialist. The immortality of the soul is saved only
by the dualist systems--those which teach that human consciousness is
something substantially distinct and different from the other
manifestations of phenomena. And reason is naturally monist. For it is
the function of reason to understand and explain the universe, and in
order to understand and explain it, it is in no way necessary for the
soul to be an imperishable substance. For the purpose of explaining and
understanding our psychic life, for psychology, the hypothesis of the
soul is unnecessary. What was formerly called rational psychology, in
opposition to empirical psychology, is not psychology but metaphysics,
and very muddy metaphysics; neither is it rational, but profoundly
irrational, or rather contra-rational.
The pretended rational doctrine of the substantiality and spirituality
of the soul, with all the apparatus that accompanies it, is born simply
of the necessity which men feel of grounding upon reason their
inexpugnable longing for immortality and the subsequent belief in it.
All the sophistries which aim at proving that the soul is substance,
simple and incorruptible, proceed from this source. And further, the
very concept of substance, as it was fixed and defined by scholasticism,
a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept,
designed expressly to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.
William James, in the third of the lectures which he devoted to
pragmatism in the Lowell Institute in Boston, in December, 1906, and
January, 1907[26]--the weakest thing in all the work of the famous
American thinker, an extremely weak thing indeed--speaks as follows:
"Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and
made it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have
fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are
from every contact with them. Yet in one case scholasticism has proved
the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I
refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance
here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents
of the wafer do not change in the Lord's Supper, and yet it has become
the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance
solely. The bread-substance must have been withdrawn and the Divine
substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate
sensible properties. But though these do not alter, a tremendous
difference has been made--no less a one than this, that we who take the
sacrament now feed upon the very substance of Divinity. The
substance-notion breaks into life, with tremendous effect, if once you
allow that substances can separate from their accidents and exchange
these latter. This is the only pragmatic application of the
substance-idea with which I am acquainted; and it is obvious that it
will only be treated seriously by those who already believe in the 'real
presence' on independent grounds."
Now, leaving on one side the question as to whether it is good
theology--and I do not say good reasoning because all this lies outside
the sphere of reason--to confound the substance of the body--the body,
not the soul--of Christ with the very substance of Divinity--that is to
say, with God Himself--it would appear impossible that one so ardently
desirous of the immortality of the soul as William James, a man whose
whole philosophy aims simply at establishing this belief on rational
grounds, should not have perceived that the pragmatic application of the
concept of substance to the doctrine of the Eucharistic
transubstantiation is merely a consequence of its anterior application
to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. As I explained in the
preceding chapter, the Sacrament of the Eucharist is simply the
reflection of the belief in immortality; it is, for the believer, the
proof, by a mystical experience, that the soul is immortal and will
enjoy God eternally. And the concept of substance was born, above all
and before all, of the concept of the substantiality of the soul, and
the latter was affirmed in order to confirm faith in the persistence of
the soul after its separation from the body. Such was at the same time
its first pragmatic application and its origin. And subsequently we
have transferred this concept to external things. It is because I feel
myself to be substance--that is to say, permanent in the midst of my
changes--that I attribute substantiality to those agents exterior to me,
which are also permanent in the midst of their changes--just as the
concept of force is born of my sensation of personal effort in putting a
thing in motion.
Read carefully in the first part of the _Summa Theologica_ of St. Thomas
Aquinas the first six articles of question lxxv., which discuss whether
the human soul is body, whether it is something self-subsistent, whether
such also is the soul of the lower animals, whether the soul is the man,
whether the soul is composed of matter and form, and whether it is
incorruptible, and then say if all this is not subtly intended to
support the belief that this incorruptible substantiality of the soul
renders it capable of receiving from God immortality, for it is clear
that as He created it when He implanted it in the body, as St. Thomas
says, so at its separation from the body He could annihilate it. And as
the criticism of these proofs has been undertaken a hundred times, it is
unnecessary to repeat it here.
Is it possible for the unforewarned reason to conclude that our soul is
a substance from the fact that our consciousness of our identity--and
this within very narrow and variable limits--persists through all the
changes of our body? We might as well say of a ship that put out to sea
and lost first one piece of timber, which was replaced by another of the
same shape and dimensions, then lost another, and so on with all her
timbers, and finally returned to port the same ship, with the same
build, the same sea-going qualities, recognizable by everybody as the
same--we might as well say of such a ship that it had a substantial
soul. Is it possible for the unforewarned reason to infer the simplicity
of the soul from the fact that we have to judge and unify our thoughts?
Thought is not one but complex, and for the reason the soul is nothing
but the succession of co-ordinated states of consciousness.
In books of psychology written from the spiritualist point of view, it
is customary to begin the discussion of the existence of the soul as a
simple substance, separable from the body, after this style: There is in
me a principle which thinks, wills, and feels.... Now this implies a
begging of the question. For it is far from being an immediate truth
that there is in me such a principle; the immediate truth is that I
think, will, and feel. And I--the I that thinks, wills, and feels--am
immediately my living body with the states of consciousness which it
sustains. It is my living body that thinks, wills, and feels. How? How
you please.
And they proceed to seek to establish the substantiality of the soul,
hypostatizing the states of consciousness, and they begin by saying that
this substance must be simple--that is, by opposing thought to
extension, after the manner of the Cartesian dualism. And as Balmes was
one of the spiritualist writers who have given the clearest and most
concise form to the argument, I will present it as he expounds it in the
second chapter of his _Curso de Filosofia Elemental_. "The human soul is
simple," he says, and adds: "Simplicity consists in the absence of
parts, and the soul has none. Let us suppose that it has three parts--A,
B, C. I ask, Where, then, does thought reside? If in A only, then B and
C are superfluous; and consequently the simple subject A will be the
soul. If thought resides in A, B, and C, it follows that thought is
divided into parts, which is absurd. What sort of a thing is a
perception, a comparison, a judgement, a ratiocination, distributed
among three subjects?" A more obvious begging of the question cannot be
conceived. Balmes begins by taking it for granted that the whole, as a
whole, is incapable of making a judgement. He continues: "The unity of
consciousness is opposed to the division of the soul. When we think,
there is a subject which knows everything that it thinks, and this is
impossible if parts be attributed to it. Of the thought that is in A, B
and C will know nothing, and so in the other cases respectively. There
will not, therefore, be _one_ consciousness of the whole thought: each
part will have its special consciousness, and there will be within us as
many thinking beings as there are parts." The begging of the question
continues; it is assumed without any proof that a whole, as a whole,
cannot perceive as a unit. Balmes then proceeds to ask if these parts A,
B, and C are simple or compound, and repeats his argument until he
arrives at the conclusion that the thinking subject must be a part which
is not a whole--that is, simple. The argument is based, as will be seen,
upon the unity of apperception and of judgement. Subsequently he
endeavours to refute the hypothesis of a communication of the parts
among themselves.
Balmes--and with him the _a priori_ spiritualists who seek to
rationalize faith in the immortality of the soul--ignore the only
rational explanation, which is that apperception and judgement are a
resultant, that perceptions or ideas themselves are components which
agree. They begin by supposing something external to and distinct from
the states of consciousness, something that is not the living body which
supports these states, something that is not I but is within me.
The soul is simple, others say, because it reflects upon itself as a
complete whole. No; the state of consciousness A, in which I think of my
previous state of consciousness B, is not the same as its predecessor.
Or if I think of my soul, I think of an idea distinct from the act by
which I think of it. To think that one thinks and nothing more, is not
to think.
The soul is the principle of life, it is said. Yes; and similarly the
category of force or energy has been conceived as the principle of
movement. But these are concepts, not phenomena, not external realities.
Does the principle of movement move? And only that which moves has
external reality. Does the principle of life live? Hume was right when
he said that he never encountered this idea of himself--that he only
observed himself desiring or performing or feeling something.[27] The
idea of some individual thing--of this inkstand in front of me, of that
horse standing at my gate, of these two and not of any other individuals
of the same class--is the fact, the phenomenon itself. The idea of
myself is myself.
All the efforts to substantiate consciousness, making it independent of
extension--remember that Descartes opposed thought to extension--are but
sophistical subtilties intended to establish the rationality of faith in
the immortality of the soul. It is sought to give the value of objective
reality to that which does not possess it--to that whose reality exists
only in thought. And the immortality that we crave is a phenomenal
immortality--it is the continuation of this present life.
The unity of consciousness is for scientific psychology--the only
rational psychology--simply a phenomenal unity. No one can say what a
substantial unity is. And, what is more, no one can say what a substance
is. For the notion of substance is a non-phenomenal category. It is a
noumenon and belongs properly to the unknowable--that is to say,
according to the sense in which it is understood. But in its
transcendental sense it is something really unknowable and strictly
irrational. It is precisely this concept of substance that an
unforewarned mind reduces to a use that is very far from that pragmatic
application to which William James referred.
And this application is not saved by understanding it in an idealistic
sense, according to the Berkeleyan principle that to be is to be
perceived (_esse est percipi_). To say that everything is idea or that
everything is spirit, is the same as saying that everything is matter or
that everything is energy, for if everything is idea or everything
spirit, and if, therefore, this diamond is idea or spirit, just as my
consciousness is, it is not plain why the diamond should not endure for
ever, if my consciousness, because it is idea or spirit, endures for
ever.
George Berkeley, Anglican Bishop of Cloyne and brother in spirit to the
Anglican bishop Joseph Butler, was equally as anxious to save the belief
in the immortality of the soul. In the first words of the Preface to his
_Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge_, he tells us
that he considers that this treatise will be useful, "particularly to
those who are tainted with scepticism, or want a demonstration of the
existence and immateriality of God, or the natural immortality of the
soul." In paragraph cxl. he lays it down that we have an idea, or rather
a notion, of spirit, and that we know other spirits by means of our own,
from which follows--so in the next paragraph he roundly affirms--the
natural immortality of the soul. And here he enters upon a series of
confusions arising from the ambiguity with which he invests the term
notion. And after having established the immortality of the soul, almost
as it were _per saltum_, on the ground that the soul is not passive like
the body, he proceeds to tell us in paragraph cxlvii. that the existence
of God is more evident than that of man. And yet, in spite of this,
there are still some who are doubtful!
The question was complicated by making consciousness a property of the
soul, consciousness being something more than soul--that is to say, a
substantial form of the body, the originator of all the organic
functions of the body. The soul not only thinks, feels, and wills, but
moves the body and prompts its vital functions; in the human soul are
united the vegetative, animal, and rational functions. Such is the
theory. But the soul separated from the body can have neither
vegetative nor animal functions.
A theory, in short, which for the reason is a veritable contexture of
confusions.
After the Renaissance and the restoration of purely rational thought,
emancipated from all theology, the doctrine of the mortality of the soul
was re-established by the newly published writings of the second-century
philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias and by Pietro Pomponazzi and
others. And in point of fact, little or nothing can be added to what
Pomponazzi has written in his _Tractatus de immortalitate animæ_. It is
reason itself, and it serves nothing to reiterate his arguments.
Attempts have not been wanting, however, to find an empirical support
for belief in the immortality of the soul, and among these may be
counted the work of Frederic W.H. Myers on _Human Personality and its
Survival of Bodily Death_. No one ever approached more eagerly than
myself the two thick volumes of this work in which the leading spirit of
the Society for Psychical Research resumed that formidable mass of data
relating to presentiments, apparitions of the dead, the phenomena of
dreams, telepathy, hypnotism, sensorial automatism, ecstasy, and all the
rest that goes to furnish the spiritualist arsenal. I entered upon the
reading of it not only without that temper of cautious suspicion which
men of science maintain in investigations of this character, but even
with a predisposition in its favour, as one who comes to seek the
confirmation of his innermost longings; but for this reason was my
disillusion all the greater. In spite of its critical apparatus it does
not differ in any respect from medieval miracle-mongering. There is a
fundamental defect of method, of logic.
And if the belief in the immortality of the soul has been unable to find
vindication in rational empiricism, neither is it satisfied with
pantheism. To say that everything is God, and that when we die we return
to God, or, more accurately, continue in Him, avails our longing
nothing; for if this indeed be so, then we were in God before we were
born, and if when we die we return to where we were before being born,
then the human soul, the individual consciousness, is perishable. And
since we know very well that God, the personal and conscious God of
Christian monotheism, is simply the provider, and above all the
guarantor, of our immortality, pantheism is said, and rightly said, to
be merely atheism disguised; and, in my opinion, undisguised. And they
were right in calling Spinoza an atheist, for his is the most logical,
the most rational, system of pantheism.
Neither is the longing for immortality saved, but rather dissolved and
submerged, by agnosticism, or the doctrine of the unknowable, which,
when it has professed to wish to leave religious feelings scathless, has
always been inspired by the most refined hypocrisy. The whole of the
first part of Spencer's _First Principles_, and especially the fifth
chapter entitled "Reconciliation"--that between reason and faith or
science and religion being understood--is a model at the same time of
philosophical superficiality and religious insincerity, of the most
refined British cant. The unknowable, if it is something more than the
merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative concept, a concept of
limitation. And upon this foundation no human feeling can be built up.
The science of religion, on the other hand, of religion considered as an
individual and social psychic phenomenon irrespective of the
transcendental objective validity of religious affirmations, is a
science which, in explaining the origin of the belief that the soul is
something that can live disjoined from the body, has destroyed the
rationality of this belief. However much the religious man may repeat
with Schleiermacher, "Science can teach thee nothing; it is for science
to learn from thee," inwardly he thinks otherwise.
From whatever side the matter is regarded, it is always found that
reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts
it. And the truth is, in all strictness, that reason is the enemy of
life.
A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as memory tends to
stability. The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely
individual, is, strictly, unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce
everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no
more than one single and self-same content in whatever place, time, or
relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains the same
for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different
each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of
the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes
it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to
arrest it. In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or
destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it,
to lay it out rigid in the mind. Science is a cemetery of dead ideas,
even though life may issue from them. Worms also feed upon corpses. My
own thoughts, tumultuous and agitated in the innermost recesses of my
soul, once they are torn from their roots in the heart, poured out on to
this paper and there fixed in unalterable shape, are already only the
corpses of thoughts. How, then, shall reason open its portals to the
revelation of life? It is a tragic combat--it is the very essence of
tragedy--this combat of life with reason. And truth? Is truth something
that is lived or that is comprehended?
It is only necessary to read the terrible _Parmenides_ of Plato to
arrive at his tragic conclusion that "the one is and is not, and both
itself and others, in relation to themselves and one another, are and
are not, and appear to be and appear not to be." All that is vital is
irrational, and all that is rational is anti-vital, for reason is
essentially sceptical.
The rational, in effect, is simply the relational; reason is limited to
relating irrational elements. Mathematics is the only perfect science,
inasmuch as it adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides numbers, but not
real and substantial things, inasmuch as it is the most formal of the
sciences. Who can extract the cube root of an ash-tree?
Nevertheless we need logic, this terrible power, in order to communicate
thoughts and perceptions and even in order to think and perceive, for we
think with words, we perceive with forms. To think is to converse with
oneself; and speech is social, and social are thought and logic. But may
they not perhaps possess a content, an individual matter, incommunicable
and untranslatable? And may not this be the source of their power?
The truth is that man, the prisoner of logic, without which he cannot
think, has always sought to make logic subservient to his desires, and
principally to his fundamental desire. He has always sought to hold fast
to logic, and especially in the Middle Ages, in the interests of
theology and jurisprudence, both of which based themselves on what was
established by authority. It was not until very much later that logic
propounded the problem of knowledge, the problem of its own validity,
the scrutiny of the metalogical foundations.
"The Western theology," Dean Stanley wrote, "is essentially logical in
form and based on law. The Eastern theology is rhetorical in form and
based on philosophy. The Latin divine succeeded to the Roman advocate.
The Oriental divine succeeded to the Grecian sophist."[28]
And all the laboured arguments in support of our hunger of immortality,
which pretend to be grounded on reason or logic, are merely advocacy and
sophistry.
The property and characteristic of advocacy is, in effect, to make use
of logic in the interests of a thesis that is to be defended, while, on
the other hand, the strictly scientific method proceeds from the facts,
the data, presented to us by reality, in order that it may arrive, or
not arrive, as the case may be, at a certain conclusion. What is
important is to define the problem clearly, whence it follows that
progress consists not seldom in undoing what has been done. Advocacy
always supposes a _petitio principii_, and its arguments are _ad
probandum_. And theology that pretends to be rational is nothing but
advocacy.
Theology proceeds from dogma, and dogma, _dogma_, in its
primitive and most direct sense, signifies a decree, something akin to
the Latin _placitum_, that which has seemed to the legislative authority
fitting to be law. This juridical concept is the starting-point of
theology. For the theologian, as for the advocate, dogma, law, is
something given--a starting-point which admits of discussion only in
respect of its application and its most exact interpretation. Hence it
follows that the theological or advocatory spirit is in its principle
dogmatical, while the strictly scientific and purely rational spirit is
sceptical, _skeptikos_--that is, investigative. It is so at least
in its principle, for there is the other sense of the term scepticism,
that which is most usual to-day, that of a system of doubt, suspicion,
and uncertainty, and this has arisen from the theological or advocatory
use of reason, from the abuse of dogmatism. The endeavour to apply the
law of authority, the _placitum_, the dogma, to different and sometimes
contraposed practical necessities, is what has engendered the scepticism
of doubt. It is advocacy, or what amounts to the same thing, theology,
that teaches the distrust of reason--not true science, not the science
of investigation, sceptical in the primitive and direct meaning of the
word, which hastens towards no predetermined solution nor proceeds save
by the testing of hypotheses.
Take the _Summa Theologica_ of St. Thomas, the classical monument of the
theology--that is, of the advocacy--of Catholicism, and open it where
you please. First comes the thesis--_utrum_ ... whether such a thing be
thus or otherwise; then the objections--_ad primum sic proceditur_; next
the answers to these objections--_sed contra est_ ... or _respondeo
dicendum_.... Pure advocacy! And underlying many, perhaps most, of its
arguments you will find a logical fallacy which may be expressed _more
scholastico_ by this syllogism: I do not understand this fact save by
giving it this explanation; it is thus that I must understand it,
therefore this must be its explanation. The alternative being that I am
left without any understanding of it at all. True science teaches, above
all, to doubt and to be ignorant; advocacy neither doubts nor believes
that it does not know. It requires a solution.
To the mentality that assumes, more or less consciously, that we must of
necessity find a solution to every problem, belongs the argument based
on the disastrous consequences of a thing. Take any book of
apologetics--that is to say, of theological advocacy--and you will see
how many times you will meet with this phrase--"the disastrous
consequences of this doctrine." Now the disastrous consequences of a
doctrine prove at most that the doctrine is disastrous, but not that it
is false, for there is no proof that the true is necessarily that which
suits us best. The identification of the true and the good is but a
pious wish. In his _Études sur Blaise Pascal_, A. Vinet says: "Of the
two needs that unceasingly belabour human nature, that of happiness is
not only the more universally felt and the more constantly experienced,
but it is also the more imperious. And this need is not only of the
senses; it is intellectual. It is not only for the _soul_; it is for the
_mind_ that happiness is a necessity. Happiness forms a part of truth."
This last proposition--_le bonheur fait partie de la verité_--is a
proposition of pure advocacy, but not of science or of pure reason. It
would be better to say that truth forms a part of happiness in a
Tertullianesque sense, in the sense of _credo quia absurdum_, which
means actually _credo quia consolans_--I believe because it is a thing
consoling to me.
No, for reason, truth is that of which it can be proved that it is, that
it exists, whether it console us or not. And reason is certainly not a
consoling faculty. That terrible Latin poet Lucretius, whose apparent
serenity and Epicurean _ataraxia_ conceal so much despair, said that
piety consists in the power to contemplate all things with a serene
soul--_pacata posse mente omnia tueri_. And it was the same Lucretius
who wrote that religion can persuade us into so great evils--_tantum
religio potuit suadere malorum_. And it is true that religion--above all
the Christian religion--has been, as the Apostle says, to the Jews a
stumbling-block, and to the intellectuals foolishness.[29] The Christian
religion, the religion of the immortality of the soul, was called by
Tacitus a pernicious superstition (_exitialis superstitio_), and he
asserted that it involved a hatred of mankind (_odium generis humani_).
Speaking of the age in which these men lived, the most genuinely
rationalistic age in the world's history, Flaubert, writing to Madame
Roger des Genettes, uttered these pregnant words: "You are right; we
must speak with respect of Lucretius; I see no one who can compare with
him except Byron, and Byron has not his gravity nor the sincerity of his
sadness. The melancholy of the ancients seems to me more profound than
that of the moderns, who all more or less presuppose an immortality on
the yonder side of the _black hole_. But for the ancients this black
hole was the infinite itself; the procession of their dreams is imaged
against a background of immutable ebony. The gods being no more and
Christ being not yet, there was between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius a
unique moment in which man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find this
grandeur; but what renders Lucretius intolerable is his physics, which
he gives as if positive. If he is weak, it is because he did not doubt
enough; he wished to explain, to arrive at a conclusion!"[30]
Yes, Lucretius wished to arrive at a conclusion, a solution, and, what
is worse, he wished to find consolation in reason. For there is also an
anti-theological advocacy, and an _odium anti-theologicum_.
Many, very many, men of science, the majority of those who call
themselves rationalists, are afflicted by it.
The rationalist acts rationally--that is to say, he does not speak out
of his part--so long as he confines himself to denying that reason
satisfies our vital hunger for immortality; but, furious at not being
able to believe, he soon becomes a prey to the vindictiveness of the
_odium anti-theologicum_, and exclaims with the Pharisees: "This people
who knoweth not the law are cursed." There is much truth in these words
of Soloviev: "I have a foreboding of the near approach of a time when
Christians will gather together again in the Catacombs, because of the
persecution of the faith--a persecution less brutal, perhaps, than that
of Nero's day, but not less refined in its severity, consummated by
mendacity, derision, and all the hypocrisies."
The anti-theological hate, the scientificist--I do not say
scientific--fury, is manifest. Consider, not the more detached
scientific investigators, those who know how to doubt, but the fanatics
of rationalism, and observe with what gross brutality they speak of
faith. Vogt considered it probable that the cranial structure of the
Apostles was of a pronounced simian character; of the indecencies of
Haeckel, that supreme incomprehender, there is no need to speak, nor yet
of those of Büchner; even Virchow is not free from them. And others work
with more subtilty. There are people who seem not to be content with
not believing that there is another life, or rather, with believing that
there is none, but who are vexed and hurt that others should believe in
it or even should wish that it might exist. And this attitude is as
contemptible as that is worthy of respect which characterizes those who,
though urged by the need they have of it to believe in another life, are
unable to believe. But of this most noble attitude of the spirit, the
most profound, the most human, and the most fruitful, the attitude of
despair, we will speak later on.
And the rationalists who do not succumb to the anti-theological fury are
bent on convincing men that there are motives for living and
consolations for having been born, even though there shall come a time,
at the end of some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all
human consciousness shall have ceased to exist. And these motives for
living and working, this thing which some call humanism, are the amazing
products of the affective and emotional hollowness of rationalism and of
its stupendous hypocrisy--a hypocrisy bent on sacrificing sincerity to
veracity, and sworn not to confess that reason is a dissolvent and
disconsolatory power.
Must I repeat again what I have already said about all this business of
manufacturing culture, of progressing, of realizing good, truth, and
beauty, of establishing justice on earth, of ameliorating life for those
who shall come after us, of subserving I know not what destiny, and all
this without our taking thought for the ultimate end of each one of us?
Must I again declare to you the supreme vacuity of culture, of science,
of art, of good, of truth, of beauty, of justice ... of all these
beautiful conceptions, if at the last, in four days or in four millions
of centuries--it matters not which--no human consciousness shall exist
to appropriate this civilization, this science, art, good, truth,
beauty, justice, and all the rest?
Many and very various have been the rationalist devices--more or less
rational--by means of which from the days of the Epicureans and the
Stoics it has been sought to discover rational consolation in truth and
to convince men, although those who sought so to do remained themselves
unconvinced, that there are motives for working and lures for living,
even though the human consciousness be destined some day to disappear.
The Epicurean attitude, the extreme and grossest expression of which is
"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," or the Horatian _carpe
diem_, which may be rendered by "Live for the day," does not differ in
its essence from the Stoic attitude with its "Accomplish what the moral
conscience dictates to thee, and afterward let it be as it may be." Both
attitudes have a common base; and pleasure for pleasure's sake comes to
the same as duty for duty's sake.
Spinoza, the most logical and consistent of atheists--I mean of those
who deny the persistence of individual consciousness through indefinite
future time--and at the same time the most pious, Spinoza devoted the
fifth and last part of his _Ethic_ to elucidating the path that leads to
liberty and to determining the concept of happiness. The concept!
Concept, not feeling! For Spinoza, who was a terrible intellectualist,
happiness (_beatitudo_) is a concept, and the love of God an
intellectual love. After establishing in proposition xxi. of the fifth
part that "the mind can imagine nothing, neither can it remember
anything that is past, save during the continuance of the body"--which
is equivalent to denying the immortality of the soul, since a soul
which, disjoined from the body in which it lived, does not remember its
past, is neither immortal nor is it a soul--he goes on to affirm in
proposition xxiii. that "the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed
with the body, but there remains of it something which is _eternal_,"
and this eternity of the mind is a certain mode of thinking. But do not
let yourselves be deceived; there is no such eternity of the individual
mind. Everything is _sub æternitatis specie_--that is to say, pure
illusion. Nothing could be more dreary, nothing more desolating, nothing
more anti-vital than this happiness, this _beatitudo_, of Spinoza, that
consists in the intellectual love of the mind towards God, which is
nothing else but the very love with which God loves Himself (prop,
xxxvi.). Our happiness--that is to say, our liberty--consists in the
constant and eternal love of God towards men. So affirms the corollary
to this thirty-sixth proposition. And all this in order to arrive at the
conclusion, which is the final and crowning proposition of the whole
_Ethic_, that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.
The everlasting refrain! Or, to put it plainly, we proceed from God and
to God we return, which, translated into concrete language, the language
of life and feeling, means that my personal consciousness sprang from
nothingness, from my unconsciousness, and to nothingness it will return.
And this most dreary and desolating voice of Spinoza is the very voice
of reason. And the liberty of which he tells us is a terrible liberty.
And against Spinoza and his doctrine of happiness there is only one
irresistible argument, the argument _ad hominem_. Was he happy, Benedict
Spinoza, while, to allay his inner unhappiness, he was discoursing of
happiness? Was he free?
In the corollary to proposition xli. of this same final and most tragic
part of that tremendous tragedy of his _Ethic_, the poor desperate Jew
of Amsterdam discourses of the common persuasion of the vulgar of the
truth of eternal life. Let us hear what he says: "It would appear that
they esteem piety and religion--and, indeed, all that is referred to
fortitude or strength of mind--as burdens which they expect to lay down
after death, when they hope to receive a reward for their servitude, not
for their piety and religion in this life. Nor is it even this hope
alone that leads them; the fear of frightful punishments with which they
are menaced after death also influences them to live--in so far as their
impotence and poverty of spirit permits--in conformity with the
prescription of the Divine law. And were not this hope and this fear
infused into the minds of men--but, on the contrary, did they believe
that the soul perished with the body, and that, beyond the grave, there
was no other life prepared for the wretched who had borne the burden _of
piety_ in this--they would return to their natural inclinations,
preferring to accommodate everything to their own liking, and would
follow fortune rather than reason. But all this appears no less absurd
than it would be to suppose that a man, because he did not believe that
he could nourish his body eternally with wholesome food, would saturate
himself with deadly poisons; or than if because believing that his soul
was not eternal and immortal, he should therefore prefer to be without a
soul (_amens_) and to live without reason; all of which is so absurd as
to be scarcely worth refuting (_quæ adeo absurda sunt, ut vix recenseri
mereantur_)."
When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that
either it is flagrantly stupid--in which case all comment is
superfluous--or it is something formidable, the very crux of the
problem. And this it is in this case. Yes! poor Portuguese Jew exiled in
Holland, yes! that he who is convinced without a vestige of doubt,
without the faintest hope of any saving uncertainty, that his soul is
not immortal, should prefer to be without a soul (_amens_), or
irrational, or idiot, that he should prefer not to have been born, is a
supposition that has nothing, absolutely nothing, absurd in it. Was he
happy, the poor Jewish intellectualist definer of intellectual love and
of happiness? For that and no other is the problem. "What does it profit
thee to know the definition of compunction if thou dost not feel it?"
says à Kempis. And what profits it to discuss or to define happiness if
you cannot thereby achieve happiness? Not inapposite in this connection
is that terrible story that Diderot tells of a eunuch who desired to
take lessons in esthetics from a native of Marseilles in order that he
might be better qualified to select the slaves destined for the harem of
the Sultan, his master. At the end of the first lesson, a physiological
lesson, brutally and carnally physiological, the eunuch exclaimed
bitterly, "It is evident that I shall never know esthetics!" Even so,
and just as eunuchs will never know esthetics as applied to the
selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever
know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for
happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is
reasoned about or defined.
And you have another rationalist, one not sad or submissive, like
Spinoza, but rebellious, and though concealing a despair not less
bitter, making a hypocritical pretence of light-heartedness, you have
Nietzsche, who discovered _mathematically_ (!!!) that counterfeit of the
immortality of the soul which is called "eternal recurrence," and which
is in fact the most stupendous tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy. The number
of atoms or irreducible primary elements being finite and the universe
eternal, a combination identical with that which at present exists must
at some future time be reproduced, and therefore that which now is must
be repeated an infinite number of times. This is evident, and just as I
shall live again the life that I am now living, so I have already lived
it before an infinite number of times, for there is an eternity that
stretches into the past--_a parte ante_--just as there will be one
stretching into the future--_a parte post_. But, unfortunately, it
happens that I remember none of my previous existences, and perhaps it
is impossible that I should remember them, for two things absolutely and
completely identical are but one. Instead of supposing that we live in a
finite universe, composed of a finite number of irreducible primary
elements, suppose that we live in an infinite universe, without limits
in space--which concrete infinity is not less inconceivable than the
concrete eternity in time--then it will follow that this system of
ours, that of the Milky Way, is repeated an infinite number of times in
the infinite of space, and that therefore I am now living an infinite
number of lives, all exactly identical. A jest, as you see, but one not
less comic--that is to say, not less tragic--than that of Nietzsche,
that of the laughing lion. And why does the lion laugh? I think he
laughs with rage, because he can never succeed in finding consolation in
the thought that he has been the same lion before and is destined to be
the same lion again.
But if Spinoza and Nietzsche were indeed both rationalists, each after
his own manner, they were not spiritual eunuchs; they had heart,
feeling, and, above all, hunger, a mad hunger for eternity, for
immortality. The physical eunuch does not feel the need of reproducing
himself carnally, in the body, and neither does the spiritual eunuch
feel the hunger for self-perpetuation.
Certain it is that there are some who assert that reason suffices them,
and they counsel us to desist from seeking to penetrate into the
impenetrable. But of those who say that they have no need of any faith
in an eternal personal life to furnish them with incentives to living
and motives for action, I know not well how to think. A man blind from
birth may also assure us that he feels no great longing to enjoy the
world of sight nor suffers any great anguish from not having enjoyed it,
and we must needs believe him, for what is wholly unknown cannot be the
object of desire--_nihil volitum quin præcognitum_, there can be no
volition save of things already known. But I cannot be persuaded that he
who has once in his life, either in his youth or for some other brief
space of time, cherished the belief in the immortality of the soul, will
ever find peace without it. And of this sort of blindness from birth
there are but few instances among us, and then only by a kind of strange
aberration. For the merely and exclusively rational man is an aberration
and nothing but an aberration.
More sincere, much more sincere, are those who say: "We must not talk
about it, for in talking about it we only waste our time and weaken our
will; let us do our duty here and hereafter let come what may." But this
sincerity hides a yet deeper insincerity. May it perhaps be that by
saying "We must not talk about it," they succeed in not thinking about
it? Our will is weakened? And what then? We lose the capacity for human
action? And what then? It is very convenient to tell a man whom a fatal
disease condemns to an early death, and who knows it, not to think about
it.
_Meglio oprando obliar, senzá indagarlo,
Questo enorme mister del universo!_
"Better to work and to forget and not to probe into this vast mystery of
the universe!" Carducci wrote in his _Idilio Maremmano_, the same
Carducci who at the close of his ode _Sul Monte Mario_ tells us how the
earth, the mother of the fugitive soul, must roll its burden of glory
and sorrow round the sun "until, worn out beneath the equator, mocked by
the last flames of dying heat, the exhausted human race is reduced to a
single man and woman, who, standing in the midst of dead woods,
surrounded by sheer mountains, livid, with glassy eyes watch thee, O
sun, set across the immense frozen waste."
But is it possible for us to give ourselves to any serious and lasting
work, forgetting the vast mystery of the universe and abandoning all
attempt to understand it? Is it possible to contemplate the vast All
with a serene soul, in the spirit of the Lucretian piety, if we are
conscious of the thought that a time must come when this All will no
longer be reflected in any human consciousness?
Cain, in Byron's poem, asks of Lucifer, the prince of the intellectuals,
"Are ye happy?" and Lucifer replies, "We are mighty." Cain questions
again, "Are ye happy?" and then the great Intellectual says to him: "No;
art thou?" And further on, this same Lucifer says to Adah, the sister
and wife of Cain: "Choose betwixt love and knowledge--since there is no
other choice." And in the same stupendous poem, when Cain says that the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a lying tree, for "we know
nothing; at least it promised knowledge at the price of death," Lucifer
answers him: "It may be death leads to the highest knowledge"--that is
to say, to nothingness.
To this word _knowledge_ which Lord Byron uses in the above quotations,
the Spanish _ciencia_, the French _science_, the German _Wissenschaft_,
is often opposed the word _wisdom, sabiduria, sagesse, Weisheit_.
Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,
Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest,
says another lord, Tennyson, in his _Locksley Hall_. And what is this
wisdom which we have to seek chiefly in the poets, leaving knowledge on
one side? It is well enough to say with Matthew Arnold in his
Introduction to Wordsworth's poems, that poetry is reality and
philosophy illusion; but reason is always reason and reality is always
reality, that which can be proved to exist externally to us, whether we
find in it consolation or despair.
I do not know why so many people were scandalized, or pretended to be
scandalized, when Brunetière proclaimed again the bankruptcy of science.
For science as a substitute for religion and reason as a substitute for
faith have always fallen to pieces. Science will be able to satisfy, and
in fact does satisfy in an increasing measure, our increasing logical or
intellectual needs, our desire to know and understand the truth; but
science does not satisfy the needs of our heart and our will, and far
from satisfying our hunger for immortality it contradicts it. Rational
truth and life stand in opposition to one another. And is it possible
that there is any other truth than rational truth?
It must remain established, therefore, that reason--human reason--within
its limits, not only does not prove rationally that the soul is
immortal or that the human consciousness shall preserve its
indestructibility through the tracts of time to come, but that it proves
rather--within its limits, I repeat--that the individual consciousness
cannot persist after the death of the physical organism upon which it
depends. And these limits, within which I say that human reason proves
this, are the limits of rationality, of what is known by demonstration.
Beyond these limits is the irrational, which, whether it be called the
super-rational or the infra-rational or the contra-rational, is all the
same thing. Beyond these limits is the absurd of Tertullian, the
impossible of the _certum est, quia impossibile est_. And this absurd
can only base itself upon the most absolute uncertainty.
The rational dissolution ends in dissolving reason itself; it ends in
the most absolute scepticism, in the phenomenalism of Hume or in the
doctrine of absolute contingencies of Stuart Mill, the most consistent
and logical of the positivists. The supreme triumph of reason, the
analytical--that is, the destructive and dissolvent--faculty, is to cast
doubt upon its own validity. The stomach that contains an ulcer ends by
digesting itself; and reason ends by destroying the immediate and
absolute validity of the concept of truth and of the concept of
necessity. Both concepts are relative; there is no absolute truth, no
absolute necessity. We call a concept true which agrees with the general
system of all our concepts; and we call a perception true which does not
contradict the system of our perceptions. Truth is coherence. But as
regards the whole system, the aggregate, as there is nothing outside of
it of which we have knowledge, we cannot say whether it is true or not.
It is conceivable that the universe, as it exists in itself, outside of
our consciousness, may be quite other than it appears to us, although
this is a supposition that has no meaning for reason. And as regards
necessity, is there an absolute necessity? By necessary we mean merely
that which is, and in so far as it is, for in another more
transcendental sense, what absolute necessity, logical and independent
of the fact that the universe exists, is there that there should be a
universe or anything else at all?
Absolute relativism, which is neither more nor less than scepticism, in
the most modern sense of the term, is the supreme triumph of the
reasoning reason.
Feeling does not succeed in converting consolation into truth, nor does
reason succeed in converting truth into consolation. But reason going
beyond truth itself, beyond the concept of reality itself, succeeds in
plunging itself into the depths of scepticism. And in this abyss the
scepticism of the reason encounters the despair of the heart, and this
encounter leads to the discovery of a basis--a terrible basis!--for
consolation to build on.
Let us examine it.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] _Pragmatism, a New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking_. Popular
lectures on philosophy by William James, 1907.
[27] _Treatise of Human Nature_, book i., part iv., sect. vi., "Of
Personal Identity": "I never can catch _myself_ at any time without a
perception, and never can observe anything but the perception."
[28] Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, _Lectures on the History of the Eastern
Church_, lecture i., sect. iii.
[29] 1 Cor. i. 23.
[30] Gustave Flaubert, _Correspondance_, troisième série (1854-1869).
Paris, 1910.
VI
IN THE DEPTHS OF THE ABYSS
_Parce unicæ spes totius orbis._--TERTULLIANUS, Adversus Marcionem, 5.
We have seen that the vital longing for human immortality finds no
consolation in reason and that reason leaves us without incentive or
consolation in life and life itself without real finality. But here, in
the depths of the abyss, the despair of the heart and of the will and
the scepticism of reason meet face to face and embrace like brothers.
And we shall see it is from this embrace, a tragic--that is to say, an
intimately loving--embrace, that the wellspring of life will flow, a
life serious and terrible. Scepticism, uncertainty--the position to
which reason, by practising its analysis upon itself, upon its own
validity, at last arrives--is the foundation upon which the heart's
despair must build up its hope.
Disillusioned, we had to abandon the position of those who seek to give
consolation the force of rational and logical truth, pretending to prove
the rationality, or at any rate the non-irrationality, of consolation;
and we had to abandon likewise the position of those who seek to give
rational truth the force of consolation and of a motive for life.
Neither the one nor the other of these positions satisfied us. The one
is at variance with our reason, the other with our feeling. These two
powers can never conclude peace and we must needs live by their war. We
must make of this war, of war itself, the very condition of our
spiritual life.
Neither does this high debate admit of that indecent and repugnant
expedient which the more or less parliamentary type of politician has
devised and dubbed "a formula of agreement," the property of which is to
render it impossible for either side to claim to be victorious. There
is no place here for a time-serving compromise. Perhaps a degenerate and
cowardly reason might bring itself to propose some such formula of
agreement, for in truth reason lives by formulas; but life, which cannot
be formulated, life which lives and seeks to live for ever, does not
submit to formulas. Its sole formula is: all or nothing. Feeling does
not compound its differences with middle terms.
_Initium sapientiæ timor Domini_, it is said, meaning perhaps _timor
mortis_, or it may be, _timor vitæ_, which is the same thing. Always it
comes about that the beginning of wisdom is a fear.
Is it true to say of this saving scepticism which I am now going to
discuss, that it is doubt? It is doubt, yes, but it is much more than
doubt. Doubt is commonly something very cold, of very little vitalizing
force, and above all something rather artificial, especially since
Descartes degraded it to the function of a method. The conflict between
reason and life is something more than a doubt. For doubt is easily
resolved into a comic element.
The methodical doubt of Descartes is a comic doubt, a doubt purely
theoretical and provisional--that is to say, the doubt of a man who acts
as if he doubted without really doubting. And because it was a
stove-excogitated doubt, the man who deduced that he existed from the
fact that he thought did not approve of "those turbulent
(_brouillonnes_) and restless persons who, being called neither by birth
nor by fortune to the management of public affairs, are perpetually
devising some new reformation," and he was pained by the suspicion that
there might be something of this kind in his own writings. No, he,
Descartes, proposed only to "reform his own thoughts and to build upon
ground that was wholly his." And he resolved not to accept anything as
true when he did not recognize it clearly to be so, and to make a clean
sweep of all prejudices and received ideas, to the end that he might
construct his intellectual habitation anew. But "as it is not enough,
before beginning to rebuild one's dwelling-house, to pull it down and to
furnish materials and architects, or to study architecture oneself ...
but it is also necessary to be provided with some other wherein to lodge
conveniently while the work is in progress," he framed for himself a
provisional ethic--_une morale de provision_--the first law of which was
to observe the customs of his country and to keep always to the religion
in which, by the grace of God, he had been instructed from his infancy,
governing himself in all things according to the most moderate opinions.
Yes, exactly, a provisional religion and even a provisional God! And he
chose the most moderate opinions "because these are always the most
convenient for practice." But it is best to proceed no further.
This methodical or theoretical Cartesian doubt, this philosophical doubt
excogitated in a stove, is not the doubt, is not the scepticism, is not
the incertitude, that I am talking about here. No! This other doubt is a
passionate doubt, it is the eternal conflict between reason and feeling,
science and life, logic and biotic. For science destroys the concept of
personality by reducing it to a complex in continual flux from moment to
moment--that is to say, it destroys the very foundation of the spiritual
and emotional life, which ranges itself unyieldingly against reason.
And this doubt cannot avail itself of any provisional ethic, but has to
found its ethic, as we shall see, on the conflict itself, an ethic of
battle, and itself has to serve as the foundation of religion. And it
inhabits a house which is continually being demolished and which
continually it has to rebuild. Without ceasing the will, I mean the will
never to die, the spirit of unsubmissiveness to death, labours to build
up the house of life, and without ceasing the keen blasts and stormy
assaults of reason beat it down.
And more than this, in the concrete vital problem that concerns us,
reason takes up no position whatever. In truth, it does something worse
than deny the immortality of the soul--for that at any rate would be one
solution--it refuses even to recognize the problem as our vital desire
presents it to us. In the rational and logical sense of the term
problem, there is no such problem. This question of the immortality of
the soul, of the persistence of the individual consciousness, is not
rational, it falls outside reason. As a problem, and whatever solution
it may receive, it is irrational. Rationally even the very propounding
of the problem lacks sense. The immortality of the soul is as
unconceivable as, in all strictness, is its absolute mortality. For the
purpose of explaining the world and existence--and such is the task of
reason--it is not necessary that we should suppose that our soul is
either mortal or immortal. The mere enunciation of the problem is,
therefore, an irrationality.
Let us hear what our brother Kierkegaard has to say. "The danger of
abstract thought is seen precisely in respect of the problem of
existence, the difficulty of which it solves by going round it,
afterwards boasting that it has completely explained it. It explains
immortality in general, and it does so in a remarkable way by
identifying it with eternity--with the eternity which is essentially the
medium of thought. But with the immortality of each individually
existing man, wherein precisely the difficulty lies, abstraction does
not concern itself, is not interested in it. And yet the difficulty of
existence lies just in the interest of the existing being--the man who
exists is infinitely interested in existing. Abstract thought besteads
immortality only in order that it may kill me as an individual being
with an individual existence, and so make me immortal, pretty much in
the same way as that famous physician in one of Holberg's plays, whose
medicine, while it took away the patient's fever, took away his life at
the same time. An abstract thinker, who refuses to disclose and admit
the relation that exists between his abstract thought and the fact that
he is an existing being, produces a comic impression upon us, however
accomplished and distinguished he may be, for he runs the risk of
ceasing to be a man. While an effective man, compounded of infinitude
and finitude, owes his effectiveness precisely to the conjunction of
these two elements and is infinitely interested in existing, an abstract
thinker, similarly compounded, is a double being, a fantastical being,
who lives in the pure being of abstraction, and at times presents the
sorry figure of a professor who lays aside this abstract essence as he
lays aside his walking-stick. When one reads the Life of a thinker of
this kind--whose writings may be excellent--one trembles at the thought
of what it is to be a man. And when one reads in his writings that
thinking and being are the same thing, one thinks, remembering his life,
that that being, which is identical with thinking, is not precisely the
same thing as being a man" (_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_,
chap. iii.).
What intense passion--that is to say, what truth--there is in this
bitter invective against Hegel, prototype of the rationalist!--for the
rationalist takes away our fever by taking away our life, and promises
us, instead of a concrete, an abstract immortality, as if the hunger for
immortality that consumes us were an abstract and not a concrete hunger!
It may indeed be said that when once the dog is dead there is an end to
the rabies, and that after I have died I shall no more be tortured by
this rage of not dying, and that the fear of death, or more properly, of
nothingness, is an irrational fear, but ... Yes, but ... _Eppur si
muove!_ And it will go on moving. For it is the source of all movement!
I doubt, however, whether our brother Kierkegaard is altogether in the
right, for this same abstract thinker, or thinker of abstractions,
thinks _in order that_ he may exist, that he may not cease to exist, or
thinks perhaps in order to forget that he will have to cease to exist.
This is the root of the passion for abstract thought. And possibly Hegel
was as infinitely interested as Kierkegaard in his own concrete,
individual existence, although the professional decorum of the
state-philosopher compelled him to conceal the fact.
Faith in immortality is irrational. And, notwithstanding, faith, life,
and reason have mutual need of one another. This vital longing is not
properly a problem, cannot assume a logical status, cannot be formulated
in propositions susceptible of rational discussion; but it announces
itself in us as hunger announces itself. Neither can the wolf that
throws itself with the fury of hunger upon its prey or with the fury of
instinct upon the she-wolf, enunciate its impulse rationally and as a
logical problem. Reason and faith are two enemies, neither of which can
maintain itself without the other. The irrational demands to be
rationalized and reason only can operate on the irrational. They are
compelled to seek mutual support and association. But association in
struggle, for struggle is a mode of association.
In the world of living beings the struggle for life establishes an
association, and a very close one, not only between those who unite
together in combat against a common foe, but between the combatants
themselves. And is there any possible association more intimate than
that uniting the animal that eats another and the animal that is eaten,
between the devourer and the devoured? And if this is clearly seen in
the struggle between individuals, it is still more evident in the
struggle between peoples. War has always been the most effective factor
of progress, even more than commerce. It is through war that conquerors
and conquered learn to know each other and in consequence to love each
other.
Christianity, the foolishness of the Cross, the irrational faith that
Christ rose from the dead in order to raise us from the dead, was saved
by the rationalistic Hellenic culture, and this in its turn was saved by
Christianity. Without Christianity the Renaissance would have been
impossible. Without the Gospel, without St. Paul, the peoples who had
traversed the Middle Ages would have understood neither Plato nor
Aristotle. A purely rationalist tradition is as impossible as a
tradition purely religious. It is frequently disputed whether the
Reformation was born as the child of the Renaissance or as a protest
against it, and both propositions may be said to be true, for the son is
always born as a protest against the father. It is also said that it was
the revived Greek classics that led men like Erasmus back to St. Paul
and to primitive Christianity, which is the most irrational form of
Christianity; but it may be retorted that it was St. Paul, that it was
the Christian irrationality underlying his Catholic theology, that led
them back to the classics. "Christianity is what it has come to be," it
has been said, "only through its alliance with antiquity, while with the
Copts and Ethiopians it is but a kind of buffoonery. Islam developed
under the influence of Persian and Greek culture, and under that of the
Turks it has been transformed into a destructive barbarism."[31]
We have emerged from the Middle Ages, from the medieval faith as ardent
as it was at heart despairing, and not without its inward and abysmal
incertitudes, and we have entered upon the age of rationalism, likewise
not without its incertitudes. Faith in reason is exposed to the same
rational indefensibility as all other faith. And we may say with Robert
Browning,
All we have gained, then, by our unbelief
Is a life of doubt diversified by faith
For one of faith diversified by doubt.
(_Bishop Blougram's Apology_.)
And if, as I have said, faith, life, can only sustain itself by leaning
upon reason, which renders it transmissible--and above all transmissible
from myself to myself--that is to say, reflective and conscious--it is
none the less true that reason in its turn can only sustain itself by
leaning upon faith, upon life, even if only upon faith in reason, faith
in its availability for something more than mere knowing, faith in its
availability for living. Nevertheless, neither is faith transmissible or
rational, nor is reason vital.
The will and the intelligence have need of one another, and the reverse
of that old aphorism, _nihil volitum quin præcognitum_, nothing is
willed but what is previously known, is not so paradoxical as at first
sight it may appear--_nihil cognitum quin prævolitum_, nothing is known
but what is previously willed. Vinet, in his study of Cousin's book on
the _Pensées_ of Pascal, says: "The very knowledge of the mind as such
has need of the heart. Without the desire to see there is no seeing; in
a great materialization of life and of thought there is no believing in
the things of the spirit." We shall see presently that to believe is, in
the first instance, to wish to believe.
The will and the intelligence seek opposite ends: that we may absorb the
world into ourselves, appropriate it to ourselves, is the aim of the
will; that we may be absorbed into the world, that of the intelligence.
Opposite ends?--are they not rather one and the same? No, they are not,
although they may seem to be so. The intelligence is monist or
pantheist, the will monotheist or egoist. The intelligence has no need
of anything outside it to exercise itself upon; it builds its foundation
with ideas themselves, while the will requires matter. To know something
is to make this something that I know myself; but to avail myself of it,
to dominate it, it has to remain distinct from myself.
Philosophy and religion are enemies, and because they are enemies they
have need of one another. There is no religion without some philosophic
basis, no philosophy without roots in religion. Each lives by its
contrary. The history of philosophy is, strictly speaking, a history of
religion. And the attacks which are directed against religion from a
presumed scientific or philosophical point of view are merely attacks
from another but opposing religious point of view. "The opposition which
professedly exists between natural science and Christianity really
exists between an impulse derived from natural religion blended with the
scientific investigation of nature, and the validity of the Christian
view of the world, which assures to spirit its pre-eminence over the
entire world of nature," says Ritschl (_Rechtfertgung und Versöhnung_,
iii. chap. iv. § 28). Now this instinct is the instinct of rationality
itself. And the critical idealism of Kant is of religious origin, and it
is in order to save religion that Kant enlarged the limits of reason
after having in a certain sense dissolved it in scepticism. The system
of antitheses, contradictions, and antinomies, upon which Hegel
constructed his absolute idealism, has its root and germ in Kant
himself, and this root is an irrational root.
We shall see later on, when we come to deal with faith, that faith is in
its essence simply a matter of will, not of reason, that to believe is
to wish to believe, and to believe in God is, before all and above all,
to wish that there may be a God. In the same way, to believe in the
immortality of the soul is to wish that the soul may be immortal, but to
wish it with such force that this volition shall trample reason under
foot and pass beyond it. But reason has its revenge.
The instinct of knowing and the instinct of living, or rather of
surviving, come into conflict. In his work on the _Analysis of the
Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical_,[32] Dr.
E. Mach tells us that not even the investigator, the savant, _der
Forscher_, is exempted from taking his part in the struggle for
existence, that even the roads of science lead mouth-wards, and that in
the actual conditions of the society in which we live the pure instinct
of knowing, _der reine Erkenntnisstrieb_, is still no more than an
ideal. And so it always will be. _Primum vivere, deinde philosophari_,
or perhaps better, _primum supervivere_ or _superesse_.
Every position of permanent agreement or harmony between reason and
life, between philosophy and religion, becomes impossible. And the
tragic history of human thought is simply the history of a struggle
between reason and life--reason bent on rationalizing life and forcing
it to submit to the inevitable, to mortality; life bent on vitalizing
reason and forcing it to serve as a support for its own vital desires.
And this is the history of philosophy, inseparable from the history of
religion.
Our sense of the world of objective reality is necessarily subjective,
human, anthropomorphic. And vitalism will always rise up against
rationalism; reason will always find itself confronted by will. Hence
the rhythm of the history of philosophy and the alternation of periods
in which life imposes itself, giving birth to spiritual forms, with
those in which reason imposes itself, giving birth to materialist forms,
although both of these classes of forms of belief may be disguised by
other names. Neither reason nor life ever acknowledges itself
vanquished. But we will return to this in the next chapter.
The vital consequence of rationalism would be suicide. Kierkegaard puts
it very well: "The consequence for existence[33] of pure thought is
suicide.... We do not praise suicide but passion. The thinker, on the
contrary, is a curious animal--for a few spells during the day he is
very intelligent, but, for the rest, he has nothing in common with man"
(_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, chap iii., § 1).
As the thinker, in spite of all, does not cease to be a man, he employs
reason in the interests of life, whether he knows it or not. Life cheats
reason and reason cheats life. Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy
fabricated in the interest of life a teleologic-evolutionist system,
rational in appearance, which might serve as a support for our vital
longing. This philosophy, the basis of the orthodox Christian
supernaturalism, whether Catholic or Protestant, was, in its essence,
merely a trick on the part of life to force reason to lend it its
support. But reason supported it with such pressure that it ended by
pulverizing it.
I have read that the ex-Carmelite, Hyacinthe Loyson, declared that he
could present himself before God with tranquillity, for he was at peace
with his conscience and with his reason. With what conscience? If with
his religious conscience, then I do not understand. For it is a truth
that no man can serve two masters, and least of all when, though they
may sign truces and armistices and compromises, these two are enemies
because of their conflicting interests.
To all this someone is sure to object that life ought to subject itself
to reason, to which we will reply that nobody ought to do what he is
unable to do, and life cannot subject itself to reason. "Ought,
therefore can," some Kantian will retort. To which we shall demur:
"Cannot, therefore ought not." And life cannot submit itself to reason,
because the end of life is living and not understanding.
Again, there are those who talk of the religious duty of resignation to
mortality. This is indeed the very summit of aberration and insincerity.
But someone is sure to oppose the idea of veracity to that of sincerity.
Granted, and yet the two may very well be reconciled. Veracity, the
homage I owe to what I believe to be rational, to what logically we
call truth, moves me to affirm, in this case, that the immortality of
the individual soul is a contradiction in terms, that it is something,
not only irrational, but contra-rational; but sincerity leads me to
affirm also my refusal to resign myself to this previous affirmation and
my protest against its validity. What I feel is a truth, at any rate as
much a truth as what I see, touch, hear, or what is demonstrated to
me--nay, I believe it is more of a truth--and sincerity obliges me not
to hide what I feel.
And life, quick to defend itself, searches for the weak point in reason
and finds it in scepticism, which it straightway fastens upon, seeking
to save itself by means of this stranglehold. It needs the weakness of
its adversary.
Nothing is sure. Everything is elusive and in the air. In an outburst of
passion Lamennais exclaims: "But what! Shall we, losing all hope, shut
our eyes and plunge into the voiceless depths of a universal scepticism?
Shall we doubt that we think, that we feel, that we are? Nature does not
allow it; she forces us to believe even when our reason is not
convinced. Absolute certainty and absolute doubt are both alike
forbidden to us. We hover in a vague mean between these two extremes, as
between being and nothingness; for complete scepticism would be the
extinction of the intelligence and the total death of man. But it is not
given to man to annihilate himself; there is in him something which
invincibly resists destruction, I know not what vital faith, indomitable
even by his will. Whether he likes it or not, he must believe, because
he must act, because he must preserve himself. His reason, if he
listened only to that, teaching him to doubt everything, itself
included, would reduce him to a state of absolute inaction; he would
perish before even he had been able to prove to himself that he existed"
(_Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion_, iii^e partie, chap.
lxvii.).
Reason, however, does not actually lead us to absolute scepticism. No!
Reason does not lead me and cannot lead me to doubt that I exist.
Whither reason does lead me is to vital scepticism, or more properly, to
vital negation--not merely to doubt, but to deny, that my consciousness
survives my death. Scepticism is produced by the clash between reason
and desire. And from this clash, from this embrace between despair and
scepticism, is born that holy, that sweet, that saving incertitude,
which is our supreme consolation.
The absolute and complete certainty, on the one hand, that death is a
complete, definite, irrevocable annihilation of personal consciousness,
a certainty of the same order as the certainty that the three angles of
a triangle are equal to two right angles, or, on the other hand, the
absolute and complete certainty that our personal consciousness is
prolonged beyond death in these present or in other conditions, and
above all including in itself that strange and adventitious addition of
eternal rewards and punishments--both of these certainties alike would
make life impossible for us. In the most secret chamber of the spirit of
him who believes himself convinced that death puts an end to his
personal consciousness, his memory, for ever, and all unknown to him
perhaps, there lurks a shadow, a vague shadow, a shadow of shadow, of
uncertainty, and while he says within himself, "Well, let us live this
life that passes away, for there is no other!" the silence of this
secret chamber speaks to him and murmurs, "Who knows!..." He may not
think he hears it, but he hears it nevertheless. And likewise in some
secret place of the soul of the believer who most firmly holds the
belief in a future life, there is a muffled voice, a voice of
uncertainty, which whispers in the ear of his spirit, "Who knows!..."
These voices are like the humming of a mosquito when the south-west wind
roars through the trees in the wood; we cannot distinguish this faint
humming, yet nevertheless, merged in the clamour of the storm, it
reaches the ear. Otherwise, without this uncertainty, how could we live?
_"Is there?" "Is there not?"_--these are the bases of our inner life.
There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of
the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never
wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would only
prove that just as there are natural monstrosities, so there are those
who are stupid as regards heart and feeling, however great their
intelligence, and those who are stupid intellectually, however great
their virtue. But, in normal cases, I cannot believe those who assure me
that never, not in a fleeting moment, not in the hours of direst
loneliness and grief, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed upon their
consciousness. I do not understand those men who tell me that the
prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that the
thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them. For my part I do
not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith
and my reason--I wish rather that there should be war between them!
In the ninth chapter of the Gospel according to Mark it is related how a
man brought unto Jesus his son who was possessed by a dumb spirit, and
wheresoever the spirit took him it tore him, causing him to foam and
gnash his teeth and pine away, wherefore he sought to bring him to Jesus
that he might cure him. And the Master, impatient of those who sought
only for signs and wonders, exclaimed: "O faithless generation, how long
shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him unto me"
(ver. 19), and they brought him unto him. And when the Master saw him
wallowing on the ground, he asked his father how long it was ago since
this had come unto him and the father replied that it was since he was &
child. And Jesus said unto him: "If thou canst believe, all things are
possible to him that believeth" (ver. 23). And then the father of the
epileptic or demoniac uttered these pregnant and immortal words: "Lord,
I believe; help thou mine unbelief!"--_Pisteyô, kyrie, boêthei tê
hapistia mou_ (ver. 24).
"Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!" A contradiction seemingly,
for if he believes, if he trusts, how is it that he beseeches the Lord
to help his lack of trust? Nevertheless, it is this contradiction that
gives to the heart's cry of the father of the demoniac its most profound
human value. His faith is a faith that is based upon incertitude.
Because he believes--that is to say, because he wishes to believe,
because he has need that his son should be cured--he beseeches the Lord
to help his unbelief, his doubt that such a cure could be effected. Of
such kind is human faith; of such kind was the heroic faith that Sancho
Panza had in his master, the knight Don Quijote de la Mancha, as I think
I have shown in my _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_; a faith based upon
incertitude, upon doubt. Sancho Panza was indeed a man, a whole and a
true man, and he was not stupid, for only if he had been stupid would he
have believed, without a shadow of doubt, in the follies of his master.
And his master himself did not believe in them without a shadow of
doubt, for neither was Don Quixote, though mad, stupid. He was at heart
a man of despair, as I think I have shown in my above-mentioned book.
And because he was a man of an heroical despair, the hero of that inward
and resigned despair, he stands as the eternal exemplar of every man
whose soul is the battle-ground of reason and immortal desire. Our Lord
Don Quixote is the prototype of the vitalist whose faith is based upon
uncertainty, and Sancho is the prototype of the rationalist who doubts
his own reason.
Tormented by torturing doubts, August Hermann Francke resolved to call
upon God, a God in whom he did not believe, or rather in whom he
believed that he did not believe, imploring Him to take pity upon him,
upon the poor pietist Francke, if perchance He really existed.[34] And
from a similar state of mind came the inspiration of the sonnet entitled
"The Atheist's Prayer," which is included in my _Rosario de Sonetos
Líricos_, and closes with these lines:
_Sufro yo a tu costa,
Dios no existiente, pues si tú existieras
existiería yo también de veras._[35]
Yes, if God the guarantor of our personal immortality existed, then
should we ourselves really exist. And if He exists not, neither do we
exist.
That terrible secret, that hidden will of God which, translated into the
language of theology, is known as predestination, that idea which
dictated to Luther his _servum arbitrium_, and which gives to Calvinism
its tragic sense, that doubt of our own salvation, is in its essence
nothing but uncertainty, and this uncertainty, allied with despair,
forms the basis of faith. Faith, some say, consists in not thinking
about it, in surrendering ourselves trustingly to the arms of God, the
secrets of whose providence are inscrutable. Yes, but infidelity also
consists in not thinking about it. This absurd faith, this faith that
knows no shadow of uncertainty, this faith of the stupid coalheaver,
joins hands with an absurd incredulity, the incredulity that knows no
shadow of uncertainty, the incredulity of the intellectuals who are
afflicted with affective stupidity in order that they may not think
about it.
And what but uncertainty, doubt, the voice of reason, was that abyss,
that terrible _gouffre_, before which Pascal trembled? And it was that
which led him to pronounce his terrible sentence, _il faut
s'abêtir_--need is that we become fools!
All Jansenism, the Catholic adaptation of Calvinism, bears the same
impress. Port-Royal, which owed its existence to a Basque, the Abbé de
Saint-Cyran, a man of the same race as Iñigo de Loyola and as he who
writes these lines, always preserved deep down a sediment of religious
despair, of the suicide of reason. Loyola also slew his reason in
obedience.
Our affirmation is despair, our negation is despair, and from despair we
abstain from affirming and denying. Note the greater part of our
atheists and you will see that they are atheists from a kind of rage,
rage at not being able to believe that there is a God. They are the
personal enemies of God. They have invested Nothingness with substance
and personality, and their No-God is an Anti-God.
And concerning that abject and ignoble saying, "If there were not a God
it would be necessary to invent Him," we shall say nothing. It is the
expression of the unclean scepticism of those conservatives who look
upon religion merely as a means of government and whose interest it is
that in the other life there shall be a hell for those who oppose their
worldly interests in this life. This repugnant and Sadducean phrase is
worthy of the time-serving sceptic to whom it is attributed.
No, with all this the deep vital sense has nothing to do. It has nothing
to do with a transcendental police regimen, or with securing order--and
what an order!--upon earth by means of promises and threats of eternal
rewards and punishments after death. All this belongs to a lower
plane--that is to say, it is merely politics, or if you like, ethics.
The vital sense has to do with living.
But it is in our endeavour to represent to ourselves what the life of
the soul after death really means that uncertainty finds its surest
foundation. This it is that most shakes our vital desire and most
intensifies the dissolvent efficacy of reason. For even if by a mighty
effort of faith we overcome that reason which tells and teaches us that
the soul is only a function of the physical organism, it yet remains
for our imagination to conceive an image of the immortal and eternal
life of the soul. This conception involves us in contradictions and
absurdities, and it may be that we shall arrive with Kierkegaard at the
conclusion that if the mortality of the soul is terrible, not less
terrible is its immortality.
But when we have overcome the first, the only real difficulty, when we
have overcome the impediment of reason, when we have achieved the faith,
however painful and involved in uncertainty it may be, that our personal
consciousness shall continue after death, what difficulty, what
impediment, lies in the way of our imagining to ourselves this
persistence of self in harmony with our desire? Yes, we can imagine it
as an eternal rejuvenescence, as an eternal growth of ourselves, and as
a journeying towards God, towards the Universal Consciousness, without
ever an arrival, we can imagine it as ... But who shall put fetters upon
the imagination, once it has broken the chain of the rational?
I know that all this is dull reading, tiresome, perhaps tedious, but it
is all necessary. And I must repeat once again that we have nothing to
do with a transcendental police system or with the conversion of God
into a great Judge or Policeman--that is to say, we are not concerned
with heaven or hell considered as buttresses to shore up our poor
earthly morality, nor are we concerned with anything egoistic or
personal. It is not I myself alone, it is the whole human race that is
involved, it is the ultimate finality of all our civilization. I am but
one, but all men are I's.
Do you remember the end of that _Song of the Wild Cock_ which Leopardi
wrote in prose?--the despairing Leopardi, the victim of reason, who
never succeeded in achieving belief. "A time will come," he says, "when
this Universe and Nature itself will be extinguished. And just as of the
grandest kingdoms and empires of mankind and the marvellous things
achieved therein, very famous in their own time, no vestige or memory
remains to-day, so, in like manner, of the entire world and of the
vicissitudes and calamities of all created things there will remain not
a single trace, but a naked silence and a most profound stillness will
fill the immensity of space. And so before ever it has been uttered or
understood, this admirable and fearful secret of universal existence
will be obliterated and lost." And this they now describe by a
scientific and very rationalistic term--namely, _entropia_. Very pretty,
is it not? Spencer invented the notion of a primordial homogeneity, from
which it is impossible to conceive how any heterogeneity could
originate. Well now, this _entropia_ is a kind of ultimate homogeneity,
a state of perfect equilibrium. For a soul avid of life, it is the most
like nothingness that the mind can conceive.
* * * * *
To this point, through a series of dolorous reflections, I have brought
the reader who has had the patience to follow me, endeavouring always to
do equal justice to the claims of reason and of feeling. I have not
wished to keep silence on matters about which others are silent; I have
sought to strip naked, not only my own soul, but the human soul, be its
nature what it may, its destiny to disappear or not to disappear. And we
have arrived at the bottom of the abyss, at the irreconcilable conflict
between reason and vital feeling. And having arrived here, I have told
you that it is necessary to accept the conflict as such and to live by
it. Now it remains for me to explain to you how, according to my way of
feeling, and even according to my way of thinking, this despair may be
the basis of a vigorous life, of an efficacious activity, of an ethic,
of an esthetic, of a religion and even of a logic. But in what follows
there will be as much of imagination as of ratiocination, or rather,
much more.
I do not wish to deceive anyone, or to offer as philosophy what it may
be is only poetry or phantasmagoria, in any case a kind of mythology.
The divine Plato, after having discussed the immortality of the soul in
his dialogue _Phædo_ (an ideal--that is to say, a lying--immortality),
embarked upon an interpretation of the myths which treat of the other
life, remarking that it was also necessary to mythologize. Let us, then,
mythologize.
He who looks for reasons, strictly so called, scientific arguments,
technically logical reflections, may refuse to follow me further.
Throughout the remainder of these reflections upon the tragic sense, I
am going to fish for the attention of the reader with the naked,
unbaited hook; whoever wishes to bite, let him bite, but I deceive no
one. Only in the conclusion I hope to gather everything together and to
show that this religious despair which I have been talking about, and
which is nothing other than the tragic sense of life itself, is, though
more or less hidden, the very foundation of the consciousness of
civilized individuals and peoples to-day--that is to say, of those
individuals and those peoples who do not suffer from stupidity of
intellect or stupidity of feeling.
And this tragic sense is the spring of heroic achievements.
If in that which follows you shall meet with arbitrary apothegms,
brusque transitions, inconsecutive statements, veritable somersaults of
thought, do not cry out that you have been deceived. We are about to
enter--if it be that you wish to accompany me--upon a field of
contradictions between feeling and reasoning, and we shall have to avail
ourselves of the one as well as of the other.
That which follows is not the outcome of reason but of life, although in
order that I may transmit it to you I shall have to rationalize it after
a fashion. The greater part of it can be reduced to no logical theory or
system; but like that tremendous Yankee poet, Walt Whitman, "I charge
that there be no theory or school founded out of me" (_Myself and
Mine_).
Neither am I the only begetter of the fancies I am about to set forth.
By no means. They have also been conceived by other men, if not
precisely by other thinkers, who have preceded me in this vale of tears,
and who have exhibited their life and given expression to it. Their
life, I repeat, not their thought, save in so far as it was thought
inspired by life, thought with a basis of irrationality.
Does this mean that in all that follows, in the efforts of the
irrational to express itself, there is a total lack of rationality, of
all objective value? No; the absolutely, the irrevocably irrational, is
inexpressible, is intransmissible. But not the contra-rational. Perhaps
there is no way of rationalizing the irrational; but there is a way of
rationalizing the contra-rational, and that is by trying to explain it.
Since only the rational is intelligible, really intelligible, and since
the absurd, being devoid of sense, is condemned to be incommunicable,
you will find that whenever we succeed in giving expression and
intelligibility to anything apparently irrational or absurd we
invariably resolve it into something rational, even though it be into
the negation of that which we affirm.
The maddest dreams of the fancy have some ground of reason, and who
knows if everything that the imagination of man can conceive either has
not already happened, or is not now happening or will not happen some
time, in some world or another? The possible combinations are perhaps
infinite. It only remains to know whether all that is imaginable is
possible.
It may also be said, and with justice, that much of what I am about to
set forth is merely a repetition of ideas which have been expressed a
hundred times before and a hundred times refuted; but the repetition of
an idea really implies that its refutation has not been final. And as I
do not pretend that the majority of these fancies are new, so neither do
I pretend, obviously, that other voices before mine have not spoken to
the winds the same laments. But when yet another voice echoes the same
eternal lament it can only be inferred that the same grief still dwells
in the heart.
And it comes not amiss to repeat yet once again the same eternal
lamentations that were already old in the days of Job and Ecclesiastes,
and even to repeat them in the same words, to the end that the devotees
of progress may see that there is something that never dies. Whosoever
repeats the "Vanity of vanities" of Ecclesiastes or the lamentations of
Job, even though without changing a letter, having first experienced
them in his soul, performs a work of admonition. Need is to repeat
without ceasing the _memento mori_.
"But to what end?" you will ask. Even though it be only to the end that
some people should be irritated and should see that these things are not
dead and, so long as men exist, cannot die; to the end that they should
be convinced that to-day, in the twentieth century, all the bygone
centuries and all of them alive, are still subsisting. When a supposed
error reappears, it must be, believe me, that it has not ceased to be
true in part, just as when one who was dead reappears, it must be that
he was not wholly dead.
Yes, I know well that others before me have felt what I feel and
express; that many others feel it to-day, although they keep silence
about it. Why do I not keep silence about it too? Well, for the very
reason that most of those who feel it are silent about it; and yet,
though they are silent, they obey in silence that inner voice. And I do
not keep silence about it because it is for many the thing which must
not be spoken, the abomination of abominations--_infandum_--and I
believe that it is necessary now and again to speak the thing which must
not be spoken. But if it leads to nothing? Even if it should lead only
to irritating the devotees of progress, those who believe that truth is
consolation, it would lead to not a little. To irritating them and
making them say: Poor fellow! if he would only use his intelligence to
better purpose!... Someone perhaps will add that I do not know what I
say, to which I shall reply that perhaps he may be right--and being
right is such a little thing!--but that I feel what I say and I know
what I feel and that suffices me. And that it is better to be lacking in
reason than to have too much of it.
And the reader who perseveres in reading me will also see how out of
this abyss of despair hope may arise, and how this critical position may
be the well-spring of human, profoundly human, action and effort, and of
solidarity and even of progress. He will see its pragmatic
justification. And he will see how, in order to work, and to work
efficaciously and morally, there is no need of either of these two
conflicting certainties, either that of faith or that of reason, and how
still less is there any need--this never under any circumstances--to
shirk the problem of the immortality of the soul, or to distort it
idealistically--that is to say, hypocritically. The reader will see how
this uncertainty, with the suffering that accompanies it, and the
fruitless struggle to escape from it, may be and is a basis for action
and morals.
And in the fact that it serves as a basis for action and morals, this
feeling of uncertainty and the inward struggle between reason on the one
hand and faith and the passionate longing for eternal life on the other,
should find their justification in the eyes of the pragmatist. But it
must be clearly stated that I do not adduce this practical consequence
in order to justify the feeling, but merely because I encounter it in my
inward experience. I neither desire to seek, nor ought I to seek, any
justification for this state of inward struggle and uncertainty and
longing; it is a fact and that suffices. And if anyone finding himself
in this state, in the depth of the abyss, fails to find there motives
for and incentives to life and action, and concludes by committing
bodily or spiritual suicide, whether he kills himself or he abandons all
co-operation with his fellows in human endeavour, it will not be I who
will pass censure upon him. And apart from the fact that the evil
consequences of a doctrine, or rather those which we call evil, only
prove, I repeat, that the doctrine is disastrous for our desires, but
not that it is false in itself, the consequences themselves depend not
so much upon the doctrine as upon him who deduces them. The same
principle may furnish one man with grounds for action and another man
with grounds for abstaining from action, it may lead one man to direct
his effort towards a certain end and another man towards a directly
opposite end. For the truth is that our doctrines are usually only the
justification _a posteriori_ of our conduct, or else they are our way of
trying to explain that conduct to ourselves.
Man, in effect, is unwilling to remain in ignorance of the motives of
his own conduct. And just as a man who has been led to perform a certain
action by hypnotic suggestion will afterwards invent reasons which would
justify it and make it appear logical to himself and others, being
unaware all the time of the real cause of his action, so every man--for
since "life is a dream" every man is in a condition of hypnotism--seeks
to find reasons for his conduct. And if the pieces on a chessboard were
endowed with consciousness, they would probably have little difficulty
in ascribing their moves to freewill--that is to say, they would claim
for them a finalist rationality. And thus it comes about that every
philosophic theory serves to explain and justify an ethic, a doctrine of
conduct, which has its real origin in the inward moral feeling of the
author of the theory. But he who harbours this feeling may possibly
himself have no clear consciousness of its true reason or cause.
Consequently, if my reason, which is in a certain sense a part of the
reason of all my brothers in humanity in time and space, teaches me this
absolute scepticism in respect of what concerns my longing for
never-ending life, I think that I can assume that my feeling of life,
which is the essence of life itself, my vitality, my boundless appetite
for living and my abhorrence of dying, my refusal to submit to
death--that it is this which suggests to me the doctrines with which I
try to counter-check the working of the reason. Have these doctrines an
objective value? someone will ask me, and I shall answer that I do not
understand what this objective value of a doctrine is. I will not say
that the more or less poetical and unphilosophical doctrines that I am
about to set forth are those which make me live; but I will venture to
say that it is my longing to live and to live for ever that inspires
these doctrines within me. And if by means of them I succeed in
strengthening and sustaining this same longing in another, perhaps when
it was all but dead, then I shall have performed a man's work and, above
all, I shall have lived. In a word, be it with reason or without reason
or against reason, I am resolved not to die. And if, when at last I die
out, I die out altogether, then I shall not have died out of
myself--that is, I shall not have yielded myself to death, but my human
destiny will have killed me. Unless I come to lose my head, or rather my
heart, I will not abdicate from life--life will be wrested from me.
To have recourse to those, ambiguous words, "optimism" and "pessimism,"
does not assist us in any way, for frequently they express the very
contrary of what those who use them mean to express. To ticket a
doctrine with the label of pessimism is not to impugn its validity, and
the so-called optimists are not the most efficient in action. I believe,
on the contrary, that many of the greatest heroes, perhaps the greatest
of all, have been men of despair and that by despair they have
accomplished their mighty works. Apart from this, however, and accepting
in all their ambiguity these denominations of optimism and pessimism,
that there exists a certain transcendental pessimism which may be the
begetter of a temporal and terrestrial optimism, is a matter that I
propose to develop in the following part of this treatise.
Very different, well I know, is the attitude of our progressives, the
partisans of "the central current of contemporary European thought"; but
I cannot bring myself to believe that these individuals do not
voluntarily close their eyes to the grand problem of existence and that,
in endeavouring to stifle this feeling of the tragedy of life, they
themselves are not living a lie.
The foregoing reflections are a kind of practical summary of the
criticism developed in the first six chapters of this treatise, a kind
of definition of the practical position to which such a criticism is
capable of leading whosoever will not renounce life and will not
renounce reason and who is compelled to live and act between these upper
and nether millstones which grind upon the soul. The reader who follows
me further is now aware that I am about to carry him into the region of
the imagination, of imagination not destitute of reason, for without
reason nothing subsists, but of imagination founded on feeling. And as
regards its truth, the real truth, that which is independent of
ourselves, beyond the reach of our logic and of our heart--of this truth
who knows aught?
FOOTNOTES:
[31] See Troeltsch, _Systematische christliche Religion_, in _Die Kultur
der Gegenwart_ series.
[32] _Die Analyse der Empfindigungen und das Verhältniss des Physischen
zum Psychischen_, i., § 12, note.
[33] I have left the original expression here, almost without
translating it--_Existents-Consequents_. It means the existential or
practical, not the purely rational or logical, consequence. (Author's
note.)
[34] Albrecht Ritschl: _Geschichte des Pietismus_, ii., Abt. i., Bonn,
1884, p. 251.
[35] Thou art the cause of my suffering, O non-existing God, for if Thou
didst exist, then should I also really exist.
VII
LOVE, SUFFERING, PITY, AND PERSONALITY
CAIN: Let me, or happy or unhappy, learn
To anticipate my immortality.
LUCIFER: Thou didst before I came upon thee.
CAIN: How?
LUCIFER: By suffering.
BYRON: _Cain_, Act II., Scene I.
The most tragic thing in the world and in life, readers and brothers of
mine, is love. Love is the child of illusion and the parent of
disillusion; love is consolation in desolation; it is the sole medicine
against death, for it is death's brother.
_Fratelli, a un tempo stesso, Amore e Morte
Ingeneró la sorte_,
as Leopardi sang.
Love seeks with fury, through the medium of the beloved, something
beyond, and since it finds it not, it despairs.
Whenever we speak of love there is always present in our memory the idea
of sexual love, the love between man and woman, whose end is the
perpetuation of the human race upon the earth. Hence it is that we never
succeed in reducing love either to a purely intellectual or to a purely
volitional element, putting aside that part in it which belongs to the
feeling, or, if you like, to the senses. For, in its essence, love is
neither idea nor volition; rather it is desire, feeling; it is something
carnal in spirit itself. Thanks to love, we feel all that spirit has of
flesh in it.
Sexual love is the generative type of every other love. In love and by
love we seek to perpetuate ourselves, and we perpetuate ourselves on the
earth only on condition that we die, that we yield up our life to
others. The humblest forms of animal life, the lowest of living beings,
multiply by dividing themselves, by splitting into two, by ceasing to be
the unit which they previously formed.
But when at last the vitality of the being that multiplies itself by
division is exhausted, the species must renew the source of life from
time to time by means of the union of two wasting individuals, by means
of what is called, among protozoaria, conjugation. They unite in order
to begin dividing again with more vigour. And every act of generation
consists in a being's ceasing to be what it was, either wholly or in
part, in a splitting up, in a partial death. To live is to give oneself,
to perpetuate oneself, and to perpetuate oneself and to give oneself is
to die. The supreme delight of begetting is perhaps nothing but a
foretaste of death, the eradication of our own vital essence. We unite
with another, but it is to divide ourselves; this most intimate embrace
is only a most intimate sundering. In its essence, the delight of sexual
love, the genetic spasm, is a sensation of resurrection, of renewing our
life in another, for only in others can we renew our life and so
perpetuate ourselves.
Without doubt there is something tragically destructive in the essence
of love, as it presents itself to us in its primitive animal form, in
the unconquerable instinct which impels the male and the female to mix
their being in a fury of conjunction. The same impulse that joins their
bodies, separates, in a certain sense, their souls; they hate one
another, while they embrace, no less than they love, and above all they
contend with one another, they contend for a third life, which as yet is
without life. Love is a contention, and there are animal species in
which the male maltreats the female in his union with her, and other in
which the female devours the male after being fertilized by him.
It has been said that love is a mutual selfishness; and, in fact, each
one of the lovers seeks to possess the other, and in seeking his own
perpetuation through the instrumentality of the other, though without
being at the time conscious of it or purposing it, he thereby seeks his
own enjoyment. Each one of the lovers is an immediate instrument of
enjoyment and a mediate instrument of perpetuation, for the other. And
thus they are tyrants and slaves, each one at once the tyrant and slave
of the other.
Is there really anything strange in the fact that the deepest religious
feeling has condemned carnal love and exalted virginity? Avarice, said
the Apostle, is the root of all evil, and the reason is because avarice
takes riches, which are only a means, for an end; and therein lies the
essence of sin, in taking means for ends, in not recognizing or in
disesteeming the end. And since it takes enjoyment for the end, whereas
it is only the means, and not perpetuation, which is the true end, what
is carnal love but avarice? And it is possible that there are some who
preserve their virginity in order the better to perpetuate themselves,
and in order to perpetuate something more human than the flesh.
For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers
perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father
of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that
in the depth of love there is a depth of eternal despair, out of which
spring hope and consolation. For out of this carnal and primitive love
of which I have been speaking, out of this love of the whole body with
all its senses, which is the animal origin of human society, out of this
loving-fondness, rises spiritual and sorrowful love.
This other form of love, this spiritual love, is born of sorrow, is
born of the death of carnal love, is born also of the feeling of
compassion and protection which parents feel in the presence of a
stricken child. Lovers never attain to a love of self abandonment, of
true fusion of soul and not merely of body, until the heavy pestle of
sorrow has bruised their hearts and crushed them in the same mortar of
suffering. Sensual love joined their bodies but disjoined their souls;
it kept their souls strangers to one another; but of this love is
begotten a fruit of their flesh--a child. And perchance this child,
begotten in death, falls sick and dies. Then it comes to pass that over
the fruit of their carnal fusion and spiritual separation and
estrangement, their bodies now separated and cold with sorrow but united
by sorrow their souls, the lovers, the parents, join in an embrace of
despair, and then is born, of the death of the child of their flesh, the
true spiritual love. Or rather, when the bond of flesh which united them
is broken, they breathe with a sigh of relief. For men love one another
with a spiritual love only when they have suffered the same sorrow
together, when through long days they have ploughed the stony ground
bowed beneath the common yoke of a common grief. It is then that they
know one another and feel one another, and feel with one another in
their common anguish, they pity one another and love one another. For to
love is to pity; and if bodies are united by pleasure, souls are united
by pain.
And this is felt with still more clearness and force in the seeding, the
taking root, and the blossoming of one of those tragic loves which are
doomed to contend with the diamond-hard laws of Destiny--one of those
loves which are born out of due time and season, before or after the
moment, or out of the normal mode in which the world, which is custom,
would have been willing to welcome them. The more barriers Destiny and
the world and its law interpose between the lovers, the stronger is the
impulse that urges them towards one another, and their happiness in
loving one another turns to bitterness, and their unhappiness in not
being able to love freely and openly grows heavier, and they pity one
another from the bottom of their hearts; and this common pity, which is
their common misery and their common happiness, gives fire and fuel to
their love. And they suffer their joy, enjoying their suffering. And
they establish their love beyond the confines of the world, and the
strength of this poor love suffering beneath the yoke of Destiny gives
them intuition of another world where there is no other law than the
liberty of love--another world where there are no barriers because there
is no flesh. For nothing inspires us more with hope and faith in another
world than the impossibility of our love truly fructifying in this world
of flesh and of appearances.
And what is maternal love but compassion for the weak, helpless,
defenceless infant that craves the mother's milk and the comfort of her
breast? And woman's love is all maternal.
To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most.
Men aflame with a burning charity towards their neighbours are thus
enkindled because they have touched the depth of their own misery, their
own apparentiality, their own nothingness, and then, turning their newly
opened eyes upon their fellows, they have seen that they also are
miserable, apparential, condemned to nothingness, and they have pitied
them and loved them.
Man yearns to be loved, or, what is the same thing, to be pitied. Man
wishes others to feel and share his hardships and his sorrows. The
roadside beggar's exhibition of his sores and gangrened mutilations is
something more than a device to extort alms from the passer-by. True
alms is pity rather than the pittance that alleviates the material
hardships of life. The beggar shows little gratitude for alms thrown to
him by one who hurries past with averted face; he is more grateful to
him who pities him but does not help than to him who helps but does not
pity, although from another point of view he may prefer the latter.
Observe with what satisfaction he relates his woes to one who is moved
by the story of them. He desires to be pitied, to be loved.
Woman's love, above all, as I have remarked, is always compassionate in
its essence--maternal. Woman yields herself to the lover because she
feels that his desire makes him suffer. Isabel had compassion upon
Lorenzo, Juliet upon Romeo, Francesca upon Paolo. Woman seems to say:
"Come, poor one, thou shalt not suffer so for my sake!" And therefore is
her love more loving and purer than that of man, braver and more
enduring.
Pity, then, is the essence of human spiritual love, of the love that is
conscious of being love, of the love that is not purely animal, of the
love, in a word, of a rational person. Love pities, and pities most when
it loves most.
Reversing the terms of the adage _nihil volitum quin præcognitum_, I
have told you that _nihil cognitum quin prævolitum_, that we know
nothing save what we have first, in one way or another, desired; and it
may even be added that we can know nothing well save what we love, save
what we pity.
As love grows, this restless yearning to pierce to the uttermost and to
the innermost, so it continually embraces all that it sees, and pities
all that it embraces. According as you turn inwards and penetrate more
deeply into yourself, you will discover more and more your own
emptiness, that you are not all that you are not, that you are not what
you would wish to be, that you are, in a word, only a nonentity. And in
touching your own nothingness, in not feeling your permanent base, in
not reaching your own infinity, still less your own eternity, you will
have a whole-hearted pity for yourself, and you will burn with a
sorrowful love for yourself--a love that will consume your so-called
self-love, which is merely a species of sensual self-delectation, the
self-enjoyment, as it were, of the flesh of your soul.
Spiritual self-love, the pity that one feels for oneself, may perhaps be
called egotism; but nothing could be more opposed to ordinary egoism.
For this love or pity for yourself, this intense despair, bred of the
consciousness that just as before you were born you were not, so after
your death you will cease to be, will lead you to pity--that is, to
love--all your fellows and brothers in this world of appearance, these
unhappy shadows who pass from nothingness to nothingness, these sparks
of consciousness which shine for a moment in the infinite and eternal
darkness. And this compassionate feeling for other men, for your
fellows, beginning with those most akin to you, those with whom you
live, will expand into a universal pity for all living things, and
perhaps even for things that have not life but merely existence. That
distant star which shines up there in the night will some day be
quenched and will turn to dust and will cease to shine and cease to
exist. And so, too, it will be with the whole of the star-strewn
heavens. Unhappy heavens!
And if it is grievous to be doomed one day to cease to be, perhaps it
would be more grievous still to go on being always oneself, and no more
than oneself, without being able to be at the same time other, without
being able to be at the same time everything else, without being able to
be all.
If you look at the universe as closely and as inwardly as you are able
to look--that is to say, if you look within yourself; if you not only
contemplate but feel all things in your own consciousness, upon which
all things have traced their painful impression--you will arrive at the
abyss of the tedium, not merely of life, but of something more: at the
tedium of existence, at the bottomless pit of the vanity of vanities.
And thus you will come to pity all things; you will arrive at universal
love.
In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, human and
extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within
yourself, you must personalize everything. For everything that it loves,
everything that it pities, love personalizes. We only pity--that is to
say, we only love--that which is like ourselves and in so far as it is
like ourselves, and the more like it is the more we love; and thus our
pity for things, and with it our love, grows in proportion as we
discover in them the likenesses which they have with ourselves. Or,
rather, it is love itself, which of itself tends to grow, that reveals
these resemblances to us. If I am moved to pity and love the luckless
star that one day will vanish from the face of heaven, it is because
love, pity, makes me feel that it has a consciousness, more or less dim,
which makes it suffer because it is no more than a star, and a star that
is doomed one day to cease to be. For all consciousness is consciousness
of death and of suffering.
Consciousness (_conscientia_) is participated knowledge, is co-feeling,
and co-feeling is com-passion. Love personalizes all that it loves. Only
by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea. And when love is
so great and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves
everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers that the total
All, that the Universe, is also a Person possessing a Consciousness, a
Consciousness which in its turn suffers, pities, and loves, and
therefore is consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe,
which love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call
God. And thus the soul pities God and feels itself pitied by Him; loves
Him and feels itself loved by Him, sheltering its misery in the bosom of
the eternal and infinite misery, which, in eternalizing itself and
infinitizing itself, is the supreme happiness itself.
God is, then, the personalization of the All; He is the eternal and
infinite Consciousness of the Universe--Consciousness taken captive by
matter and struggling to free himself from it. We personalize the All
in order to save ourselves from Nothingness; and the only mystery really
mysterious is the mystery of suffering.
Suffering is the path of consciousness, and by it living beings arrive
at the possession of self-consciousness. For to possess consciousness of
oneself, to possess personality, is to know oneself and to feel oneself
distinct from other beings, and this feeling of distinction is only
reached through an act of collision, through suffering more or less
severe, through the sense of one's own limits. Consciousness of oneself
is simply consciousness of one's own limitation. I feel myself when I
feel that I am not others; to know and to feel the extent of my being is
to know at what point I cease to be, the point beyond which I no longer
am.
And how do we know that we exist if we do not suffer, little or much?
How can we turn upon ourselves, acquire reflective consciousness, save
by suffering? When we enjoy ourselves we forget ourselves, forget that
we exist; we pass over into another, an alien being, we alienate
ourselves. And we become centred in ourselves again, we return to
ourselves, only by suffering.
_Nessun maggior dolore
che ricordarsi del tempo felice
nella miseria_
are the words that Dante puts into the mouth of Francesca da Rimini
(_Inferno_, v., 121-123); but if there is no greater sorrow than the
recollection in adversity of happy bygone days, there is, on the other
hand, no pleasure in remembering adversity in days of prosperity.
"The bitterest sorrow that man can know is to aspire to do much and to
achieve nothing" (_polla phroneoita mêdenos chrateein_)--so
Herodotus relates that a Persian said to a Theban at a banquet (book
ix., chap. xvi.). And it is true. With knowledge and desire we can
embrace everything, or almost everything; with the will nothing, or
almost nothing. And contemplation is not happiness--no! not if this
contemplation implies impotence. And out of this collision between our
knowledge and our power pity arises.
We pity what is like ourselves, and the greater and clearer our sense of
its likeness with ourselves, the greater our pity. And if we may say
that this likeness provokes our pity, it may also be maintained that it
is our reservoir of pity, eager to diffuse itself over everything, that
makes us discover the likeness of things with ourselves, the common bond
that unites us with them in suffering.
Our own struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase our own
consciousness makes us discover in the endeavours and movements and
revolutions of all things a struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase
consciousness, to which everything tends. Beneath the actions of those
most akin to myself, of my fellow-men, I feel--or, rather, I co-feel--a
state of consciousness similar to that which lies beneath my own
actions. On hearing my brother give a cry of pain, my own pain awakes
and cries in the depth of my consciousness. And in the same way I feel
the pain of animals, and the pain of a tree when one of its branches is
being cut off, and I feel it most when my imagination is alive, for the
imagination is the faculty of intuition, of inward vision.
Proceeding from ourselves, from our own human consciousness, the only
consciousness which we feel from within and in which feeling is
identical with being, we attribute some sort of consciousness, more or
less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for
they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply a struggle
to realize fullness of consciousness through suffering, a continual
aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and
yet to preserve their proper limits.
And this process of personalization or subjectivization of everything
external, phenomenal, or objective, is none other than the vital
process of philosophy in the contest of life against reason and of
reason against life. We have already indicated it in the preceding
chapter, and we must now confirm it by developing it further.
Giovanni Baptista Vico, with his profound esthetic penetration into the
soul of antiquity, saw that the spontaneous philosophy of man was to
make of himself the norm of the universe, guided by the _instinto
d'animazione_. Language, necessarily anthropomorphic, mythopeic,
engenders thought. "Poetic wisdom, which was the primitive wisdom of
paganism," says Vico in his _Scienza Nuova_, "must have begun with a
metaphysic, not reasoned and abstract, like that of modern educated men,
but felt and imagined, such as must have been that of primitive men.
This was their own poetry, which with them was inborn, an innate
faculty, for nature had furnished them with such feelings and such
imaginations, a faculty born of the ignorance of causes, and therefore
begetting a universal sense of wonder, for knowing nothing they
marvelled greatly at everything. This poetry had a divine origin, for,
while they invented the causes of things out of their own imagination,
at the same time they regarded these causes with feelings of wonder as
gods. In this way the first men of the pagan peoples, as children of the
growing human race, fashioned things out of their ideas.... This nature
of human things has bequeathed that eternal property which Tacitus
elucidated with a fine phrase when he said, not without reason, that men
in their terror _fingunt simul creduntque_."
And then, passing from the age of imagination, Vico proceeds to show us
the age of reason, this age of ours in which the mind, even the popular
mind, is too remote from the senses, "with so many abstractions of which
all languages are full," an age in which "the ability to conceive an
immense image of such a personage as we call sympathetic Nature is
denied to us, for though the phrase 'Dame Nature' may be on our lips,
there is nothing in our minds that corresponds with it, our minds being
occupied with the false, the non-existent." "To-day," Vico continues,
"it is naturally impossible for us to enter into the vast imagination of
these primitive men." But is this certain? Do not we continue to live by
the creations of their imagination, embodied for ever in the language
with which we think, or, rather, the language which thinks in us?
It was in vain that Comte declared that human thought had already
emerged from the age of theology and was now emerging from the age of
metaphysics into the age of positivism; the three ages coexist, and
although antagonistic they lend one another mutual support.
High-sounding positivism, whenever it ceases to deny and begins to
affirm something, whenever it becomes really positive, is nothing but
metaphysics; and metaphysics, in its essence, is always theology, and
theology is born of imagination yoked to the service of life, of life
with its craving for immortality.
Our feeling of the world, upon which is based our understanding of it,
is necessarily anthropomorphic and mythopeic. When rationalism dawned
with Thales of Miletus, this philosopher abandoned Oceanus and Thetis,
gods and the progenitors of gods, and attributed the origin of things to
water; but this water was a god in disguise. Beneath nature (_phhysist_)
and the world (_khosmos_), mythical and anthropomorphic creations
throbbed with life. They were implicated in the structure of language
itself. Xenophon tells us (_Memorabilia_, i., i., 6-9) that among
phenomena Socrates distinguished between those which were within the
scope of human study and those which the gods had reserved for
themselves, and that he execrated the attempt of Anaxagoras to explain
everything rationally. His contemporary, Hippocrates, regarded diseases
as of divine origin, and Plato believed that the sun and stars were
animated gods with their souls (_Philebus_, cap. xvi., _Laws_, x.), and
only permitted astronomical investigation so long as it abstained from
blasphemy against these gods. And Aristotle in his _Physics_ tells us
that Zeus rains not in order that the corn may grow, but by necessity
(_ex anharchêst_). They tried to mechanize and rationalize God, but God
rebelled against them.
And what is the concept of God, a concept continually renewed because
springing out of the eternal feeling of God in man, but the eternal
protest of life against reason, the unconquerable instinct of
personalization? And what is the notion of substance itself but the
objectivization of that which is most subjective--that is, of the will
or consciousness? For consciousness, even before it knows itself as
reason, feels itself, is palpable to itself, is most in harmony with
itself, as will, and as will not to die. Hence that rhythm, of which we
spoke, in the history of thought. Positivism inducted us into an age of
rationalism--that is to say, of materialism, mechanism, or mortalism;
and behold now the return of vitalism, of spiritualism. What was the
effort of pragmatism but an effort to restore faith in the human
finality of the universe? What is the effort of a Bergson, for example,
especially in his work on creative evolution, but an attempt to
re-integrate the personal God and eternal consciousness? Life never
surrenders.
And it avails us nothing to seek to repress this mythopeic or
anthropomorphic process and to rationalize our thought, as if we thought
only for the sake of thinking and knowing, and not for the sake of
living. The very language with which we think prevents us from so doing.
Language, the substance of thought, is a system of metaphors with a
mythic and anthropomorphic base. And to construct a purely rational
philosophy it would be necessary to construct it by means of algebraic
formulas or to create a new language for it, an inhuman language--that
is to say, one inapt for the needs of life--as indeed Dr. Richard
Avenarius, professor of philosophy at Zürich, attempted to do in his
_Critique of Pure Experience (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung_), in order to
avoid preconceptions. And this rigorous attempt of Avenarius, the chief
of the critics of experience, ends strictly in pure scepticism. He
himself says at the end of the Prologue to the work above mentioned:
"The childish confidence that it is granted to us to discover truth has
long since disappeared; as we progress we become aware of the
difficulties that lie in the way of its discovery and of the limitation
of our powers. And what is the end?... If we could only succeed in
seeing clearly into ourselves!"
Seeing clearly! seeing clearly! Clear vision would be only attainable by
a pure thinker who used algebra instead of language and was able to
divest himself of his own humanity--that is to say, by an unsubstantial,
merely objective being: a no-being, in short. In spite of reason we are
compelled to think with life, and in spite of life we are compelled to
rationalize thought.
This animation, this personification, interpenetrates our very
knowledge. "Who is it that sends the rain? Who is it that thunders?" old
Strepsiades asks of Socrates in _The Clouds_ of Aristophanes, and the
philosopher replies: "Not Zeus, but the clouds." "But," questions
Strepsiades, "who but Zeus makes the clouds sweep along?" to which
Socrates answers: "Not a bit of it; it is atmospheric whirligig."
"Whirligig?" muses Strepsiades; "I never thought of that--that Zeus is
gone and that Son Whirligig rules now in his stead." And so the old man
goes on personifying and animating the whirlwind, as if the whirlwind
were now a king, not without consciousness of his kingship. And in
exchanging a Zeus for a whirlwind--God for matter, for example--we all
do the same thing. And the reason is because philosophy does not work
upon the objective reality which we perceive with the senses, but upon
the complex of ideas, images, notions, perceptions, etc., embodied in
language and transmitted to us with our language by our ancestors. That
which we call the world, the objective world, is a social tradition. It
is given to us ready made.
Man does not submit to being, as consciousness, alone in the Universe,
nor to being merely one objective phenomenon the more. He wishes to save
his vital or passional subjectivity by attributing life, personality,
spirit, to the whole Universe. In order to realize his wish he has
discovered God and substance; God and substance continually reappear in
his thought cloaked in different disguises. Because we are conscious, we
feel that we exist, which is quite another thing from knowing that we
exist, and we wish to feel the existence of everything else; we wish
that of all the other individual things each one should also be an "I."
The most consistent, although the most incongruous and vacillating,
idealism, that of Berkeley, who denied the existence of matter, of
something inert and extended and passive, as the cause of our sensations
and the substratum of external phenomena, is in its essence nothing but
an absolute spiritualism or dynamism, the supposition that every
sensation comes to us, causatively, from another spirit--that is, from
another consciousness. And his doctrine has a certain affinity with
those of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. The former's doctrine of the Will
and the latter's doctrine of the Unconscious are already implied in the
Berkeleyan theory that to be is to be perceived. To which must be added:
and to cause others to perceive what is. Thus the old adage _operari
sequitur esse_ (action follows being) must be modified by saying that to
be is to act, and only that which acts--the active--exists, and in so
far as it acts.
As regards Schopenhauer, there is no need to endeavour to show that the
will, which he posits as the essence of things, proceeds from
consciousness. And it is only necessary to read his book on the Will in
Nature to see how he attributed a certain spirit and even a certain
personality to the plants themselves. And this doctrine of his carried
him logically to pessimism, for the true property and most inward
function of the will is to suffer. The will is a force which feels
itself--that is, which suffers. And, someone will add, which enjoys. But
the capacity to enjoy is impossible without the capacity to suffer; and
the faculty of enjoyment is one with that of pain. Whosoever does not
suffer does not enjoy, just as whosoever is insensible to cold is
insensible to heat.
And it is also quite logical that Schopenhauer, who deduced pessimism
from the voluntarist doctrine or doctrine of universal personalization,
should have deduced from both of these that the foundation of morals is
compassion. Only his lack of the social and historical sense, his
inability to feel that humanity also is a person, although a collective
one, his egoism, in short, prevented him from feeling God, prevented him
from individualizing and personalizing the total and collective
Will--the Will of the Universe.
On the other hand, it is easy to understand his aversion from purely
empirical, evolutionist, or transformist doctrines, such as those set
forth in the works of Lamarck and Darwin which came to his notice.
Judging Darwin's theory solely by an extensive extract in _The Times_,
he described it, in a letter to Adam Louis von Doss (March 1, 1860), as
"downright empiricism" _(platter Empirismus)_. In fact, for a
voluntarist like Schopenhauer, a theory so sanely and cautiously
empirical and rational as that of Darwin left out of account the inward
force, the essential motive, of evolution. For what is, in effect, the
hidden force, the ultimate agent, which impels organisms to perpetuate
themselves and to fight for their persistence and propagation?
Selection, adaptation, heredity, these are only external conditions.
This inner, essential force has been called will on the supposition that
there exists also in other beings that which we feel in ourselves as a
feeling of will, the impulse to be everything, to be others as well as
ourselves yet without ceasing to be what we are. And it may be said
that this force is the divine in us, that it is God Himself who works in
us because He suffers in us.
And sympathy teaches us to discover this force, this aspiration towards
consciousness, in all things. It moves and activates the most minute
living creatures; it moves and activates, perhaps, the very cells of our
own bodily organism, which is a confederation, more or less solidary, of
living beings; it moves the very globules of our blood. Our life is
composed of lives, our vital aspiration of aspirations existing perhaps
in the limbo of subconsciousness. Not more absurd than so many other
dreams which pass as valid theories is the belief that our cells, our
globules, may possess something akin to a rudimentary cellular, globular
consciousness or basis of consciousness. Or that they may arrive at
possessing such consciousness. And since we have given a loose rein to
the fancy, we may fancy that these cells may communicate with one
another, and that some of them may express their belief that they form
part of a superior organism endowed with a collective personal
consciousness. And more than once in the history of human feeling this
fancy has been expressed in the surmisal of some philosopher or poet
that we men are a kind of globules in the blood of a Supreme Being, who
possesses his own personal collective consciousness, the consciousness
of the Universe.
Perhaps the immense Milky Way which on clear nights we behold stretching
across the heavens, this vast encircling ring in which our planetary
system is itself but a molecule, is in its turn but a cell in the
Universe, in the Body of God. All the cells of our body combine and
co-operate in maintaining and kindling by their activity our
consciousness, our soul; and if the consciousness or the souls of all
these cells entered completely into our consciousness, into the
composite whole, if I possessed consciousness of all that happens in my
bodily organism, I should feel the universe happening within myself,
and perhaps the painful sense of my limitedness would disappear. And if
all the consciousness of all beings unite in their entirety in the
universal consciousness, this consciousness--that is to say, God--is
all.
In every instant obscure consciousnesses, elementary souls, are born and
die within us, and their birth and death constitute our life. And their
sudden and violent death constitutes our pain. And in like manner, in
the heart of God consciousnesses are born and die--but do they die?--and
their births and deaths constitute His life.
If there is a Universal and Supreme Consciousness, I am an idea in it;
and is it possible for any idea in this Supreme Consciousness to be
completely blotted out? After I have died, God will go on remembering
me, and to be remembered by God, to have my consciousness sustained by
the Supreme Consciousness, is not that, perhaps, to be?
And if anyone should say that God has made the universe, it may be
rejoined that so also our soul has made our body as much as, if not more
than, it has been made by it--if, indeed, there be a soul.
When pity, love, reveals to us the whole universe striving to gain, to
preserve, and to enlarge its consciousness, striving more and more to
saturate itself with consciousness, feeling the pain of the discords
which are produced within it, pity reveals to us the likeness of the
whole universe with ourselves; it reveals to us that it is human, and it
leads us to discover our Father in it, of whose flesh we are flesh; love
leads us to personalize the whole of which we form a part.
To say that God is eternally producing things is fundamentally the same
as saying that things are eternally producing God. And the belief in a
personal and spiritual God is based on the belief in our own personality
and spirituality. Because we feel ourselves to be consciousness, we
feel God to be consciousness--that is to say, a person; and because we
desire ardently that our consciousness shall live and be independently
of the body, we believe that the divine person lives and exists
independently of the universe, that his state of consciousness is _ad
extra_.
No doubt logicians will come forward and confront us with the evident
rational difficulties which this involves; but we have already stated
that, although presented under logical forms, the content of all this is
not strictly rational. Every rational conception of God is in itself
contradictory. Faith in God is born of love for God--we believe that God
exists by force of wishing that He may exist, and it is born also,
perhaps, of God's love for us. Reason does not prove to us that God
exists, but neither does it prove that He cannot exist.
But of this conception of faith in God as the personalization of the
universe we shall have more to say presently.
And recalling what has been said in another part of this work, we may
say that material things, in so far as they are known to us, issue into
knowledge through the agency of hunger, and out of hunger issues the
sensible or material universe in which we conglomerate these things; and
that ideal things issue out of love, and out of love issues God, in whom
we conglomerate these ideal things as in the Consciousness of the
Universe. It is social consciousness, the child of love, of the instinct
of perpetuation, that leads us to socialize everything, to see society
in everything, and that shows us at last that all Nature is really an
infinite Society. For my part, the feeling that Nature is a society has
taken hold of me hundreds of times in walking through the woods
possessed with a sense of solidarity with the oaks, a sense of their dim
awareness of my presence.
Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and
anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes
everything identical with man.[36] And the work of man is to
supernaturalize Nature--that is to say, to make it divine by making it
human, to help it to become conscious of itself, in short. The action of
reason, on the other hand, is to mechanize or materialize.
And just as a fruitful union is consummated between the individual--who
is, in a certain sense, a society--and society, which is also an
individual--the two being so inseparable from one another that it is
impossible to say where the one begins and the other ends, for they are
rather two aspects of a single essence--so also the spirit, the social
element, which by relating us to others makes us conscious, unites with
matter, the individual and individualizing element; similarly, reason or
intelligence and imagination embrace in a mutually fruitful union, and
the Universe merges into one with God.
* * * * *
Is all this true? And what is truth? I in my turn will ask, as Pilate
asked--not, however, only to turn away and wash my hands, without
waiting for an answer.
Is truth in reason, or above reason, or beneath reason, or outside of
reason, in some way or another? Is only the rational true? May there not
be a reality, by its very nature, unattainable by reason, and perhaps,
by its very nature, opposed to reason? And how can we know this reality
if reason alone holds the key to knowledge?
Our desire of living, our need of life, asks that that may be true which
urges us to self-preservation and self-perpetuation, which sustains man
and society; it asks that the true water may be that which assuages our
thirst, and because it assuages it, that the true bread may be that
which satisfies our hunger, because it satisfies it.
The senses are devoted to the service of the instinct of preservation,
and everything that satisfies this need of preserving ourselves, even
though it does not pass through the senses, is nevertheless a kind of
intimate penetration of reality in us. Is the process of assimilating
nutriment perhaps less real than the process of knowing the nutritive
substance? It may be said that to eat a loaf of bread is not the same
thing as seeing, touching, or tasting it; that in the one case it enters
into our body, but not therefore into our consciousness. Is this true?
Does not the loaf of bread that I have converted into my flesh and blood
enter more into my consciousness than the other loaf which I see and
touch, and of which I say: "This is mine"? And must I refuse objective
reality to the bread that I have thus converted into my flesh and blood
and made mine when I only touch it?
There are some who live by air without knowing it. In the same way, it
may be, we live by God and in God--in God the spirit and consciousness
of society and of the whole Universe, in so far as the Universe is also
a society.
God is felt only in so far as He is lived; and man does not live by
bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God
(Matt. iv. 4; Deut. viii. 3).
And this personalization of the all, of the Universe, to which we are
led by love, by pity, is the personalization of a person who embraces
and comprehends within himself the other persons of which he is
composed.
The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.
For where there is no consciousness there is no finality, finality
presupposing a purpose. And, as we shall see, faith in God is based
simply upon the vital need of giving finality to existence, of making it
answer to a purpose. We need God, not in order to understand the _why_,
but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate _wherefore_, to give a
meaning to the Universe.
And neither ought we to be surprised by the affirmation that this
consciousness of the Universe is composed and integrated by the
consciousnesses of the beings which form the Universe, by the
consciousnesses of all the beings that exist, and that nevertheless it
remains a personal consciousness distinct from those which compose it.
Only thus is it possible to understand how in God we live, move, and
have our being. That great visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg, saw or caught
a glimpse of this in his book on Heaven and Hell _(De Coelo et Inferno_,
lii.), when he tells us: "An entire angelic society appears sometimes in
the form of a single angel, which also it hath been granted me by the
Lord to see. When the Lord Himself appears in the midst of the angels,
He doth not appear as encompassed by a multitude, but as a single being
in angelic form. Hence it is that the Lord in the Word is called an
angel, and likewise that on entire society is so called. Michael,
Gabriel, and Raphael are nothing but angelical societies, which are so
named from their functions."
May we not perhaps live and love--that is, suffer and pity--in this
all-enveloping Supreme Person--we, all the persons who suffer and pity
and all the beings that strive to achieve personality, to acquire
consciousness of their suffering and their limitation? And are we not,
perhaps, ideas of this total Grand Consciousness, which by thinking of
us as existing confers existence upon us? Does not our existence consist
in being perceived and felt by God? And, further on, this same visionary
tells us, under the form of images, that each angel, each society of
angels, and the whole of heaven comprehensively surveyed, appear in
human form, and in virtue of this human form the Lord rules them as one
man.
"God does not think, He creates; He does not exist, He is eternal,"
wrote Kierkegaard (_Afslutende uvidens-kabelige Efterskrift_); but
perhaps it is more exact to say with Mazzini, the mystic of the Italian
city, that "God is great because His thought is action" (_Ai giovani
d'ltalia_), because with Him to think is to create, and He gives
existence to that which exists in His thought by the mere fact of
thinking it, and the impossible is the unthinkable by God. Is it not
written in the Scriptures that God creates with His word--that is to
say, with His thought--and that by this, by His Word, He made everything
that exists? And what God has once made does He ever forget? May it not
be that all the thoughts that have ever passed through the Supreme
Consciousness still subsist therein? In Him, who is eternal, is not all
existence eternalized?
Our longing to save consciousness, to give personal and human finality
to the Universe and to existence, is such that even in the midst of a
supreme, an agonizing and lacerating sacrifice, we should still hear the
voice that assured us that if our consciousness disappears, it is that
the infinite and eternal Consciousness may be enriched thereby, that our
souls may serve as nutriment to the Universal Soul. Yes, I enrich God,
because before I existed He did not think of me as existing, because I
am one more--one more even though among an infinity of others--who,
having really lived, really suffered, and really loved, abide in His
bosom. It is the furious longing to give finality to the Universe, to
make it conscious and personal, that has brought us to believe in God,
to wish that God may exist, to create God, in a word. To create Him,
yes! This saying ought not to scandalize even the most devout theist.
For to believe in God is, in a certain sense, to create Him, although He
first creates us.[37] It is He who in us is continually creating
Himself.
We have created God in order to save the Universe from nothingness, for
all that is not consciousness and eternal consciousness, conscious of
its eternity and eternally conscious, is nothing more than appearance.
There is nothing truly real save that which feels, suffers, pities,
loves, and desires, save consciousness; there is nothing substantial but
consciousness. And we need God in order to save consciousness; not in
order to think existence, but in order to live it; not in order to know
the why and how of it, but in order to feel the wherefore of it. Love is
a contradiction if there is no God.
Let us now consider this idea of God, of the logical God or the Supreme
Reason, and of the vital God or the God of the heart--that is, Supreme
Love.
FOOTNOTES:
[36] _Todo lo humaniza, y aun lo humana_.
[37] In the translation it is impossible to retain the play upon the
verbs _crear_, to create, and _creer_, to believe: _"Porque creer en
Dios es en cierto modo crearle, aunque El nos cree antes."_--J.E.C.F.
VIII
FROM GOD TO GOD
To affirm that the religious sense is a sense of divinity and that it is
impossible without some abuse of the ordinary usages of human language
to speak of an atheistic religion, is not, I think, to do violence to
the truth; although it is clear that everything will depend upon the
concept that we form of God, a concept which in its turn depends upon
the concept of divinity.
Our proper procedure, in effect, will be to begin with this sense of
divinity, before prefixing to the concept of this quality the definite
article and the capital letter and so converting it into "the
Divinity"--that is, into God. For man has not deduced the divine from
God, but rather he has reached God through the divine.
In the course of these somewhat wandering but at the same time urgent
reflections upon the tragic sense of life, I have already alluded to the
_timor fecit deos_ of Statius with the object of limiting and correcting
it. It is not my intention to trace yet once again the historical
processes by which peoples have arrived at the consciousness and concept
of a personal God like the God of Christianity. And I say peoples and
not isolated individuals, for if there is any feeling or concept that is
truly collective and social it is the feeling and concept of God,
although the individual subsequently individualizes it. Philosophy may,
and in fact does, possess an individual origin; theology is necessarily
collective.
Schleiermacher's theory, which attributes the origin, or rather the
essence, of the religious sense to the immediate and simple feeling of
dependency, appears to be the most profound and exact explanation.
Primitive man, living in society, feels himself to be dependent upon the
mysterious forces invisibly environing him; he feels himself to be in
social communion, not only with beings like himself, his fellow-men, but
with the whole of Nature, animate and inanimate, which simply means, in
other words, that he personalizes everything. Not only does he possess a
consciousness of the world, but he imagines that the world, like
himself, possesses consciousness also. Just as a child talks to his doll
or his dog as if it understood what he was saying, so the savage
believes that his fetich hears him when he speaks to it, and that the
angry storm-cloud is aware of him and deliberately pursues him. For the
newly born mind of the primitive natural man has not yet wholly severed
itself from the cords which still bind it to the womb of Nature, neither
has it clearly marked out the boundary that separates dreaming from
waking, imagination from reality.
The divine, therefore, was not originally something objective, but was
rather the subjectivity of consciousness projected exteriorly, the
personalization of the world. The concept of divinity arose out of the
feeling of divinity, and the feeling of divinity is simply the dim and
nascent feeling of personality vented upon the outside world. And
strictly speaking it is not possible to speak of outside and inside,
objective and subjective, when no such distinction was actually felt;
indeed it is precisely from this lack of distinction that the feeling
and concept of divinity proceed. The clearer our consciousness of the
distinction between the objective and the subjective, the more obscure
is the feeling of divinity in us.
It has been said, and very justly so it would appear, that Hellenic
paganism was not so much polytheistic as pantheistic. I do not know that
the belief in a multitude of gods, taking the concept of God in the
sense in which we understand it to-day, has ever really existed in any
human mind. And if by pantheism is understood the doctrine, not that
everything and each individual thing is God--a proposition which I find
unthinkable--but that everything is divine, then it may be said without
any great abuse of language that paganism was pantheistic. Its gods not
only mixed among men but intermixed with them; they begat gods upon
mortal women and upon goddesses mortal men begat demi-gods. And if
demi-gods, that is, demi-men, were believed to exist, it was because the
divine and the human were viewed as different aspects of the same
reality. The divinization of everything was simply its humanization. To
say that the sun was a god was equivalent to saying that it was a man, a
human consciousness, more or less, aggrandized and sublimated. And this
is true of all beliefs from fetichism to Hellenic paganism.
The real distinction between gods and men consisted in the fact that the
former were immortal. A god came to be identical with an immortal man
and a man was deified, reputed as a god, when it was deemed that at his
death he had not really died. Of certain heroes it was believed that
they were alive in the kingdom of the dead. And this is a point of great
importance in estimating the value of the concept of the divine.
In those republics of gods there was always some predominating god, some
real monarch. It was through the agency of this divine monarchy that
primitive peoples were led from monocultism to monotheism. Hence
monarchy and monotheism are twin brethren. Zeus, Jupiter, was in process
of being converted into an only god, just as Jahwé originally one god
among many others, came to be converted into an only god, first the god
of the people of Israel, then the god of humanity, and finally the god
of the whole universe.
Like monarchy, monotheism had a martial origin. "It is only on the march
and in time of war," says Robertson Smith in _The Prophets of
Israel_,[38] "that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a central
authority, and so it came about that in the first beginnings of national
organization, centring in the sanctuary of the ark, Israel was thought
of mainly as the host of Jehovah. The very name of Israel is martial,
and means 'God (_El_) fighteth,' and Jehovah in the Old Testament is
Iahwè Çebäôth--the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the
battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly realized; but in
primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in
time of peace."
God, the only God, issued, therefore, from man's sense of divinity as a
warlike, monarchical and social God. He revealed himself to the people
as a whole, not to the individual. He was the God of a people and he
jealously exacted that worship should be rendered to him alone. The
transition from this monocultism to monotheism was effected largely by
the individual action, more philosophical perhaps than theological, of
the prophets. It was, in fact, the individual activity of the prophets
that individualized the divinity. And above all by making the divinity
ethical.
Subsequently reason--that is, philosophy--took possession of this God
who had arisen in the human consciousness as a consequence of the sense
of divinity in man, and tended to define him and convert him into an
idea. For to define a thing is to idealize it, a process which
necessitates the abstraction from it of its incommensurable or
irrational element, its vital essence. Thus the God of feeling, the
divinity felt as a unique person and consciousness external to us,
although at the same time enveloping and sustaining us, was converted
into the idea of God.
The logical, rational God, the _ens summum_, the _primum movens_, the
Supreme Being of theological philosophy, the God who is reached by the
three famous ways of negation, eminence and causality, _viæ negationis,
eminentiæ, causalitatis_, is nothing but an idea of God, a dead thing.
The traditional and much debated proofs of his existence are, at bottom,
merely a vain attempt to determine his essence; for as Vinet has very
well observed, existence is deduced from essence; and to say that God
exists, without saying what God is and how he is, is equivalent to
saying nothing at all.
And this God, arrived at by the methods of eminence and negation or
abstraction of finite qualities, ends by becoming an unthinkable God, a
pure idea, a God of whom, by the very fact of his ideal excellence, we
can say that he is nothing, as indeed he has been defined by Scotus
Erigena: _Deus propter excellentiam non inmerito nihil vocatur_. Or in
the words of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in his fifth Epistle,
"The divine darkness is the inaccessible light in which God is said to
dwell." The anthropomorphic God, the God who is felt, in being purified
of human, and as such finite, relative and temporal, attributes,
evaporates into the God of deism or of pantheism.
The traditional so-called proofs of the existence of God all refer to
this God-Idea, to this logical God, the God by abstraction, and hence
they really prove nothing, or rather, they prove nothing more than the
existence of this idea of God.
In my early youth, when first I began to be puzzled by these eternal
problems, I read in a book, the author of which I have no wish to
recall,[39] this sentence: "God is the great X placed over the ultimate
barrier of human knowledge; in the measure in which science advances,
the barrier recedes." And I wrote in the margin, "On this side of the
barrier, everything is explained without Him; on the further side,
nothing is explained, either with Him or without Him; God therefore is
superfluous." And so far as concerns the God-Idea, the God of the
proofs, I continue to be of the same opinion. Laplace is said to have
stated that he had not found the hypothesis of God necessary in order to
construct his scheme of the origin of the Universe, and it is very true.
In no way whatever does the idea of God help us to understand better the
existence, the essence and the finality of the Universe.
That there is a Supreme Being, infinite, absolute and eternal, whose
existence is unknown to us, and who has created the Universe, is not
more conceivable than that the material basis of the Universe itself,
its matter, is eternal and infinite and absolute. We do not understand
the existence of the world one whit the better by telling ourselves that
God created it. It is a begging of the question, or a merely verbal
solution, intended to cover up our ignorance. In strict truth, we deduce
the existence of the Creator from the fact that the thing created
exists, a process which does not justify rationally His existence. You
cannot deduce a necessity from a fact, or else everything were
necessary.
And if from the nature of the Universe we pass to what is called its
order, which is supposed to necessitate an Ordainer, we may say that
order is what there is, and we do not conceive of any other. This
deduction of God's existence from the order of the Universe implies a
transition from the ideal to the real order, an outward projection of
our mind, a supposition that the rational explanation of a thing
produces the thing itself. Human art, instructed by Nature, possesses a
conscious creative faculty, by means of which it apprehends the process
of creation, and we proceed to transfer this conscious and artistic
creative faculty to the consciousness of an artist-creator, but from
what nature he in his turn learnt his art we cannot tell.
The traditional analogy of the watch and the watchmaker is inapplicable
to a Being absolute, infinite and eternal. It is, moreover, only another
way of explaining nothing. For to say that the world is as it is and not
otherwise because God made it so, while at the same time we do not know
for what reason He made it so, is to say nothing. And if we knew for
what reason God made it so, then God is superfluous and the reason
itself suffices. If everything were mathematics, if there were no
irrational element, we should not have had recourse to this explanatory
theory of a Supreme Ordainer, who is nothing but the reason of the
irrational, and so merely another cloak for our ignorance. And let us
not discuss here that absurd proposition that, if all the type in a
printing-press were printed at random, the result could not possibly be
the composition of _Don Quixote_. Something would be composed which
would be as good as _Don Quixote_ for those who would have to be content
with it and would grow in it and would form part of it.
In effect, this traditional supposed proof of God's existence resolves
itself fundamentally into hypostatizing or substantivating the
explanation or reason of a phenomenon; it amounts to saying that
Mechanics is the cause of movement, Biology of life, Philology of
language, Chemistry of bodies, by simply adding the capital letter to
the science and converting it into a force distinct from the phenomena
from which we derive it and distinct from our mind which effects the
derivation. But the God who is the result of this process, a God who is
nothing but reason hypostatized and projected towards the infinite,
cannot possibly be felt as something living and real, nor yet be
conceived of save as a mere idea which will die with us.
The question arises, on the other hand, whether a thing the idea of
which has been conceived but which has no real existence, does not exist
because God wills that it should not exist, or whether God does not will
it to exist because, in fact, it does not exist; and, with regard to the
impossible, whether a thing is impossible because God wills it so, or
whether God wills it so because, in itself and by the very fact of its
own inherent absurdity, it is impossible. God has to submit to the
logical law of contradiction, and He cannot, according to the
theologians, cause two and two to make either more or less than four.
Either the law of necessity is above Him or He Himself is the law of
necessity. And in the moral order the question arises whether falsehood,
or homicide, or adultery, are wrong because He has so decreed it, or
whether He has so decreed it because they are wrong. If the former, then
God is a capricious and unreasonable God, who decrees one law when He
might equally well have decreed another, or, if the latter, He obeys an
intrinsic nature and essence which exists in things themselves
independently of Him--that is to say, independently of His sovereign
will; and if this is the case, if He obeys the innate reason of things,
this reason, if we could but know it, would suffice us without any
further need of God, and since we do not know it, God explains nothing.
This reason would be above God. Neither is it of any avail to say that
this reason is God Himself, the supreme reason of things. A reason of
this kind, a necessary reason, is not a personal something. It is will
that gives personality. And it is because of this problem of the
relations between God's reason, necessarily necessary, and His will,
necessarily free, that the logical and Aristotelian God will always be a
contradictory God.
The scholastic theologians never succeeded in disentangling themselves
from the difficulties in which they found themselves involved when they
attempted to reconcile human liberty with divine prescience and with the
knowledge that God possesses of the free and contingent future; and that
is strictly the reason why the rational God is wholly inapplicable to
the contingent, for the notion of contingency is fundamentally the same
as the notion of irrationality. The rational God is necessarily
necessary in His being and in His working; in every single case He
cannot do other than the best, and a number of different things cannot
all equally be the best, for among infinite possibilities there is only
one that is best accommodated to its end, just as among the infinite
number of lines that can be drawn from one point to another, there is
only one straight line. And the rational God, the God of reason, cannot
but follow in each case the straight line, the line that leads most
directly to the end proposed, a necessary end, just as the only straight
line that leads to it is a necessary line. And thus for the divinity of
God is substituted His necessity. And in the necessity of God, His free
will--that is to say, His conscious personality--perishes. The God of
our heart's desire, the God who shall save our soul from nothingness,
must needs be an arbitrary God.
Not because He thinks can God be God, but because He works, because He
creates; He is not a contemplative but an active God. A God-Reason, a
theoretical or contemplative God, such as is this God of theological
rationalism, is a God that is diluted in His own contemplation. With
this God corresponds, as we shall see, the beatific vision, understood
as the supreme expression of human felicity. A quietist God, in short,
as reason, by its very essence, is quietist.
There remains the other famous proof of God's existence, that of the
supposed unanimous consent in a belief in Him among all peoples. But
this proof is not strictly rational, neither is it an argument in favour
of the rational God who explains the Universe, but of the God of the
heart, who makes us live. We should be justified in calling it a
rational proof only on the supposition that we believed that reason was
identical with a more or less unanimous agreement among all peoples,
that it corresponded with the verdict of a universal suffrage, only on
the supposition that we held that _vox populi_, which is said to be _vox
Dei_, was actually the voice of reason.
Such was, indeed, the belief of Lamennais, that tragic and ardent
spirit, who affirmed that life and truth were essentially one and the
same thing--would that they were!--and that reason was one, universal,
everlasting and holy (_Essai sur l'indifférence_, partie iv., chap,
viii.). He invoked the _aut omnibus credendum est aut nemini_ of
Lactantius--we must believe all or none--and the saying of Heraclitus
that every individual opinion is fallible, and that of Aristotle that
the strongest proof consists in the general agreement of mankind, and
above all that of Pliny (_Paneg. Trajani_, lxii.), to the effect that
one man cannot deceive all men or be deceived by all--_nemo omnes,
neminem omnes fefellerunt_. Would that it were so! And so he concludes
with the dictum of Cicero (_De natura deorum_, lib. iii., cap. ii., 5
and 6), that we must believe the tradition of our ancestors even though
they fail to render us a reason--_maioribus autem nostris, etiam nulla
ratione reddita credere_.
Let us suppose that this belief of the ancients in the divine
interpenetration of the whole of Nature is universal and constant, and
that it is, as Aristotle calls it, an ancestral dogma (_patrios doxa_)
(_Metaphysica_, lib. vii., cap. vii.); this would prove only that there
is a motive impelling peoples and individuals--that is to say, all or
almost all or a majority of them--to believe in a God. But may it not be
that there are illusions and fallacies rooted in human nature itself? Do
not all peoples begin by believing that the sun turns round the earth?
And do we not all naturally incline to believe that which satisfies our
desires? Shall we say with Hermann[40] that, "if there is a God, He has
not left us without some indication of Himself, and if is His will that
we should find Him."
A pious desire, no doubt, but we cannot strictly call it a reason,
unless we apply to it the Augustinian sentence, but which again is not
a reason, "Since thou seekest Me, it must be that thou hast found Me,"
believing that God is the cause of our seeking Him.
This famous argument from the supposed unanimity of mankind's belief in
God, the argument which with a sure instinct was seized upon by the
ancients, is in its essence identical with the so-called moral proof
which Kant employed in his _Critique of Practical Reason_, transposing
its application from mankind collectively to the individual, the proof
which he derives from our conscience, or rather from our feeling of
divinity. It is not a proof strictly or specifically rational, but
vital; it cannot be applied to the logical God, the _ens summum_, the
essentially simple and abstract Being, the immobile and impassible prime
mover, the God-Reason, in a word, but to the biotic God, to the Being
essentially complex and concrete, to the suffering God who suffers and
desires in us and with us, to the Father of Christ who is only to be
approached through Man, through His Son (John xiv. 6), and whose
revelation is historical, or if you like, anecdotical, but not
philosophical or categorical.
The unanimous consent of mankind (let us suppose the unanimity) or, in
other words, this universal longing of all human souls who have arrived
at the consciousness of their humanity, which desires to be the end and
meaning of the Universe, this longing, which is nothing but that very
essence of the soul which consists in its effort to persist eternally
and without a break in the continuity of consciousness, leads us to the
human, anthropomorphic God, the projection of our consciousness to the
Consciousness of the Universe; it leads us to the God who confers human
meaning and finality upon the Universe and who is not the _ens summum_,
the _primum movens_, nor the Creator of the Universe, nor merely the
Idea-God. It leads us to the living, subjective God, for He is simply
subjectivity objectified or personality universalized--He is more than a
mere idea, and He is will rather than reason. God is Love--that is,
Will. Reason, the Word, derives from Him, but He, the Father, is, above
all, Will.
"There can be no doubt whatever," Ritschl says (_Rechtfertigung und
Versöhnung_, iii., chap. v.), "that a very imperfect view was taken of
God's spiritual personality in the older theology, when the functions of
knowing and willing alone were employed to illustrate it. Religious
thought plainly ascribes to God affections of feeling as well. The older
theology, however, laboured under the impression that feeling and
emotion were characteristic only of limited and created personality; it
transformed, _e.g._, the religious idea of the Divine blessedness into
eternal self-knowledge, and that of the Divine wrath into a fixed
purpose to punish sin." Yes, this logical God, arrived at by the _via
negationis_, was a God who, strictly speaking, neither loved nor hated,
because He neither enjoyed nor suffered, an inhuman God, and His justice
was a rational or mathematical justice--that is, an injustice.
The attributes of the living God, of the Father of Christ, must be
deduced from His historical revelation in the Gospel and in the
conscience of every Christian believer, and not from metaphysical
reasonings which lead only to the Nothing-God of Scotus Erigena, to the
rational or pantheistic God, to the atheist God--in short, to the
de-personalized Divinity.
Not by the way of reason, but only by the way of love and of suffering,
do we come to the living God, the human God. Reason rather separates us
from Him. We cannot first know Him in order that afterwards we may love
Him; we must begin by loving Him, longing for Him, hungering after Him,
before knowing Him. The knowledge of God proceeds from the love of God,
and this knowledge has little or nothing of the rational in it. For God
is indefinable. To seek to define Him is to seek to confine Him within
the limits of our mind--that is to say, to kill Him. In so far as we
attempt to define Him, there rises up before us--Nothingness.
The idea of God, formulated by a theodicy that claims to be rational, is
simply an hypothesis, like the hypotheses of ether, for example.
Ether is, in effect, a merely hypothetical entity, valuable only in so
far as it explains that which by means of it we endeavour to
explain--light, electricity or universal gravitation--and only in so far
as these facts cannot be explained in any other way. In like manner the
idea of God is also an hypothesis, valuable only in so far as it enables
us to explain that which by means of if we endeavour to explain--the
essence and existence of the Universe--and only so long as these cannot
be explained in any other way. And since in reality we explain the
Universe neither better nor worse with this idea than without it, the
idea of God, the supreme _petitio principii_, is valueless.
But if ether is nothing but an hypothesis explanatory of light, air, on
the other hand, is a thing that is directly felt; and even though it did
not enable us to explain the phenomenon of sound, we should nevertheless
always be directly aware of it, and, above all, of the lack of it in
moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way God Himself,
not the idea of God, may become a reality that is immediately felt; and
even though the idea of Him does not enable us to explain either the
existence or the essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct
feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And this
feeling--mark it well, for all that is tragic in it and the whole tragic
sense of life is founded upon this--this feeling is a feeling of hunger
for God, of the lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first
instance, as we shall see, to wish that there may be a God, to be unable
to live without Him.
So long as I pilgrimaged through the fields of reason in search of God,
I could not find Him, for I was not deluded by the idea of God, neither
could I take an idea for God, and it was then, as I wandered among the
wastes of rationalism, that I told myself that we ought to seek no other
consolation than the truth, meaning thereby reason, and yet for all that
I was not comforted. But as I sank deeper and deeper into rational
scepticism on the one hand and into heart's despair on the other, the
hunger for God awoke within me, and the suffocation of spirit made me
feel the want of God, and with the want of Him, His reality. And I
wished that there might be a God, that God might exist. And God does not
exist, but rather super-exists, and He is sustaining our existence,
existing us _(existiéndonos)_.
God, who is Love, the Father of Love, is the son of love in us. There
are men of a facile and external habit of mind, slaves of reason, that
reason which externalizes us, who think it a shrewd comment to say that
so far from God having made man in His image and likeness, it is rather
man who has made his gods or his God in his own image and likeness,[41]
and so superficial are they that they do not pause to consider that if
the second of these propositions be true, as in fact it is, it is owing
to the fact that the first is not less true. God and man, in effect,
mutually create one another; God creates or reveals Himself in man and
man creates himself in God. God is His own maker, _Deus ipse se facit_,
said Lactantius (_Divinarum Institutionum_, ii., 8), and we may say that
He is making Himself continually both in man and by man. And if each of
us, impelled by his love, by his hunger for divinity, creates for
himself an image of God according to his own desire, and if according to
His desire God creates Himself for each of us, then there is a
collective, social, human God, the resultant of all the human
imaginations that imagine Him. For God is and reveals Himself in
collectivity. And God is the richest and most personal of human
conceptions.
The Master of divinity has bidden us be perfect as our Father who is in
heaven is perfect (Matt. v. 48), and in the sphere of thought and
feeling our perfection consists in the zeal with which we endeavour to
equate our imagination with the total imagination of the humanity of
which in God we form a part.
The logical theory of the opposition between the extension and the
comprehension of a concept, the one increasing in the ratio in which the
other diminishes, is well known. The concept that is most extensive and
at the same time least comprehensive is that of being or of thing, which
embraces everything that exists and possesses no other distinguishing
quality than that of being; while the concept that is most comprehensive
and least extensive is that of the Universe, which is only applicable to
itself and comprehends all existing qualities. And the logical or
rational God, the God obtained by way of negation, the absolute entity,
merges, like reality itself, into nothingness; for, as Hegel pointed
out, pure being and pure nothingness are identical. And the God of the
heart, the God who is felt, the God of living men, is the Universe
itself conceived as personality, is the consciousness of the Universe. A
God universal and personal, altogether different from the individual God
of a rigid metaphysical monotheism.
I must advert here once again to my view of the opposition that exists
between individuality and personality, notwithstanding the fact that the
one demands the other. Individuality is, if I may so express it, the
continent or thing which contains, personality the content or thing
contained, or I might say that my personality is in a certain sense my
comprehension, that which I comprehend or embrace within myself--which
is in a certain way the whole Universe--and that my individuality is my
extension; the one my infinite, the other my finite. A hundred jars of
hard earthenware are strongly individualized, but it is possible for
them to be all equally empty or all equally full of the same homogeneous
liquid, whereas two bladders of so delicate a membrane as to admit of
the action of osmosis and exosmosis may be strongly differentiated and
contain liquids of a very mixed composition. And thus a man, in so far
as he is an individual, may be very sharply detached from others, a sort
of spiritual crustacean, and yet be very poor in differentiating
content. And further, it is true on the other hand that the more
personality a man has and the greater his interior richness and the more
he is a society within himself, the less brusquely he is divided from
his fellows. In the same way the rigid God of deism, of Aristotelian
monotheism, the _ens summum_, is a being in whom individuality, or
rather simplicity, stifles personality. Definition kills him, for to
define is to impose boundaries, it is to limit, and it is impossible to
define the absolutely indefinable. This God lacks interior richness; he
is not a society in himself. And this the vital revelation obviated by
the belief in the Trinity, which makes God a society and even a family
in himself and no longer a pure individual. The God of faith is
personal; He is a person because He includes three persons, for
personality is not sensible of itself in isolation. An isolated person
ceases to be a person, for whom should he love? And if he does not love,
he is not a person. Nor can a simple being love himself without his love
expanding him into a compound being.
It was because God was felt as a Father that the belief in the Trinity
arose. For a God-Father cannot be a single, that is, a solitary, God. A
father is always the father of a family. And the fact that God was felt
as a father acted as a continual incentive to conceive Him not merely
anthropomorphically--that is to say, as a man, _anthropos_--but
andromorphically, as a male, _anêr_. In the popular Christian
imagination, in effect, God the Father is conceived of as a male. And
the reason is that man, _homo_, _anthropos_, as we know him, is
necessarily either a male, _vir_, _anêr_, or a female, _mulier_, _gynê_. And
to these may be added the child, who is neuter. And hence in order to
satisfy imaginatively this necessity of feeling God as a perfect
man--that is, as a family--arose the cult of the God-Mother, the Virgin
Mary, and the cult of the Child Jesus.
The cult of the Virgin, Mariolatry, which, by the gradual elevation of
the divine element in the Virgin has led almost to her deification,
answers merely to the demand of the feeling that God should be a perfect
man, that God should include in His nature the feminine element. The
progressive exaltation of the Virgin Mary, the work of Catholic piety,
having its beginning in the expression Mother of God, _theotokos_,
_deipara_, has culminated in attributing to her the status of
co-redeemer and in the dogmatic declaration of her conception without
the stain of original sin. Hence she now occupies a position between
Humanity and Divinity and nearer Divinity than Humanity. And it has been
surmised that in course of time she may perhaps even come to be regarded
as yet another personal manifestation of the Godhead.
And yet this might not necessarily involve the conversion of the Trinity
into a Quaternity. If _pneuma_, in Greek, spirit, instead of being neuter
had been feminine, who can say that the Virgin Mary might not already
have become an incarnation or humanization of the Holy Spirit? That
fervent piety which always knows how to mould theological speculation in
accordance with its own desires would have found sufficient warranty for
such a doctrine in the text of the Gospel, in Luke's narrative of the
Annunciation where the angel Gabriel hails Mary with the words, "The
Holy Spirit shall come upon thee," _pneuma agion epeleusetai epi se_ (Luke
i. 35). And thus a dogmatic evolution would have been effected parallel
to that of the divinization of Jesus, the Son, and his identification
with the Word.
In any case the cult of the Virgin, of the eternal feminine, or rather
of the divine feminine, of the divine maternity, helps to complete the
personalization of God by constituting Him a family.
In one of my books (_Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_, part ii., chap.
lxvii.) I have said that "God was and is, in our mind, masculine. In His
mode of judging and condemning men, He acts as a male, not as a human
person above the limitation of sex; He acts as a father. And to
counterbalance this, the Mother element was required, the Mother who
always forgives, the Mother whose arms are always open to the child when
he flies from the frowning brow or uplifted hand of the angry father;
the Mother in whose bosom we seek the dim, comforting memory of that
warmth and peace of our pre-natal unconsciousness, of that milky
sweetness that soothed our dreams of innocence; the Mother who knows no
justice but that of forgiveness, no law but that of love. Our weak and
imperfect conception of God as a God with a long beard and a voice of
thunder, of a God who promulgates laws and pronounces dooms, of a God
who is the Master of a household, a Roman Paterfamilias, required
counterpoise and complement, and since fundamentally we are unable to
conceive of the personal and living God as exalted above human and even
masculine characteristics, and still less as a neutral or hermaphrodite
God, we have recourse to providing Him with a feminine God, and by the
side of the God-Father we have placed the Goddess-Mother, she who always
forgives, because, since she sees with love-blind eyes, she sees always
the hidden cause of the fault and in that hidden cause the only justice
of forgiveness ..."
And to this I must now add that not only are we unable to conceive of
the full and living God as masculine simply, but we are unable to
conceive of Him as individual simply, as the projection of a solitary I,
an unsocial I, an I that is in reality an abstract I. My living I is an
I that is really a We; my living personal I lives only in other, of
other, and by other I's; I am sprung, from a multitude of ancestors, I
carry them within me in extract, and at the same time I carry within me,
potentially, a multitude of descendants, and God, the projection of my I
to the infinite--or rather I, the projection of God to the finite--must
also be multitude. Hence, in order to save the personality of God--that
is to say, in order to save the living God--faith's need--the need of
the feeling and the imagination--of conceiving Him and; feeling Him as
possessed of a certain internal multiplicity.
This need the pagan feeling of a living divinity obviated by polytheism.
It is the agglomeration of its gods, the republic of them, that really
constitutes its Divinity. The real God of Hellenic paganism is not so
much Father Zeus (_Jupiter_) as the whole society of gods and demi-gods.
Hence the solemnity of the invocation of Demosthenes when he invoked all
the gods and all the goddesses: _tois theohis euchomai pasi kahi pasais_.
And when the rationalizers converted the term god, _theos_, which is
properly an adjective, a quality predicated of each one of the gods,
into a substantive, and added the definite article to it, they produced
_the_ god, _o theos_, the dead and abstract god of philosophical
rationalism, a substantivized quality and therefore void of personality.
For the masculine concrete god (_el_ dios) is nothing but the neuter
abstract divine quality (_lo_ divino). Now the transition from feeling
the divinity in all things to substantivating it and converting the
Divinity into God, cannot be achieved without feeling undergoing a
certain risk. And the Aristotelian God, the God of the logical proofs,
is nothing more than the Divinity, a concept and not a living person who
can be felt and with whom through love man can communicate. This God is
merely a substantivized adjective; He is a constitutional God who
reigns but does not govern, and Knowledge is His constitutional charter.
And even in Greco-Latin paganism itself the tendency towards a living
monotheism is apparent in the fact that Zeus was conceived of and felt
as a father, _Zeus patêr_, as Homer calls him, the _Ju-piter_ or
_Ju-pater_ of the Latins, and as a father of a whole widely extended
family of gods and goddesses who together with him constituted the
Divinity.
The conjunction of pagan polytheism with Judaic monotheism, which had
endeavoured by other means to save the personality of God, gave birth to
the feeling of the Catholic God, a God who is a society, as the pagan
God of whom I have spoken was a society, and who at the same time is
one, as the God of Israel finally became one. Such is the Christian
Trinity, whose deepest sense rationalistic deism has scarcely ever
succeeded in understanding, that deism, which though more or less
impregnated with Christianity, always remains Unitarian or Socinian.
And the truth is that we feel God less as a superhuman consciousness
than as the actual consciousness of the whole human race, past, present,
and future, as the collective consciousness of the whole race, and still
more, as the total and infinite consciousness which embraces and
sustains all consciousnesses, infra-human, human, and perhaps,
super-human. The divinity that there is in everything, from the
lowest--that is to say, from the least conscious--of living forms, to
the highest, including our own human consciousness, this divinity we
feel to be personalized, conscious of itself, in God. And this gradation
of consciousnesses, this sense of the gulf between the human and the
fully divine, the universal, consciousness, finds its counterpart in the
belief in angels with their different hierarchies, as intermediaries
between our human consciousness and that of God. And these gradations a
faith consistent with itself must believe to be infinite, for only by an
infinite number of degrees is it possible to pass from the finite to the
infinite.
Deistic rationalism conceives God as the Reason of the Universe, but its
logic compels it to conceive Him as an impersonal reason--that is to
say, as an idea--while deistic vitalism feels and imagines God as
Consciousness, and therefore as a person or rather as a society of
persons. The consciousness of each one of us, in effect, is a society of
persons; in me there are various I's and even the I's of those among
whom I live, live in me.
The God of deistic rationalism, in effect, the God of the logical proofs
of His existence, the _ens realissimum_ and the immobile prime mover, is
nothing more than a Supreme Reason, but in the same sense in which we
can call the law of universal gravitation the reason of the falling of
bodies, this law being merely the explanation of the phenomenon. But
will anyone say that that which we call the law of universal
gravitation, or any other law or mathematical principle, is a true and
independent reality, that it is an angel, that it is something which
possesses consciousness of itself and others, that it is a person? No,
it is nothing but an idea without any reality outside of the mind of him
who conceives it. And similarly this God-Reason either possesses
consciousness of himself or he possesses no reality outside the mind
that conceives him. And if he possesses consciousness of himself, he
becomes a personal reason, and then all the value of the traditional
proofs disappears, for these proofs only proved a reason, but not a
supreme consciousness. Mathematics prove an order, a constancy, a reason
in the series of mechanical phenomena, but they 'do not prove that this
reason is conscious of itself. This reason is a logical necessity, but
the logical necessity does not prove the teleological or finalist
necessity. And where there is no finality there is no personality, there
is no consciousness.
The rational God, therefore--that is to say, the God who is simply the
Reason of the Universe and nothing more--consummates his own
destruction, is destroyed in our mind in so far as he is such a God, and
is only born again in us when we feel him in our heart as a living
person, as Consciousness, and no longer merely as the impersonal and
objective Reason of the Universe. If we wish for a rational explanation
of the construction of a machine, all that we require to know is the
mechanical science of its constructor; but if we would have a reason for
the existence of such a machine, then, since it is the work not of
Nature but of man, we must suppose a conscious, constructive being. But
the second part of this reasoning is not applicable to God, even though
it be said that in Him the mechanical science and the mechanician, by
means of which the machine was constructed, are one and the same thing.
From the rational point of view this identification is merely a begging
of the question. And thus it is that reason destroys this Supreme
Reason, in so far as the latter is a person.
The human reason, in effect, is a reason that is based upon the
irrational, upon the total vital consciousness, upon will and feeling;
our human reason is not a reason that can prove to us the existence of a
Supreme Reason, which in its turn would have to be based upon the
Supreme Irrational, upon the Universal Consciousness. And the revelation
of this Supreme Consciousness in our feeling and imagination, by love,
by faith, by the process of personalization, is that which leads us to
believe in the living God.
And this God, the living God, your God, our God, is in me, is in you,
lives in us, and we live and move and have our being in Him. And He is
in us by virtue of the hunger, the longing, which we have for Him, He is
Himself creating the longing for Himself. And He is the God of the
humble, for in the words of the Apostle, God chose the foolish things of
the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to
confound the things which are mighty (i Cor. i. 27). And God is in each
one of us in the measure in which each one feels Him and loves Him. "If
of two men," says Kierkegaard, "one prays to the true God without
sincerity of heart, and the other prays to an idol with all the passion
of an infinite yearning, it is the first who really prays to an idol,
while the second really prays to God." It would be better to say that
the true God is He to whom man truly prays and whom man truly desires.
And there may even be a truer revelation in superstition itself than in
theology. The venerable Father of the long beard and white locks who
appears among the clouds carrying the globe of the world in his hand is
more living and more real than the _ens realissimum_ of theodicy.
Reason is an analytical, that is, a dissolving force, whenever it
transfers its activity from the form of intuitions, whether those of the
individual instinct of preservation or those of the social instinct of
perpetuation, and applies it to the essence and matter of them. Reason
orders the sensible perceptions which give us the material world; but
when its analysis is exercised upon the reality of the perceptions
themselves, it dissolves them and plunges us into a world of
appearances, a world of shadows without consistency, for outside the
domain of the formal, reason is nihilist and annihilating. And it
performs the same terrible office when we withdraw it from its proper
domain and apply it to the scrutiny of the imaginative intuitions which
give us the spiritual world. For reason annihilates and imagination
completes, integrates or totalizes; reason by itself alone kills, and it
is imagination that gives life. If it is true that imagination by itself
alone, in giving us life without limit, leads us to lose our identity in
the All and also kills us as individuals, it kills us by excess of life.
Reason, the head, speaks to us the word Nothing! imagination, the heart,
the word All! and between all and nothing, by the fusion of the all and
the nothing within us, we live in God, who is All, and God lives in us
who, without Him, are nothing. Reason reiterates, Vanity of vanities!
all is vanity! And imagination answers, Plenitude of plenitudes! all is
plenitude! And thus we live the vanity of plenitude or the plenitude of
vanity.
And so deeply rooted in the depths of man's being is this vital need of
living a world[42] illogical, irrational, personal or divine, that those
who do not believe in God, or believe that they do not believe in Him,
believe nevertheless in some little pocket god or even devil of their
own, or in an omen, or in a horseshoe picked up by chance on the
roadside and carried about with them to bring them good luck and defend
them from that very reason whose loyal and devoted henchmen they imagine
themselves to be.
The God whom we hunger after is the God to whom we pray, the God of the
_Pater Noster_, of the Lord's Prayer; the God whom we beseech, before
all and above all, and whether we are aware of it or not, to instil
faith into us, to make us believe in Him, to make Himself in us, the God
to whom we pray that His name may be hallowed and that His will may be
done--His will, not His reason--on earth as it is in heaven; but feeling
that His will cannot be other than the essence of our will, the desire
to persist eternally.
And such a God is the God of love--_how_ He is it profits us not to ask,
but rather let each consult his own heart and give his imagination leave
to picture Him in the remoteness of the Universe, gazing down upon him
with those myriad eyes of His that shine in the night-darkened heavens.
He in whom you believe, reader, He is your God, He who has lived with
you and within you, who was born with you, who was a child when you were
a child, who became a man according as you became a man, who will vanish
when you yourself vanish, and who is your principle of continuity in
the spiritual life, for He is the principle of solidarity among all men
and in each man and between men and the Universe, and He is, as you are,
a person. And if you believe in God, God believes in you, and believing
in you He creates you continually. For in your essence you are nothing
but the idea that God possesses of you--but a living idea, because the
idea of a God who is living and conscious of Himself, of a
God-Consciousness, and apart from what you are in the society of God you
are nothing.
How to define God? Yes, that is our longing. That was the longing of the
man Jacob, when, after wrestling all the night until the breaking of the
day with that divine visitant, he cried, "Tell me, I pray thee, thy
name!" (Gen. xxxii. 29). Listen to the words of that great Christian
preacher, Frederick William Robertson, in a sermon preached in Trinity
Chapel, Brighton, on the 10th of June, 1849: "And this is our
struggle--_the_ struggle. Let any true man go down into the deeps of his
own being, and answer us--what is the cry that comes from the most real
part of his nature? Is it the cry for daily bread? Jacob asked for that
in his _first_ communing with God--preservation, safety. Is it even
this--to be forgiven our sins? Jacob had a sin to be forgiven, and in
that most solemn moment of his existence he did not say a syllable about
it. Or is it this--'Hallowed be Thy name'? No, my brethren. Out of our
frail and yet sublime humanity, the demand that rises in the earthlier
hours of our religion may be this--'Save my soul'; but in the most
unearthly moments it is this--'Tell me thy name.' We move through a
world of mystery; and the deepest question is, What is the being that is
ever near, sometimes felt, never seen; that which has haunted us from
childhood with a dream of something surpassingly fair, which has never
yet been realized; that which sweeps through the soul at times as a
desolation, like the blast from the wings of the Angel of Death,
leaving us stricken and silent in our loneliness; that which has
touched us in our tenderest point, and the flesh has quivered with
agony, and our mortal affections have shrivelled up with pain; that
which comes to us in aspirations of nobleness and conceptions of
superhuman excellence? Shall we say It or He? What is It? Who is He?
Those anticipations of Immortality and God--what are they? Are they the
mere throbbings of my own heart, heard and mistaken for a living
something beside me? Are they the sound of my own wishes, echoing
through the vast void of Nothingness? or shall I call them God, Father,
Spirit, Love? A living Being within me or outside me? Tell me Thy name,
thou awful mystery of Loveliness! This is the struggle of all earnest
life."[43]
Thus Robertson. To which I must add this comment, that Tell me thy name
is essentially the same as Save my soul! We ask Him His name in order
that He may save our soul, that He may save the human soul, that He may
save the human finality of the Universe. And if they tell us that He is
called He, that He is the _ens realissimum_ or the Supreme Being or any
other metaphysical name, we are not contented, for we know that every
metaphysical name is an X, and we go on asking Him His name. And there
is only one name that satisfies our longing, and that is the name
Saviour, Jesus. God is the love that saves. As Browning said in his
_Christmas Eve and Easter Day_,
For the loving worm within its clod,
Were diviner than a loveless God
Amid his worlds, I will dare to say.
The essence of the divine is Love, Will that personalizes and
eternalizes, that feels the hunger for eternity and infinity.
It is ourselves, it is our eternity that we seek in God, it is our
divinization. It was Browning again who said, in _Saul_,
'Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! my flesh that I seek
In the Godhead!
But this God who saves us, this personal God, the Consciousness of the
Universe who envelops and sustains our consciousnesses, this God who
gives human finality to the whole creation--does He exist? Have we
proofs of His existence?
This question leads in the first place to an enquiry into the cleaning
of this notion of existence. What is it to exist and in what sense do we
speak of things as not existing?
In its etymological signification to exist is to be outside of
ourselves, outside of our mind: _ex-sistere_. But is there anything
outside of our mind, outside of our consciousness which embraces the sum
of the known? Undoubtedly there is. The matter of knowledge comes to us
from without. And what is the mode of this matter? It is impossible for
us to know, for to know is to clothe matter with form, and hence we
cannot know the formless as formless. To do so would be tantamount to
investing chaos with order.
This problem of the existence of God, a problem that is rationally
insoluble, is really identical with the problem of consciousness, of the
_ex-sistentia_ and not of the _in-sistentia_ of consciousness, it is
none other than the problem of the substantial existence of the soul,
the problem of the perpetuity of the human soul, the problem of the
human finality of the Universe itself. To believe in a living and
personal God, in an eternal and universal consciousness that knows and
loves us, is to believe that the Universe exists _for_ man. For man, or
for a consciousness of the same order as the human consciousness, of the
same nature, although sublimated, a consciousness that is capable of
knowing us, in the depth of whose being our memory may live for ever.
Perhaps, as I have said before, by a supreme and desperate effort of
resignation we might succeed in making the sacrifice of our personality
provided that we knew that at our death it would go to enrich a Supreme
Personality; provided that we knew that the Universal Soul was nourished
by our souls and had need of them. We might perhaps meet death with a
desperate resignation or with a resigned despair, delivering up our soul
to the soul of humanity, bequeathing to it our work, the work that bears
the impress of our person, if it were certain that this humanity were
destined to bequeath its soul in its turn to another soul, when at long
last consciousness shall have become extinct upon this desire-tormented
Earth. But is it certain?
And if the soul of humanity is eternal, if the human collective
consciousness is eternal, if there is a Consciousness of the Universe,
and if this Consciousness is eternal, why must our own individual
consciousness--yours, reader, mine--be not eternal?
In the vast all of the Universe, must there be this unique anomaly--a
consciousness that knows itself, loves itself and feels itself, joined
to an organism which can only live within such and such degrees of heat,
a merely transitory phenomenon? No, it is not mere curiosity that
inspires the wish to know whether or not the stars are inhabited by
living organisms, by consciousnesses akin to our own, and a profound
longing enters into that dream that our souls shall pass from star to
star through the vast spaces of the heavens, in an infinite series of
transmigrations. The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe
that everything is animated, that consciousness, in a greater or less
degree, extends through everything. We wish not only to save ourselves,
but to save the world from nothingness. And therefore God. Such is His
finality as we feel it.
What would a universe be without any consciousness capable of reflecting
it and knowing it? What would objectified reason be without will and
feeling? For us it would be equivalent to nothing--a thousand times more
dreadful than nothing.
If such a supposition is reality, our life is deprived of sense and
value.
It is not, therefore, rational necessity, but vital anguish that impels
us to believe in God. And to believe in God--I must reiterate it yet
again--is, before all and above all, to feel a hunger for God, a hunger
for divinity, to be sensible of His lack and absence, to wish that God
may exist. And it is to wish to save the human finality of the Universe.
For one might even come to resign oneself to being absorbed by God, if
it be that our consciousness is based upon a Consciousness, if
consciousness is the end of the Universe.
"The wicked man hath said in his heart, There is no God." And this is
truth. For in his head the righteous man may say to himself, God does
not exist! But only the wicked can say it in his heart. Not to believe
that there is a God or to believe that there is not a God, is one thing;
to resign oneself to there not being a God is another thing, and it is a
terrible and inhuman thing; but not to wish that there be a God exceeds
every other moral monstrosity; although, as a matter of fact, those who
deny God deny Him because of their despair at not finding Him.
And now reason once again confronts us with the Sphinx-like
question--the Sphinx, in effect, is reason--Does God exist? This eternal
and eternalizing person who gives meaning--and I will add, a human
meaning, for there is none other--to the Universe, is it a substantial
something, existing independently of our consciousness, independently of
our desire? Here we arrive at the insoluble, and it is best that it
should be so. Let it suffice for reason that it cannot prove the
impossibility of His existence.
To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to
act as if He existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the
inner spring of our action. This longing or hunger for divinity begets
hope, hope begets faith, and faith and hope beget charity. Of this
divine longing is born our sense of beauty, of finality, of goodness.
Let us see how this may be.
FOOTNOTES:
[38] Lecture I., p. 36. London, 1895, Black.
[39] _No quiero acordarme_, a phrase that is always associated in
Spanish literature with the opening sentence of _Don Quijote: En an
lugar de la Mancha de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme_.--J.E.C.F.
[40] W. Hermann, _Christlich systematische Dogmatik_, in the volume
entitled _Systematische christliche Religion. Die Kultur der Gegenwart_
series, published by P. Hinneberg.
[41] _Dieu a fait l'homme à son image, mais l'homme le lui a bien
rendu_, Voltaire.--J.E.C.F.
[42] _Vivir un mundo_.
[43] _Sermons_, by the Rev. Frederick W. Robertson. First series, sermon
iii., "Jacob's Wrestling." Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübuer and Co., London,
1898.
IX
FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY
Sanctius ac reverentius visum de actis deorum credere quam
scire.--TACITUS: _Germania_, 34.
The road that leads us to the living God, the God of the heart, and that
leads us back to Him when we have left Him for the lifeless God of
logic, is the road of faith, not of rational or mathematical conviction.
And what is faith?
This is the question propounded in the Catechism of Christian Doctrine
that was taught us at school, and the answer runs: Faith is believing
what we have not seen.
This, in an essay written some twelve years ago, I amended as follows:
"Believing what we have not seen, no! but creating what we do not see."
And I have already told you that believing in God is, in the first
instance at least, wishing that God may be, longing for the existence of
God.
The theological virtue of faith, according to the Apostle Paul, whose
definition serves as the basis of the traditional Christian
disquisitions upon it, is "the substance of things hoped for, the
evidence of things not seen," _elpizomevôn hupostasis, pragmatôn
elegchos ou blepomenôn_ (Heb. xi. 1).
The substance, or rather the support and basis, of hope, the guarantee
of it. That which connects, or, rather than connects, subordinates,
faith to hope. And in fact we do not hope because we believe, but rather
we believe because we hope. It is hope in God, it is the ardent longing
that there may be a God who guarantees the eternity of consciousness,
that leads us to believe in Him.
But faith, which after all is something compound, comprising a
cognitive, logical, or rational element together with an affective,
biotic, sentimental, and strictly irrational element, is presented to us
under the form of knowledge. And hence the insuperable difficulty of
separating it from some dogma or other. Pure faith, free from dogmas,
about which I wrote a great deal years ago, is a phantasm. Neither is
the difficulty overcome by inventing the theory of faith in faith
itself. Faith needs a matter to work upon.
Believing is a form of knowing, even if it be no more than a knowing and
even a formulating of our vital longing. In ordinary language the term
"believing," however, is used in a double and even a contradictory
sense. It may express, on the one hand, the highest degree of the mind's
conviction of the truth of a thing, and, on the other hand, it may imply
merely a weak and hesitating persuasion of its truth. For if in one
sense believing expresses the firmest kind of assent we are capable of
giving, the expression "I believe that it is so, although I am not sure
of it," is nevertheless common in ordinary speech.
And this agrees with what we have said above with respect to uncertainty
as the basis of faith. The most robust faith, in so far as it is
distinguished from all other knowledge that is not _pistic_ or of
faith--faithful, as we might say--is based on uncertainty. And this is
because faith, the guarantee of things hoped for, is not so much
rational adhesion to a theoretical principle as trust in a person who
assures us of something. Faith supposes an objective, personal element.
We do not so much believe something as believe someone who promises us
or assures us of this or the other thing. We believe in a person and in
God in so far as He is a person and a personalization of the Universe.
This personal or religious element in faith is evident. Faith, it is
said, is in itself neither theoretical knowledge nor rational adhesion
to a truth, nor yet is its essence sufficiently explained by defining it
as trust in God. Seeberg says of faith that it is "the inward submission
to the spiritual authority of God, immediate obedience. And in so far as
this obedience is the means of attaining a rational principle, faith is
a personal conviction."[44]
The faith which St. Paul defined, _pistis_ in Greek, is better
translated as trust, confidence. The word _pistis_ is derived from the
verb _peithô_, which in its active voice means to persuade and in its
middle voice to trust in someone, to esteem him as worthy of trust, to
place confidence in him, to obey. And _fidare se_, to trust, is derived
from the root _fid_--whence _fides_, faith, and also confidence. The
Greek root _pith_ and the Latin _fid_ are twin brothers. In the root of
the word "faith" itself, therefore, there is implicit the idea of
confidence, of surrender to the will of another, to a person. Confidence
is placed only in persons. We trust in Providence, which we conceive as
something personal and conscious, not in Fate, which is something
impersonal. And thus it is in the person who tells us the truth, in the
person who gives us hope, that we believe, not directly and immediately
in truth itself or in hope itself.
And this personal or rather personifying element in faith extends even
to the lowest forms of it, for it is this that produces faith in
pseudo-revelation, in inspiration, in miracle. There is a story of a
Parisian doctor, who, when he found that a quack-healer was drawing away
his clientèle, removed to a quarter of the city as distant as possible
from his former abode, where he was totally unknown, and here he gave
himself out as a quack-healer and conducted himself as such. When he was
denounced as an illegal practitioner he produced his doctor's
certificate, and explained his action more or less as follows: "I am
indeed a doctor, but if I had announced myself as such I should not
have had as large a clientèle as I have as a quack-healer. Now that all
my clients know that I have studied medicine, however, and that I am a
properly qualified medical man, they will desert me in favour of some
quack who can assure them that he has never studied, but cures simply by
inspiration." And true it is that a doctor is discredited when it is
proved that he has never studied medicine and possesses no qualifying
certificate, and that a quack is discredited when it is proved that he
has studied and is a qualified practitioner. For some believe in science
and in study, while others believe in the person, in inspiration, and
even in ignorance.
"There is one distinction in the world's geography which comes
immediately to our minds when we thus state the different thoughts and
desires of men concerning their religion. We remember how the whole
world is in general divided into two hemispheres upon this matter. One
half of the world--the great dim East--is mystic. It insists upon not
seeing anything too clearly. Make any one of the great ideas of life
distinct and clear, and immediately it seems to the Oriental to be
untrue. He has an instinct which tells him that the vastest thoughts are
too vast for the human mind, and that if they are made to present
themselves in forms of statement which the human mind can comprehend,
their nature is violated and their strength is lost.
"On the other hand, the Occidental, the man of the West, demands
clearness and is impatient with mystery. He loves a definite statement
as much as his brother of the East dislikes it. He insists on knowing
what the eternal and infinite forces mean to his personal life, how they
will make him personally happier and better, almost how they will build
the house over his head, and cook the dinner on his hearth. This is the
difference between the East and the West, between man on the banks of
the Ganges and man on the banks of the Mississippi. Plenty of
exceptions, of course, there are--mystics in Boston and St. Louis,
hard-headed men of facts in Bombay and Calcutta. The two great
dispositions cannot be shut off from one another by an ocean or a range
of mountains. In some nations and places--as, for instance, among the
Jews and in our own New England--they notably commingle. But in general
they thus divide the world between them. The East lives in the moonlight
of mystery, the West in the sunlight of scientific fact. The East cries
out to the Eternal for vague impulses. The West seizes the present with
light hands, and will not let it go till it has furnished it with
reasonable, intelligible motives. Each misunderstands, distrusts, and in
large degree despises the other. But the two hemispheres together, and
not either one by itself, make up the total world." Thus, in one of his
sermons, spoke the great Unitarian preacher Phillips Brooks, late Bishop
of Massachusetts (_The Mystery of Iniquity and Other Sermons_, sermon
xvi.).
We might rather say that throughout the whole world, in the East as well
as in the West, rationalists seek definition and believe in the concept,
while vitalists seek inspiration and believe in the person. The former
scrutinize the Universe in order that they may wrest its secrets from
it; the latter pray to the Consciousness of the Universe, strive to
place themselves in immediate relationship with the Soul of the World,
with God, in order that they may find the guarantee or substance of what
they hope for, which is not to die, and the evidence of what they do not
see.
And since a person is a will, and will always has reference to the
future, he who believes, believes in what is to come--that is, in what
he hopes for. We do not believe, strictly speaking, in what is or in
what was, except as the guarantee, as the substance, of what will be.
For the Christian, to believe in the resurrection of Christ--that is to
say, in tradition and in the Gospel, which assure him that Christ has
risen, both of them personal forces--is to believe that he himself will
one day rise again by the grace of Christ. And even scientific
faith--for such there is--refers to the future and is an act of trust.
The man of science believes that at a certain future date an eclipse of
the sun will take place; he believes that the laws which have governed
the world hitherto will continue to govern it.
To believe, I repeat, is to place confidence in someone, and it has
reference to a person. I say that I know that there is an animal called
the horse, and that it has such and such characteristics, because I have
seen it; and I say that I believe in the existence of the giraffe or the
ornithorhyncus, and that it possesses such and such qualities, because I
believe those who assure me that they have seen it. And hence the
element of uncertainty attached to faith, for it is possible that a
person may be deceived or that he may deceive us.
But, on the other hand, this personal element in belief gives it an
effective and loving character, and above all, in religious faith, a
reference to what is hoped for. Perhaps there is nobody who would
sacrifice his life for the sake of maintaining that the three angles of
a triangle are together equal to two right angles, for such a truth does
not demand the sacrifice of our life; but, on the other hand, there are
many who have lost their lives for the sake of maintaining their
religious faith. Indeed it is truer to say that martyrs make faith than
that faith makes martyrs. For faith is not the mere adherence of the
intellect to an abstract principle; it is not the recognition of a
theoretical truth, a process in which the will merely sets in motion our
faculty of comprehension; faith is an act of the will--it is a movement
of the soul towards a practical truth, towards a person, towards
something that makes us not merely comprehend life, but that makes us
live.[45]
Faith makes us live by showing us that life, although it is dependent
upon reason, has its well-spring and source of power elsewhere, in
something supernatural and miraculous. Cournot the mathematician, a man
of singularly well-balanced and scientifically equipped mind, has said
that it is this tendency towards the supernatural and miraculous that
gives life, and that when it is lacking, all the speculations of the
reason lead to nothing but affliction of spirit (_Traité de
l'enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et dans
l'histoire_, § 329). And in truth we wish to live.
But, although we have said that faith is a thing of the will, it would
perhaps be better to say that it is will itself--the will not to die,
or, rather, that it is some other psychic force distinct from
intelligence, will, and feeling. We should thus have feeling, knowing,
willing, and believing or creating. For neither feeling, nor
intelligence, nor will creates; they operate upon a material already
given, upon the material given them by faith. Faith is the creative
power in man. But since it has a more intimate relation with the will
than with any other of his faculties, we conceive it under the form of
volition. It should be borne in mind, however, that wishing to
believe--that is to say, wishing to create--is not precisely the same as
believing or creating, although it is its starting-point.
Faith, therefore, if not a creative force, is the fruit of the will, and
its function is to create. Faith, in a certain sense, creates its
object. And faith in God consists in creating God; and since it is God
who gives us faith in Himself, it is God who is continually creating
Himself in us. Therefore St. Augustine said: "I will seek Thee, Lord, by
calling upon Thee, and I will call upon Thee by believing in Thee. My
faith calls upon Thee, Lord, the faith which Thou hast given me, with
which Thou hast inspired me through the Humanity of Thy Son, through the
ministry of Thy preacher" (_Confessions_, book i., chap. i.). The power
of creating God in our own image and likeness, of personalizing the
Universe, simply means that we carry God within us, as the substance of
what we hope for, and that God is continually creating us in His own
image and likeness.
And we create God--that is to say, God creates Himself in us--by
compassion, by love. To believe in God is to love Him, and in our love
to fear Him; and we begin by loving Him even before knowing Him, and by
loving Him we come at last to see and discover Him in all things.
Those who say that they believe in God and yet neither love nor fear
Him, do not in fact believe in Him but in those who have taught them
that God exists, and these in their turn often enough do not believe in
Him either. Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any
passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty,
without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation,
believe only in the God-Idea, not in God Himself. And just as belief in
God is born of love, so also it may be born of fear, and even of hate,
and of such kind was the belief of Vanni Fucci, the thief, whom Dante
depicts insulting God with obscene gestures in Hell (_Inf._, xxv., 1-3).
For the devils also believe in God, and not a few atheists.
Is it not perhaps a mode of believing in God, this fury with which those
deny and even insult Him, who, because they cannot bring themselves to
believe in Him, wish that He may not exist? Like those who believe,
they, too, wish that God may exist; but being men of a weak and passive
or of an evil disposition, in whom reason is stronger than will, they
feel themselves caught in the grip of reason and haled along in their
own despite, and they fall into despair, and because of their despair
they deny, and in their denial they affirm and create the thing that
they deny, and God reveals Himself in them, affirming Himself by their
very denial of Him.
But it will be objected to all this that to demonstrate that faith
creates its own object is to demonstrate that this object is an object
for faith alone, that outside faith it has no objective reality; just
as, on the other hand, to maintain that faith is necessary because it
affords consolation to the masses of the people, or imposes a wholesome
restraint upon them, is to declare that the object of faith is illusory.
What is certain is that for thinking believers to-day, faith is, before
all and above all, wishing that God may exist.
Wishing that God may exist, and acting and feeling as if He did exist.
And desiring God's existence and acting conformably with this desire, is
the means whereby we create God--that is, whereby God creates Himself in
us, manifests Himself to us, opens and reveals Himself to us. For God
goes out to meet him who seeks Him with love and by love, and hides
Himself from him who searches for Him with the cold and loveless reason.
God wills that the heart should have rest, but not the head, reversing
the order of the physical life in which the head sleeps and rests at
times while the heart wakes and works unceasingly. And thus knowledge
without love leads us away from God; and love, even without knowledge,
and perhaps better without it, leads us to God, and through God to
wisdom. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God!
And if you should ask me how I believe in God--that is to say, how God
creates Himself in me and reveals Himself to me--my answer may, perhaps,
provoke your smiles or your laughter, or it may even scandalize you.
I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath
of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me,
leading me, grasping me; because I possess an inner consciousness of a
particular providence and of a universal mind that marks out for me the
course of my own destiny. And the concept of law--it is nothing but a
concept after all!--tells me nothing and teaches me nothing.
Once and again in my life I have seen myself suspended in a trance over
the abyss; once and again I have found myself at the cross-roads,
confronted by a choice of ways and aware that in choosing one I should
be renouncing all the others--for there is no turning back upon these
roads of life; and once and again in such unique moments as these I have
felt the impulse of a mighty power, conscious, sovereign, and loving.
And then, before the feet of the wayfarer, opens out the way of the
Lord.
It is possible for a man to feel the Universe calling to him and guiding
him as one person guides and calls to another, to hear within him its
voice speaking without words and saying: "Go and preach to all peoples!"
How do you know that the man you see before you possesses a
consciousness like you, and that an animal also possesses such a
consciousness, more or less dimly, but not a stone? Because the man acts
towards you like a man, like a being made in your likeness, and because
the stone does not act towards you at all, but suffers you to act upon
it. And in the same way I believe that the Universe possesses a certain
consciousness like myself, because its action towards me is a human
action, and I feel that it is a personality that environs me.
Here is a formless mass; it appears to be a kind of animal; it is
impossible to distinguish its members; I only see two eyes, eyes which
gaze at me with a human gaze, the gaze of a fellow-being, a gaze which
asks for pity; and I hear it breathing. I conclude that in this formless
mass there is a consciousness. In just such a way and none other, the
starry-eyed heavens gaze down upon the believer, with a superhuman, a
divine, gaze, a gaze that asks for supreme pity and supreme love, and in
the serenity of the night he hears the breathing of God, and God touches
him in his heart of hearts and reveals Himself to him. It is the
Universe, living, suffering, loving, and asking for love.
From loving little trifling material things, which lightly come and
lightly go, having no deep root in our affections, we come to love the
more lasting things, the things which our hands cannot grasp; from
loving goods we come to love the Good; from loving beautiful things we
come to love Beauty; from loving the true we come to love the Truth;
from loving pleasures we come to love Happiness; and, last of all, we
come to love Love. We emerge from ourselves in order to penetrate
further into our supreme I; individual consciousness emerges from us in
order to submerge itself in the total Consciousness of which we form a
part, but without being dissolved in it. And God is simply the Love that
springs from universal suffering and becomes consciousness.
But this, it will be said, is merely to revolve in an iron ring, for
such a God is not objective. And at this point it may not be out of
place to give reason its due and to examine exactly what is meant by a
thing existing, being objective.
What is it, in effect, to exist? and when do we say that a thing exists?
A thing exists when it is placed outside us, and in such a way that it
shall have preceded our perception of it and be capable of continuing to
subsist outside us after we have disappeared. But have I any certainty
that anything has preceded me or that anything must survive me? Can my
consciousness know that there is anything outside it? Everything that I
know or can know is within my consciousness. We will not entangle
ourselves, therefore, in the insoluble problem of an objectivity outside
our perceptions. Things exist in so far as they act. To exist is to act.
But now it will be said that it is not God, but the idea of God, that
acts in us. To which we shall reply that it is sometimes God acting by
His idea, but still very often it is rather God acting in us by Himself.
And the retort will be a demand for proofs of the objective truth of the
existence of God, since we ask for signs. And we shall have to answer
with Pilate: What is truth?
And having asked this question, Pilate turned away without waiting for
an answer and proceeded to wash his hands in order that he might
exculpate himself for having allowed Christ to be condemned to death.
And there are many who ask this question, What is truth? but without any
intention of waiting for the answer, and solely in order that they may
turn away and wash their hands of the crime of having helped to kill and
eject God from their own consciousness or from the consciousness of
others.
What is truth? There are two kinds of truth--the logical or objective,
the opposite of which is error, and the moral or subjective, the
opposite of which is falsehood. And in a previous essay I have
endeavoured to show that error is the fruit of falsehood.[46]
Moral truth, the road that leads to intellectual truth, which also is
moral, inculcates the study of science, which is over and above all a
school of sincerity and humility. Science teaches us, in effect, to
submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they
are--that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would
have them be. In a religiously scientific investigation, it is the data
of reality themselves, it is the perceptions which we receive from the
outside world, that formulate themselves in our mind as laws--it is not
we ourselves who thus formulate them. It is the numbers themselves which
in our mind create mathematics. Science is the most intimate school of
resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly
most insignificant of facts. And it is the gateway of religion; but
within the temple itself its function ceases.
And just as there is logical truth, opposed to error, and moral truth,
opposed to falsehood, so there is also esthetic truth or verisimilitude,
which is opposed to extravagance, and religious truth or hope, which is
opposed to the inquietude of absolute despair. For esthetic
verisimilitude, the expression of which is sensible, differs from
logical truth, the demonstration of which is rational; and religious
truth, the truth of faith, the substance of things hoped for, is not
equivalent to moral truth, but superimposes itself upon it. He who
affirms a faith built upon a basis of uncertainty does not and cannot
lie.
And not only do we not believe with reason, nor yet above reason nor
below reason, but we believe against reason. Religious faith, it must be
repeated yet again, is not only irrational, it is contra-rational.
Kierkegaard says: "Poetry is illusion before knowledge; religion
illusion after knowledge. Between poetry and religion the worldly wisdom
of living plays its comedy. Every individual who does not live either
poetically or religiously is a fool" (_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig
Efterskrift_, chap. iv., sect. 2a, § 2). The same writer tells us that
Christianity is a desperate sortie (_salida_). Even so, but it is only
by the very desperateness of this sortie that we can win through to
hope, to that hope whose vitalizing illusion is of more force than all
rational knowledge, and which assures us that there is always something
that cannot be reduced to reason. And of reason the same may be said as
was said of Christ: that he who is not with it is against it. That which
is not rational is contra-rational; and such is hope.
By this circuitous route we always arrive at hope in the end.
To the mystery of love, which is the mystery of suffering, belongs a
mysterious form, and this form is time. We join yesterday to to-morrow
with links of longing, and the now is, strictly, nothing but the
endeavour of the before to make itself the after; the present is simply
the determination of the past to become the future. The now is a point
which, if not sharply articulated, vanishes; and, nevertheless, in this
point is all eternity, the substance of time.
Everything that has been can be only as it was, and everything that is
can be only as it is; the possible is always relegated to the future,
the sole domain of liberty, wherein imagination, the creative and
liberating energy, the incarnation of faith, has space to roam at large.
Love ever looks and tends to the future, for its work is the work of our
perpetuation; the property of love is to hope, and only upon hopes does
it nourish itself. And thus when love sees the fruition of its desire it
becomes sad, for it then discovers that what it desired was not its true
end, and that God gave it this desire merely as a lure to spur it to
action; it discovers that its end is further on, and it sets out again
upon its toilsome pilgrimage through life, revolving through a constant
cycle of illusions and disillusions. And continually it transforms its
frustrated hopes into memories, and from these memories it draws fresh
hopes. From the subterranean ore of memory we extract the jewelled
visions of our future; imagination shapes our remembrances into hopes.
And humanity is like a young girl full of longings, hungering for life
and thirsting for love, who weaves her days with dreams, and hopes,
hopes ever, hopes without ceasing, for the eternal and predestined
lover, for him who, because he was destined for her from the beginning,
from before the dawn of her remotest memory, from before her
cradle-days, shall live with her and for her into the illimitable
future, beyond the stretch of her furthest hopes, beyond the grave
itself. And for this poor lovelorn humanity, as for the girl ever
awaiting her lover, there is no kinder wish than that when the winter of
life shall come it may find the sweet dreams of its spring changed into
memories sweeter still, and memories that shall burgeon into new hopes.
In the days when our summer is over, what a flow of calm felicity, of
resignation to destiny, must come from remembering hopes which have
never been realized and which, because they have never been realized,
preserve their pristine purity.
Love hopes, hopes ever and never wearies of hoping; and love of God, our
faith in God, is, above all, hope in Him. For God dies not, and he who
hopes in God shall live for ever. And our fundamental hope, the root and
stem of all our hopes, is the hope of eternal life.
And if faith is the substance of hope, hope in its turn is the form of
faith. Until it gives us hope, our faith is a formless faith, vague,
chaotic, potential; it is but the possibility of believing, the longing
to believe. But we must needs believe in something, and we believe in
what we hope for, we believe in hope. We remember the past, we know the
present, we only believe in the future. To believe what we have not seen
is to believe what we shall see. Faith, then, I repeat once again, is
faith in hope; we believe what we hope for.
Love makes us believe in God, in whom we hope and from whom we hope to
receive life to come; love makes us believe in that which the dream of
hope creates for us.
Faith is our longing for the eternal, for God; and hope is God's
longing, the longing of the eternal, of the divine in us, which advances
to meet our faith and uplifts us. Man aspires to God by faith and cries
to Him: "I believe--give me, Lord, wherein to believe!" And God, the
divinity in man, sends him hope in another life in order that he may
believe in it. Hope is the reward of faith. Only he who believes truly
hopes; and only he who truly hopes believes. We only believe what we
hope, and we only hope what we believe.
It was hope that called God by the name of Father; and this name, so
comforting yet so mysterious, is still bestowed upon Him by hope. The
father gave us life and gives bread wherewith to sustain it, and we ask
the father to preserve our life for us. And if Christ was he who, with
the fullest heart and purest mouth, named with the name of Father his
Father and ours, if the noblest feeling of Christianity is the feeling
of the Fatherhood of God, it is because in Christ the human race
sublimated its hunger for eternity.
It may perhaps be said that this longing of faith, that this hope, is
more than anything else an esthetic feeling. Possibly the esthetic
feeling enters into it, but without completely satisfying it.
We seek in art an image of eternalization. If for a brief moment our
spirit finds peace and rest and assuagement in the contemplation of the
beautiful, even though it finds therein no real cure for its distress,
it is because the beautiful is the revelation of the eternal, of the
divine in things, and beauty but the perpetuation of momentaneity. Just
as truth is the goal of rational knowledge, so beauty is the goal of
hope, which is perhaps in its essence irrational.
Nothing is lost, nothing wholly passes away, for in some way or another
everything is perpetuated; and everything, after passing through time,
returns to eternity. The temporal world has its roots in eternity, and
in eternity yesterday is united with to-day and to-morrow. The scenes of
life pass before us as in a cinematograph show, but on the further side
of time the film is one and indivisible.
Physicists affirm that not a single particle of matter nor a single
tremor of energy is lost, but that each is transformed and transmitted
and persists. And can it be that any form, however fugitive it may be,
is lost? We must needs believe--believe and hope!--that it is not, but
that somewhere it remains archived and perpetuated, and that there is
some mirror of eternity in which, without losing themselves in one
another, all the images that pass through time are received. Every
impression that reaches me remains stored up in my brain even though it
may be so deep or so weak that it is buried in the depths of my
subconsciousness; but from these depths it animates my life; and if the
whole of my spirit, the total content of my soul, were to awake to full
consciousness, all these dimly perceived and forgotten fugitive
impressions would come to life again, including even those which I had
never been aware of. I carry within me everything that has passed before
me, and I perpetuate it with myself, and it may be that it all goes into
my germs, and that all my ancestors live undiminished in me and will
continue so to live, united with me, in my descendants. And perhaps I,
the whole I, with all this universe of mine, enter into each one of my
actions, or, at all events, that which is essential in me enters into
them--that which makes me myself, my individual essence.
And how is this individual essence in each several thing--that which
makes it itself and not another--revealed to us save as beauty? What is
the beauty of anything but its eternal essence, that which unites its
past with its future, that element of it that rests and abides in the
womb of eternity? or, rather, what is it but the revelation of its
divinity?
And this beauty, which is the root of eternity, is revealed to us by
love; it is the supreme revelation of the love of God and the token of
our ultimate victory over time. It is love that reveals to us the
eternal in us and in our neighbours.
Is it the beautiful, the eternal, in things, that awakens and kindles
our love for them, or is it our love for things that reveals to us the
beautiful, the eternal, in them? Is not beauty perhaps a creation of
love, in the same way and in the same sense that the sensible world is a
creation of the instinct of preservation and the supersensible world of
that of perpetuation? Is not beauty, and together with beauty eternity,
a creation of love? "Though our outward man perish," says the Apostle,
"yet the inward man is renewed day by day" (2 Cor. iv. 16). The man of
passing appearances perishes and passes away with them; the man of
reality remains and grows. "For our light affliction, which is but for a
moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory"
(ver. 17). Our suffering causes us anguish, and this anguish, bursting
because of its own fullness, seems to us consolation. "While we look not
at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for
the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not
seen are eternal" (ver. 18).
This suffering gives hope, which is the beautiful in life, the supreme
beauty, or the supreme consolation. And since love is full of suffering,
since love is compassion and pity, beauty springs from compassion and is
simply the temporal consolation that compassion seeks. A tragic
consolation! And the supreme beauty is that of tragedy. The
consciousness that everything passes away, that we ourselves pass away,
and that everything that is ours and everything that environs us passes
away, fills us with anguish, and this anguish itself reveals to us the
consolation of that which does not pass away, of the eternal, of the
beautiful.
And this beauty thus revealed, this perpetuation of momentaneity, only
realizes itself practically, only lives through the work of charity.
Hope in action is charity, and beauty in action is goodness.
* * * * *
Charity, which eternalizes everything it loves, and in giving us the
goodness of it brings to light its hidden beauty, has its root in the
love of God, or, if you like, in charity towards God, in pity for God.
Love, pity, personalizes everything, we have said; in discovering the
suffering in everything and in personalizing everything, it personalizes
the Universe itself as well--for the Universe also suffers--and it
discovers God to us. For God is revealed to us because He suffers and
because we suffer; because He suffers He demands our love, and because
we suffer He gives us His love, and He covers our anguish with the
eternal and infinite anguish.
This was the scandal of Christianity among Jews and Greeks, among
Pharisees and Stoics, and this, which was its scandal of old, the
scandal of the Cross, is still its scandal to-day, and will continue to
be so, even among Christians themselves--the scandal of a God who
becomes man in order that He may suffer and die and rise again, because
He has suffered and died, the scandal of a God subject to suffering and
death. And this truth that God suffers--a truth that appals the mind of
man--is the revelation of the very heart of the Universe and of its
mystery, the revelation that God revealed to us when He sent His Son in
order that he might redeem us by suffering and dying. It was the
revelation of the divine in suffering, for only that which suffers is
divine.
And men made a god of this Christ who suffered, and through him they
discovered the eternal essence of a living, human God--that is, of a God
who suffers--it is only the dead, the inhuman, that does not suffer--a
God who loves and thirsts for love, for pity, a God who is a person.
Whosoever knows not the Son will never know the Father, and the Father
is only known through the Son; whosoever knows not the Son of Man--he
who suffers bloody anguish and the pangs of a breaking heart, whose soul
is heavy within him even unto death, who suffers the pain that kills and
brings to life again--will never know the Father, and can know nothing
of the suffering God.
He who does not suffer, and who does not suffer because he does not
live, is that logical and frozen _ens realissimum_, the _primum movens_,
that impassive entity, which because of its impassivity is nothing but a
pure idea. The category does not suffer, but neither does it live or
exist as a person. And how is the world to derive its origin and life
from an impassive idea? Such a world would be but the idea of the world.
But the world suffers, and suffering is the sense of the flesh of
reality; it is the spirit's sense of its mass and substance; it is the
self's sense of its own tangibility; it is immediate reality.
Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it
is only suffering that makes us persons. And suffering is universal,
suffering is that which unites all us living beings together; it is the
universal or divine blood that flows through us all. That which we call
will, what is it but suffering?
And suffering has its degrees, according to the depth of its
penetration, from the suffering that floats upon the sea of appearances
to the eternal anguish, the source of the tragic sense of life, which
seeks a habitation in the depths of the eternal and there awakens
consolation; from the physical suffering that contorts our bodies to the
religious anguish that flings us upon the bosom of God, there to be
watered by the divine tears.
Anguish is something far deeper, more intimate, and more spiritual than
suffering. We are wont to feel the touch of anguish even in the midst of
that which we call happiness, and even because of this happiness itself,
to which we cannot resign ourselves and before which we tremble. The
happy who resign themselves to their apparent happiness, to a transitory
happiness, seem to be as men without substance, or, at any rate, men who
have not discovered this substance in themselves, who have not touched
it. Such men are usually incapable of loving or of being loved, and they
go through life without really knowing either pain or bliss.
There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to
choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. And love leads us
to no other happiness than that of love itself and its tragic
consolation of uncertain hope. The moment love becomes happy and
satisfied, it no longer desires and it is no longer love. The
satisfied, the happy, do not love; they fall asleep in habit, near
neighbour to annihilation. To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to
be. Man is the more man--that is, the more divine--the greater his
capacity for suffering, or, rather, for anguish.
At our coming into the world it is given to us to choose between love
and happiness, and we wish--poor fools!--for both: the happiness of
loving and the love of happiness. But we ought to ask for the gift of
love and not of happiness, and to be preserved from dozing away into
habit, lest we should fall into a fast sleep, a sleep without waking,
and so lose our consciousness beyond power of recovery. We ought to ask
God to make us conscious of ourselves in ourselves, in our suffering.
What is Fate, what is Fatality, but the brotherhood of love and
suffering? What is it but that terrible mystery in virtue of which love
dies as soon as it touches the happiness towards which it reaches out,
and true happiness dies with it? Love and suffering mutually engender
one another, and love is charity and compassion, and the love that is
not charitable and compassionate is not love. Love, in a word, is
resigned despair.
That which the mathematicians call the problem of maxima and minima,
which is also called the law of economy, is the formula for all
existential--that is, passional--activity. In material mechanics and in
social mechanics, in industry and in political economy, every problem
resolves itself into an attempt to obtain the greatest possible
resulting utility with the least possible effort, the greatest income
with the least expenditure, the most pleasure with the least pain. And
the terrible and tragic formula of the inner, spiritual life is either
to obtain the most happiness with the least love, or the most love with
the least happiness. And it is necessary to choose between the one and
the other, and to know that he who approaches the infinite of love, the
love that is infinite, approaches the zero of happiness, the supreme
anguish. And in reaching this zero he is beyond the reach of the misery
that kills. "Be not, and thou shalt be mightier than aught that is,"
said Brother Juan de los Angeles in one of his _Diálogos de la conquista
del reino de Dios_ (Dial. iii. 8).
And there is something still more anguishing than suffering. A man about
to receive a much-dreaded blow expects to have to suffer so severely
that he may even succumb to the suffering, and when the blow falls he
feels scarcely any pain; but afterwards, when he has come to himself and
is conscious of his insensibility, he is seized with terror, a tragic
terror, the most terrible of all, and choking with anguish he cries out:
"Can it be that I no longer exist?" Which would you find most
appalling--to feel such a pain as would deprive you of your senses on
being pierced through with a white-hot iron, or to see yourself thus
pierced through without feeling any pain? Have you never felt the
horrible terror of feeling yourself incapable of suffering and of tears?
Suffering tells us that we exist; suffering tells us that those whom we
love exist; suffering tells us that the world in which we live exists;
and suffering tells us that God exists and suffers; but it is the
suffering of anguish, the anguish of surviving and being eternal.
Anguish discovers God to us and makes us love Him.
To believe in God is to love Him, and to love Him is to feel Him
suffering, to pity Him.
It may perhaps appear blasphemous to say that God suffers, for suffering
implies limitation. Nevertheless, God, the Consciousness of the
Universe, is limited by the brute matter in which He lives, by the
unconscious, from which He seeks to liberate Himself and to liberate us.
And we, in our turn, must seek to liberate Him. God suffers in each and
all of us, in each and all of the consciousnesses imprisoned in
transitory matter, and we all suffer in Him. Religious anguish is but
the divine suffering, the feeling that God suffers in me and that I
suffer in Him.
The universal suffering is the anguish of all in seeking to be all else
but without power to achieve it, the anguish of each in being he that he
is, being at the same time all that he is not, and being so for ever.
The essence of a being is not only its endeavour to persist for ever, as
Spinoza taught us, but also its endeavour to universalize itself; it is
the hunger and thirst for eternity and infinity. Every created being
tends not only to preserve itself in itself, but to perpetuate itself,
and, moreover, to invade all other beings, to be others without ceasing
to be itself, to extend its limits to the infinite, but without breaking
them. It does not wish to throw down its walls and leave everything laid
flat, common and undefended, confounding and losing its own
individuality, but it wishes to carry its walls to the extreme limits of
creation and to embrace everything within them. It seeks the maximum of
individuality with the maximum also of personality; it aspires to the
identification of the Universe with itself; it aspires to God.
And this vast I, within which each individual I seeks to put the
Universe--what is it but God? And because I aspire to God, I love Him;
and this aspiration of mine towards God is my love for Him, and just as
I suffer in being He, He also suffers in being I, and in being each one
of us.
I am well aware that in spite of my warning that I am attempting here to
give a logical form to a system of a-logical feelings, I shall be
scandalizing not a few of my readers in speaking of a God who suffers,
and in applying to God Himself, as God, the passion of Christ. The God
of so-called rational theology excludes in effect all suffering. And the
reader will no doubt think that this idea of suffering can have only a
metaphorical value when applied to God, similar to that which is
supposed to attach to those passages in the Old Testament which
describe the human passions of the God of Israel. For anger, wrath, and
vengeance are impossible without suffering. And as for saying that God
suffers through being bound by matter, I shall be told that, in the
words of Plotinus (_Second Ennead_, ix., 7), the Universal Soul cannot
be bound by the very thing--namely, bodies or matter--which is bound by
It.
Herein is involved the whole problem of the origin of evil, the evil of
sin no less than the evil of pain, for if God does not suffer, He causes
suffering; and if His life, since God lives, is not a process of
realizing in Himself a total consciousness which is continually becoming
fuller--that is to say, which is continually becoming more and more
God--it is a process of drawing all things towards Himself, of imparting
Himself to all, of constraining the consciousness of each part to enter
into the consciousness of the All, which is He Himself, until at last He
comes to be all in all--_panta en paot_, according to the expression of
St. Paul, the first Christian mystic. We will discuss this more fully,
however, in the next chapter on the apocatastasis or beatific union.
For the present let it suffice to say that there is a vast current of
suffering urging living beings towards one another, constraining them to
love one another and to seek one another, and to endeavour to complete
one another, and to be each himself and others at the same time. In God
everything lives, and in His suffering everything suffers, and in loving
God we love His creatures in Him, just as in loving and pitying His
creatures we love and pity God in them. No single soul can be free so
long as there is anything enslaved in God's world, neither can God
Himself, who lives in the soul of each one of us, be free so long as our
soul is not free.
My most immediate sensation is the sense and love of my own misery, my
anguish, the compassion I feel for myself, the love I bear for myself.
And when this compassion is vital and superabundant, it overflows from
me upon others, and from the excess of my own compassion I come to have
compassion for my neighbours. My own misery is so great that the
compassion for myself which it awakens within me soon overflows and
reveals to me the universal misery.
And what is charity but the overflow of pity? What is it but reflected
pity that overflows and pours itself out in a flood of pity for the woes
of others and in the exercise of charity?
When the overplus of our pity leads us to the consciousness of God
within us, it fills us with so great anguish for the misery shed abroad
in all things, that we have to pour our pity abroad, and this we do in
the form of charity. And in this pouring abroad of our pity we
experience relief and the painful sweetness of goodness. This is what
Teresa de Jesús, the mystical doctor, called "sweet-tasting suffering"
(_dolor sabroso_), and she knew also the lore of suffering loves. It is
as when one looks upon some thing of beauty and feels the necessity of
making others sharers in it. For the creative impulse, in which charity
consists, is the work of suffering love.
We feel, in effect, a satisfaction in doing good when good superabounds
within us, when we are swollen with pity; and we are swollen with pity
when God, filling our soul, gives us the suffering sensation of
universal life, of the universal longing for eternal divinization. For
we are not merely placed side by side with others in the world, having
no common root with them, neither is their lot indifferent to us, but
their pain hurts us, their anguish fills us with anguish, and we feel
our community of origin and of suffering even without knowing it.
Suffering, and pity which is born of suffering, are what reveal to us
the brotherhood of every existing thing that possesses life and more or
less of consciousness. "Brother Wolf" St. Francis of Assisi called the
poor wolf that feels a painful hunger for the sheep, and feels, too,
perhaps, the pain of having to devour them; and this brotherhood reveals
to us the Fatherhood of God, reveals to us that God is a Father and that
He exists. And as a Father He shelters our common misery.
Charity, then, is the impulse to liberate myself and all my fellows from
suffering, and to liberate God, who embraces us all.
Suffering is a spiritual thing. It is the most immediate revelation of
consciousness, and it may be that our body was given us simply in order
that suffering might be enabled to manifest itself. A man who had never
known suffering, either in greater or less degree, would scarcely
possess consciousness of himself. The child first cries at birth when
the air, entering into his lungs and limiting him, seems to say to him:
You have to breathe me in order that you may live!
We must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us,
that the material or sensible world which the senses create for us
exists solely in order to embody and sustain that other spiritual or
imaginable world which the imagination creates for us. Consciousness
tends to be ever more and more consciousness, to intensify its
consciousness, to acquire full consciousness of its complete self, of
the whole of its content. We must needs believe with faith, whatever
counsels reason may give us, that in the depths of our own bodies, in
animals, in plants, in rocks, in everything that lives, in all the
Universe, there is a spirit that strives to know itself, to acquire
consciousness of itself, to be itself--for to be oneself is to know
oneself--to be pure spirit; and since it can only achieve this by means
of the body, by means of matter, it creates and makes use of matter at
the same time that it remains the prisoner of it. The face can only see
itself when portrayed in the mirror, but in order to see itself it must
remain the prisoner of the mirror in which it sees itself, and the image
which it sees therein is as the mirror distorts it; and if the mirror
breaks, the image is broken; and if the mirror is blurred, the image is
blurred.
Spirit finds itself limited by the matter in which it has to live and
acquire consciousness of itself, just as thought is limited by the word
in which as a social medium it is incarnated. Without matter there is no
spirit, but matter makes spirit suffer by limiting it. And suffering is
simply the obstacle which matter opposes to spirit; it is the clash of
the conscious with the unconscious.
Suffering is, in effect, the barrier which unconsciousness, matter, sets
up against consciousness, spirit; it is the resistance to will, the
limit which the visible universe imposes upon God; it is the wall that
consciousness runs up against when it seeks to extend itself at the
expense of unconsciousness; it is the resistance which unconsciousness
opposes to its penetration by consciousness.
Although in deference to authority we may believe, we do not in fact
know, that we possess heart, stomach, or lungs so long as they do not
cause us discomfort, suffering, or anguish. Physical suffering, or even
discomfort, is what reveals to us our own internal core. And the same is
true of spiritual suffering and anguish, for we do not take account of
the fact that we possess a soul until it hurts us.
Anguish is that which makes consciousness return upon itself. He who
knows no anguish knows what he does and what he thinks, but he does not
truly know that he does it and that he thinks it. He thinks, but he does
not think that he thinks, and his thoughts are as if they were not his.
Neither does he properly belong to himself. For it is only anguish, it
is only the passionate longing never to die, that makes a human spirit
master of itself.
Pain, which is a kind of dissolution, makes us discover our internal
core; and in the supreme dissolution, which is death, we shall, at last,
through the pain of annihilation, arrive at the core of our temporal
core--at God, whom in our spiritual anguish we breathe and learn to
love.
Even so must we believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give
us.
The origin of evil, as many discovered of old, is nothing other than
what is called by another name the inertia of matter, and, as applied to
the things of the spirit, sloth. And not without truth has it been said
that sloth is the mother of all vices, not forgetting that the supreme
sloth is that of not longing madly for immortality.
Consciousness, the craving for more, more, always more, hunger of
eternity and thirst of infinity, appetite for God--these are never
satisfied. Each consciousness seeks to be itself and to be all other
consciousnesses without ceasing to be itself: it seeks to be God. And
matter, unconsciousness, tends to be less and less, tends to be nothing,
its thirst being a thirst for repose. Spirit says: I wish to be! and
matter answers: I wish not to be!
And in the order of human life, the individual would tend, under the
sole instigation of the instinct of preservation, the creator of the
material world, to destruction, to annihilation, if it were not for
society, which, in implanting in him the instinct of perpetuation, the
creator of the spiritual world, lifts and impels him towards the All,
towards immortalization. And everything that man does as a mere
individual, opposed to society, for the sake of his own preservation,
and at the expense of society, if need be, is bad; and everything that
he does as a social person, for the sake of the society in which he
himself is included, for the sake of its perpetuation and of the
perpetuation of himself in it, is good. And many of those who seem to be
the greatest egoists, trampling everything under their feet in their
zeal to bring their work to a successful issue, are in reality men
whose souls are aflame and overflowing with charity, for they subject
and subordinate their petty personal I to the social I that has a
mission to accomplish.
He who would tie the working of love, of spiritualization, of
liberation, to transitory and individual forms, crucifies God in matter;
he crucifies God who makes the ideal subservient to his own temporal
interests or worldly glory. And such a one is a deicide.
The work of charity, of the love of God, is to endeavour to liberate God
from brute matter, to endeavour to give consciousness to everything, to
spiritualize or universalize everything; it is to dream that the very
rocks may find a voice and work in accordance with the spirit of this
dream; it is to dream that everything that exists may become conscious,
that the Word may become life.
We have but to look at the eucharistic symbol to see an instance of it.
The Word has been imprisoned in a piece of material bread, and it has
been imprisoned therein to the end that we may eat it, and in eating it
make it our own, part and parcel of our body in which the spirit dwells,
and that it may beat in our heart and think in our brain and be
consciousness. It has been imprisoned in this bread in order that, after
being buried in our body, it may come to life again in our spirit.
And we must spiritualize everything. And this we shall accomplish by
giving our spirit, which grows the more the more it is distributed, to
all men and to all things. And we give our spirit when we invade other
spirits and make ourselves the master of them.
All this is to be believed with faith, whatever counsels reason may give
us.
* * * * *
And now we are about to see what practical consequences all these more
or less fantastical doctrines may have in regard to logic, to esthetics,
and, above all, to ethics--their religious concretion, in a word. And
perhaps then they will gain more justification in the eyes of the
reader who, in spite of my warnings, has hitherto been looking for the
scientific or even philosophic development of an irrational system.
I think it may not be superfluous to recall to the reader once again
what I said at the conclusion of the sixth chapter, that entitled "In
the Depths of the Abyss"; but we now approach the practical or
pragmatical part of this treatise. First, however, we must see how the
religious sense may become concrete in the hopeful vision of another
life.
FOOTNOTES:
[44] Reinold Seeberg, _Christliche-protestantische Ethik_ in
_Systematische christliche Religion_, in _Die Kultur der Gegenwart_
series.
[45] _Cf._ St. Thomas Aquinas, _Summa_, secunda secundæ, quæstio iv.,
art. 2.
[46] "_Qué es Verdad?_" ("What is truth?"), published in _La España
Moderna_, March, 1906, vol. 207 (reprinted in the edition of collected
_Ensayos_, vol. vi., Madrid, 1918).
X
RELIGION, THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE BEYOND AND THE APOCATASTASIS
_Kai gar isôs kai malista prepei mellonta echeise apodêmein diaskopein te
kai muthologein peri tês apodêmias tês echei, poian tina autên oiometha
einai._--PLATO: _Phædo_.
Religion is founded upon faith, hope, and charity, which in their turn
are founded upon the feeling of divinity and of God. Of faith in God is
born our faith in men, of hope in God hope in men, and of charity or
piety towards God--for as Cicero said,[47] _est enim pietas iustitia
adversum deos_--charity towards men. In God is resumed not only
Humanity, but the whole Universe, and the Universe spiritualized and
penetrated with consciousness, for as the Christian Faith teaches, God
shall at last be all in all. St. Teresa said, and Miguel de Molinos
repeated with a harsher and more despairing inflection, that the soul
must realize that nothing exists but itself and God.
And this relation with God, this more or less intimate union with Him,
is what we call religion.
What is religion? In what does it differ from the religious sense and
how are the two related? Every man's definition of religion is based
upon his own inward experience of it rather than upon his observation of
it in others, nor indeed is it possible to define it without in some way
or another experiencing it. Tacitus said (_Hist._ v. 4), speaking of the
Jews, that they regarded as profane everything that the Romans held to
be sacred, and that what was sacred to them was to the Romans impure:
_profana illic omnia quæ apud nos sacra, rursum conversa apud illos quæ
nobis incesta_. Therefore he, the Roman, describes the Jews as a people
dominated by superstition and hostile to religion, _gens superstitioni
obnoxia, religionibus adversa_, while as regards Christianity, with
which he was very imperfectly acquainted, scarcely distinguishing it
from Judaism, he deemed it to be a pernicious superstition, _existialis
superstitio_, inspired by a hatred of mankind, _odium generis humani_
(_Ab excessu Aug._, xv., 44). And there have been many others who have
shared his opinion. But where does religion end and superstition begin,
or perhaps rather we should say at what point does superstition merge
into religion? What is the criterion by means of which we discriminate
between them?
It would be of little profit to recapitulate here, even summarily, the
principal definitions, each bearing the impress of the personal feeling
of its definer, which have been given of religion. Religion is better
described than defined and better felt than described. But if there is
any one definition that latterly has obtained acceptance, it is that of
Schleiermacher, to the effect that religion consists in the simple
feeling of a relationship of dependence upon something above us and a
desire to establish relations with this mysterious power. Nor is there
much amiss with the statement of W. Hermann[48] that the religious
longing of man is a desire for truth concerning his human existence. And
to cut short these extraneous citations, I will end with one from the
judicious and perspicacious Cournot: "Religious manifestations are the
necessary consequence of man's predisposition to believe in the
existence of an invisible, supernatural and miraculous world, a
predisposition which it has been possible to consider sometimes as a
reminiscence of an anterior state, sometimes as an intimation of a
future destiny" (_Traité de l'enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans
les sciences et dans l'histoire_, § 396). And it is this problem of
human destiny, of eternal life, or of the human finality of the Universe
or of God, that we have now reached. All the highways of religion lead
up to this, for it is the very essence of all religion.
Beginning with the savage's personalization of the whole Universe in his
fetich, religion has its roots in the vital necessity of giving human
finality to the Universe, to God, and this necessity obliges it,
therefore, to attribute to the Universe, to God, consciousness of self
and of purpose. And it may be said that religion is simply union with
God, each one interpreting God according to his own sense of Him. God
gives transcendent meaning and finality to life; but He gives it
relatively to each one of us who believe in Him. And thus God is for man
as much as man is for God, for God in becoming man, in becoming human,
has given Himself to man because of His love of him.
And this religious longing for union with God is a longing for a union
that cannot be consummated in science or in art, but only in life. "He
who possesses science and art, has religion; he who possesses neither
science nor art, let him get religion," said Goethe in one of his
frequent accesses of paganism. And yet in spite of what he said, he
himself, Goethe...?
And to wish that we may be united with God is not to wish that we may be
lost and submerged in Him, for this loss and submersion of self ends at
last in the complete dissolution of self in the dreamless sleep of
Nirvana; it is to wish to possess Him rather than to be possessed by
Him. When his disciples, amazed at his saying that it was impossible for
a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven, asked Jesus who then
could be saved, the Master replied that with men it was impossible but
not with God; and then said Peter, "Behold, we have forsaken all and
followed thee; what shall we have therefore?" And the reply of Jesus
was, not that they should be absorbed in the Father, but that they
should sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel
(Matt. xix. 23-26).
It was a Spaniard, and very emphatically a Spaniard, Miguel de Molinos,
who said in his _Guía Espiritual_[49] that "he who would attain to the
mystical science must abandon and be detached from five things: first,
from creatures; second, from temporal things; third, from the very gifts
of the Holy Spirit; fourth, from himself; and fifth, he must be detached
even from God." And he adds that "this last is the completest of all,
because that soul only that knows how to be so detached is that which
attains to being lost in God, and only the soul that attains to being so
lost succeeds in finding itself." Emphatically a true Spaniard, Molinos,
and truly Spanish is this paradoxical expression of quietism or rather
of nihilism--for he himself elsewhere speaks of annihilation--and not
less Spanish, nay, perhaps even more Spanish, were the Jesuits who
attacked him, upholding the prerogatives of the All against the claims
of Nothingness. For religion is not the longing for self-annihilation,
but for self-completion, it is the longing not for death but for life.
"The eternal religion of the inward essence of man ... the individual
dream of the heart, is the worship of his own being, the adoration of
life," as the tortured soul of Flaubert was intimately aware (_Par les
champs et par les grèves_, vii.).
When at the beginning of the so-called modern age, at the Renaissance,
the pagan sense of religion came to life again, it took concrete form in
the knightly ideal with its codes of love and honour. But it was a
paganism Christianized, baptized. "Woman--_la donna_--was the divinity
enshrined within those savage breasts. Whosoever will investigate the
memorials of primitive times will find this ideal of woman in its full
force and purity; the Universe is woman. And so it was in Germany, in
France, in Provence, in Spain, in Italy, at the beginning of the modern
age. History was cast in this mould; Trojans and Romans were conceived
as knights-errant, and so too were Arabs, Saracens, Turks, the Sultan
and Saladin.... In this universal fraternity mingle angels, saints,
miracles and paradise, strangely blended with the fantasy and
voluptuousness of the Oriental world, and all baptized in the name of
Chivalry." Thus, in his _Storia della Letteratura italiana_, ii., writes
Francesco de Sanctis, and in an earlier passage he informs us that for
that breed of men "in paradise itself the lover's delight was to look
upon his lady--_Madonna_--and that he had no desire to go thither if he
might not go in his lady's company." What, in fact, was Chivalry--which
Cervantes, intending to kill it, afterwards purified and Christianized
in _Don Quixote_--but a real though distorted religion, a hybrid between
paganism and Christianity, whose gospel perhaps was the legend of
Tristan and Iseult? And did not even the Christianity of the
mystics--those knights-errant of the spirit--possibly reach its
culminating-point in the worship of the divine woman, the Virgin Mary?
What else was the Mariolatry of a St. Bonaventura, the troubadour of
Mary? And this sentiment found its inspiration in love of the fountain
of life, of that which saves us from death.
But as the Renaissance advanced men turned from the religion of woman to
the religion of science; desire, the foundation of which was curiosity,
ended in curiosity, in eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of
good and evil. Europe flocked to the University of Bologna in search of
learning. Chivalry was succeeded by Platonism. Men sought to discover
the mystery of the world and of life. But it was really in order to save
life, which they had also sought to save in the worship of woman. Human
consciousness sought to penetrate the Universal Consciousness, but its
real object, whether it was aware of it or not, was to save itself.
For the truth is that we feel and imagine the Universal
Consciousness--and in this feeling and imagination religious experience
consists--simply in order that thereby we may save our own individual
consciousnesses. And how?
Once again I must repeat that the longing for the immortality of the
soul, for the permanence, in some form or another, of our personal and
individual consciousness, is as much of the essence of religion as is
the longing that there may be a God. The one does not exist apart from
the other, the reason being that fundamentally they are one and the same
thing. But as soon as we attempt to give a concrete and rational form to
this longing for immortality and permanence, to define it to ourselves,
we encounter even more difficulties than we encountered in our attempt
to rationalize God.
The universal consent of mankind has again been invoked as a means of
justifying this immortal longing for immortality to our own feeble
reason. _Permanere animos arbitratur consensu nationum omnium_, said
Cicero, echoing the opinion of the ancients (_Tuscul. Quæst._, xvi.,
36). But this same recorder of his own feelings confessed that, although
when he read the arguments in favour of the immortality of the soul in
the _Phædo_ of Plato he was compelled to assent to them, as soon as he
put the book aside and began to revolve the problem in his own mind, all
his previous assent melted away, _assentio omnis illa illabitur_ (cap.
xi., 25). And what happened to Cicero happens to us all, and it happened
likewise to Swedenborg, the most daring visionary of the other world.
Swedenborg admitted that he who discourses of life after death, putting
aside all erudite notions concerning the soul and its mode of union with
the body, believes that after death he shall live in a glorious joy and
vision, as a man among angels; but when he begins to reflect upon the
doctrine of the union of the soul with the body, or upon the
hypothetical opinion concerning the soul, doubts arise in him as to
whether the soul is thus or otherwise, and when these doubts arise, his
former idea is dissipated (_De cælo et inferno_, § 183). Nevertheless,
as Cournot says, "it is the destiny that awaits me, _me_ or my _person_,
that moves, perturbs and consoles me, that makes me capable of
abnegation and sacrifice, whatever be the origin, the nature or the
essence of this inexplicable bond of union, in the absence of which the
philosophers are pleased to determine that my person must disappear"
(_Traité_, etc., § 297).
Must we then embrace the pure and naked faith in an eternal life without
trying to represent it to ourselves? This is impossible; it is beyond
our power to bring ourselves or accustom ourselves to do so. And
nevertheless there are some who call themselves Christians and yet leave
almost altogether on one side this question of representation. Take any
work of theology informed by the most enlightened--that is, the most
rationalistic and liberal--Protestantism; take, for instance, the
_Dogmatik_ of Dr. Julius Kaftan, and of the 668 pages of which the sixth
edition, that of 1909, consists, you will find only one, the last, that
is devoted to this problem. And in this page, after affirming that
Christ is not only the beginning and middle but also the end and
consummation of History, and that those who are in Christ will attain to
fullness of life, the eternal life of those who are in Christ, not a
single word as to what that life may be. Half a dozen words at most
about eternal death, that is, hell, "for its existence is demanded by
the moral character of faith and of Christian hope." Its moral
character, eh? not its religious character, for I am not aware that the
latter knows any such exigency. And all this inspired by a prudent
agnostic parsimony.
Yes, the prudent, the rational, and, some will say, the pious,
attitude, is not to seek to penetrate into mysteries that are hidden
from our knowledge, not to insist upon shaping a plastic representation
of eternal glory, such as that of the _Divina Commedia_. True faith,
true Christian piety, we shall be told, consists in resting upon the
confidence that God, by the grace of Christ, will, in some way or
another, make us live in Him, in His Son; that, as our destiny is in His
almighty hands, we should surrender ourselves to Him, in the full
assurance that He will do with us what is best for the ultimate end of
life, of spirit and of the universe. Such is the teaching that has
traversed many centuries, and was notably prominent in the period
between Luther and Kant.
And nevertheless men have not ceased endeavouring to imagine to
themselves what this eternal life may be, nor will they cease their
endeavours so long as they are men and not merely thinking machines.
There are books of theology--or of what passes for theology--full of
disquisitions upon the conditions under which the blessed dead live in
paradise, upon their mode of enjoyment, upon the properties of the
glorious body, for without some form of body the soul cannot be
conceived.
And to this same necessity, the real necessity of forming to ourselves a
concrete representation of what this other life may be, must in great
part be referred the indestructible vitality of doctrines such as those
of spiritualism, metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls from star
to star, and the like; doctrines which as often as they are pronounced
to be defeated and dead, are found to have come to life again, clothed
in some more or less new form. And it is merely supine to be content to
ignore them and not to seek to discover their permanent and living
essence. Man will never willingly abandon his attempt to form a concrete
representation of the other life.
But is an eternal and endless life after death indeed thinkable? How
can we conceive the life of a disembodied spirit? How can we conceive
such a spirit? How can we conceive a pure consciousness, without a
corporal organism? Descartes divided the world into thought and
extension, a dualism which was imposed upon him by the Christian dogma
of the immortality of the soul. But is extension, is matter, that which
thinks and is spiritualized, or is thought that which is extended and
materialized? The weightiest questions of metaphysics arise practically
out of our desire to arrive at an understanding of the possibility of
our immortality--from this fact they derive their value and cease to be
merely the idle discussions of fruitless curiosity. For the truth is
that metaphysics has no value save in so far as it attempts to explain
in what way our vital longing can or cannot be realized. And thus it is
that there is and always will be a rational metaphysic and a vital
metaphysic, in perennial conflict with one another, the one setting out
from the notion of cause, the other from the notion of substance.
And even if we were to succeed in imagining personal immortality, might
we not possibly feel it to be something no less terrible than its
negation? "Calypso was inconsolable at the departure of Ulysses; in her
sorrow she was dismayed at being immortal," said the gentle, the
mystical Fénelon at the beginning of his _Télémaque_. Was it not a kind
of doom that the ancient gods, no less than the demons, were subject
to--the deprivation of the power to commit suicide?
When Jesus took Peter and James and John up into a high mountain and was
transfigured before them, his raiment shining as white as snow, and
Moses and Elias appeared and talked with him, Peter said to the Master:
"Master, it is good for us to be here; and let us make three
tabernacles; one for thee and one for Moses and one for Elias," for he
wished to eternalize that moment. And as they came down from the
mountain, Jesus charged them that they should tell no man what they had
seen until the Son of Man should have risen from the dead. And they,
keeping this saying to themselves, questioned one with another what this
rising from the dead should mean, as men not understanding the purport
of it. And it was after this that Jesus met the father whose son was
possessed with a dumb spirit and who cried out to him, "Lord, I believe;
help thou mine unbelief" (Mark ix.).
Those three apostles did not understand what this rising from the dead
meant. Neither did those Sadducees who asked the Master whose wife she
should be in the resurrection who in this life had had seven husbands
(Matt. xxii.); and it was then that Jesus said that God is not the God
of the dead, but of the living. And the other life is not, in fact,
thinkable to us except under the same forms as those of this earthly and
transitory life. Nor is the mystery at all clarified by that metaphor of
the grain and the wheat that it bears, with which Paul answers the
question, "How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?"
(1 Cor. xv. 35).
How can a human soul live and enjoy God eternally without losing its
individual personality--that is to say, without losing itself? What is
it to enjoy God? What is eternity as opposed to time? Does the soul
change or does it not change in the other life? If it does not change,
how does it live? And if it changes, how does it preserve its
individuality through so vast a period of time? For though the other
life may exclude space, it cannot exclude time, as Cournot observes in
the work quoted above.
If there is life in heaven there is change. Swedenborg remarked that the
angels change, because the delight of the celestial life would gradually
lose its value if they always enjoyed it in its fullness, and because
angels, like men, love themselves, and he who loves himself experiences
changes of state; and he adds further that at times the angels are sad,
and that he, Swedenborg, discoursed with some when they were sad (_De
Cælo et Inferno_, §§ 158, 160). In any case, it is impossible for us to
conceive life without change, change of growth or of diminution, of
sadness or of joy, of love or of hate.
In effect, an eternal life is unthinkable and an eternal life of
absolute felicity, of beatific vision, is more unthinkable still.
And what precisely is this beatific vision? We observe in the first
place that it is called vision and not action, something passive being
therefore presupposed. And does not this beatific vision suppose loss of
personal consciousness? A saint in heaven, says Bossuet, is a being who
is scarcely sensible of himself, so completely is he possessed by God
and immerged in His glory.... Our attention cannot stay on the saint,
because one finds him outside of himself, and subject by an unchangeable
love to the source of his being and his happiness (_Du culte qui est dû
à Dieu_). And these are the words of Bossuet, the antiquietist. This
loving vision of God supposes an absorption in Him. He who in a state of
blessedness enjoys God in His fullness must perforce neither think of
himself, nor remember himself, nor have any consciousness of himself,
but be in perpetual ecstasy (_ekstasis_) outside of himself, in a
condition of alienation. And the ecstasy that the mystics describe is a
prelude of this vision.
He who sees God shall die, say the Scriptures (Judg. xiii. 22); and may
it not be that the eternal vision of God is an eternal death, a swooning
away of the personality? But St. Teresa, in her description of the last
state of prayer, the rapture, transport, flight, or ecstasy of the soul,
tells us that the soul is borne as upon a cloud or a mighty eagle, "but
you see yourself carried away and know not whither," and it is "with
delight," and "if you do not resist, the senses are not lost, at least I
was so much myself as to be able to perceive that I was being lifted up
"--that is to say, without losing consciousness. And God "appears to be
not content with thus attracting the soul to Himself in so real a way,
but wishes to have the body also, though it be mortal and of earth so
foul." "Ofttimes the soul is absorbed--or, to speak more correctly, the
Lord absorbs it in Himself; and when He has held it thus for a moment,
the will alone remains in union with Him"--not the intelligence alone.
We see, therefore, that it is not so much vision as a union of the will,
and meanwhile, "the understanding and memory are distraught ... like one
who has slept long and dreamed and is hardly yet awake." It is "a soft
flight, a delicious flight, a noiseless flight." And in this delicious
flight the consciousness of self is preserved, the awareness of
distinction from God with whom one is united. And one is raised to this
rapture, according to the Spanish mystic, by the contemplation of the
Humanity of Christ--that is to say, of something concrete and human; it
is the vision of the living God, not of the idea of God. And in the 28th
chapter she tells us that "though there were nothing else to delight the
sight in heaven but the great beauty of the glorified bodies, that would
be an excessive bliss, particularly the vision of the Humanity of Jesus
Christ our Lord...." "This vision," she continues, "though imaginary, I
did never see with my bodily eyes, nor, indeed, any other, but only with
the eyes of the soul." And thus it is that in heaven the soul does not
see God only, but everything in God, or rather it sees that everything
is God, for God embraces all things. And this idea is further emphasized
by Jacob Böhme. The saint tells us in the _Moradas Setimas_ (vii. 2)
that "this secret union takes place in the innermost centre of the soul,
where God Himself must dwell." And she goes on to say that "the soul, I
mean the spirit of the soul, is made one with God ..."; and this union
may be likened to "two wax candles, the tips of which touch each other
so closely that there is but one light; or again, the wick, the wax,
and the light become one, but the one candle can again be separated from
the other, and the two candles remain distinct; or the wick may be
withdrawn from the wax." But there is another more intimate union, and
this is "like rain falling from heaven into a river or stream, becoming
one and the same liquid, so that the river and the rain-water cannot be
divided; or it resembles a streamlet flowing into the sea, which cannot
afterwards be disunited from it; or it may be likened to a room into
which a bright light enters through two windows--though divided when it
enters, the light becomes one and the same." And what difference is
there between this and the internal and mystical silence of Miguel de
Molinos, the third and most perfect degree of which is the silence of
thought? (_Guía Espiritual_, book i., chap. xvii., § 128). Do we not
here very closely approach the view that "nothingness is the way to
attain to that high state of a mind reformed"? (book iii., chap. xx., §
196). And what marvel is it that Amiel in his _Journal Intime_ should
twice have made use of the Spanish word _nada_, nothing, doubtless
because he found none more expressive in any other language? And
nevertheless, if we read our mystical doctor, St. Teresa, with care, we
shall see that the sensitive element is never excluded, the element of
delight--that is to say, the element of personal consciousness. The soul
allows itself to be absorbed in God in order that it may absorb Him, in
order that it may acquire consciousness of its own divinity.
A beatific vision, a loving contemplation in which the soul is absorbed
in God and, as it were, lost in Him, appears either as an annihilation
of self or as a prolonged tedium to our natural way of feeling. And
hence a certain feeling which we not infrequently observe and which has
more than once expressed itself in satires, not altogether free from
irreverence or perhaps impiety, with reference to the heaven of eternal
glory as a place of eternal boredom. And it is useless to despise
feelings such as these, so wholly natural and spontaneous.
It is clear that those who feel thus have failed to take note of the
fact that man's highest pleasure consists in acquiring and intensifying
consciousness. Not the pleasure of knowing, exactly, but rather that of
learning. In knowing a thing we tend to forget it, to convert it, if the
expression may be allowed, into unconscious knowledge. Man's pleasure,
his purest delight, is allied with the act of learning, of getting at
the truth of things, of acquiring knowledge with differentiation. And
hence the famous saying of Lessing which I have already quoted. There is
a story told of an ancient Spaniard who accompanied Vasco Núñez de
Balboa when he climbed that peak in Darien from which both the Atlantic
and the Pacific are visible. On beholding the two oceans the old man
fell on his knees and exclaimed, "I thank Thee, God, that Thou didst not
let me die without having seen so great a wonder." But if this man had
stayed there, very soon the wonder would have ceased to be wonderful,
and with the wonder the pleasure, too, would have vanished. His joy was
the joy of discovery. And perhaps the joy of the beatific vision may be
not exactly that of the contemplation of the supreme Truth, whole and
entire (for this the soul could not endure), but rather that of a
continual discovery of the Truth, of a ceaseless act of learning
involving an effort which keeps the sense of personal consciousness
continually active.
It is difficult for us to conceive a beatific vision of mental quiet, of
full knowledge and not of gradual apprehension, as in any way different
from a kind of Nirvana, a spiritual diffusion, a dissipation of energy
in the essence of God, a return to unconsciousness induced by the
absence of shock, of difference--in a word, of activity.
May it not be that the very condition which makes our eternal union with
God thinkable destroys our longing? What difference is there between
being absorbed by God and absorbing Him in ourself? Is it the stream
that is lost in the sea or the sea that is lost in the stream? It is all
the same.
Our fundamental feeling is our longing not to lose the sense of the
continuity of our consciousness, not to break the concatenation of our
memories, the feeling of our own personal concrete identity, even though
we may be gradually being absorbed in God, enriching Him. Who at eighty
years of age remembers the child that he was at eight, conscious though
he may be of the unbroken chain connecting the two? And it may be said
that the problem for feeling resolves itself into the question as to
whether there is a God, whether there is a human finality to the
Universe. But what is finality? For just as it is always possible to ask
the why of every why, so it is also always possible to ask the wherefore
of every wherefore. Supposing that there is a God, then wherefore God?
For Himself, it will be said. And someone is sure to reply: What is the
difference between this consciousness and no-consciousness? But it will
always be true, as Plotinus has said (_Enn_., ii., ix., 8), that to ask
why God made the world is the same as to ask why there is a soul. Or
rather, not why, but wherefore (_dia ti_).
For him who places himself outside himself, in an objective hypothetical
position--which is as much as to say in an inhuman position--the
ultimate wherefore is as inaccessible--and strictly, as absurd--as the
ultimate why. What difference in effect does it make if there is not any
finality? What logical contradiction is involved in the Universe not
being destined to any finality, either human or superhuman? What
objection is there in reason to there being no other purpose in the sum
of things save only to exist and happen as it does exist and happen? For
him who places himself outside himself, none; but for him who lives and
suffers and desires within himself--for him it is a question of life or
death. Seek, therefore, thyself! But in finding oneself, does not one
find one's own nothingness? "Having become a sinner in seeking himself,
man has become wretched in finding himself," said Bossuet (_Traité de la
Concupiscence_, chap. xi.). "Seek thyself" begins with "Know thyself."
To which Carlyle answers (_Past and Present_, book iii., chap. xi.):
"The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. 'Know
thyself': long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee; thou
wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this
of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou
canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules. That will be thy better
plan."
Yes, but what I work at, will not that too be lost in the end? And if it
be lost, wherefore should I work at it? Yes, yes, it may be that to
accomplish my work--and what is my work?--without thinking about myself,
is to love God. And what is it to love God?
And on the other hand, in loving God in myself, am I not loving myself
more than God, am I not loving myself in God?
What we really long for after death is to go on living this life, this
same mortal life, but without its ills, without its tedium, and without
death. Seneca, the Spaniard, gave expression to this in his _Consolatio
ad Marciam_ (xxvi.); what he desired was to live this life again: _ista
moliri_. And what Job asked for (xix. 25-7) was to see God in the flesh,
not in the spirit. And what but that is the meaning of that comic
conception of _eternal recurrence_ which issued from the tragic soul of
poor Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality?
And this beatific vision which is the primary Catholic solution of the
problem, how can it be realized, I ask again, without obliteration of
the consciousness of self? Will it not be like a sleep in which we
dream without knowing what we dream? Who would wish for an eternal life
like that? To think without knowing that we think is not to be sensible
of ourselves, it is not to be ourselves. And is not eternal life perhaps
eternal consciousness, not only seeing God, but seeing that we see Him,
seeing ourselves at the same time and ourselves as distinct from Him? He
who sleeps lives, but he has no consciousness of himself; and would
anyone wish for an eternal sleep? When Circe advised Ulysses to descend
to the abode of the dead in order to consult the soothsayer Teiresias,
she told him that Teiresias alone among the shades of the dead was
possessed of understanding, for all the others flitted about like
shadows (_Odyssey_, x., 487-495). And can it be said that the others,
apart from Teiresias, had really overcome death? Is it to overcome death
to flit about like shadows without understanding?
And on the other hand, may we not imagine that possibly this earthly
life of ours is to the other life what sleep is to waking? May not all
our life be a dream and death an awakening? But an awakening to what?
And supposing that everything is but the dream of God and that God one
day will awaken? Will He remember His dream?
Aristotle, the rationalist, tells in his _Ethics_ of the superior
happiness of the contemplative life, _bios theôrêtikos_; and all
rationalists are wont to place happiness in knowledge. And the
conception of eternal happiness, of the enjoyment of God, as a beatific
vision, as knowledge and comprehension of God, is a thing of rationalist
origin, it is the kind of happiness that corresponds with the God-Idea
of Aristotelianism. But the truth is that, in addition to vision,
happiness demands delight, and this is a thing which has very little to
do, with rationalism and is only attainable when we feel ourselves
distinct from God.
Our Aristotelian Catholic theologian, the author of the endeavour to
rationalize Catholic feeling, St. Thomas Aquinas, tells us in his
_Summa_ (_prima secundæ partis, quæstio_ iv., _art_. i) that "delight is
requisite for happiness. For delight is caused by the fact of desire
resting in attained good. Hence, since happiness is nothing but the
attainment of the Sovereign Good, there cannot be happiness without
concomitant delight." But where is the delight of him who rests? To
rest, _requiescere_--is not that to sleep and not to possess even the
consciousness that one is resting? "Delight is caused by the vision of
God itself," the theologian continues. But does the soul feel itself
distinct from God? "The delight that accompanies the activity of the
understanding does not impede, but rather strengthens that activity," he
says later on. Obviously! for what happiness were it else? And in order
to save delectation, delight, pleasure, which, like pain, has always
something material in it, and which we conceive of only as existing in a
soul incarnate in a body, it was necessary to suppose that the soul in a
state of blessedness is united with its body. Apart from some kind of
body, how is delight possible? The immortality of the pure soul, without
some sort of body or spirit-covering, is not true immortality. And at
bottom, what we long for is a prolongation of this life, this life and
no other, this life of flesh and suffering, this life which we imprecate
at times simply because it comes to an end. The majority of suicides
would not take their lives if they had the assurance that they would
never die on this earth. The self-slayer kills himself because he will
not wait for death.
When in the thirty-third canto of the _Paradiso_, Dante relates how he
attained to the vision of God, he tells us that just as a man who
beholds somewhat in his sleep retains on awakening nothing but the
impression of the feeling in his mind, so it was with him, for when the
vision had all but passed away the sweetness that sprang from it still
distilled itself in his heart.
_Cotal son to, che quasi tutta cessa
mia visione ed ancor mi distilla
nel cuor lo dulce che nacque da essa_
like snow that melts in the sun--
_cosi la neve al sol si disigilla_.
That is to say, that the vision, the intellectual content, passes, and
that which remains is the delight, the _passione impressa_, the
emotional, the irrational--in a word, the corporeal.
What we desire is not merely spiritual felicity, not merely vision, but
delight, bodily happiness. The other happiness, the rationalist
_beatitude_, the happiness of being submerged in understanding, can
only--I will not say satisfy or deceive, for I do not believe that it
ever satisfied or deceived even a Spinoza. At the conclusion of his
_Ethic_, in propositions xxxv. and xxxvi. of the fifth part, Spinoza,
affirms that God loves Himself with an infinite intellectual love; that
the intellectual love of the mind towards God is the selfsame love with
which God loves Himself, not in so far as He is infinite, but in so far
as He can be manifested through the essence of the human mind,
considered under the form of eternity--that is to say, that the
intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love
with which God loves Himself. And after these tragic, these desolating
propositions, we are told in the last proposition of the whole book,
that which closes and crowns this tremendous tragedy of the _Ethic_,
that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself, and that
our repression of our desires is not the cause of our enjoyment of
virtue, but rather because we find enjoyment in virtue we are able to
repress our desires. Intellectual love! intellectual love! what is this
intellectual love? Something of the nature of a red flavour, or a bitter
sound, or an aromatic colour, or rather something of the same sort as a
love-stricken triangle or an enraged ellipse--a pure metaphor, but a
tragic metaphor. And a metaphor corresponding tragically with that
saying that the heart also has its reasons. Reasons of the heart! loves
of the head! intellectual delight! delicious intellection!--tragedy,
tragedy, tragedy!
And nevertheless there is something which may be called intellectual
love, and that is the love of understanding, that which Aristotle meant
by the contemplative life, for there is something of action and of love
in the act of understanding, and the beatific vision is the vision of
the total truth. Is there not perhaps at the root of every passion
something of curiosity? Did not our first parents, according to the
Biblical story, fall because of their eagerness to taste of the fruit of
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and to be as gods, knowers
of this knowledge? The vision of God--that is to say, the vision of the
Universe itself, in its soul, in its inmost essence--would not that
appease all our longing? And this vision can fail to satisfy only men of
a gross mind who do not perceive that the greatest joy of man is to be
more man--that is, more God--and that man is more God the more
consciousness he has.
And this intellectual love, which is nothing but the so-called platonic
love, is a means to dominion and possession. There is, in fact, no more
perfect dominion than knowledge; he who knows something, possesses it.
Knowledge unites the knower with the known. "I contemplate thee and in
contemplating thee I make thee mine"--such is the formula. And to know
God, what can that be but to possess Him? He who knows God is thereby
himself God.
In _La Dégradation de l'énergie_ (iv^e partie, chap. xviii., 2) B.
Brunhes relates a story concerning the great Catholic mathematician
Cauchy, communicated to him by M. Sarrau, who had it from Père Gratry.
While Cauchy and Père Gratry were walking in the gardens of the
Luxumbourg, their conversation turned upon the happiness which those in
heaven would have in knowing at last, without any obscurity or
limitation, the truths which they had so long and so laboriously sought
to investigate on earth. In allusion to the study which Cauchy had made
of the mechanistic theory of the reflection of light, Père Gratry threw
out the suggestion that one on the greatest intellectual joys of the
great geometrician in the future life would be to penetrate into the
secret of light. To which Cauchy replied that it did not appear to him
to be possible to know more about this than he himself already knew,
neither could he conceive how the most perfect intelligence could arrive
at a clearer comprehension of the mystery of reflection than that
manifested in his own explanation of it, seeing that he had furnished a
mechanistic theory of the phenomenon. "His piety," Brunhes adds, "did
not extend to a belief that God Himself could have created anything
different or anything better."
From this narrative two points of interest emerge. The first is the idea
expressed in it as to what contemplation, intellectual love, or beatific
vision, may mean for men of a superior order of intelligence, men whose
ruling passion is knowledge; and the second is the implicit faith shown
in the mechanistic explanation of the world.
This mechanistic tendency of the intellect coheres with the well-known
formula, "Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is
transformed"--a formula by means of which it has been sought to
interpret the ambiguous principle of the conservation of energy,
forgetting that practically, for us, for men, energy is utilizable
energy, and that this is continually being lost, dissipated by the
diffusion of heat, and degraded, its tendency being to arrive at a
dead-level and homogeneity. That which has value, and more than value,
reality, for us, is the differential, which is the qualitative; pure,
undifferentiated quantity is for us as if it did not exist, for it does
not act. And the material Universe, the body of the Universe, would
appear to be gradually proceeding--unaffected by the retarding action of
living organisms or even by the conscious action of man--towards a state
of perfect stability, of homogeneity (_vide_ Brunhes, _op. cit._) For,
while spirit tends towards concentration, material energy tends towards
diffusion.
And may not this have an intimate relation with our problem? May there
not be a connection between this conclusion of scientific philosophy
with respect to a final state of stability and homogeneity and the
mystical dream of the apocatastasis? May not this death of the body of
the Universe be the final triumph of its spirit, of God?
It is manifest that there is an intimate relation between the religious
need of an eternal life after death and the conclusions--always
provisional--at which scientific philosophy arrives with respect to the
probable future of the material or sensible Universe. And the fact is
that just as there are theologians of God and the immortality of the
soul, so there are also those whom Brunhes calls (_op. cit._, chap.
xxvi., § 2) theologians of monism, and whom it would perhaps be better
to call atheologians, people who pertinaciously adhere to the spirit of
_a priori_ affirmation; and this becomes intolerable, Brunhes adds, when
they harbour the pretension of despising theology. A notable type of
these gentlemen may be found in Haeckel, who has succeeded in solving
the riddles of Nature!
These atheologians have seized upon the principle of the conservation of
energy, the "Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is
transformed" formula, the theological origin of which is seen in
Descartes, and have made use of it as a means whereby we are able to
dispense with God. "The world built to last," Brunhes comments,
"resisting all wear and tear, or rather automatically repairing the
rents that appear in it--what a splendid theme for oratorical
amplification! But these same amplifications which served in the
seventeenth century to prove the wisdom of the Creator have been used in
our days as arguments for those who presume to do without Him." It is
the old story: so-called scientific philosophy, the origin and
inspiration of which is fundamentally theological or religious, ending
in an atheology or irreligion, which is itself nothing else but theology
and religion. Let us call to mind the comments of Ritschl upon this
head, already quoted in this work.
To-day the last word of science, or rather of scientific philosophy,
appears to be that, by virtue of the degradation of energy, of the
predominance of irreversible phenomena, the material, sensible world is
travelling towards a condition of ultimate levelness, a kind of final
homogeneity. And this brings to our mind the hypothesis, not only so
much used but abused by Spencer, of a primordial homogeneity, and his
fantastic theory of the instability of the homogeneous. An instability
that required the atheological agnosticism of Spencer in order to
explain the inexplicable transition from the homogeneous to the
heterogeneous. For how, without any action from without, can any
heterogeneity emerge from perfect and absolute homogeneity? But as it
was necessary to get rid of every kind of creation, "the unemployed
engineer turned metaphysician," as Papini called him, invented the
theory of the instability of the homogeneous, which is more ... what
shall I say? more mystical, and even more mythological if you like, than
the creative action of God.
The Italian positivist, Roberto Ardigo, was nearer the mark when,
objecting to Spencer's theory, he said that the most natural supposition
was that things always were as they are now, that always there have been
worlds in process of formation, in the nebulous stage, worlds
completely formed and worlds in process of dissolution; that
heterogeneity, in short, is eternal. Another way, it will be seen, of
not solving the riddle.
Is this perhaps the solution? But in that case the Universe would be
infinite, and in reality we are unable to conceive a Universe that is
both eternal and limited such as that which served as the basis of
Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence. If the Universe must be
eternal, if within it and as regards each of its component worlds,
periods in which the movement is towards homogeneity, towards the
degradation of energy, must alternate with other periods in which the
movement is towards heterogeneity, then it is necessary that the
Universe should be infinite, that there should be scope, always and in
each world, for some action coming from without. And, in fact, the body
of God cannot be other than eternal and infinite.
But as far as our own world is concerned, its gradual
levelling-down--or, we might say, its death--appears to be proved. And
how will this process affect the fate of our spirit? Will it wane with
the degradation of the energy of our world and return to
unconsciousness, or will it rather grow according as the utilizable
energy diminishes and by virtue of the very efforts that it makes to
retard this degradation and to dominate Nature?--for this it is that
constitutes the life of the spirit. May it be that consciousness and its
extended support are two powers in contraposition, the one growing at
the expense of the other?
The fact is that the best of our scientific work, the best of our
industry (that part of it I mean--and it is a large part--that does not
tend to destruction), is directed towards retarding this fatal process
of the degradation of energy. And organic life, the support of our
consciousness, is itself an effort to avoid, so far as it is possible,
this fatal period, to postpone it.
It is useless to seek to deceive ourselves with pagan pæans in praise
of Nature, for as Leopardi, that Christian atheist, said with profound
truth in his stupendous poem _La Ginestra_, Nature "gives us life like a
mother, but loves us like a step-mother." The origin of human
companionship was opposition to Nature; it was horror of impious Nature
that first linked men together in the bonds of society. It is human
society, in effect, the source of reflective consciousness and of the
craving for immortality, that inaugurates the state of grace upon the
state of Nature; and it is man who, by humanizing and spiritualizing
Nature by his industry, supernaturalizes her.
In two amazing sonnets which he called _Redemption_, the tragic
Portuguese poet, Antero de Quental, embodied his dream of a spirit
imprisoned, not in atoms or ions or crystals, but--as is natural in a
poet--in the sea, in trees, in the forest, in the mountains, in the
wind, in all material individualities and forms; and he imagines that a
day may come when all these captive souls, as yet in the limbo of
existence, will awaken to consciousness, and, emerging as pure thought
from the forms that imprisoned them, they will see these forms, the
creatures of illusion, fall away and dissolve like a baseless vision. It
is a magnificent dream of the penetration of everything by
consciousness.
May it not be that the Universe, our Universe--who knows if there are
others?--began with a zero of spirit--and zero is not the same as
nothing--and an infinite of matter, and that its goal is to end with an
infinite of spirit and a zero of matter? Dreams!
May it be that everything has a soul and that this soul begs to be
freed?
_Oh tierras de Alvargonzález,
en el corazón de España,
tierras pobres, tierras tristes,
tan tristes que tienen alma!_
sings our poet Antonio Machado in his _Campos de Castilla_.[50] Is the
sadness of the field in the fields themselves or in us who look upon
them? Do they not suffer? But what can an individual soul in a world of
matter actually be? Is it the rock or the mountain that is the
individual? Is it the tree?
And nevertheless the fact always remains that spirit and matter are at
strife. This is the thought that Espronceda expressed when he wrote:
_Aquí, para vivir en santa calma,
o sobra la materia, o sobra el alma._[51]
And is there not in the history of thought, or of human imagination if
you prefer it, something that corresponds to this process of the
reduction of matter, in the sense of a reduction of everything to
consciousness?
Yes, there is, and its author is the first Christian mystic, St. Paul of
Tarsus, the Apostle of the Gentiles, he who because he had never with
his bodily eyes looked upon the face of the fleshly and mortal Christ,
the ethical Christ, created within himself an immortal and religious
Christ--he who was caught up into the third heaven and there beheld
secret and unspeakable things (2 Cor. xii.). And this first Christian
mystic dreamed also of a final triumph of spirit, of consciousness, and
this is what in theology is technically called the apocatastasis or
restitution.
In 1 Cor. xv. 26-28 he tells us that "the last enemy that shall be
destroyed is death, for he hath put all things under his feet. But when
he saith all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is
excepted, which did put all things under him. And when all things shall
be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto
him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all": _hina hê
ho theos panta en pasin_--that is to say, that the end is that God,
Consciousness, will end by being all in all.
This doctrine is completed by Paul's teaching, in his Epistle to the
Ephesians, with regard to the end of the whole history of the world. In
this Epistle, as you know, he represents Christ--by whom "were all
things created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and
invisible" (Col. i. 16)--as the head over all things (Eph. i. 22), and
in him, in this head, we all shall be raised up that we may live in the
communion of saints and that we "may be able to comprehend with all
saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, and to
know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge" (Eph. iii. 18, 19).
And this gathering of us together in Christ, who is the head and, as it
were, the compendium, of Humanity, is what the Apostle calls the
gathering or collecting together or recapitulating of all things in
Christ, _anakephalaiôsthai ta panta en Christô_. And this
recapitulation--_anakephalaiôsis_, anacefaleosis--the end of the world's
history and of the human race, is merely another aspect of the
apocatastasis. The apocatastasis, God's coming to be all in all, thus
resolves itself into the anacefaleosis, the gathering together of all
things in Christ, in Humanity--Humanity therefore being the end of
creation. And does not this apocatastasis, this humanization or
divinization of all things, do away with matter? But if matter, which is
the principle of individuation, the scholastic _principium
individuationis_, is once done away with, does not everything return to
pure consciousness, which, in its pure purity, neither knows itself nor
is it anything that can be conceived or felt? And if matter be
abolished, what support is there left for spirit?
Thus a different train of thought leads us to the same difficulties, the
same unthinkabilities.
It may be said, on the other hand, that the apocatastasis, God's coming
to be all in all, presupposes that there was a time when He was not all
in all. The supposition that all beings shall attain to the enjoyment of
God implies the supposition that God shall attain to the enjoyment of
all beings, for the beatific vision is mutual, and God is perfected in
being better known, and His being is nourished and enriched with souls.
Following up the track of these wild dreams, we might imagine an
unconscious God, slumbering in matter, and gradually wakening into
consciousness of everything, consciousness of His own divinity; we might
imagine the whole Universe becoming conscious of itself as a whole and
becoming conscious of each of its constituent consciousnesses, becoming
God. But in that case, how did this unconscious God begin? Is He not
matter itself? God would thus be not the beginning but the end of the
Universe; but can that be the end which was not the beginning? Or can it
be that outside time, in eternity, there is a difference between
beginning and end? "The soul of all things cannot be bound by that very
thing--that is, matter--which it itself has bound," says Plotinus
(_Enn._ ii., ix. 7). Or is it not rather the Consciousness of the Whole
that strives to become the consciousness of each part and to make each
partial consciousness conscious of itself--that is, of the total
consciousness? Is not this universal soul a monotheist or solitary God
who is in process of becoming a pantheist God? And if it is not so, if
matter and pain are alien to God, wherefore, it will be asked, did God
create the world? For what purpose did He make matter and introduce
pain? Would it not have been better if He had not made anything? What
added glory does He gain by the creation of angels or of men whose fall
He must punish with eternal torment? Did He perhaps create evil for the
sake of remedying it? Or was redemption His design, redemption complete
and absolute, redemption of all things and of all men? For this
hypothesis is neither more rational nor more pious than the other.
In so far as we attempt to represent eternal happiness to ourselves, we
are confronted by a series of questions to which there is no
satisfactory--that is, rational--answer, and it matters not whether the
supposition from which we start be monotheist, or pantheist, or even
panentheist.
Let us return to the Pauline apocatastasis.
Is it not possible that in becoming all in all God completes Himself,
becomes at last fully God, an infinite consciousness embracing all
consciousnesses? And what is an infinite consciousness? Since
consciousness supposes limitation, or rather since consciousness is
consciousness of limitation, of distinction, does it not thereby exclude
infinitude? What value has the notion of infinitude applied to
consciousness? What is a consciousness that is all consciousness,
without anything outside it that is not consciousness? In such a case,
of what is consciousness the consciousness? Of its content? Or may it
not rather be that, starting from chaos, from absolute unconsciousness,
in the eternity of the past, we continually approach the apocatastasis
or final apotheosis without ever reaching it?
May not this apocatastasis, this return of all things to God, be rather
an ideal term to which we unceasingly approach--some of us with fleeter
step than others--but which we are destined never to reach? May not the
absolute and perfect eternal happiness be an eternal hope, which would
die if it were to be realized? Is it possible to be happy without hope?
And there is no place for hope when once possession has been realized,
for hope, desire, is killed by possession. May it not be, I say, that
all souls grow without ceasing, some in a greater measure than others,
but all having to pass some time through the same degree of growth,
whatever that degree may be, and yet without ever arriving at the
infinite, at God, to whom they continually approach? Is not eternal
happiness an eternal hope, with its eternal nucleus of sorrow in order
that happiness shall not be swallowed up in nothingness?
Follow more questions to which there is no answer. "He shall be all in
all," says the Apostle. But will His mode of being in each one be
different or will it be the same for all alike? Will not God be wholly
in one of the damned? Is He not in his soul? Is He not in what is called
hell? And in what sense is He in hell?
Whence arise new problems, those relating to the opposition between
heaven and hell, between eternal happiness and eternal unhappiness.
May it not be that in the end all shall be saved, including Cain and
Judas and Satan himself, as Origen's development of the Pauline
apocatastasis led him to hope?
When our Catholic theologians seek to justify rationally--or in other
words, ethically--the dogma of the eternity of the pains of hell, they
put forward reasons so specious, ridiculous, and childish, that it would
appear impossible that they should ever have obtained currency. For to
assert that since God is infinite, an offence committed against Him is
infinite also and therefore demands an eternal punishment, is, apart
from the inconceivability of an infinite offence, to be unaware that, in
human ethics, if not in the human police system, the gravity of the
offence is measured not by the dignity of the injured person but by the
intention of the injurer, and that to speak of an infinite culpable
intention is sheer nonsense, and nothing else. In this connection those
words which Christ addressed to His Father are capable of application:
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and no man who
commits an offence against God or his neighbour knows what he does. In
human ethics, or if you like in human police regulations--that which is
called penal law and is anything but law[52] eternal punishment is a
meaningless phrase.
"God is just and punishes us; that is all we need to know; as far as we
are concerned the rest is merely curiosity." Such was the conclusion of
Lamennais (_Essai_, etc., iv^e partie, chap, vii.), an opinion shared by
many others. Calvin also held the same view. But is there anyone who is
content with this? Pure curiosity!--to call this load that wellnigh
crushes our heart pure curiosity!
May we not say, perhaps, that the evil man is annihilated because he
wished to be annihilated, or that he did not wish strongly enough to
eternalize himself because he was evil? May we not say that it is not
believing in the other life that makes a man good, but rather that being
good makes him believe in it? And what is being good and being evil?
These states pertain to the sphere of ethics, not of religion: or,
rather, does not the doing good though being evil pertain to ethics, and
the being good though doing evil to religion?
Shall we not perhaps be told, on the other hand, that if the sinner
suffers an eternal punishment, it is because he does not cease to
sin?--for the damned sin without ceasing. This, however, is no solution
of the problem, which derives all its absurdity from the fact that
punishment has been conceived as vindictiveness or vengeance, not as
correction, has been conceived after the fashion of barbarous peoples.
And in the same way hell has been conceived as a sort of police
institution, necessary in order to put fear into the world. And the
worst of it is that it no longer intimidates, and therefore will have to
be shut up.
But, on the other hand, as a religious conception and veiled in mystery,
why not--although the idea revolts our feelings--an eternity of
suffering? why not a God who is nourished by our suffering? Is our
happiness the end of the Universe? or may we possibly sustain with our
suffering some alien happiness? Let us read again in the _Eumenides_ of
that terrible tragedian, Æschylus, those choruses of the Furies in
which they curse the new gods for overturning the ancient laws and
snatching Orestes from their hands--impassioned invectives against the
Apollinian redemption. Does not redemption tear man, their captive and
plaything, from the hands of the gods, who delight and amuse themselves
in his sufferings, like children, as the tragic poet says, torturing
beetles? And let us remember the cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?"
Yes, why not an eternity of suffering? Hell is an eternalization of the
soul, even though it be an eternity of pain. Is not pain essential to
life?
Men go on inventing theories to explain what they call the origin of
evil. And why not the origin of good? Why suppose that it is good that
is positive and original, and evil that is negative and derivatory?
"Everything that is, in so far as it is, is good," St. Augustine
affirmed. But why? What does "being good" mean? Good is good for
something, conducive to an end, and to say that everything is good is
equivalent to saying that everything is making for its end. But what is
its end? Our desire is to eternalize ourselves, to persist, and we call
good everything that conspires to this end and bad everything that tends
to lessen or destroy our consciousness. We suppose that human
consciousness is an end and not a means to something else which may not
be consciousness, whether human or superhuman.
All metaphysical optimism, such as that of Leibnitz, and all
metaphysical pessimism, such as that of Schopenhauer, have no other
foundation than this. For Leibnitz this world is the best because it
conspires to perpetuate consciousness, and, together with consciousness,
will, because intelligence increases will and perfects it, because the
end of man is the contemplation of God; while for Schopenhauer this
world is the worst of all possible worlds, because it conspires to
destroy will, because intelligence, representation, nullifies the will
that begot it.
And similarly Franklin, who believed in another life, asserted that he
was willing to live this life over again, the life that he had actually
lived, "from its beginning to the end"; while Leopardi, who did not
believe in another life, asserted that nobody would consent to live his
life over again. These two views of life are not merely ethical, but
religious; and the feeling of moral good, in so far as it is a
teleological value, is of religious origin also.
And to return to our interrogations: Shall not all be saved, shall not
all be made eternal, and eternal not in suffering but in happiness,
those whom we call good and those whom we call bad alike?
And as regards this question of good and evil, does not the malice of
him who judges enter in? Is the badness in the intention of him who does
the deed or is it not rather in that of him who judges it to be bad? But
the terrible thing is that man judges himself, creates himself his own
judge.
Who then shall be saved? And now the imagination puts forth another
possibility--neither more nor less rational than all those which have
just been put forward interrogatively--and that is that only those are
saved who have longed to be saved, that only those are eternalized who
have lived in an agony of hunger for eternity and for eternalization. He
who desires never to die and believes that he shall never die in the
spirit, desires it because he deserves it, or rather, only he desires
personal immortality who carries his immortality within him. The man who
does not long passionately, and with a passion that triumphs over all
the dictates of reason, for his own immortality, is the man who does not
deserve it, and because he does not deserve it he does not long for it.
And it is no injustice not to give a man that which he does not know how
to desire, for "ask, and it shall be given you." It may be that to each
will be given that which he desired. And perhaps the sin against the
Holy Ghost--for which, according to the Evangelist, there is no
remission--is none other than that of not desiring God, not longing to
be made eternal.
As is your sort of mind
So is your sort of search; you'll find
What you desire, and that's to be
A Christian,
said Robert Browning in _Christmas Eve and Easter Day_.
In his _Inferno_ Dante condemned the Epicureans, those who did not
believe in another life, to something more terrible than the not having
it, and that is the consciousness of not having it, and this he
expressed in plastic form by picturing them shut up in their tombs for
all eternity, without light, without air, without fire, without
movement, without life (_Inferno_, x., 10-15).
What cruelty is there in denying to a man that which he did not or could
not desire? In the sixth book of his _Æneid_ (426-429) the gentle Virgil
makes us hear the plaintive voices and sobbing of the babes who weep
upon the threshold of Hades,
_Continuo àuditæ voces, vagitus et ingens,
Infantumque animæ flentes in limine primo,_
unhappy in that they had but entered upon life and never known the
sweetness of it, and whom, torn from their mothers' breasts, a dark day
had cut off and drowned in bitter death--
_Quos dulcis vitæ exsortes et at ubere raptos
Abstulit atra dies et funere mersit acerbo._
But what life did they lose, if they neither knew life nor longed for
it? And yet is it true that they never longed for it?
It may be said that others craved life on their behalf, that their
parents longed for them to be eternal to the end that they might be
gladdened by them in paradise. And so a fresh field is opened up for the
imagination--namely, the consideration of the solidarity and
representivity of eternal salvation.
There are many, indeed, who imagine the human race as one being, a
collective and solidary individual, in whom each member may represent or
may come to represent the total collectivity; and they imagine salvation
as something collective. As something collective also, merit, and as
something collective sin, and redemption. According to this mode of
feeling and imagining, either all are saved or none is saved; redemption
is total and it is mutual; each man is his neighbour's Christ.
And is there not perhaps a hint of this in the popular Catholic belief
with regard to souls in purgatory, the belief that the living may devote
suffrages and apply merits to the souls of their dead? This sense of the
transmission of merits, both to the living and the dead, is general in
popular Catholic piety.
Nor should it be forgotten that in the history of man's religious
thought there has often presented itself the idea of an immortality
restricted to a certain number of the elect, spirits representative of
the rest and in a certain sense including them; an idea of pagan
derivation--for such were the heroes and demi-gods--which sometimes
shelters itself behind the pronouncement that there are many that are
called and few that are chosen.
Recently, while I was engaged upon this essay, there came into my hands
the third edition of the _Dialogue sur la vie et sur la mort_, by
Charles Bonnefon, a book in which imaginative conceptions similar to
those that I have been setting forth find succinct and suggestive
expression. The soul cannot live without the body, Bonnefon says, nor
the body without the soul, and thus neither birth nor death has any real
existence--strictly speaking, there is no body, no soul, no birth, no
death, all of which are abstractions and appearances, but only a
thinking life, of which we form part and which can neither be born nor
die. Hence he is led to deny human individuality and to assert that no
one can say "I am" but only "we are," or, more correctly, "there is in
us." It is humanity, the species, that thinks and loves in us. And souls
are transmitted in the same way that bodies are transmitted. "The living
thought or the thinking life which we are will find itself again
immediately in a form analogous to that which was our origin and
corresponding with our being in the womb of a pregnant woman." Each of
us, therefore, has lived before and will live again, although he does
not know it. "If humanity is gradually raised above itself, when the
last man dies, the man who will contain all the rest of mankind in
himself, who shall say that he may not have arrived at that higher order
of humanity such as exists elsewhere, in heaven?... As we are all bound
together in solidarity, we shall all, little by little, gather the
fruits of our travail." According to this mode of imagining and
thinking, since nobody is born, nobody dies, no single soul has finished
its struggle but many times has been plunged into the midst of the human
struggle "ever since the type of embryo corresponding with the same
consciousness was represented in the succession of human phenomena." It
is obvious that since Bonnefon begins by denying personal individuality,
he leaves out of account our real longing, which is to save our
individuality; but on the other hand, since he, Bonnefon, is a personal
individual and feels this longing, he has recourse to the distinction
between the called and the chosen, and to the idea of representative
spirits, and he concedes to a certain number of men this representative
individual immortality. Of these elect he says that "they will be
somewhat more necessary to God than we ourselves." And he closes this
splendid dream by supposing that "it is not impossible that we shall
arrive by a series of ascensions at the supreme happiness, and that our
life shall be merged in the perfect Life as a drop of water in the sea.
Then we shall understand," he continues, "that everything was
necessary, that every philosophy and every religion had its hour of
truth, and that in all our wanderings and errors and in the darkest
moments of our history we discerned the light of the distant beacon, and
that we were all predestined to participate in the Eternal Light. And if
the God whom we shall find again possesses a body--and we cannot
conceive a living God without a body--we, together with each of the
myriads of races that the myriads of suns have brought forth, shall be
the conscious cells of his body. If this dream should be fulfilled, an
ocean of love would beat upon our shores and the end of every life would
be to add a drop of water to this ocean's infinity." And what is this
cosmic dream of Bonnefon's but the plastic representation of the Pauline
apocatastasis?
Yes, this dream, which has its origin far back in the dawn of
Christianity, is fundamentally the same as the Pauline anacefaleosis,
the fusion of all men in Man, in the whole of Humanity embodied in a
Person, who is Christ, and the fusion not only of all men but of all
things, and the subsequent subjection of all things to God, in order
that God, Consciousness, may be all in all. And this supposes a
collective redemption and a society beyond the grave.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, two pietists of Protestant
origin, Johann Jakob Moser and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, gave a new
force and value to the Pauline anacefaleosis. Moser "declared that his
religion consisted not in holding certain doctrines to be true and in
living a virtuous life conformably therewith, but in being reunited to
God through Christ. But this demands the thorough knowledge--a knowledge
that goes on increasing until the end of life--of one's own sins and
also of the mercy and patience of God, the transformation of all natural
feelings, the appropriation of the atonement wrought by the death of
Christ, the enjoyment of peace with God in the permanent witness of the
Holy Spirit to the remission of sins, the ordering of life according to
the pattern of Christ, which is the fruit of faith alone, the drawing
near to God and the intercourse of the soul with Him, the disposition to
die in grace and the joyful expectation of the Judgement which will
bestow blessedness in the more intimate enjoyment of God and in the
_commerce with all the saints_" (Ritschl, _Geschichte des Pietismus_,
vol. iii., § 43). The commerce with all the saints--that is to say, the
eternal human society. And for his part, Oetinger considers eternal
happiness not as the contemplation of God in His infinitude, but, taking
the Epistle to the Ephesians as his authority, as the contemplation of
God in the harmony of the creature with Christ. The commerce with all
the saints was, according to him, essential to the content of eternal
happiness. It was the realization of the kingdom of God, which thus
comes to be the kingdom of Man. And in his exposition of these doctrines
of the two pietists, Ritschl confesses _(op. cit._, iii., § 46) that
both witnesses have with these doctrines contributed something to
Protestantism that is of like value with the theological method of
Spener, another pietist.
We see, therefore, that the Christian, mystical, inward longing ever
since St. Paul, has been to give human finality, or divine finality, to
the Universe, to save human consciousness, and to save it by converting
all humanity into a person. This longing is expressed in the
anacefaleosis, the gathering together of all things, all things in earth
and in heaven, the visible and the invisible, in Christ, and also in the
apocatastasis, the return of all things to God, to consciousness, in
order that God may be all in all. And does not God's being all in all
mean that all things shall acquire consciousness and that in this
consciousness everything that has happened will come to life again, and
that everything that has existed in time will be eternalized? And within
the all, all individual consciousnesses, those which have been, those
that are, and those that will be, and as they have been, as they are,
and as they will be, will exist in a condition of society and
solidarity.
But does not this awakening to consciousness of everything that has
been, necessarily involve a fusion of the identical, an amalgamation of
like things? In this conversion of the human race into a true society in
Christ, a communion of saints, a kingdom of heaven, will not individual
differences, tainted as they are with deceit and even with sin, be
obliterated, and in the perfect society will that alone remain of each
man which was the essential part of him? Would it not perhaps result,
according to Bonnefon's supposition, that this consciousness that lived
in the twentieth century in this corner of this earth would feel itself
to be the same with other such consciousnesses as have lived in other
centuries and perhaps in other worlds?
And how can we conceive of an effective and real union, a substantial
and intimate union, soul with soul, of all those who have been?
If any two creatures grew into one
They would do more than the world has done,
said Browning in _The Flight of the Duchess_; and Christ has told us
that where two or three are gathered together in His name, there is He
in the midst of them.
Heaven, then, so it is believed by many, is society, a more perfect
society than that of this world; it is human society fused into a
person. And there are not wanting some who believe that the tendency of
all human progress is the conversion of our species into one collective
being with real consciousness--is not perhaps an individual human
organism a kind of confederation of cells?--and that when it shall have
acquired full consciousness, all those who have existed will come to
life again in it.
Heaven, so many think, is society. Just as no one can live in isolation,
so no one can survive in isolation. No one can enjoy God in heaven who
sees his brother suffering in hell, for the sin and the merit were
common to both. We think with the thoughts of others and we feel with
the feelings of others. To see God when God shall be all in all is to
see all things in God and to live in God with all things.
This splendid dream of the final solidarity of mankind is the Pauline
anacefaleosis and apocatastasis. We Christians, said the Apostle (I Cor.
xii. 27) are the body of Christ, members of Him, flesh of His flesh and
bone of His bone (Eph. v. 30), branches of the vine.
But in this final solidarization, in this true and supreme
_Christination_ of all creatures, what becomes of each individual
consciousness? what becomes of Me, of this poor fragile I, this I that
is the slave of time and space, this I which reason tells me is a mere
passing accident, but for the saving of which I live and suffer and hope
and believe? Granting that the human finality of the Universe is saved,
that consciousness is saved, would I resign myself to make the sacrifice
of this poor I, by which and by which alone I know this finality and
this consciousness?
And here, facing this supreme religious sacrifice, we reach the summit
of the tragedy, the very heart of it--the sacrifice of our own
individual consciousness upon the altar of the perfected Human
Consciousness, of the Divine Consciousness.
But is there really a tragedy? If we could attain to a clear vision of
this anacefaleosis, if we could succeed in understanding and feeling
that we were going to enrich Christ, should we hesitate for a moment in
surrendering ourselves utterly to Him? Would the stream that flows into
the sea, and feels in the freshness of its waters the bitterness of the
salt of the ocean, wish to flow back to its source? would it wish to
return to the cloud which drew its life from the sea? is not its joy to
feel itself absorbed?
And yet....
Yes, in spite of everything, this is the climax of the tragedy.
And the soul, my soul at least, longs for something else, not
absorption, not quietude, not peace, not appeasement, it longs ever to
approach and never to arrive, it longs for a never-ending longing, for
an eternal hope which is eternally renewed but never wholly fulfilled.
And together with all this, it longs for an eternal lack of something
and an eternal suffering. A suffering, a pain, thanks to which it grows
without ceasing in consciousness and in longing. Do not write upon the
gate of heaven that sentence which Dante placed over the threshold of
hell, _Lasciate ogni speranza!_ Do not destroy time! Our life is a hope
which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its
turn begets hope. Give us leave to live! The eternity that is like an
eternal present, without memory and without hope, is death. Thus do
ideas exist, but not thus do men live. Thus do ideas exist in the
God-Idea, but not thus can men live in the living God, in the God-Man.
An eternal purgatory, then, rather than a heaven of glory; an eternal
ascent. If there is an end of all suffering, however pure and
spiritualized we may suppose it to be, if there is an end of all desire,
what is it that makes the blessed in paradise go on living? If in
paradise they do not suffer for want of God, how shall they love Him?
And if even there, in the heaven of glory, while they behold God little
by little and closer and closer, yet without ever wholly attaining to
Him, there does not always remain something more for them to know and
desire, if there does not always remain a substratum of doubt, how shall
they not fall asleep?
Or, to sum up, if in heaven there does not remain something of this
innermost tragedy of the soul, what sort of a life is that? Is there
perhaps any greater joy than that of remembering misery--and to remember
it is to feel it--in time of felicity? Does not the prison haunt the
freed prisoner? Does he not miss his former dreams of liberty?
* * * * *
Mythological dreams! it will be said. And I have not pretended that they
are anything else. But has not the mythological dream its content of
truth? Are not dream and myth perhaps revelations of an inexpressible
truth, of an irrational truth, of a truth that cannot be proven?
Mythology! Perhaps; but, as in the days of Plato, we must needs
mythologize when we come to deal with the other life. But we have just
seen that whenever we seek to give a form that is concrete, conceivable,
or in other words, rational, to our primary, primordial, and fundamental
longing for an eternal life conscious of itself and of its personal
individuality, esthetic, logical, and ethical absurdities are multiplied
and there is no way of conceiving the beatific vision and the
apocatastasis that is free from contradictions and inconsistencies.
And nevertheless!...
Nevertheless, yes, we must needs long for it, however absurd it may
appear to us; nay, more, we must needs believe in it, in some way or
another, in order that we may live. In order that we may live, eh? not
in order that we may understand the Universe. We must needs believe in
it, and to believe in it is to be religious. Christianity, the only
religion which we Europeans of the twentieth century are really capable
of feeling, is, as Kierkegaard said, a desperate sortie (_Afsluttende
uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, ii., i., cap. i.), a sortie which can be
successful only by means of the martyrdom of faith, which is, according
to this same tragic thinker, the crucifixion of reason.
Not without reason did he who had the right to do so speak of the
foolishness of the cross. Foolishness, without doubt, foolishness. And
the American humorist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, was not altogether wide of
the mark in making one of the characters in his ingenious conversations
say that he thought better of those who were confined in a lunatic
asylum on account of religious mania than of those who, while professing
the same religious principles, kept their wits and appeared to enjoy
life very well outside of the asylums.[53] But those who are at large,
are they not really, thanks to God, mad too? Are there not mild
madnesses, which not only permit us to mix with our neighbours without
danger to society, but which rather enable us to do so, for by means of
them we are able to attribute a meaning and finality to life and society
themselves?
And after all, what is madness and how can we distinguish it from
reason, unless we place ourselves outside both the one and the other,
which for us is impossible?
Madness perhaps it is, and great madness, to seek to penetrate into the
mystery of the Beyond; madness to seek to superimpose the
self-contradictory dreams of our imagination upon the dictates of a sane
reason. And a sane reason tells us that nothing can be built up without
foundations, and that it is not merely an idle but a subversive task to
fill the void of the unknown with fantasies. And nevertheless....
We must needs believe in the other life, in the eternal life beyond the
grave, and in an individual and personal life, in a life in which each
one of us may feel his consciousness and fed that it is united, without
being confounded, with all other consciousnesses in the Supreme
Consciousness, in God; we must needs believe in that other life in order
that we may live this life, and endure it, and give it meaning and
finality. And we must needs believe in that other life, perhaps, in
order that we may deserve it, in order that we may obtain it, for it may
be that he neither deserves it nor will obtain it who does not
passionately desire it above reason and, if need be, against reason.
And above all, we must feel and act as if an endless continuation of
our earthly life awaited us after death; and if it be that nothingness
is the fate that awaits us we must not, in the words of _Obermann_, so
act that it shall be a just fate.
And this leads us directly to the examination of the practical or
ethical aspect of our sole problem.
FOOTNOTES:
[47] _De natura deorum_, lib. i., cap. 41.
[48] _Op. cit._
[49] _Guía Espiritual que desembaraza al alma y la conduce por el
interior camino para alcanzar la perfecta contemplación y el rico tesoro
de la paz interior_, book iii., chap. xviii., § 185.
[50]
O land of Alvargonzález,
In the heart of Spain,
Sad land, poor land,
So sad that it has a soul!
[51]
To living a life of blessed quiet here on earth,
Either matter or soul is a hindrance.
[52] Eso que llaman derecho penal, y que es todo menos derecho.
[53] _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table._
XI
THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM
L'homme est périssable. II se peut; mais périssons en résistant,
et, si le néant nous est reservé, ne faisons pas que ce soit une
justice.--SÉNANCOUR: _Obermann_, lettre xc.
Several times in the devious course of these essays I have defined, in
spite of my horror of definitions, my own position with regard to the
problem that I have been examining; but I know there will always be some
dissatisfied reader, educated in some dogmatism or other, who will say:
"This man comes to no conclusion, he vacillates--now he seems to affirm
one thing and then its contrary--he is full of contradictions--I can't
label him. What is he?" Just this--one who affirms contraries, a man of
contradiction and strife, as Jeremiah said of himself; one who says one
thing with his heart and the contrary with his head, and for whom this
conflict is the very stuff of life. And that is as clear as the water
that flows from the melted snow upon the mountain tops.
I shall be told that this is an untenable position, that a foundation
must be laid upon which to build our action and our works, that it is
impossible to live by contradictions, that unity and clarity are
essential conditions of life and thought, and that it is necessary to
unify thought. And this leaves us as we were before. For it is precisely
this inner contradiction that unifies my life and gives it its practical
purpose.
Or rather it is the conflict itself, it is this self-same passionate
uncertainty, that unifies my action and makes me live and work.
We think in order that we may live, I have said; but perhaps it were
more correct to say that we think because we live, and the form of our
thought corresponds with that of our life. Once more I must repeat that
our ethical and philosophical doctrines in general are usually merely
the justification _a posteriori_ of our conduct, of our actions. Our
doctrines are usually the means we seek in order to explain and justify
to others and to ourselves our own mode of action. And this, be it
observed, not merely for others, but for ourselves. The man who does not
really know why he acts as he does and not otherwise, feels the
necessity of explaining to himself the motive of his action and so he
forges a motive. What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are
usually but the pretexts for it. The very same reason which one man may
regard as a motive for taking care to prolong his life may be regarded
by another man as a motive for shooting himself.
Nevertheless it cannot be denied that reasons, ideas, have an influence
upon human actions, and sometimes even determine them, by a process
analogous to that of suggestion upon a hypnotized person, and this is so
because of the tendency in every idea to resolve itself into action--an
idea being simply an inchoate or abortive act. It was this notion that
suggested to Fouillée his theory of idea-forces. But ordinarily ideas
are forces which we accommodate to other forces, deeper and much less
conscious.
But putting all this aside for the present, what I wish to establish is
that uncertainty, doubt, perpetual wrestling with the mystery of our
final destiny, mental despair, and the lack of any solid and stable
dogmatic foundation, may be the basis of an ethic.
He who bases or thinks that he bases his conduct--his inward or his
outward conduct, his feeling or his action--upon a dogma or theoretical
principle which he deems incontrovertible, runs the risk of becoming a
fanatic, and moreover, the moment that this dogma is weakened or
shattered, the morality based upon it gives way. If, the earth that he
thought firm begins to rock, he himself trembles at the earthquake, for
we do not all come up to the standard of the ideal Stoic who remains
undaunted among the ruins of a world shattered into atoms. Happily the
stuff that is underneath a man's ideas will save him. For if a man
should tell you that he does not defraud or cuckold his best friend only
because he is afraid of hell, you may depend upon it that neither would
he do so even if he were to cease to believe in hell, but that he would
invent some other excuse instead. And this is all to the honour of the
human race.
But he who believes that he is sailing, perhaps without a set course, on
an unstable and sinkable raft, must not be dismayed if the raft gives
way beneath his feet and threatens to sink. Such a one thinks that he
acts, not because he deems his principle of action to be true, but in
order to make it true, in order to prove its truth, in order to create
his own spiritual world.
My conduct must be the best proof, the moral proof, of my supreme
desire; and if I do not end by convincing myself, within the bounds of
the ultimate and irremediable uncertainty, of the truth of what I hope
for, it is because my conduct is not sufficiently pure. Virtue,
therefore, is not based upon dogma, but dogma upon virtue, and it is not
faith that creates martyrs but martyrs who create faith. There is no
security or repose--so far as security and repose are obtainable in this
life, so essentially insecure and unreposeful--save in conduct that is
passionately good.
Conduct, practice, is the proof of doctrine, theory. "If any man will do
His will--the will of Him that sent me," said Jesus, "he shall know of
the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself" (John
vii. 17); and there is a well-known saying of Pascal: "Begin by taking
holy water and you will end by becoming a believer." And pursuing a
similar train of thought, Johann Jakob Moser, the pietist, was of the
opinion that no atheist or naturalist had the right to regard the
Christian religion as void of truth so long as he had not put it to the
proof by keeping its precepts and commandments (Ritschl, _Geschichte des
Pietismus_, book vii., 43).
What is our heart's truth, anti-rational though it be? The immortality
of the human soul, the truth of the persistence of our consciousness
without any termination whatsoever, the truth of the human finality of
the Universe. And what is its moral proof? We may formulate it thus: Act
so that in your own judgement and in the judgement of others you may
merit eternity, act so that you may become irreplaceable, act so that
you may not merit death. Or perhaps thus: Act as if you were to die
to-morrow, but to die in order to survive and be eternalized. The end of
morality is to give personal, human finality to the Universe; to
discover the finality that belongs to it--if indeed it has any
finality--and to discover it by acting.
More than a century ago, in 1804, in Letter XC of that series that
constitutes the immense monody of his _Obermann_, Sénancour wrote the
words which I have put at the head of this chapter--and of all the
spiritual descendants of the patriarchal Rousseau, Sénancour was the
most profound and the most intense; of all the men of heart and feeling
that France has produced, not excluding Pascal, he was the most tragic.
"Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if it
is nothingness that awaits us, do not let us so act that it shall be a
just fate." Change this sentence from its negative to the positive
form--"And if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it
shall be an unjust fate"--and you get the firmest basis of action for
the man who cannot or will not be a dogmatist.
That which is irreligious and demoniacal, that which incapacitates us
for action and leaves us without any ideal defence against our evil
tendencies, is the pessimism that Goethe puts into the mouth of
Mephistopheles when he makes him say, "All that has achieved existence
deserves to be destroyed" (_denn alles was ensteht ist wert doss es
zugrunde geht_). This is the pessimism which we men call evil, and not
that other pessimism that consists in lamenting what it fears to be true
and struggling against this fear--namely, that everything is doomed to
annihilation in the end. Mephistopheles asserts that everything that
exists deserves to be destroyed, annihilated, but not that everything
will be destroyed or annihilated; and we assert that everything that
exists deserves to be exalted and eternalized, even though no such fate
is in store for it. The moral attitude is the reverse of this.
Yes, everything deserves to be eternalized, absolutely everything, even
evil itself, for that which we call evil would lose its evilness in
being eternalized, because it would lose its temporal nature. For the
essence of evil consists in its temporal nature, in its not applying
itself to any ultimate and permanent end.
And it might not be superfluous here to say something about that
distinction, more overlaid with confusion than any other, between what
we are accustomed to call optimism and pessimism, a confusion not less
than that which exists with regard to the distinction between
individualism and socialism. Indeed, it is scarcely possible to form a
clear idea as to what pessimism really is.
I have just this very day read in the _Nation_ (July 6, 1912) an
article, entitled "A Dramatic Inferno," that deals with an English
translation of the works of Strindberg, and it opens with the following
judicious observations: "If there were in the world a sincere and total
pessimism, it would of necessity be silent. The despair which finds a
voice is a social mood, it is the cry of misery which brother utters to
brother when both are stumbling through a valley of shadows which is
peopled with--comrades. In its anguish it bears witness to something
that is good in life, for it presupposes sympathy ... The real gloom,
the sincere despair, is dumb and blind; it writes no books, and feels no
impulse to burden an intolerable universe with a monument more lasting
than brass." Doubtless there is something of sophistry in this
criticism, for the man who is really in pain weeps and even cries aloud,
even if he is alone and there is nobody to hear him, simply as a means
of alleviating his pain, although this perhaps may be a result of social
habits. But does not the lion, alone in the desert, roar if he has an
aching tooth? But apart from this, it cannot be denied that there is a
substance of truth underlying these remarks. The pessimism that protests
and defends itself cannot be truly said to be pessimism. And, in truth,
still less is it pessimism to hold that nothing ought to perish although
all things may be doomed to annihilation, while on the other hand it is
pessimism to affirm that all things ought to be annihilated even though
nothing may perish.
Pessimism, moreover, may possess different values. There is a
eudemonistic or economic pessimism, that which denies happiness; there
is an ethical pessimism, that which denies the triumph of moral good;
and there is a religious pessimism, that which despairs of the human
finality of the Universe, of the eternal salvation of the individual
soul.
All men deserve to be saved, but, as I have said in the previous
chapter, he above all deserves immortality who desires it passionately
and even in the face of reason. An English writer, H.G. Wells, who has
taken upon himself the rôle of the prophet (a thing not uncommon in his
country), tells us in _Anticipations_ that "active and capable men of
all forms of religious profession tend in practice to disregard the
question of immortality altogether." And this is because the religious
professions of these active and capable men to whom Wells refers are
usually simply a lie, and their lives are a lie, too, if they seek to
base them upon religion. But it may be that at bottom there is not so
much truth in what Wells asserts as he and others imagine. These active
and capable men live in the midst of a society imbued with Christian
principles, surrounded by institutions and social feelings that are the
product of Christianity, and faith in the immortality of the soul exists
deep down in their own souls like a subterranean river, neither seen nor
heard, but watering the roots of their deeds and their motives.
It must be admitted that there exists in truth no more solid foundation
for morality than the foundation of the Catholic ethic. The end of man
is eternal happiness, which consists in the vision and enjoyment of God
_in sæcula sæculorum_. Where it errs, however, is in the choice of the
means conducive to this end; for to make the attainment of eternal
happiness dependent upon believing or not believing in the Procession of
the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son and not from the Father
alone, or in the Divinity of Jesus, or in the theory of the Hypostatic
Union, or even in the existence of God, is, as a moment's reflection
will show, nothing less than monstrous. A human God--and that is the
only kind of God we are able to conceive--would never reject him who was
unable to believe in Him with his head, and it is not in his head but in
his heart that the wicked man says that there is no God, which is
equivalent to saying that he wishes that there may not be a God. If any
belief could be bound up with the attainment of eternal happiness it
would be the belief in this happiness itself and in the possibility of
it.
And what shall we say of that other proposition of the king of pedants,
to the effect that we have not come into the world to be happy but to
fulfil our duty (_Wir sind nicht auf der Welt, um glücklich zu sein,
sondern um unsere Schuldigkeit zu tun_)? If we are in the world _for_
something (_um etwas_), whence can this _for_ be derived but from the
very essence of our own will, which asks for happiness and not duty as
the ultimate end? And if it is sought to attribute some other value to
this _for_, an objective value, as some Sadducean pedant would say, then
it must be recognized that the objective reality, that which would
remain even though humanity should disappear, is as indifferent to our
duty as to our happiness, is as little concerned with our morality as
with our felicity. I am not aware that Jupiter, Uranus, or Sirius would
allow their course to be affected by the fact that we are or are not
fulfilling our duty any more than by the fact that we are or are not
happy.
Such considerations must appear to these pedants to be characterized by
a ridiculous vulgarity and a dilettante superficiality. (The
intellectual world is divided into two classes--dilettanti on the one
hand, and pedants on the other.) What choice, then, have we? The modern
man is he who resigns himself to the truth and is content to be ignorant
of the synthesis of culture--witness what Windelband says on this head
in his study of the fate of Hölderlin (_Praeludien_, i.). Yes, these men
of culture are resigned, but there remain a few poor savages like
ourselves for whom resignation is impossible. We do not resign ourselves
to the idea of having one day to disappear, and the criticism of the
great Pedant does not console us.
The quintessence of common sense was expressed by Galileo Galilei when
he said: "Some perhaps will say that the bitterest pain is the loss of
life, but I say that there are others more bitter; for whosoever is
deprived of life is deprived at the same time of the power to lament,
not only this, but any other loss whatsoever." Whether Galileo was
conscious or not of the humour of this sentence I do not know, but it is
a tragic humour.
But, to turn back, I repeat that if the attainment of eternal happiness
could be bound up with any particular belief, it would be with the
belief in the possibility of its realization. And yet, strictly
speaking, not even with this. The reasonable man says in his head,
"There is no other life after this," but only the wicked says it in his
heart. But since the wicked man is possibly only a man who has been
driven to despair, will a human God condemn him because of his despair?
His despair alone is misfortune enough.
But in any event let us adopt the Calderónian formula in _La Vida es
Sueño_:
_Que estoy soñando y que quiero
obrar hacer bien, pues no se pierde
el hacer bien aun en sueños_[54]
But are good deeds really not lost? Did Calderón know? And he added:
_Acudamos a lo eterno
que es la fama vividora
donde ni duermen las dichas
no las grandezas reposan_[55]
Is it really so? Did Calderón know?
Calderón had faith, robust Catholic faith; but for him who lacks faith,
for him who cannot believe in what Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca
believed, there always remains the attitude of _Obermann_.
If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it; let
us fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory; let us
fight against it quixotically.
And not only do we fight against destiny in longing for what is
irrational, but in acting in such a way that we make ourselves
irreplaceable, in impressing our seal and mark upon others, in acting
upon our neighbours in order to dominate them, in giving ourselves to
them in order that we may eternalize ourselves so far as we can.
Our greatest endeavour must be to make ourselves irreplaceable; to make
the theoretical fact--if this expression does not involve a
contradiction in terms--the fact that each one of us is unique and
irreplaceable, that no one else can fill the gap that will be left when
we die, a practical truth.
For in fact each man is unique and irreplaceable; there cannot be any
other I; each one of us--our soul, that is, not our life--is worth the
whole Universe. I say the spirit and not the life, for the ridiculously
exaggerated value which those attach to human life who, not really
believing in the spirit--that is to say, in their personal
immortality--tirade against war and the death penalty, for example, is a
value which they attach to it precisely because they do not really
believe in the spirit of which life is the servant. For life is of use
only in so far as it serves its lord and master, spirit, and if the
master perishes with the servant, neither the one nor the other is of
any great value.
And to act in such a way as to make our annihilation an injustice, in
such a way as to make our brothers, our sons, and our brothers' sons,
and their sons' sons, feel that we ought not to have died, is something
that is within the reach of all.
The essence of the doctrine of the Christian redemption is in the fact
that he who suffered agony and death was the unique man--that is, Man,
the Son of Man, or the Son of God; that he, because he was sinless, did
not deserve to have died; and that this propitiatory divine victim died
in order that he might rise again and that he might raise us up from the
dead, in order that he might deliver us from death by applying his
merits to us and showing us the way of life. And the Christ who gave
himself for his brothers in humanity with an absolute self-abnegation is
the pattern for our action to shape itself on.
All of us, each one of us, can and ought to determine to give as much
of himself as he possibly can--nay, to give more than he can, to exceed
himself, to go beyond himself, to make himself irreplaceable, to give
himself to others in order that he may receive himself back again from
them. And each one in his own civil calling or office. The word office,
_officium_, means obligation, debt, but in the concrete, and that is
what it always ought to mean in practice. We ought not so much to try to
seek that particular calling which we think most fitting and suitable
for ourselves, as to make a calling of that employment in which chance,
Providence, or our own will has placed us.
Perhaps Luther rendered no greater service to Christian civilization
than that of establishing the religious value of the civil occupation,
of shattering the monastic and medieval idea of the religious calling,
an idea involved in the mist of human passions and imaginations and the
cause of terrible life tragedies. If we could but enter into the
cloister and examine the religious vocation of those whom the
self-interest of their parents had forced as children into a novice's
cell and who had suddenly awakened to the life of the world--if indeed
they ever do awake!--or of those whom their own self-delusions had led
into it! Luther saw this life of the cloister at close quarters and
suffered it himself, and therefore he was able to understand and feel
the religious value of the civil calling, to which no man is bound by
perpetual vows.
All that the Apostle said in the fourth chapter of his Epistle to the
Ephesians with regard to the respective functions of Christians in the
Church must be transferred and applied to the civil or
non-ecclesiastical life, for to-day among ourselves the
Christian--whether he know it or not, and whether he like it or not--is
the citizen, and just as the Apostle exclaimed, "I am a Roman citizen!"
each one of us, even the atheist, might exclaim "I am a Christian!" And
this demands the _civilizing_, in the sense of dis-ecclesiasticizing, of
Christianity, which was Luther's task, although he himself eventually
became the founder of a Church.
There is a common English phrase, "the right man in the right place." To
which we might rejoin, "Cobbler, to thy last!" Who knows what is the
post that suits him best and for which he is most fitted? Does a man
himself know it better than others or do they know it better than he?
Who can measure capacities and aptitudes? The religious attitude,
undoubtedly, is to endeavour to make the occupation in which we find
ourselves our vocation, and only in the last resort to change it for
another.
This question of the proper vocation is possibly the gravest and most
deep-seated of social problems, that which is at the root of all the
others. That which is known _par excellence_ as the social question is
perhaps not so much a problem of the distribution of wealth, of the
products of labour, as a problem of the distribution of avocations, of
the modes of production. It is not aptitude--a thing impossible to
ascertain without first putting it to the test and not always clearly
indicated in a man, for with regard to the majority of callings a man is
not born but made--it is not special aptitude, but rather social,
political, and customary reasons that determine a man's occupation. At
certain times and in certain countries it is caste and heredity; at
other times and in other places, the guild or corporation; in later
times machinery--in almost all cases necessity; liberty scarcely ever.
And the tragedy of it culminates in those occupations, pandering to
evil, in which the soul is sacrificed for the sake of the livelihood, in
which the workman works with the consciousness, not of the uselessness
merely, but of the social perversity, of his work, manufacturing the
poison that will kill him, the weapon, perchance, with which his
children will be murdered. This, and not the question of wages, is the
gravest problem.
I shall never forget a scene of which I was a witness that took place
on the banks of the river that flows through Bilbao, my native town. A
workman was hammering at something in a shipwright's yard, working
without putting his heart into his work, as if he lacked energy or
worked merely for the sake of getting a wage, when suddenly a woman's
voice was heard crying, "Help! help!" A child had fallen into the river.
Instantly the man was transformed. With an admirable energy,
promptitude, and sang-froid he threw off his clothes and plunged into
the water to rescue the drowning infant.
Possibly the reason why there is less bitterness in the agrarian
socialist movement than in that of the towns is that the field labourer,
although his wages and his standard of living are no better than those
of the miner or artisan, has a clearer consciousness of the social value
of his work. Sowing corn is a different thing from extracting diamonds
from the earth.
And it may be that the greatest social progress consists in a certain
indifferentiation of labour, in the facility for exchanging one kind of
work for another, and that other not perhaps a more lucrative, but a
nobler one--for there are degrees of nobility in labour. But unhappily
it is only too seldom that a man who keeps to one occupation without
changing is concerned with making a religious vocation of it, or that
the man who changes his occupation for another does so from any
religious motive.
And do you not know cases in which a man, justifying his action on the
ground that the professional organism to which he belongs and in which
he works is badly organized and does not function as it ought, will
evade the strict performance of his duty on the pretext that he is
thereby fulfilling a higher duty? Is not this insistence upon the
literal carrying out of orders called disciplinarianism, and do not
people speak disparagingly of bureaucracy and the Pharisaism of public
officials? And cases occur not unlike that of an intelligent and
studious military officer who should discover the deficiencies of his
country's military organization and denounce them to his superiors and
perhaps to the public--thereby fulfilling his duty--and who, when on
active service, should refuse to carry out an operation which he was
ordered to undertake, believing that there was but scant probability of
success or rather certainty of failure, so long as these deficiencies
remained unremedied. He would deserve to be shot. And as for this
question of Pharisaism ...
And there is always a way of obeying an order while yet retaining the
command, a way of carrying out what one believes to be an absurd
operation while correcting its absurdity, even though it involve one's
own death. When in my bureaucratic capacity I have come across some
legislative ordinance that has fallen into desuetude because of its
manifest absurdity, I have always endeavoured to apply it. There is
nothing worse than a loaded pistol which nobody uses left lying in some
corner of the house; a child finds it, begins to play with it, and kills
its own father. Laws that have fallen into desuetude are the most
terrible of all laws, when the cause of the desuetude is the badness of
the law.
And these are not groundless suppositions, and least of all in our
country. For there are many who, while they go about looking out for I
know not what ideal--that is to say, fictitious duties and
responsibilities--neglect the duty of putting their whole soul into the
immediate and concrete business which furnishes them with a living; and
the rest, the immense majority, perform their task perfunctorily, merely
for the sake of nominally complying with their duty--_para cumplir_, a
terribly immoral phrase--in order to get themselves out of a difficulty,
to get the job done, to qualify for their wages without earning them,
whether these wages be pecuniary or otherwise.
Here you have a shoemaker who lives by making shoes, and makes them with
just enough care and attention to keep his clientèle together without
losing custom. Another shoemaker lives on a somewhat higher spiritual
plane, for he has a proper love for his work, and out of pride or a
sense of honour strives for the reputation of being the best shoemaker
in the town or in the kingdom, even though this reputation brings him no
increase of custom or profit, but only renown and prestige. But there is
a still higher degree of moral perfection in this business of
shoemaking, and that is for the shoemaker to aspire to become for his
fellow-townsmen the one and only shoemaker, indispensable and
irreplaceable, the shoemaker who looks after their footgear so well that
they will feel a definite loss when he dies--when he is "dead to them,"
not merely "dead"[56]--and they will feel that he ought not to have
died. And this will result from the fact that in working for them he was
anxious to spare them any discomfort and to make sure that it should not
be any preoccupation with their feet that should prevent them from being
at leisure to contemplate the higher truths; he shod them for the love
of them and for the love of God in them--he shod them religiously.
I have chosen this example deliberately, although it may perhaps appear
to you somewhat pedestrian. For the fact is that in this business of
shoemaking, the religious, as opposed to the ethical, sense is at a very
low ebb.
Working men group themselves in associations, they form co-operative
societies and unions for defence, they fight very justly and nobly for
the betterment of their class; but it is not clear that these
associations have any great influence on their moral attitude towards
their work. They have succeeded in compelling employers to employ only
such workmen, and no others, as the respective unions shall designate in
each particular case; but in the selection of those designated they pay
little heed to their technical fitness. Often the employer finds it
almost impossible to dismiss an inefficient workman on account of his
inefficiency, for his fellow-workers take his part. Their work,
moreover, is often perfunctory, performed merely as a pretext for
receiving a wage, and instances even occur when they deliberately
mishandle it in order to injure their employer.
In attempting to justify this state of things, it may be said that the
employers are a hundred times more blameworthy than the workmen, for
they are not concerned to give a better wage to the man who does better
work, or to foster the general education and technical proficiency of
the workman, or to ensure the intrinsic goodness of the article
produced. The improvement of the product--which, apart from reasons of
industrial and mercantile competition, ought to be in itself and for the
good of the consumers, for charity's sake, the chief end of the
business--is not so regarded either by employers or employed, and this
is because neither the one nor the other have any religious sense of
their social function. Neither of them seek to make themselves
irreplaceable. The evil is aggravated when the business takes the
unhappy form of the impersonal limited company, for where there is no
longer any personal signature there is no longer any of that pride which
seeks to give the signature prestige, a pride which in its way is a
substitute for the craving for eternalization. With the disappearance of
the concrete individuality, the basis of all religion, the religious
sense of the business calling disappears also.
And what has been said of employers and workmen applies still more to
members of the liberal professions and public functionaries. There is
scarcely a single servant of the State who feels the religious bearing
of his official and public duties. Nothing could be more unsatisfactory,
nothing more confused, than the feeling among our people with regard to
their duties towards the State, and this sense of duty is still further
obliterated by the attitude of the Catholic Church, whose action so far
as the State is concerned is in strict truth anarchical. It is no
uncommon thing to find among its ministers upholders of the moral
lawfulness of smuggling and contraband as if in disobeying the legally
constituted authority the smuggler and contrabandist did not sin against
the Fourth Commandment of the law of God, which in commanding us to
honour our father and mother commands us to obey all lawful authority in
so far as the ordinances of such authority are not contrary (and the
levying of these contributions is certainly not contrary) to the law of
God.
There are many who, since it is written "In the sweat of thy face shalt
thou eat bread," regard work as a punishment, and therefore they
attribute merely an economico-political, or at best an esthetic, value
to the work of everyday life. For those who take this view--and it is
the view principally held by the Jesuits--the business of life is
twofold: there is the inferior and transitory business of winning a
livelihood, of winning bread for ourselves and our children in an
honourable, manner--and the elasticity of this honour is well known; and
there is the grand business of our salvation, of winning eternal glory.
This inferior or worldly business is to be undertaken not only so as to
permit us, without deceiving or seriously injuring our neighbours, to
live decently in accordance with our social position, but also so as to
afford us the greatest possible amount of time for attending to the
other main business of our life. And there are others who, rising
somewhat above this conception of the work of our civil occupation, a
conception which is economical rather than ethical, attain to an
esthetic conception and sense of it, and this involves endeavouring to
acquire distinction and renown in our occupation, the converting of it
into an art for art's sake, for beauty's sake. But it is necessary to
rise still higher than this, to attain to an ethical sense of our civil
calling, to a sense which derives from our religious sense, from our
hunger of eternalization. To work at our ordinary civil occupation, with
eyes fixed on God, for the love of God, which is equivalent to saying
for the love of our eternalization, is to make of this work a work of
religion.
That saying, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," does not
mean that God condemned man to work, but to the painfulness of it. It
would have been no condemnation to have condemned man to work itself,
for work is the only practical consolation for having been born. And,
for a Christian, the proof that God did not condemn man to work itself
consists in the saying of the Scripture that, before the Fall, while he
was still in a state of innocence, God took man and put him in the
garden "to dress it and to keep it" (Gen. ii. 15). And how, in fact,
would man have passed his time in Paradise if he had had no work to do
in keeping it in order? And may it not be that the beatific vision
itself is a kind of work?
And even if work were our punishment, we ought to strive to make it, the
punishment itself, our consolation and our redemption; and if we must
needs embrace some cross or other, there is for each one of us no better
cross than the cross of our own civil calling. For Christ did not say,
"Take up my cross and follow me," but "Take up thy cross and follow me":
every man his own cross, for the Saviour's cross the Saviour alone can
bear. And the imitation of Christ, therefore, does not consist in that
monastic ideal so shiningly set forth in the book that commonly bears
the name of à Kempis, an ideal only applicable to a very limited number
of persons and therefore anti-Christian; but to imitate Christ is to
take up each one his own cross, the cross of his own civil
occupation--civil and not merely religions--as Christ took up his cross,
the cross of his calling, and to embrace it and carry it, looking
towards God and striving to make each act of this calling a true prayer.
In making shoes and because he makes them a man can gain heaven,
provided that the shoemaker strives to be perfect, as a shoemaker, as
our Father in heaven is perfect.
Fourier, the socialist dreamer, dreamed of making work attractive in his
phalansteries by the free choice of vocations and in other ways. There
is no other way than that of liberty. Wherein consists the charm of the
game of chance, which is a kind of work, if not in the voluntary
submission of the player to the liberty of Nature--that is, to chance?
But do not let us lose ourselves in a comparison between work and play.
And the sense of making ourselves irreplaceable, of not meriting death,
of making our annihilation, if it is annihilation that awaits us, an
injustice, ought to impel us not only to perform our own occupation
religiously, from love of God and love of our eternity and
eternalization, but to perform it passionately, tragically if you like.
It ought to impel us to endeavour to stamp others with our seal, to
perpetuate ourselves in them and in their children by dominating them,
to leave on all things the imperishable impress of our signature. The
most fruitful ethic is the ethic of mutual imposition.
Above all, we must recast in a positive form the negative commandments
which we have inherited from the Ancient Law. Thus where it is written,
"Thou shalt not lie!" let us understand, "Thou shalt always speak the
truth, in season and out of season!" although it is we ourselves, and
not others, who are judges in each case of this seasonableness. And for
"Thou shalt not kill!" let us understand, "Thou shalt give life and
increase it!" And for "Thou shalt not steal!" let us say, "Thou shalt
increase the general wealth!" And for "Thou shalt not commit adultery!"
"Thou shalt give children, healthy, strong, and good, to thy country and
to heaven!" And thus with all the other commandments.
He who does not lose his life shall not find it. Give yourself then to
others, but in order to give yourself to them, first dominate them. For
it is not possible to dominate except by being dominated. Everyone
nourishes himself upon the flesh of that which he devours. In order that
you may dominate your neighbour you must know and love him. It is by
attempting to impose my ideas upon him that I become the recipient of
his ideas. To love my neighbour is to wish that he may be like me, that
he may be another I--that is to say, it is to wish that I may be he; it
is to wish to obliterate the division between him and me, to suppress
the evil. My endeavour to impose myself upon another, to be and live in
him and by him, to make him mine--which is the same as making myself
his--is that which gives religious meaning to human collectivity, to
human solidarity.
The feeling of solidarity originates in myself; since I am a society, I
feel the need of making myself master of human society; since I am a
social product, I must socialize myself, and from myself I proceed to
God--who is I projected to the All--and from God to each of my
neighbours.
My immediate first impulse is to protest against the inquisitor and to
prefer the merchant who comes to offer me his wares. But when my
impressions are clarified by reflection, I begin to see that the
inquisitor, when he acts from a right motive, treats me as a man, as an
end in myself, and if he molests me it is from a charitable wish to save
my soul; while the merchant, on the other hand, regards me merely as a
customer, as a means to an end, and his indulgence and tolerance is at
bottom nothing but a supreme indifference to my destiny. There is much
more humanity in the inquisitor.
Similarly there is much more humanity in war than in peace.
Non-resistance to evil implies resistance to good, and to take the
offensive, leaving the defensive out of the question, is perhaps the
divinest thing in humanity. War is the school of fraternity and the bond
of love; it is war that has brought peoples into touch with one
another, by mutual aggression and collision, and has been the cause of
their knowing and loving one another. Human love knows no purer embrace,
or one more fruitful in its consequences, than that between victor and
vanquished on the battlefield. And even the purified hate that springs
from war is fruitful. War is, in its strictest sense, the sanctification
of homicide; Cain is redeemed as a leader of armies. And if Cain had not
killed his brother Abel, perhaps he would have died by the hand of Abel.
God revealed Himself above all in war; He began by being the God of
battles; and one of the greatest services of the Cross is that, in the
form of the sword-hilt, it protects the hand that wields the sword.
The enemies of the State say that Cain, the fratricide, was the founder
of the State. And we must accept the fact and turn it to the glory of
the State, the child of war. Civilization began on the day on which one
man, by subjecting another to his will and compelling him to do the work
of two, was enabled to devote himself to the contemplation of the world
and to set his captive upon works of luxury. It was slavery that enabled
Plato to speculate upon the ideal republic, and it was war that brought
slavery about. Not without reason was Athena the goddess of war and of
wisdom. But is there any need to repeat once again these obvious truths,
which, though they have continually been forgotten, are continually
rediscovered?
And the supreme commandment that arises out of love towards God, and the
foundation of all morality, is this: Yield yourself up entirely, give
your spirit to the end that you may save it, that you may eternalize it.
Such is the sacrifice of life.
The individual _quâ_ individual, the wretched captive of the instinct of
preservation and of the senses, cares only about preserving himself, and
all his concern is that others should not force their way into his
sphere, should not disturb him, should not interrupt his idleness; and
in return for their abstention or for the sake of example he refrains
from forcing himself upon them, from interrupting their idleness, from
disturbing them, from taking possession of them. "Do not do unto others
what you would not have them do unto you," he translates thus: I do not
interfere with others--let them not interfere with me. And he shrinks
and pines and perishes in this spiritual avarice and this repellent
ethic of anarchic individualism: each one for himself. And as each one
is not himself, he can hardly live for himself.
But as soon as the individual feels himself in society, he feels himself
in God, and kindled by the instinct of perpetuation he glows with love
towards God, and with a dominating charity he seeks to perpetuate
himself in others, to perennialize his spirit, to eternalize it, to
unnail God, and his sole desire is to seal his spirit upon other spirits
and to receive their impress in return. He has shaken off the yoke of
his spiritual sloth and avarice.
Sloth, it is said, is the mother of all the vices; and in fact sloth
does engender two vices--avarice and envy--which in their turn are the
source of all the rest. Sloth is the weight of matter, in itself inert,
within us, and this sloth, while it professes to preserve us by
economizing our forces, in reality attenuates us and reduces us to
nothing.
In man there is either too much matter or too much spirit, or to put it
better, either he feels a hunger for spirit--that is, for eternity--or
he feels a hunger for matter--that is, submission to annihilation. When
spirit is in excess and he feels a hunger for yet more of it, he pours
it forth and scatters it abroad, and in scattering it abroad he
amplifies it with that of others; and on the contrary, when a man is
avaricious of himself and thinks that he will preserve himself better by
withdrawing within himself, he ends by losing all--he is like the man
who received the single talent: he buried it in order that he might not
lose it, and in the end he was bereft of it. For to him that hath shall
be given, but from him that hath but a little shall be taken away even
the little that he hath.
Be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect, we are bidden,
and this terrible precept--terrible because for us the infinite
perfection of the Father is unattainable--must be our supreme rule of
conduct. Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible that he
achieves will be scarcely worth the trouble of achieving. It behoves us
to aspire to the impossible, to the absolute and infinite perfection,
and to say to the Father, "Father, I cannot--help Thou my impotence."
And He acting in us will achieve it for us.
And to be perfect is to be all, it is to be myself and to be all else,
it is to be humanity, it is to be the Universe. And there is no other
way of being all but to give oneself to all, and when all shall be in
all, all will be in each one of us. The apocatastasis is more than a
mystical dream: it is a rule of action, it is a beacon beckoning us to
high exploits.
And from it springs the ethic of invasion, of domination, of aggression,
of inquisition if you like. For true charity is a kind of invasion--it
consists in putting my spirit into other spirits, in giving them my
suffering as the food and consolation for their sufferings, in awakening
their unrest with my unrest, in sharpening their hunger for God with my
hunger for God. It is not charity to rock and lull our brothers to sleep
in the inertia and drowsiness of matter, but rather to awaken them to
the uneasiness and torment of spirit.
To the fourteen works of mercy which we learnt in the Catechism of
Christian Doctrine there should sometimes be added yet another, that of
awakening the sleeper. Sometimes, at any rate, and surely when the
sleeper sleeps on the brink of a precipice, it is much more merciful to
awaken him than to bury him after he is dead--let us leave the dead to
bury their dead. It has been well said, "Whosoever loves thee dearly
will make thee weep," and charity often causes weeping. "The love that
does not mortify does not deserve so divine a name," said that ardent
Portuguese apostle, Fr. Thomé de Jesús,[57] who was also the author of
this ejaculation--"O infinite fire, O eternal love, who weepest when
thou hast naught to embrace and feed upon and many hearts to burn!" He
who loves his neighbour burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood,
in burning groans and distils itself in tears.
And to do this is generosity, one of the two mother virtues which are
born when inertia, sloth, is overcome. Most of our miseries come from
spiritual avarice.
The cure for suffering--which, as we have said, is the collision of
consciousness with unconsciousness--is not to be submerged in
unconsciousness, but to be raised to consciousness and to suffer more.
The evil of suffering is cured by more suffering, by higher suffering.
Do not take opium, but put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound, for
when you sleep and no longer feel the suffering, you are not. And to be,
that is imperative. Do not then close your eyes to the agonizing Sphinx,
but look her in the face and let her seize you in her mouth and crunch
you with her hundred thousand poisonous teeth and swallow you. And when
she has swallowed you, you will know the sweetness of the taste of
suffering.
The way thereto in practice is by the ethic of mutual imposition. Men
should strive to impose themselves upon one another, to give their
spirits to one another, to seal one another's souls.
There is matter for thought in the fact that the Christian ethic has
been called an ethic of slaves. By whom? By anarchists! It is anarchism
that is an ethic of slaves, for it is only the slave that chants the
praises of anarchical liberty. Anarchism, no! but _panarchism_; not the
creed of "Nor God nor master!" but that of "All gods and all masters!"
all striving to become gods, to become immortal, and achieving this by
dominating others.
And there are so many ways of dominating. There is even a passive way,
or one at least that is apparently passive, of fulfilling at times this
law of life. Adaptation to environment, imitation, putting oneself in
another's place, sympathy, in a word, besides being a manifestation of
the unity of the species, is a mode of self-expansion, of being another.
To be conquered, or at least to seem to be conquered, is often to
conquer; to take what is another's is a way of living in him.
And in speaking of domination, I do not mean the domination of the
tiger. The fox also dominates by cunning, and the hare by flight, and
the viper by poison, and the mosquito by its smallness, and the squid by
the inky fluid with which it darkens the water and under cover of which
it escapes. And no one is scandalized at this, for the same universal
Father who gave its fierceness, its talons, and its jaws to the tiger,
gave cunning to the fox, swift feet to the hare, poison to the viper,
diminutiveness to the mosquito, and its inky fluid to the squid. And
nobleness or ignobleness does not consist in the weapons we use, for
every species and even every individual possesses its own, but rather in
the way in which we use them, and above all in the cause in which we
wield them.
And among the weapons of conquest must be included the weapon of
patience and of resignation, but a passionate patience and a passionate
resignation, containing within itself an active principle and antecedent
longings. You remember that famous sonnet of Milton--Milton, the great
fighter, the great Puritan disturber of the spiritual peace, the singer
of Satan--who, when he considered how his light was spent and that one
talent which it is death to hide lodged with him useless, heard the
voice of Patience saying to him,
God doth not need
Either man's work, or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best: his state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.
They also serve who only stand and wait--yes, but it is when they wait
for Him passionately, hungeringly, full of longing for immortality in
Him.
And we must impose ourselves, even though it be by our patience. "My cup
is small, but I drink out of my cup," said the egoistical poet of an
avaricious people.[58] No, out of my cup all drink, for I wish all to
drink out of it; I offer it to them, and my cup grows according to the
number of those who drink out of it, and all, in putting it to their
lips, leave in it something of their spirit. And while they drink out of
my cup, I also drink out of theirs. For the more I belong to myself, and
the more I am myself, the more I belong to others; out of the fullness
of myself I overflow upon my brothers, and as I overflow upon them they
enter into me.
"Be ye perfect, as your Father is perfect," we are bidden, and our
Father is perfect because He is Himself and because He is in each one of
His children who live and move and have their being in Him. And the end
of perfection is that we all may be one (John xvii. 21), all one body in
Christ (Rom. xii. 5), and that, at the last, when all things are subdued
unto the Son, the Son himself may be subject to Him that put all things
under him, that God may be all in all. And this is to make the Universe
consciousness, to make Nature a society, and a human society. And then
shall we be able confidently to call God Father.
I am aware that those who say that ethics is a science will say that
all this commentary of mine is nothing but rhetoric; but each man has
his own language and his own passion--that is to say, each man who knows
what passion is--and as for the man who knows it not, nothing will it
avail him to know science.
And the passion that finds its expression in this rhetoric, the devotees
of ethical science call egotism. But this egotism is the only true
remedy for egoism, spiritual avarice, the vice of preserving and
reserving oneself and of not striving to perennialize oneself by giving
oneself.
"Be not, and ye shall be mightier than all that is," said Fr. Juan de
los Angeles in one of his _Diálogos de la Conquista del Reina de Dios_
(_Dial._, iii., 8); but what does this "Be not" mean? May it not mean
paradoxically--and such a mode of expression is common with the
mystics--the contrary of that which, at a first and literal reading, it
would appear to mean? Is not the whole ethic of submission and quietism
an immense paradox, or rather a great tragic contradiction? Is not the
monastic, the strictly monastic, ethic an absurdity? And by the monastic
ethic I mean that of the solitary Carthusian, that of the hermit, who
flees from the world--perhaps carrying it with him nevertheless--in
order that he may live quite alone with a God who is lonely as himself;
not that of the Dominican inquisitor who scoured Provence in search of
Albigensian hearts to burn.
"Let God do it all," someone will say; but if man folds his arms, God
will go to sleep.
This Carthusian ethic and that scientific ethic which is derived from
ethical science--oh, this science of ethics! rational and rationalistic
ethics! pedantry of pedantry, all is pedantry!--yes, this perhaps is
egoism and coldness of heart.
There are some who say that they isolate themselves with God in order
that they may the better work out their salvation, their redemption; but
since sin is collective, redemption must be collective also. "The
religious is the determination of the whole, and everything outside this
is an illusion of the senses, and that is why the greatest criminal is
at bottom innocent, a good-natured man and a saint" (Kierkegaard,
_Afsluttende_, etc., ii., ii., cap. iv., sect. 2, _a_).
Are we to understand, on the other hand, that men seek to gain the
other, the eternal life, by renouncing this the temporal life? If the
other life is anything, it must be a continuation of this, and only as
such a continuation, more or less purified, is it mirrored in our
desire; and if this is so, such as is this life of time, so will be the
life of eternity.
"This world and the other are like the two wives of one husband--if he
pleases one he makes the other envious," said an Arab thinker, quoted by
Windelband (_Das Heilige_, in vol. ii. of _Präludien_); but such a
thought could only have arisen in the mind of one who had failed to
resolve the tragic conflict between his spirit and the world in a
fruitful warfare, a practical contradiction. "Thy kingdom come" to us;
so Christ taught us to pray to the Father, not "May we come to Thy
kingdom"; and according to the primitive Christian belief the eternal
life was to be realized on this earth itself and as a continuation of
the earthly life. We were made men and not angels in order that we might
seek our happiness through the medium of this life, and the Christ of
the Christian Faith became, not an angelic, but a human, being,
redeeming us by taking upon himself a real and effective body and not an
appearance of one merely. And according to this same Faith, even the
highest of the angelical hierarchy adore the Virgin, the supreme symbol
of terrestrial Humanity. The angelical ideal, therefore, is not the
Christian ideal, and still less is it the human ideal, nor can it be. An
angel, moreover, is a neutral being, without sex and without country.
It is impossible for us to feel the other life, the eternal life, I have
already repeated more than once, as a life of angelical contemplation;
it must be a life of action. Goethe said that "man must believe in
immortality, since in his nature he has a right to it." And he added:
"The conviction of our persistence arises in me from the concept of
activity. If I work without ceasing to the end, Nature is obliged (_so
ist die Natur verpflichtet_) to provide me with another form of
existence, since my actual spirit can bear no more." Change Nature to
God, and you have a thought that remains Christian in character, for the
first Fathers of the Church did not believe that the immortality of the
soul was a natural gift--that is to say, something rational--but a
divine gift of grace. And that which is of grace is usually, in its
essence, of justice, since justice is divine and gratuitous, not
natural. And Goethe added: "I could begin nothing with an eternal
happiness before me, unless new tasks and new difficulties were given me
to overcome." And true it is that there is no happiness in a vacuity of
contemplation.
But may there not be some justification for the morality of the hermit,
of the Carthusian, the ethic of the Thebaid? Might we not say, perhaps,
that it is necessary to preserve these exceptional types in order that
they may stand as everlasting patterns for mankind? Do not men breed
racehorses, which are useless for any practical kind of work, but which
preserve the purity of the breed and become the sires of excellent
hackneys and hunters? Is there not a luxury of ethics, not less
justifiable than any other sort of luxury? But, on the other hand, is
not all this substantially esthetics, and not ethics, still less
religion? May not the contemplative, medieval, monastic ideal be
esthetical, and not religious nor even ethical? And after all, those of
the seekers after solitude who have related to us their conversation
when they were alone with God have performed an eternalizing work, they
have concerned themselves with the souls of others. And by this alone,
that it has given us an Eckhart, a Seuse, a Tauler, a Ruysbroek, a Juan
de la Cruz, a Catherine of Siena, an Angela of Foligno, a Teresa de
Jesús, is the cloister justified.
But the chief of our Spanish Orders are the Predicadores, founded by
Domingo de Guzmán for the aggressive work of extirpating heresy; the
Company of Jesus, a militia with the world as its field of operations
(which explains its history); the order of the Escuelas Pías, also
devoted to a work of an aggressive or invasive nature, that of
instruction. I shall certainly be reminded that the reform of the
contemplative Order of the Carmelites which Teresa de Jesús undertook
was a Spanish work. Yes, Spanish it was, and in it men sought liberty.
It was, in fact, the yearning for liberty, for inward liberty, which, in
the troubled days of the Inquisition, led many choice spirits to the
cloister. They imprisoned themselves in order that they might be more
free. "Is it not a fine thing that a poor nun of San José can attain to
sovereignty over the whole earth and the elements?" said St. Teresa in
her _Life_. It was the Pauline yearning for liberty, the longing to
shake off the bondage of the external law, which was then very severe,
and, as Maestro Fray Luis de León said, very stubborn.
But did they actually find liberty in the cloister? It is very doubtful
if they did, and to-day it is impossible. For true liberty is not to rid
oneself of the external law; liberty is consciousness of the law. Not he
who has shaken off the yoke of the law is free, but he who has made
himself master of the law. Liberty must be sought in the midst of the
world, which is the domain of the law, and of sin, the offspring of the
law. That which we must be freed from is sin, which is collective.
Instead of renouncing the world in order that we may dominate it--and
who does not know the collective instinct of domination of those
religious Orders whose members renounce the world?--what we ought to do
is to dominate the world in order that we may be able to renounce it.
Not to seek poverty and submission, but to seek wealth in order that we
may use it to increase human consciousness, and to seek power for the
same end.
It is curious that monks and anarchists should be at enmity with each
other, when fundamentally they both profess the same ethic and are
related by close ties of kinship. Anarchism tends to become a kind of
atheistic monachism and a religious, rather than an ethical or
economico-social, doctrine. The one party starts from the assumption
that man is naturally evil, born in original sin, and that it is through
grace that he becomes good, if indeed he ever does become good; and the
other from the assumption that man is naturally good and is subsequently
perverted by society. And these two theories really amount to the same
thing, for in both the individual is opposed to society, as if the
individual had preceded society and therefore were destined to survive
it. And both ethics are ethics of the cloister.
And the fact that guilt is collective must not actuate me to throw mine
upon the shoulders of others, but rather to take upon myself the burden
of the guilt of others, the guilt of all men; not to merge and sink my
guilt in the total mass of guilt, but to make this total guilt my own;
not to dismiss and banish my own guilt, but to open the doors of my
heart to the guilt of all men, to centre it within myself and
appropriate it to myself. And each one of us ought to help to remedy the
guilt, and just because others do not do so. The fact that society is
guilty aggravates the guilt of each member of it. "Someone ought to do
it, but why should I? is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed
amiability. Someone ought to do it, so why not I? is the cry of some
earnest servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous
duty. Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral
evolution." Thus spoke Mrs. Annie Besant in her autobiography. Thus
spoke theosophy.
The fact that society is guilty aggravates the guilt of each one, and he
is most guilty who most is sensible of the guilt. Christ, the innocent,
since he best knew the intensity of the guilt, was in a certain sense
the most guilty. In him the culpability, together with the divinity, of
humanity arrived at the consciousness of itself. Many are wont to be
amused when they read how, because of the most trifling faults, faults
at which a man of the world would merely smile, the greatest saints
counted themselves the greatest sinners. But the intensity of the fault
is not measured by the external act, but by the consciousness of it, and
an act for which the conscience of one man suffers acutely makes
scarcely any impression on the conscience of another. And in a saint,
conscience may be developed so fully and to such a degree of
sensitiveness that the slightest sin may cause him more remorse than his
crime causes the greatest criminal. And sin rests upon our consciousness
of it, it is in him who judges and in so far as he judges. When a man
commits a vicious act believing in good faith that he is doing a
virtuous action, we cannot hold him morally guilty, while on the other
hand that man is guilty who commits an act which he believes to be
wrong, even though in itself the act is indifferent or perhaps
beneficent. The act passes away, the intention remains, and the evil of
the evil act is that it corrupts the intention, that in knowingly doing
wrong a man is predisposed to go on doing it, that it blurs the
conscience. And doing evil is not the same as being evil. Evil blurs the
conscience, and not only the moral conscience but the general, psychical
consciousness. And everything that exalts and expands consciousness is
good, while that which depresses and diminishes it is evil.
And here we might raise the question which, according to Plato, was
propounded by Socrates, as to whether virtue is knowledge, which is
equivalent to asking whether virtue is rational.
The ethicists--those who maintain that ethics is a science, those whom
the reading of these divagations will provoke to exclaim, "Rhetoric,
rhetoric, rhetoric!"--would appear to think that virtue is the fruit of
knowledge, of rational study, and that even mathematics help us to be
better men. I do not know, but for my part I feel that virtue, like
religion, like the longing never to die--and all these are fundamentally
the same thing--is the fruit of passion.
But, I shall be asked, What then is passion? I do not know, or rather, I
know full well, because I feel it, and since I feel it there is no need
for me to define it to myself. Nay, more; I fear that if I were to
arrive at a definition of it, I should cease to feel it and to possess
it. Passion is like suffering, and like suffering it creates its object.
It is easier for the fire to find something to burn than for something
combustible to find the fire.
That this may appear empty and sophistical well I know. And I shall also
be told that there is the science of passion and the passion of science,
and that it is in the moral sphere that reason and life unite together.
I do not know, I do not know, I do not know.... And perhaps I may be
saying fundamentally the same thing, although more confusedly, that my
imaginary adversaries say, only more clearly, more definitely, and more
rationally, those adversaries whom I imagine in order that I may have
someone to fight. I do not know, I do not know.... But what they say
freezes me and sounds to me as though it proceeded from emptiness of
feeling.
And, returning to our former question, Is virtue knowledge?--Is
knowledge virtue? For they are two distinct questions. Virtue may be a
science, the science of acting rightly, without every other science
being therefore virtue. The virtue of Machiavelli is a science, and it
cannot be said that his _virtu_ is always moral virtue It is well known,
moreover, that the cleverest and the most learned men are not the best.
No, no, no! Physiology does not teach us how to digest, nor logic how to
discourse, nor esthetics how to feel beauty or express it, nor ethics
how to be good. And indeed it is well if they do not teach us how to be
hypocrites; for pedantry, whether it be the pedantry of logic, or of
esthetics, or of ethics, is at bottom nothing but hypocrisy.
Reason perhaps teaches certain bourgeois virtues, but it does not make
either heroes or saints. Perhaps the saint is he who does good not for
good's sake, but for God's sake, for the sake of eternalization.
Perhaps, on the other hand, culture, or as I should say Culture--oh,
this culture!--which is primarily the work of philosophers and men of
science, is a thing which neither heroes nor saints have had any share
in the making of. For saints have concerned themselves very little with
the progress of human culture; they have concerned themselves rather
with the salvation of the individual souls of those amongst whom they
lived. Of what account in the history of human culture is our San Juan
de la Cruz, for example--that fiery little monk, as culture, in perhaps
somewhat uncultured phrase, has called him--compared with Descartes?
All those saints, burning with religious charity towards their
neighbours, hungering for their own and others' eternalization, who went
about burning hearts, inquisitors, it may be--what have all those saints
done for the progress of the science of ethics? Did any of them discover
the categorical imperative, like the old bachelor of Königsberg, who, if
he was not a saint, deserved to be one?
The son of a famous professor of ethics, one who scarcely ever opened
his lips without mentioning the categorical imperative, was lamenting to
me one day the fact that he lived in a desolating dryness of spirit, in
a state of inward emptiness. And I was constrained to answer him thus:
"My friend, your father had a subterranean river flowing through his
spirit, a fresh current fed by the beliefs of his early childhood, by
hopes in the beyond; and while he thought that he was nourishing his
soul with this categorical imperative or something of that sort, he was
in reality nourishing it with those waters which had their spring in his
childish days. And it may be that to you he has given the flower of his
spirit, his rational doctrines of ethics, but not the root, not the
subterranean source, not the irrational substratum."
How was it that Krausism took root here in Spain, while Kantism and
Hegelianism did not, although the two latter systems are much more
profound, morally and philosophically, than the first? Because in
transplanting the first, its roots were transplanted with it. The
philosophical thought of a people or a period is, as it were, the
flower, the thing that is external and above ground; but this flower, or
fruit if you prefer it, draws its sap from the root of the plant, and
this root, which is in and under the ground, is the religious sense. The
philosophical thought of Kant, the supreme flower of the mental
evolution of the Germanic people, has its roots in the religious feeling
of Luther, and it is not possible for Kantism, especially the practical
part of it, to take root and bring forth flower and fruit in peoples who
have not undergone the experience of the Reformation and who perhaps
were incapable of experiencing it. Kantism is Protestant, and we
Spaniards are fundamentally Catholic. And if Krause struck some roots
here--more numerous and more permanent than is commonly supposed--it is
because Krause had roots in pietism, and pietism, as Ritschl has
demonstrated in his _Geschichte des Pietismus_, has specifically
Catholic roots and may be described as the irruption, or rather the
persistence, of Catholic mysticism in the heart of Protestant
rationalism. And this explains why not a few Catholic thinkers in Spain
became followers of Krause.
And since we Spaniards are Catholic--whether we know it or not, and
whether we like it or not--and although some of us may claim to be
rationalists or atheists, perhaps the greatest service we can render to
the cause of culture, and of what is of more value than culture,
religiousness--if indeed they are not the same thing--is in endeavouring
to formulate clearly to ourselves this subconscious, social, or popular
Catholicism of ours. And that is what I have attempted to do in this
work.
What I call the tragic sense of life in men and peoples is at any rate
our tragic sense of life, that of Spaniards and the Spanish people, as
it is reflected in my consciousness, which is a Spanish consciousness,
made in Spain. And this tragic sense of life is essentially the Catholic
sense of it, for Catholicism, and above all popular Catholicism, is
tragic. The people abhors comedy. When Pilate--the type of the refined
gentleman, the superior person, the esthete, the rationalist if you
like--proposes to give the people comedy and mockingly presents Christ
to them, saying, "Behold the man!" the people mutinies and shouts
"Crucify him! Crucify him!" The people does not want comedy but tragedy.
And that which Dante, the great Catholic, called the Divine Comedy, is
the most tragical tragedy that has ever been written.
And as I have endeavoured in these essays to exhibit the soul of a
Spaniard, and therewithal the Spanish soul, I have curtailed the number
of quotations from Spanish writers, while scattering with perhaps too
lavish a hand those from the writers of other countries. For all human
souls are brother-souls.
And there is one figure, a comically tragic figure, a figure in which
is revealed all that is profoundly tragic in the human comedy, the
figure of Our Lord Don Quixote, the Spanish Christ, who resumes and
includes in himself the immortal soul of my people. Perhaps the passion
and death of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance is the passion and
death of the Spanish people, its death and resurrection. And there is a
Quixotesque philosophy and even a Quixotesque metaphysic, there is a
Quixotesque logic, and also a Quixotesque ethic and a Quixotesque
religious sense--the religious sense of Spanish Catholicism. This is the
philosophy, this is the logic, this is the ethic, this is the religious
sense, that I have endeavoured to outline, to suggest rather than to
develop, in this work. To develop it rationally, no; the Quixotesque
madness does not submit to scientific logic.
And now, before concluding and bidding my readers farewell, it remains
for me to speak of the rôle that is reserved for Don Quixote in the
modern European tragi-comedy.
Let us see, in the next and last essay, what this may be.
FOOTNOTES:
[54] Act II., Scene 4: "I am dreaming and I wish to act rightly, for
good deeds are not lost, though they be wrought in dreams."
[55] Act III., Scene 10: "Let us aim at the eternal, the glory that does
not wane, where bliss slumbers not and where greatness does not repose."
[56] "Se _les_ muera," y no sólo "se muera."
[57] _Trabalhos de Jesus_, part i.
[58] De Musset.
CONCLUSION
DON QUIXOTE IN THE CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN TRAGI-COMEDY
"A voice crying in the wilderness!"--ISA. xl. 3.
Need is that I bring to a conclusion, for the present at any rate, these
essays that threaten to become like a tale that has no ending. They have
gone straight from my hands to the press in the form of a kind of
improvization upon notes collected during a number of years, and in
writing each essay I have not had before me any of those that preceded
it. And thus they will go forth full of inward contradictions--apparent
contradictions, at any rate--like life and like me myself.
My sin, if any, has been that I have embellished them to excess with
foreign quotations, many of which will appear to have been dragged in
with a certain degree of violence. But I will explain this another time.
A few years after Our Lord Don Quixote had journeyed through Spain,
Jacob Böhme declared in his _Aurora_ (chap xi., § 142) that he did not
write a story or history related to him by others, but that he himself
had had to stand in the battle, which he found to be full of heavy
strivings, and wherein he was often struck down to the ground like all
other men; and a little further on (§ 152) he adds: "Although I must
become a spectacle of scorn to the world and the devil, yet my hope is
in God concerning the life to come; in Him will I venture to hazard it
and not resist or strive against the Spirit. Amen." And like this
Quixote of the German intellectual world, neither will I resist the
Spirit.
And therefore I cry with the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and
I send forth my cry from this University of Salamanca, a University that
arrogantly styled itself _omnium scientiarum princeps_, and which
Carlyle called a stronghold of ignorance and which a French man of
letters recently called a phantom University; I send it forth from this
Spain--"the land of dreams that become realities, the rampart of Europe,
the home of the knightly ideal," to quote from a letter which the
American poet Archer M. Huntington sent me the other day--from this
Spain which was the head and front of the Counter-Reformation in the
sixteenth century. And well they repay her for it!
In the fourth of these essays I spoke of the essence of Catholicism. And
the chief factors in _de-essentializing_ it--that is, in
de-Catholicizing Europe--have been the Renaissance, the Reformation, and
the Revolution, which for the ideal of an eternal, ultra-terrestrial
life, have substituted the ideal of progress, of reason, of science, or,
rather, of Science with the capital letter. And last of all, the
dominant ideal of to-day, comes Culture.
And in the second half of the nineteenth century, an age essentially
unphilosophical and technical, dominated by a myopic specialism and by
historical materialism, this ideal took a practical form, not so much in
the popularization as in the vulgarization of science--or, rather, of
pseudo-science--venting itself in a flood of cheap, popular, and
propagandist literature. Science sought to popularize itself as if it
were its function to come down to the people and subserve their
passions, and not the duty of the people to rise to science and through
science to rise to higher heights, to new and profounder aspirations.
All this led Brunetière to proclaim the bankruptcy of science, and this
science--if you like to call it science--did in effect become bankrupt.
And as it failed to satisfy, men continued their quest for happiness,
but without finding it, either in wealth, or in knowledge, or in power,
or in pleasure, or in resignation, or in a good conscience, or in
culture. And the result was pessimism.
Neither did the gospel of progress satisfy. What end did progress serve?
Man would not accommodate himself to rationalism; the _Kulturkampf_ did
not suffice him; he sought to give a final finality to life, and what I
call the final finality is the real _hontôs hon_. And the famous _maladie
du siècle_, which announced itself in Rousseau and was exhibited more
plainly in Sénancour's _Obermann_ than in any other character, neither
was nor is anything else but the loss of faith in the immortality of the
soul, in the human finality of the Universe.
The truest symbol of it is to be found in a creation of fiction, Dr.
Faustus.
This immortal Dr. Faustus, the product of the Renaissance and the
Reformation, first comes into our ken at the beginning of the
seventeenth century, when in 1604 he is introduced to us by Christopher
Marlowe. This is the same character that Goethe was to rediscover two
centuries later, although in certain respects the earlier Faust was the
fresher and more spontaneous. And side by side with him Mephistopheles
appears, of whom Faust asks: "What good will my soul do thy lord?"
"Enlarge his kingdom," Mephistopheles replies. "Is that the reason why
he tempts us thus?" the Doctor asks again, and the evil spirit answers:
"_Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris_," which, mistranslated into
Romance, is the equivalent of our proverb--"The misfortune of many is
the consolation of fools." "Where we are is hell, and where hell is
there must we ever be," Mephistopheles continues, to which Faust answers
that he thinks hell's a fable and asks him who made the world. And
finally this tragic Doctor, tortured with our torture, meets Helen, who,
although no doubt Marlowe never suspected it, is none other than
renascent Culture. And in Marlowe's _Faust_ there is a scene that is
worth the whole of the second part of the _Faust_ of Goethe. Faust says
to Helen: "Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss"--and he kisses
her--
Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for Helen is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
Give me my soul again!--the cry of Faust, the Doctor, when, after having
kissed Helen, he is about to be lost eternally. For the primitive Faust
has no ingenuous Margaret to save him. This idea of his salvation was
the invention of Goethe. And is there not a Faust whom we all know, our
own Faust? This Faust has studied Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Medicine,
and even Theology, only to find that we can know nothing, and he has
sought escape in the open country (_hinaus ins weite Land_) and has
encountered Mephistopheles, the embodiment of that force which, ever
willing evil, ever achieves good in its own despite. This Faust has been
led by Mephistopheles to the arms of Margaret, child of the
simple-hearted people, she whom Faust, the overwise, had lost. And
thanks to her--for she gave herself to him--this Faust is saved,
redeemed by the people that believes with a simple faith. But there was
a second part, for that Faust was the anecdotical Faust and not the
categorical Faust of Goethe, and he gave himself again to Culture, to
Helen, and begot Euphorion upon her, and everything ends among mystical
choruses with the discovery of the eternal feminine. Poor Euphorion!
And this Helen is the spouse of the fair Menelaus, the Helen whom Paris
bore away, who was the cause of the war of Troy, and of whom the ancient
Trojans said that no one should be incensed because men fought for a
woman who bore so terrible a likeness to the immortal gods. But I
rather think that Faust's Helen was that other Helen who accompanied
Simon Magus, and whom he declared to be the divine wisdom. And Faust can
say to her: Give me my soul again!
For Helen with her kisses takes away our soul. And what we long for and
have need of is soul--soul of bulk and substance.
But the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution came, bringing
Helen to us, or, rather, urged on by Helen, and now they talk to us
about Culture and Europe.
Europe! This idea of Europe, primarily and immediately of geographical
significance, has been converted for us by some magical process into a
kind of metaphysical category. Who can say to-day--in Spain, at any
rate--what Europe is? I only know that it is a shibboleth (_vide_ my
_Tres Ensayos_). And when I proceed to examine what it is that our
Europeanizers call Europe, it sometimes seems to me that much of its
periphery remains outside of it--Spain, of course, and also England,
Italy, Scandinavia, Russia--and hence it is reduced to the central
portion, Franco-Germany, with its annexes and dependencies.
All this is the consequence, I repeat, of the Renaissance and the
Reformation, which, although apparently they lived in a state of
internecine war, were twin-brothers. The Italians of the Renaissance
were all of them Socinians; the humanists, with Erasmus at their head,
regarded Luther, the German monk, as a barbarian, who derived his
driving force from the cloister, as did Bruno and Campanella. But this
barbarian was their twin-brother, and though their antagonist he was
also the antagonist of the common enemy. All this, I say, is due to the
Renaissance and the Reformation, and to what was the offspring of these
two, the Revolution, and to them we owe also a new Inquisition, that of
science or culture, which turns against those who refuse to submit to
its orthodoxy the weapons of ridicule and contempt.
When Galileo sent his treatise on the earth's motion to the Grand Duke
of Tuscany, he told him that it was meet that that which the higher
authorities had determined should be believed and obeyed, and that he
considered his treatise "as poetry or as a dream, and as such I desire
your highness to receive it." And at other times he calls it a "chimera"
or a "mathematical caprice." And in the same way in these essays, for
fear also--why not confess it?--of the Inquisition, of the modern, the
scientific, Inquisition, I offer as a poetry, dream, chimera, mystical
caprice, that which springs from what is deepest in me. And I say with
Galileo, _Eppur si muove!_ But is it only because of this fear? Ah, no!
for there is another, more tragic Inquisition, and that is the
Inquisition which the modern man, the man of culture, the European--and
such am I, whether I will or not--carries within him. There is a more
terrible ridicule, and that is the ridicule with which a man
contemplates his own self. It is my reason that laughs at my faith and
despises it.
And it is here that I must betake me to my Lord Don Quixote in order
that I may learn of him how to confront ridicule and overcome it, and a
ridicule which perhaps--who knows?--he never knew.
Yes, yes--how shall my reason not smile at these dilettantesque,
would-be mystical, pseudo-philosophical interpretations, in which there
is anything rather than patient study and--shall I say
scientific?--objectivity and method? And nevertheless ... _eppur si
muove!_
_Eppur si muove!_ And I take refuge in dilettantism, in what a pedant
would call _demi-mondaine_ philosophy, as a shelter against the pedantry
of specialists, against the philosophy of the professional philosophers.
And who knows?... Progress usually comes from the barbarian, and there
is nothing more stagnant than the philosophy of the philosophers and
the theology of the theologians.
Let them talk to us of Europe! The civilization of Thibet is parallel
with ours, and men who disappear like ourselves have lived and are
living by it. And over all civilizations there hovers the shadow of
Ecclesiastes, with his admonition, "How dieth the wise man?--as the
fool" (ii. 16).
Among the people of my country there is an admirable reply to the
customary interrogation, "How are you?"[59] and it is "Living." And that
is the truth--we are living, and living as much as all the rest. What
can a man ask for more? And who does not recollect the verse?--
_Coda vez que considero
que me tengo de morir,
tiendo la capa en el suelo
y no me harto de dormir._[60]
But no, not sleeping, but dreaming--dreaming life, since life is a
dream.
Among us Spaniards another phrase has very rapidly passed into current
usage, the expression "It's a question of passing the time," or "killing
the time." And, in fact, we make time in order to kill it. But there is
something that has always preoccupied us as much as or more than passing
the time--a formula which denotes an esthetical attitude--and that is,
gaining eternity, which is the formula of the religious attitude. The
truth is, we leap from the esthetic and the economic to the religious,
passing over the logical and the ethical; we jump from art to religion.
One of our younger novelists, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, in his recent novel,
_La Pata de la Raposa_, has told us that the idea of death is the trap,
and spirit the fox or the wary virtue with which to circumvent the
ambushes set by fatality, and he continues: "Caught in the trap, weak
men and weak peoples lie prone on the ground ...; to robust spirits and
strong peoples the rude shock of danger gives clear-sightedness; they
quickly penetrate into the heart of the immeasurable beauty of life, and
renouncing for ever their original hastiness and folly, emerge from the
trap with muscles taut for action and with the soul's vigour, power, and
efficiency increased a hundredfold." But let us see; weak men ... weak
peoples ... robust spirits ... strong peoples ... what does all this
mean? I do not know. What I think I know is that some individuals and
peoples have not yet really thought about death and immortality, have
not felt them, and that others have ceased to think about them, or
rather ceased to feel them. And the fact that they have never passed
through the religious period is not, I think, a matter for either men or
peoples to boast about.
The immeasurable beauty of life is a very fine thing to write about, and
there are, indeed, some who resign themselves to it and accept it as it
is, and even some who would persuade us that there is no problem in the
"trap." But it has been said by Calderón that "to seek to persuade a man
that the misfortunes which he suffers are not misfortunes, does not
console him for them, but is another misfortune in addition."[61] And,
furthermore, "only the heart can speak to the heart," as Fray Diego de
Estella said (_Vanidad del Mundo_, cap. xxi.).
A short time ago a reply that I made to those who reproached us
Spaniards for our scientific incapacity appeared to scandalize some
people. After having remarked that the electric light and the steam
engine function here in Spain just as well as in the countries where
they were invented, and that we make use of logarithms as much as they
do in the country where the idea of them was first conceived, I
exclaimed, "Let others invent!"--a paradoxical expression which I do not
retract. We Spaniards ought to appropriate to ourselves some of those
sage counsels which Count Joseph de Maistre gave to the Russians, a
people not unlike ourselves. In his admirable letters to Count
Rasoumowski on public education in Russia, he said that a nation should
not think the worse of itself because it was not made for science; that
the Romans had no understanding of the arts, neither did they possess a
mathematician, which, however, did not prevent them from playing their
part in the world; and in particular we should take to heart everything
that he said about that crowd of arrogant sciolists who idolize the
tastes, the fashions, and the languages of foreign countries, and are
ever ready to pull down whatever they despise--and they despise
everything.
We have not the scientific spirit? And what of that, if we have some
other spirit? And who can tell if the spirit that we have is or is not
compatible with the scientific spirit?
But in saying "Let others invent!" I did not mean to imply that we must
be content with playing a passive rôle. No. For them their science, by
which we shall profit; for us, our own work. It is not enough to be on
the defensive, we must attack.
But we must attack wisely and cautiously. Reason must be our weapon. It
is the weapon even of the fool. Our sublime fool and our exemplar, Don
Quixote, after he had destroyed with two strokes of his sword that
pasteboard visor "which he had fitted to his head-piece, made it anew,
placing certain iron bars within it, in such a manner that he rested
satisfied with its solidity, and without wishing to make a second trial
of it, he deputed and held it in estimation of a most excellent
visor."[62] And with the pasteboard visor on his head he made himself
immortal--that is to say, he made himself ridiculous. For it was by
making himself ridiculous that Don Quixote achieved his immortality.
And there are so many ways of making ourselves ridiculous I ... Cournot
said _(Traité de l'enchaînement des idées fondamentales_, etc., § 510):
"It is best not to speak to either princes or peoples of the
probabilities of death; princes will punish this temerity with disgrace;
the public will revenge itself with ridicule." True, and therefore it is
said that we must live as the age lives. _Corrumpere et corrumpi sæculum
vocatur_ (Tacitus: _Germania_ 19).
It is necessary to know how to make ourselves ridiculous, and not only
to others but to ourselves. And more than ever to-day, when there is so
much chatter about our backwardness compared with other civilized
peoples, to-day when a parcel of shallow-brained critics say that we
have had no science, no art, no philosophy, no Renaissance, (of this we
had perhaps too much), no anything, these same critics being ignorant of
our real history, a history that remains yet to be written, the first
task being to undo the web of calumniation and protest that has been
woven around it.
Carducci, the author of the phrase about the _contorcimenti
dell'affannosa grandiositá spagnola_, has written (in _Mosche Cochiere_)
that "even Spain, which never attained the hegemony of the world of
thought, had her Cervantes." But was Cervantes a solitary and isolated
phenomenon, without roots, without ancestry, without a foundation? That
an Italian rationalist, remembering that it was Spain that reacted
against the Renaissance in his country, should say that Spain _non ebbe
egemonia mai di pensiero_ is, however, readily comprehended. Was there
no importance, was there nothing akin to cultural hegemony, in the
Counter-Reformation, of which Spain was the champion, and which in point
of fact began with the sack of Rome by the Spaniards, a providential
chastisement of the city of the pagan popes of the pagan Renaissance?
Apart from the question as to whether the Counter-Reformation was good
or bad, was there nothing akin to hegemony in Loyola or the Council of
Trent? Previous to this Council, Italy witnessed a nefarious and
unnatural union between Christianity and Paganism, or rather, between
immortalism and mortalism, a union to which even some of the Popes
themselves consented in their souls; theological error was philosophical
truth, and all difficulties were solved by the accommodating formula
_salva fide_. But it was otherwise after the Council; after the Council
came the open and avowed struggle between reason and faith, science and
religion. And does not the fact that this change was brought about,
thanks principally to Spanish obstinacy, point to something akin to
hegemony?
Without the Counter-Reformation, would the Reformation have followed the
course that it did actually follow? Without the Counter-Reformation
might not the Reformation, deprived of the support of pietism, have
perished in the gross rationalism of the _Aufklärung_, of the age of
Enlightenment? Would nothing have been changed had there been no Charles
I., no Philip II., our great Philip?
A negative achievement, it will be said. But what is that? What is
negative? what is positive? At what point in time--a line always
continuing in the same direction, from the past to the future--does the
zero occur which denotes the boundary between the positive and the
negative? Spain, which is said to be the land of knights and rogues--and
all of them rogues--has been the country most slandered by history
precisely because it championed the Counter-Reformation. And because
its arrogance has prevented it from stepping down into the public
forum, into the world's vanity fair, and publishing its own
justification.
Let us leave on one side Spain's eight centuries of warfare against the
Moors, during which she defended Europe from Mohammedanism, her work of
internal unification, her discovery of America and the Indies--for this
was the achievement of Spain and Portugal, and not of Columbus and Vasco
da Gama--let us leave all this, and more than this, on one side, and it
is not a little thing. Is it not a cultural achievement to have created
a score of nations, reserving nothing for herself, and to have begotten,
as the Conquistadores did, free men on poor Indian slaves? Apart from
all this, does our mysticism count for nothing in the world of thought?
Perhaps the peoples whose souls Helen will ravish away with her kisses
may some day have to return to this mysticism to find their souls again.
But, as everybody knows, Culture is composed of ideas and only of ideas,
and man is only Culture's instrument. Man for the idea, and not the idea
for man; the substance for the shadow. The end of man is to create
science, to catalogue the Universe, so that it may be handed back to God
in order, as I wrote years ago in my novel, _Amor y Pedagogia_. Man,
apparently, is not even an idea. And at the end of all, the human race
will fall exhausted at the foot of a pile of libraries--whole woods
rased to the ground to provide the paper that is stored away in
them--museums, machines, factories, laboratories ... in order to
bequeath them--to whom? For God will surely not accept them.
That horrible regenerationist literature, almost all of it an imposture,
which the loss of our last American colonies provoked, led us into the
pedantry of extolling persevering and silent effort--and this with great
vociferation, vociferating silence--of extolling prudence, exactitude,
moderation, spiritual fortitude, synteresis, equanimity, the social
virtues, and the chiefest advocates of them were those of us who lacked
them most. Almost all of us Spaniards fell into this ridiculous mode of
literature, some more and some less. And so it befell that that
arch-Spaniard Joaquín Costa, one of the least European spirits we ever
had, invented his famous saying that we must Europeanize Spain, and,
while proclaiming that we must lock up the sepulchre of the Cid with a
sevenfold lock, Cid-like urged us to--conquer Africa! And I myself
uttered the cry, "Down with Don Quixote!" and from this blasphemy, which
meant the very opposite of what it said--such was the fashion of the
hour--sprang my _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_ and my cult of Quixotism
as the national religion.
I wrote that book in order to rethink _Don Quixote_ in opposition to the
Cervantists and erudite persons, in order to make a living work of what
was and still is for the majority a dead letter. What does it matter to
me what Cervantes intended or did not intend to put into it and what he
actually did put into it? What is living in it is what I myself discover
in it, whether Cervantes put it there or not, what I myself put into and
under and over it, and what we all put into it. I wanted to hunt down
our philosophy in it.
For the conviction continually grows upon me that our philosophy, the
Spanish philosophy, is liquescent and diffused in our literature, in our
life, in our action, in our mysticism, above all, and not in
philosophical systems. It is concrete. And is there not perhaps as much
philosophy or more in Goethe, for example, as in Hegel? The poetry of
Jorge Manrique, the Romancero, _Don Quijote_, _La Vida es Sueño_, the
_Subida al Monte Carmelo_, imply an intuition of the world and a concept
of life (_Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht_). And it was difficult for
this philosophy of ours to formulate itself in the second half of the
nineteenth century, a period that was aphilosophical, positivist,
technicist, devoted to pure history and the natural sciences, a period
essentially materialist and pessimist.
Our language itself, like every cultured language, contains within
itself an implicit philosophy.
A language, in effect, is a potential philosophy. Platonism is the Greek
language which discourses in Plato, unfolding its secular metaphors;
scholasticism is the philosophy of the dead Latin of the Middle Ages
wrestling with the popular tongues; the French language discourses in
Descartes, the German in Kant and in Hegel, and the English in Hume and
in Stuart Mill. For the truth is that the logical starting-point of all
philosophical speculation is not the I, neither is it representation
(_Vorstellung_), nor the world as it presents itself immediately to the
senses; but it is mediate or historical representation, humanly
elaborated and such as it is given to us principally in the language by
means of which we know the world; it is not psychical but spiritual
representation. When we think, we are obliged to set out, whether we
know it not and whether we will or not, from what has been thought by
others who came before us and who environ us. Thought is an inheritance.
Kant thought in German, and into German he translated Hume and Rousseau,
who thought in English and French respectively. And did not Spinoza
think in Judeo-Portuguese, obstructed by and contending with Dutch?
Thought rests upon prejudgements, and prejudgements pass into language.
To language Bacon rightly ascribed not a few of the errors of the _idola
fori_. But is it possible to philosophize in pure algebra or even in
Esperanto? In order to see the result of such an attempt one has only to
read the work of Avenarius on the criticism of pure experience (_reine
Erfahrung_), of this prehuman or inhuman experience. And even Avenarius,
who was obliged to invent a language, invented one that was based upon
the Latin tradition, with roots which carry in their metaphorical
implications a content of impure experience, of human social experience.
All philosophy is, therefore, at bottom philology. And philology, with
its great and fruitful law of analogical formations, opens wide the door
to chance, to the irrational, to the absolutely incommensurable. History
is not mathematics, neither is philosophy. And how many philosophical
ideas are not strictly owing to something akin to rhyme, to the
necessity of rightly placing a consonant! In Kant himself there is a
great deal of this, of esthetic symmetry, rhyme.
Representation is, therefore, like language, like reason itself--which
is simply internal language--a social and racial product, and race, the
blood of the spirit, is language, as Oliver Wendell Holmes has said, and
as I have often repeated.
It was in Athens and with Socrates that our Western philosophy first
became mature, conscious of itself, and it arrived at this consciousness
by means of the dialogue, of social conversation. And it is profoundly
significant that the doctrine of innate ideas, of the objective and
normative value of ideas, of what Scholasticism afterwards knew as
Realism, should have formulated itself in dialogues. And these ideas,
which constitute reality, are names, as Nominalism showed. Not that they
may not be more than names (_flatus vocis_), but that they are nothing
less than names. Language is that which gives us reality, and not as a
mere vehicle of reality, but as its true flesh, of which all the rest,
dumb or inarticulate representation, is merely the skeleton. And thus
logic operates upon esthetics, the concept upon the expression, upon the
word, and not upon the brute perception.
And this is true even in the matter of love. Love does not discover that
it is love until it speaks, until it says, I love thee! In Stendhal's
novel, _La Chartreuse de Parme_, it is with a very profound intuition
that Count Mosca, furious with jealousy because of the love which he
believes unites the Duchess of Sanseverina with his nephew Fabrice, is
made to say, "I must be calm; if my manner is violent the duchess,
simply because her vanity is piqued, is capable of following Belgirate,
and then, during the journey, chance may lead to a word which will give
a name to the feelings they bear towards each other, and thereupon in a
moment all the consequences will follow."
Even so--all things were made by the word, and the word was in the
beginning.
Thought, reason--that is, living language--is an inheritance, and the
solitary thinker of Aben Tofail, the Arab philosopher of Guadix, is as
absurd as the ego of Descartes. The real and concrete truth, not the
methodical and ideal, is: _homo sum, ergo cogito_. To feel oneself a man
is more immediate than to think. But, on the other hand, History, the
process of culture, finds its perfection and complete effectivity only
in the individual; the end of History and Humanity is man, each man,
each individual. _Homo sum, ergo cogito; cogito ut sim Michael de
Unamuno_. The individual is the end of the Universe.
And we Spaniards feel this very strongly, that the individual is the end
of the Universe. The introspective individuality of the Spaniard was
pointed out by Martin A.S. Hume in a passage in _The Spanish
People_,[63] upon which I commented in an essay published in _La España
Moderna_.[64]
And it is perhaps this same introspective individualism which has not
permitted the growth on Spanish soil of strictly philosophical--or,
rather, metaphysical--systems. And this in spite of Suárez, whose formal
subtilties do not merit the name of philosophy.
Our metaphysics, if we can be said to possess such a thing, has been
metanthropics, and our metaphysicians have been philologists--or,
rather, humanists--in the most comprehensive sense of the term.
Menéndez de Pelayo, as Benedetto Croce very truly said (_Estetica_,
bibliographical appendix), was inclined towards metaphysical idealism,
but he appeared to wish to take something from other systems, even from
empirical theories. For this reason Croce considers that his work
(referring to his _Historia de las ideas estéticas de España_) suffers
from a certain uncertainty, from the theoretical point of view of its
author, Menéndez de Pelayo, which was that of a perfervid Spanish
humanist, who, not wishing to disown the Renaissance, invented what he
called Vivism, the philosophy of Luis Vives, and perhaps for no other
reason than because he himself, like Vives, was an eclectic Spaniard of
the Renaissance. And it is true that Menéndez de Pelayo, whose
philosophy is certainly all uncertainty, educated in Barcelona in the
timidities of the Scottish philosophy as it had been imported into the
Catalan spirit--that creeping philosophy of common sense, which was
anxious not to compromise itself and yet was all compromise, and which
is so well exemplified in Balmes--always shunned all strenuous inward
combat and formed his consciousness upon compromises.
Angel Ganivet, a man all divination and instinct, was more happily
inspired, in my opinion, when he proclaimed that the Spanish philosophy
was that of Seneca, the pagan Stoic of Cordoba, whom not a few
Christians regarded as one of themselves, a philosophy lacking in
originality of thought but speaking with great dignity of tone and
accent. His accent was a Spanish, Latino-African accent, not Hellenic,
and there are echoes of him in Tertullian--Spanish, too, at heart--who
believed in the corporal and substantial nature of God and the soul, and
who was a kind of Don Quixote in the world of Christian thought in the
second century.
But perhaps we must look for the hero of Spanish thought, not in any
actual flesh-and-bone philosopher, but in a creation of fiction, a man
of action, who is more real than all the philosophers--Don Quixote.
There is undoubtedly a philosophical Quixotism, but there is also a
Quixotic philosophy. May it not perhaps be that the philosophy of the
Conquistadores, of the Counter-Reformers, of Loyola, and above all, in
the order of abstract but deeply felt thought, that of our mystics, was,
in its essence, none other than this? What was the mysticism of St. John
of the Cross but a knight-errantry of the heart in the divine warfare?
And the philosophy of Don Quixote cannot strictly be called idealism; he
did not fight for ideas. It was of the spiritual order; he fought for
the spirit.
Imagine Don Quixote turning his heart to religious speculation--as he
himself once dreamed of doing when he met those images in bas-relief
which certain peasants were carrying to set up in the retablo of their
village church[65]--imagine Don Quixote given up to meditation upon
eternal truths, and see him ascending Mount Carmel in the middle of the
dark night of the soul, to watch from its summit the rising of that sun
which never sets, and, like the eagle that was St. John's companion in
the isle of Patmos, to gaze upon it face to face and scrutinize its
spots. He leaves to Athena's owl--the goddess with the glaucous, or
owl-like, eyes, who sees in the dark but who is dazzled by the light of
noon--he leaves to the owl that accompanied Athena in Olympus the task
of searching with keen eyes in the shadows for the prey wherewith to
feed its young.
And the speculative or meditative Quixotism is, like the practical
Quixotism, madness, a daughter-madness to the madness of the Cross. And
therefore it is despised by the reason. At bottom, philosophy abhors
Christianity, and well did the gentle Marcus Aurelius prove it.
The tragedy of Christ, the divine tragedy, is the tragedy of the Cross.
Pilate, the sceptic, the man of culture, by making a mockery of it,
sought to convert it into a comedy; he conceived the farcical idea of
the king with the reed sceptre and crown of thorns, and cried "Behold
the man!" But the people, more human than he, the people that thirsts
for tragedy, shouted, "Crucify him! crucify him!" And the human, the
intra-human, tragedy is the tragedy of Don Quixote, whose face was
daubed with soap in order that he might make sport for the servants of
the dukes and for the dukes themselves, as servile as their servants.
"Behold the madman!" they would have said. And the comic, the
irrational, tragedy is the tragedy of suffering caused by ridicule and
contempt.
The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people,
can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to
make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule.
I have already spoken of the forceful sonnets of that tragic Portuguese,
Antero de Quental, who died by his own hand. Feeling acutely for the
plight of his country on the occasion of the British ultimatum in 1890,
he wrote as follows:[66] "An English statesman of the last century, who
was also undoubtedly a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace
Walpole, said that for those who feel, life is a tragedy, and a comedy
for those who think. Very well, then, if we are destined to end
tragically, we Portuguese, we who _feel_, we would far rather prefer
this terrible, but noble, destiny, to that which is reserved, and
perhaps at no very remote future date, for England, the country that
_thinks_ and _calculates_, whose destiny it is to finish miserably and
comically." We may leave on one side the assertion that the English are
a thinking and calculating people, implying thereby their lack of
feeling, the injustice of which is explained by the occasion which
provoked it, and also the assertion that the Portuguese feel, implying
that they do not think or calculate--for we twin-brothers of the
Atlantic seaboard have always been distinguished by a certain pedantry
of feeling; but there remains a basis of truth underlying this terrible
idea--namely, that some peoples, those who put thought above feeling, I
should say reason above faith, die comically, while those die tragically
who put faith above reason. For the mockers are those who die comically,
and God laughs at their comic ending, while the nobler part, the part of
tragedy, is theirs who endured the mockery.
The mockery that underlies the career of Don Quixote is what we must
endeavour to discover.
And shall we be told yet again that there has never been any Spanish
philosophy in the technical sense of the word? I will answer by asking,
What is this sense? What does philosophy mean? Windelband, the historian
of philosophy, in his essay on the meaning of philosophy (_Was ist
Philosophie_? in the first volume of his _Präludien_) tells us that "the
history of the word 'philosophy' is the history of the cultural
significance of science." He continues: "When scientific thought attains
an independent existence as a desire for knowledge for the sake of
knowledge, it takes the name of philosophy; when subsequently knowledge
as a whole divides into its various branches, philosophy is the general
knowledge of the world that embraces all other knowledge. As soon as
scientific thought stoops again to becoming a means to ethics or
religious contemplation, philosophy is transformed into an art of life
or into a formulation of religious beliefs. And when afterwards the
scientific life regains its liberty, philosophy acquires once again its
character as an independent knowledge of the world, and in so far as it
abandons the attempt to solve this problem, it is changed into a theory
of knowledge itself." Here you have a brief recapitulation of the
history of philosophy from Thales to Kant, including the medieval
scholasticism upon which it endeavoured to establish religious beliefs.
But has philosophy no other office to perform, and may not its office be
to reflect upon the tragic sense of life itself, such as we have been
studying it, to formulate this conflict between reason and faith,
between science and religion, and deliberately to perpetuate this
conflict?
Later on Windelband says: "By philosophy in the systematic, not in the
historical, sense, I understand the critical knowledge of values of
universal validity (_allgemeingiltigen Werten_)." But what values are
there of more universal validity than that of the human will seeking
before all else the personal, individual, and concrete immortality of
the soul--or, in other words, the human finality of the Universe--and
that of the human reason denying the rationality and even the
possibility of this desire? What values are there of more universal
validity than the rational or mathematical value and the volitional or
teleological value of the Universe in conflict with one another?
For Windelband, as for Kantians and neo-Kantians in general, there are
only three normative categories, three universal norms--those of the
true or the false, the beautiful or the ugly, and the morally good or
evil. Philosophy is reduced to logics, esthetics, and ethics,
accordingly as it studies science, art, or morality. Another category
remains excluded--namely, that of the pleasing and the unpleasing, or
the agreeable and the disagreeable: in other words, the hedonic. The
hedonic cannot, according to them, pretend to universal validity, it
cannot be normative. "Whosoever throws upon philosophy," wrote
Windelband, "the burden of deciding the question of optimism and
pessimism, whosoever demands that philosophy should pronounce judgement
on the question as to whether the world is more adapted to produce pain
than pleasure, or _vice versa_--such a one, if his attitude is not
merely that of a dilettante, sets himself the fantastic task of finding
an absolute determination in a region in which no reasonable man has
ever looked for one." It remains to be seen, nevertheless, whether this
is as clear as it seems, in the case of a man like myself, who am at the
same time reasonable and yet nothing but a dilettante, which of course
would be the abomination of desolation.
It was with a very profound insight that Benedetto Croce, in his
philosophy of the spirit in relation to esthetics as the science of
expression and to logic as the science of pure concept, divided
practical philosophy into two branches--economics and ethics. He
recognizes, in effect, the existence of a practical grade of spirit,
purely economical, directed towards the singular and unconcerned with
the universal. Its types of perfection, of economic genius, are Iago and
Napoleon, and this grade remains outside morality. And every man passes
through this grade, because before all else he must wish to be himself,
as an individual, and without this grade morality would be inexplicable,
just as without esthetics logic would lack meaning. And the discovery of
the normative value of the economic grade, which seeks the hedonic, was
not unnaturally the work of an Italian, a disciple of Machiavelli, who
speculated so fearlessly with regard to _virtù_, practical efficiency,
which is not exactly the same as moral virtue.
But at bottom this economic grade is but the rudimentary state of the
religious grade. The religious is the transcendental economic or
hedonic. Religion is a transcendental economy and hedonistic. That which
man seeks in religion, in religious faith, is to save his own
individuality, to eternalize it, which he achieves neither by science,
nor by art, nor by ethics. God is a necessity neither for science, nor
art, nor ethics; what necessitates God is religion. And with an insight
that amounts to genius our Jesuits speak of the grand business of our
salvation. Business--yes, business; something belonging to the economic,
hedonistic order, although transcendental. We do not need God in order
that He may teach us the truth of things, or the beauty of them, or in
order that He may safeguard morality by means of a system of penalties
and punishments, but in order that He may save us, in order that He may
not let us die utterly. And because this unique longing is the longing
of each and every normal man--those who are abnormal by reason of their
barbarism or their hyperculture may be left out of the reckoning--it is
universal and normative.
Religion, therefore, is a transcendental economy, or, if you like,
metaphysic. Together with its logical, esthetic, and ethical values, the
Universe has for man an economic value also, which, when thus made
universal and normative, is the religious value. We are not concerned
only with truth, beauty, and goodness: we are concerned also and above
all with the salvation of the individual, with perpetuation, which those
norms do not secure for us. That science of economy which is called
political teaches us the most adequate, the most economical way of
satisfying our needs, whether these needs are rational or irrational,
beautiful or ugly, moral or immoral--a business economically good may be
a swindle, something that in the long run kills the soul--and the
supreme human _need_ is the need of not dying, the need of enjoying for
ever the plenitude of our own individual limitation. And if the Catholic
eucharistic doctrine teaches that the substance of the body of Jesus
Christ is present whole and entire in the consecrated Host, and in each
part of it, this means that God is wholly and entirely in the whole
Universe and also in each one of the individuals that compose it. And
this is, fundamentally, not a logical, nor an esthetic, nor an ethical
principle, but a transcendental economic or religious principle. And
with this norm, philosophy is able to judge of optimism and pessimism.
_If the human soul is immortal, the world is economically or
hedonistically good; if not, it is bad_. And the meaning which pessimism
and optimism give to the categories of good and evil is not an ethical
sense, but an economic or hedonistic sense. Good is that which satisfies
our vital longing and evil is that which does not satisfy it.
Philosophy, therefore, is also the science of the tragedy of life, a
reflection upon the tragic sense of it. An essay in this philosophy,
with its inevitable internal contradictions and antinomies, is what I
have attempted in these essays. And the reader must not overlook the
fact that I have been operating upon myself; that this work partakes of
the nature of a piece of self-surgery, and without any other anesthetic
than that of the work itself. The enjoyment of operating upon myself has
ennobled the pain of being operated upon.
And as for my other claim--the claim that this is a Spanish philosophy,
perhaps _the_ Spanish philosophy, that if it was an Italian who
discovered the normative and universal value of the economic grade, it
is a Spaniard who announces that this grade is merely the beginning of
the religious grade, and that the essence of our religion, of our
Spanish Catholicism, consists precisely in its being neither a science,
nor an art, nor an ethic, but an economy of things eternal--that is to
say, of things divine: as for this claim that all this is Spanish, I
must leave the task of substantiating it to another and an historical
work. But leaving aside the external and written tradition, that which
can be demonstrated by reference to historical documents, is there not
some present justification of this claim in the fact that I am a
Spaniard--and a Spaniard who has scarcely ever been outside Spain; a
product, therefore, of the Spanish tradition of the living tradition, of
the tradition which is transmitted in feelings and ideas that dream, and
not in texts that sleep?
The philosophy in the soul of my people appears to me as the expression
of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don
Quixote, as the expression of a conflict between what the world is as
scientific reason shows it to be, and what we wish that it might be, as
our religious faith affirms it to be. And in this philosophy is to be
found the explanation of what is usually said about us--namely, that we
are fundamentally irreducible to _Kultur_--or, in other words, that we
refuse to submit to it. No, Don Quixote does not resign himself either
to the world, or to science or logic, or to art or esthetics, or to
morality or ethics.
"And the upshot of all this," so I have been told more than once and by
more than one person, "will be simply that all you will succeed in doing
will be to drive people to the wildest Catholicism." And I have been
accused of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. Be it so! And what
then?
Yes, I know, I know very well, that it is madness to seek to turn the
waters of the river back to their source, and that it is only the
ignorant who seek to find in the past a remedy for their present ills;
but I know too that everyone who fights for any ideal whatever, although
his ideal may seem to lie in the past, is driving the world on to the
future, and that the only reactionaries are those who find themselves at
home in the present. Every supposed restoration of the past is a
creation of the future, and if the past which it is sought to restore is
a dream, something imperfectly known, so much the better. The march, as
ever, is towards the future, and he who marches is getting there, even
though he march walking backwards. And who knows if that is not the
better way!...
I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I believe that the
soul of my country is medieval, that it has perforce passed through the
Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution--learning from them,
yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the
spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark
Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the struggle
between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance which was the offspring of
the Middle Ages.
And if some accuse me of subserving the cause of Catholic reaction,
others perhaps, the official Catholics.... But these, in Spain, trouble
themselves little about anything, and are interested only in their own
quarrels and dissensions. And besides, poor folk, they have neither eyes
nor ears!
But the truth is that my work--I was going to say my mission--is to
shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in
affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and
this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all
those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to
agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and
passionate desire.
Will this work be efficacious? But did Don Quixote believe in the
immediate apparential efficacy of his work? It is very doubtful, and at
any rate he did not by any chance put his visor to the test by slashing
it a second time. And many passages in his history show that he did not
look with much confidence to the immediate success of his design to
restore knight-errantry. And what did it matter to him so long as thus
he lived and immortalized himself? And he must have surmised, and did in
fact surmise, that his work would have another and higher efficacy, and
that was that it would ferment in the minds of all those who in a pious
spirit read of his exploits.
Don Quixote made himself ridiculous; but did he know the most tragic
ridicule of all, the inward ridicule, the ridiculousness of a man's self
to himself, in the eyes of his own soul? Imagine Don Quixote's
battlefield to be his own soul; imagine him to be fighting in his soul
to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, to preserve the treasure
of his infancy; imagine him an inward Don Quixote, with a Sancho, at his
side, inward and heroical too--and tell me if you find anything comic in
the tragedy.
And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer, he has left
himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all theories and
all philosophies. Other peoples have left chiefly institutions, books;
we have left souls; St. Teresa is worth any institution, any _Critique
of Pure Reason_.
But Don Quixote was converted. Yes--and died, poor soul. But the other,
the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives amongst us,
animating us with his spirit--this Don Quixote was not converted, this
Don Quixote continues to incite us to make ourselves ridiculous, this
Don Quixote must never die. And the conversion of the other Don
Quixote--he who was converted only to die--was possible because he was
mad, and it was his madness, and not his death nor his conversion that
immortalized him, earning him forgiveness for the crime of having been
born.[67] _Felix culpa!_ And neither was his madness cured, but only
transformed. His death was his last knightly adventure; in dying he
stormed heaven, which suffereth violence.
This mortal Don Quixote died and descended into hell, which he entered
lance on rest, and freed all the condemned, as he had freed the galley
slaves, and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down the scroll that
Dante saw there and replaced it by one on which was written "Long live
hope!" and escorted by those whom he had freed, and they laughing at
him, he went to heaven. And God laughed paternally at him, and this
divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness.
And the other Don Quixote remained here amongst us, fighting with
desperation. And does he not fight out of despair? How is it that among
the words that English has borrowed from our language, such as _siesta,
camarilla, guerrilla_, there is to be found this word _desperdo_? Is not
this inward Don Quixote that I spoke of, conscious of his own tragic
comicness, a man of despair (_desesperado_). A _desperado_--yes, like
Pizarro and like Loyola. But "despair is the master of impossibilities,"
as we learn from Salazar y Torres (_Elegir al enemigo_, Act I.), and it
is despair and despair alone that begets heroic hope, absurd hope, mad
hope. _Spero quia absurdum_, it ought to have been said, rather than
_credo_.
And Don Quixote, who lived in solitude, sought more solitude still; he
sought the solitudes of the Peña Pobre, in order that there, alone,
without witnesses, he might give himself up to greater follies with
which to assuage his soul. But he was not quite alone, for Sancho
accompanied him--Sancho the good, Sancho the believing, Sancho the
simple. If, as some say, in Spain Don Quixote is dead and Sancho lives,
then we are saved, for Sancho, his master dead, will become a
knight-errant himself. And at any rate he is waiting for some other mad
knight to follow again.
And there is also a tragedy of Sancho. The other Sancho, the Sancho who
journeyed with the mortal Don Quixote--it is not certain that he died,
although some think that he died hopelessly mad, calling for his lance
and believing in the truth of all those things which his dying and
converted master had denounced and abominated as lies. But neither is it
certain that the bachelor Sansón Carrasco, or the curate, or the barber,
or the dukes and canons are dead, and it is with these that the
heroical Sancho has to contend.
Don Quixote journeyed alone, alone with Sancho, alone with his solitude.
And shall we not also journey alone, we his lovers, creating for
ourselves a Quixotesque Spain which only exists in our imagination?
And again we shall be asked: What has Don Quixote bequeathed to
_Kultur_? I answer: Quixotism, and that is no little thing! It is a
whole method, a whole epistemology, a whole esthetic, a whole logic, a
whole ethic--above all, a whole religion--that is to say, a whole
economy of things eternal and things divine, a whole hope in what is
rationally absurd.
For what did Don Quixote fight? For Dulcinea, for glory, for life, for
survival. Not for Iseult, who is the eternal flesh; not for Beatrice,
who is theology; not for Margaret, who is the people; not for Helen, who
is culture. He fought for Dulcinea, and he won her, for he lives.
And the greatest thing about him was his having been mocked and
vanquished, for it was in being overcome that he overcame; he overcame
the world by giving the world cause to laugh at him.
And to-day? To-day he feels his own comicness and the vanity of his
endeavours so far as their temporal results are concerned; he sees
himself from without--culture has taught him to objectify himself, to
alienate himself from himself instead of entering into himself--and in
seeing himself from without he laughs at himself, but with a bitter
laughter. Perhaps the most tragic character would be that of a Margutte
of the inner man, who, like the Margutte of Pulci, should die of
laughter, but of laughter at himself. _E riderá in eterno_, he will
laugh for all eternity, said the Angel Gabriel of Margutte. Do you not
hear the laughter of God?
The mortal Don Quixote, in dying, realized his own comicness and bewept
his sins; but the immortal Quixote, realizing his own comicness,
superimposes himself upon it and triumphs over it without renouncing it.
And Don Quixote does not surrender, because he is not a pessimist, and
he fights on. He is not a pessimist, because pessimism is begotten by
vanity, it is a matter of fashion, pure intellectual snobbism, and Don
Quixote is neither vain nor modern with any sort of modernity (still
less is he a modernist), and he does not understand the meaning of the
word "snob" unless it be explained to him in old Christian Spanish. Don
Quixote is not a pessimist, for since he does not understand what is
meant by the _joie de vivre_ he does not understand its opposite.
Neither does he understand futurist fooleries. In spite of
Clavileño,[68] he has not got as far as the aeroplane, which seems to
tend to put not a few fools at a still greater distance from heaven. Don
Quixote has not arrived at the age of the tedium of life, a condition
that not infrequently takes the form of that topophobia so
characteristic of many modern spirits, who pass their lives running at
top speed from one place to another, not from any love of the place to
which they are going, but from hatred of the place they are leaving
behind, and so flying from all places: which is one of the forms of
despair.
But Don Quixote hears his own laughter, he hears the divine laughter,
and since he is not a pessimist, since he believes in life eternal, he
has to fight, attacking the modern, scientific, inquisitorial orthodoxy
in order to bring in a new and impossible Middle Age, dualistic,
contradictory, passionate. Like a new Savonarola, an Italian Quixote of
the end of the fifteenth century, he fights against this Modern Age that
began with Machiavelli and that will end comically. He fights against
the rationalism inherited from the eighteenth century. Peace of mind,
reconciliation between reason and faith--this, thanks to the providence
of God, is no longer possible. The world must be as Don Quixote wishes
it to be, and inns must be castles, and he will fight with it and will,
to all appearances, be vanquished, but he will triumph by making himself
ridiculous. And he will triumph by laughing at himself and making
himself the object of his own laughter.
"Reason speaks and feeling bites" said Petrarch; but reason also bites
and bites in the inmost heart. And more light does not make more warmth.
"Light, light, more light!" they tell us that the dying Goethe cried.
No, warmth, warmth, more warmth! for we die of cold and not of darkness.
It is not the night kills, but the frost. We must liberate the enchanted
princess and destroy the stage of Master Peter.[69]
But God! may there not be pedantry too in thinking ourselves the objects
of mockery and in making Don Quixotes of ourselves? Kierkegaard said
that the regenerate (_Opvakte_) desire that the wicked world should mock
at them for the better assurance of their own regeneracy, for the
enjoyment of being able to bemoan the wickedness of the world
(_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, ii., Afsnit ii., cap. 4,
sect. 2, b).
The question is, how to avoid the one or the other pedantry, or the one
or the other affectation, if the natural man is only a myth and we are
all artificial.
Romanticism! Yes, perhaps that is partly the word. And there is an
advantage in its very lack of precision. Against romanticism the forces
of rationalist and classicist pedantry, especially in France, have
latterly been unchained. Romanticism itself is merely another form of
pedantry, the pedantry of sentiment? Perhaps. In this world a man of
culture is either a dilettante or a pedant: you have to take your
choice. Yes, René and Adolphe and Obermann and Lara, perhaps they were
all pedants.... The question is to seek consolation in disconsolation.
The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration,
essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotesque, has been called a
_demi-mondaine_ philosophy. Leave out the _demi_; call it _mondaine_,
mundane. Mundane--yes, a philosophy for the world and not for
philosophers, just as chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone. The
world desires illusion (_mundus vult decipi_)--either the illusion
antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or the illusion subsequent to
reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever
wishes to delude will always find someone willing to be deluded. Blessed
are they who are easily befooled! A Frenchman, Jules de Gaultier, said
that it was the privilege of his countrymen _n'être pas dupe_--not to be
taken in. A sorry privilege!
Science does not give Don Quixote what he demands of it. "Then let him
not make the demand," it will be said, "let him resign himself, let him
accept life and truth as they are." But he does not accept them as they
are, and he asks for signs, urged thereto by Sancho, who stands by his
side. And it is not that Don Quixote does not understand what those
understand who talk thus to him, those who succeed in resigning
themselves and accepting rational life and rational truth. No, it is
that the needs of his heart are greater. Pedantry? Who knows!...
And in this critical century, Don Quixote, who has also contaminated
himself with criticism, has to attack his own self, the victim of
intellectualism and of sentimentalism, and when he wishes to be most
spontaneous he appears to be most affected. And he wishes, unhappy man,
to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the rational. And he
sinks into the despair of the critical century whose two greatest
victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoi. And through this despair he reaches
the heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke--that intellectual Don
Quixote who escaped from the cloister--and becomes an awakener of
sleeping souls (_dormitantium animorum excubitor_), as the ex-Dominican
said of himself--he who wrote: "Heroic love is the property of those
superior natures who are called insane (_insano_) not because they do
not know (_no sanno_), but because they over-know (_soprasanno_)."
But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines; at any rate the
inscription at the foot of his statue in the Campo dei Fiori, opposite
the Vatican, states that it has been dedicated to him by the age which
he had foretold (_il secolo da lui divinato_). But our Don Quixote, the
inward, the immortal Don Quixote, conscious of his own comicness, does
not believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they
are not of it. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the
world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire alone to the
mountain, fleeing from the king-making and king-killing crowds, as
Christ retired alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the
loaves and fishes, they sought to proclaim him king. He left the title
of king for the inscription written over the Cross.
What, then, is the new mission of Don Quixote, to-day, in this world? To
cry aloud, to cry aloud in the wilderness. But though men hear not, the
wilderness hears, and one day it will be transformed into a resounding
forest, and this solitary voice that goes scattering over the wilderness
like seed, will fructify into a gigantic cedar, which with its hundred
thousand tongues will sing an eternal hosanna to the Lord of life and of
death.
And now to you, the younger generation, bachelor Carrascos of a
Europeanizing regenerationism, you who are working after the best
European fashion, with scientific method and criticism, to you I say:
Create wealth, create nationality, create art, create science, create
ethics, above all create--or rather, translate--_Kultur_, and thus kill
in yourselves both life and death. Little will it all last you!...
And with this I conclude--high time that I did!--for the present at any
rate, these essays on the tragic sense of life in men and in peoples, or
at least in myself--who am a man--and in the soul of my people as it is
reflected in mine.
I hope, reader, that some time while our tragedy is still playing, in
some interval between the acts, we shall meet again. And we shall
recognize one another. And forgive me if I have troubled you more than
was needful and inevitable, more than I intended to do when I took up my
pen proposing to distract you for a while from your distractions. And
may God deny you peace, but give you glory!
SALAMANCA, _In the year of grace_ 1912.
FOOTNOTES:
[59] "Que tal?" o "como va?" y es aquella que responde: "se vive!"
[60] Whenever I consider that I needs must die, I stretch my cloak upon
the ground and am not surfeited with sleeping.
[61] No es consuelo de desdichas--es otra desdicha aparte--querer a
quien las padece--persuadir que no son tales (_Gustos y diogustos no son
niés que imaginatión_, Act I., Scene 4).
[62] _Don Quijote_, part i., chap, i.
[63] Preface.
[64] _El individualismo español_, in vol. clxxi., March 1, 1903.
[65] See _El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha_, part ii.,
chap. lviii., and the corresponding chapter in my _Vida de Don Quijote y
Sancho_.
[66] In an article which was to have been published on the occasion of
the ultimatum, and of which the original is in the possession of the
Conde do Ameal. This fragment appeared in the Portuguese review, _A
Aguía_ (No. 3), March, 1912.
[67] An allusion to the phrase in Calderón's _La Vida es Sueño_, "Que
delito cometí contra vosotros naciendo?"--J.E.C.F.
[68] The wooden horse upon which Don Quixote imagined that he and Sancho
had been carried in the air. See _Don Quijote_, part ii., chaps. 40 and
41.--J.E.C.F.
[69] _Don Quijote_, part ii., chap. 26.
INDEX
Æschylus, 246
Alexander of Aphrodisias, 88
Amiel, 18, 68, 228
Anaxagoras, 143
Angelo of Foligno, 289
Antero de Quintal, 240, 315
Ardigo, Roberto, 238
Aristotle, 1, 21, 80, 144, 165, 171, 232, 235
Arnold, Matthew, 103
Athanasius, 63-65
Avenarius, Richard, 144, 310
de Ayala, Ramón Pérez, 303
Bacon, 310
Balfour, A.J., 27
Balmes, 84, 85
Bergson, 144, 328
Berkeley, Bishop, 87, 146
Besant, Mrs. A., 291
Boccaccio, 52
Böhme, Jacob, 227, 297
Bonnefon, 250, 254
Bossuet, 226, 231
Brooks, Phillips, 76, 190
Browning, Robert, 112, 181, 249, 254
Brunetière, 103, 298
Brunhes, B., 235, 237, 238
Bruno, 301, 329
Büchner, 95
Butler, Joseph, 5, 6, 87
Byron, Lord, 94, 102, 103, 132
Calderón, 39, 268, 323
Calvin, 121, 246
Campanella, 301
Carducci, 102, 306
Carlyle, 231, 298
Catherine of Sienna, 289
Cauchy, 236
Cervantes, 220, 306
Channing, W.E., 78
Cicero, 165, 216, 221
Clement of Alexandria, 32
Cortés, Donoso, 74
Costa, Joaquin, 309
Cournot, 192, 217, 222, 306
Cowper, 43
Croce, Benedetto, 313, 318
Dante, 42, 51, 140, 223, 233, 256, 295
Darwin, 72, 147
Descartes, 34, 86, 107, 224, 237, 293, 310, 312
Diderot, 99
Diego de Estella, 304
Dionysius the Areopagite, 160
Domingo de Guzmán, 289
Duns Scotus, 76
Eckhart, 289
Empedocles, 61
Erasmus, 112, 301
Erigena, 160, 167
Fénelon, 224
Fichte, 8, 29
Flaubert, 94, 219
Fouillée, 261
Fourier, 278
Francesco de Sanctis, 220
Francke, August, 120
Franklin, 248
Galileo, 72, 267, 302
Ganivet, Angel, 313
de Gaultier, Jules, 328
Goethe, 218, 264, 288, 299, 309
Gounod, 56
Gratry, Père, 236
Haeckel, 95
Harnack, 59, 64, 65, 69, 75
Hartmann, 146
Hegel, 5, 111, 170, 294, 309, 310
Heraclitus, 165
Hermann, 69, 70, 77, 165, 217
Herodotus, 140
Hippocrates, 143
Hodgson, S.H., 30
Holberg, 109
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 257, 311
Hume, David, 79, 86, 104, 310
Hume, Martin A.S., 312
Huntingdon, A.M., 298
James, William, 5, 81, 86
Jansen, 121
Juan de los Angeles, 1, 207, 286
Juan de la Cruz, 67, 289, 293
Justin Martyr, 63
Kaftan, 68, 222
Kant, Immanuel, 3, 4, 11, 13, 67, 68, 73, 79, 114, 143, 166, 294, 310,
311, 317
à Kempis, 51, 99, 277
Kierkegaard, 3, 109, 115, 123, 153, 178, 198, 257, 287, 327
Krause, 294
Lactantius, 59, 74, 165, 169
Lamarck, 147
Lamennais, 74, 117, 165, 246
Laplace, 161
Leibnitz, 247
Leo XIII., 75
Leopardi, 44, 47, 123, 132, 240, 248
Le Roy, 73
Lessing, 229
Linnæus, 1
Loisy, 72
Loyola, 122, 307, 314, 324
Loyson, Hyacinthe, 116
Lucretius, 94, 102
Luis de León, 289
Luther, 3, 121, 270, 294, 301
Mach, Dr. E., 114
Machado, Antonio, 241
Machiavelli, 296, 326, 328
de Maistre, Count Joseph, 74, 305
Malebranche, 63
Malón de Chaide, 66
Manrique, Jorge, 309
Marcus Aurelius, 315
Marlowe, Christopher, 299
Martins, Oliveira, 68
Mazzini, 153
Melanchthon, 69
Menéndez de Pelayo, 313
Michelet, 45
Miguel de Molinos, 216, 219, 228
Mill, Stuart, 104, 310
Milton, 284
Moser, Johann Jacob, 252, 263
Myers, W.H., 88
Nietzsche, 50, 61, 100, 231, 239, 328
Nimesius, 59
Obermann, 11, 47, 259, 263, 268
Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph, 252, 253
Ordóñez de Lara, 56
Origen, 245
Papini, 238
Pascal, 40, 45, 74, 262, 263
Petrarch, 327
Pfleiderer, 61
Pius IX., 72
Pizarro, 324
Plato, 38, 45, 48, 61, 90, 125, 143, 216, 217, 221, 292, 310
Pliny, 165
Plotinus, 209, 230, 243
Pohle, Joseph, 77
Pomponazzi, Pietro, 88
Renan, 51, 68
Ritschl, Albrecht, 68, 114, 121, 167, 238, 253, 263, 294
Robertson, F.W., 180
Robespierre, 41
Rohde, Erwin, 60, 61
Rousseau, 53, 263, 299, 310
Ruysbroek, 289
Saint Augustine, 74, 192, 247
Saint Bonaventura, 220
Saint Francis of Assissi, 52, 210
Saint Paul, 48, 49, 62, 94, 112, 188, 209, 225, 241, 253, 255, 270
Saint Teresa, 67, 75, 210, 226, 228, 289, 323
Saint Thomas Aquinas, 83, 92, 233
Salazar y Torres, 324
Schleiermacher, 89, 156, 217
Schopenhauer, 146, 147, 247
Seeberg, Reinold, 188
Sénancour, 43, 47, 260, 263, 299
Seneca, 231, 313
Seuse, Heinrich, 75, 289
Shakespeare, 39
Socrates, 29, 143, 145
Solon, 17
Soloviev, 95
Spencer, Herbert, 89, 124, 238, 253
Spener, 253
Spinoza, Benedict, 6, 7, 22, 24, 31, 38, 40, 89, 97-99, 101, 208, 234,
310
Stanley, Dean, 91
Stendhal, 311
Stirmer, Max, 29
Suárez, 312
Swedenborg, 153, 221, 225
Tacitus, 56, 94, 142, 216, 306
Tauler, 289
Tennyson, Lord, 33, 103
Tertullian, 74, 94, 104
Thales of Miletus, 143, 317
Thomé de Jesús, 283
Tolstoi, 328
Troeltsch, Ernst, 70, 112
Velasquez, 70
Vico, Giovanni Baptista, 142, 143
Vinet, A., 93, 113, 160
Virchow, 95
Virgil, 249
Vives, Luis, 313
Vogt, 95
Walpole, Horace, 315
Weizsäcker, 62, 77
Wells, H.G., 265
Whitman, Walt, 125
Windelband, 267, 316, 317
Xenophon, 29, 143
End of Project Gutenberg's Tragic Sense Of Life, by Miguel de Unamuno
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE ***
***** This file should be named 14636-8.txt or 14636-8.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
https://www.gutenberg.org/1/4/6/3/14636/
Produced by David Starner, Martin Pettit and the PG Online Distributed
Proofreading Team
Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.
Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.
*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
https://gutenberg.org/license).
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that
- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is
owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments
must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License. You must require such a user to return or
destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
Project Gutenberg-tm works.
- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
of receipt of the work.
- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
https://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at
809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
[email protected]. Email contact links and up to date contact
information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
page at https://pglaf.org
For additional contact information:
Dr. Gregory B. Newby
Chief Executive and Director
[email protected]
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit https://pglaf.org
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
donations. To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
https://www.gutenberg.org
This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
