Tragic Sense Of Life
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Title: Tragic Sense Of Life
Author: Miguel de Unamuno
Translator: J. E. Crawford Flitch
Release date: January 8, 2005 [eBook #14636]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE ***
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
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