In the course of my frequent peregrinations, when I go up and down the
country preaching my lay sermons in the towns and cities of Spain, I
have a way of taking my audiences as raw material for experiment. I
carry out tests upon them, observing how they respond and react to my
words. And I have observed that whenever they hear me say something
which they think, however erroneously, implies a kind of negation
of the immortality of the soul and of the existence of another life
transcending this world, they break out into applause. And this
applause saddens me and sometimes prompts me to attack.
If these outbursts of applause meant simply: “Hear, hear! Bravo! This
man’s honest. He puts love of truth, however painful the truth may
be, before love of consolation”--if the applause meant that, I would
accept it, though with a certain sadness. But no, this applause means
something different. It means: “Hear, hear! Excellent! We don’t want
another life! This life is enough for us!” And this wounds me, for it
is an explosion of the most debasing materialism.
Not believing that God exists or that the soul is immortal,
or believing that God does not exist and that the soul is not
immortal--and believing that the soul is not immortal is not the same
as not believing that it is immortal--this is a belief that I can
respect; but not wishing that God should exist or that the soul should
be immortal is a thing profoundly repellent to me.
And it is precisely because I have this thorn in my heart of hearts,
because I cannot resign myself to one day returning to unconsciousness,
because I have a thirst for eternity, that this applause bruises
my heart. That a man should not believe in another life, that I
understand, for I myself find no proof of it; but that he should resign
himself to this, and above all that he should not desire anything more
than this life, that is a thing I do indeed not understand.
And then these gross calumniations of Christ and of Christianity, these
stupidities that go contrary to nature and that have stunted the human
spirit, and all this alluvion of vulgarity that so many unfortunate
people swallow whole....
In one of those series of popular publications which flatter and
seduce the coarsest instincts of the unlettered multitudes, there is a
book--translated from the Italian, I believe--entitled “Jesus Christ
Has Never Existed.” It is one of the most deplorable, shallow, and
worthless books imaginable, inspired not by a love of truth but by
the most blatant sectarianism. I was talking about it one day to a
man who had read it and who had been delighted with it, and I said:
“It is not the thesis that shocks me. The thesis that Jesus had no
historical existence, that He is a myth, has many times been put
forward, and with apparently very plausible arguments, at any rate with
erudition--recently by Karthoff--but it is a thesis that has been
demolished by the most judicious investigators, no matter what their
personal creed may have been.” He replied: “Then I’m sorry, for He
ought not to have existed.” And naturally I did not know what to say to
that.
This lack of ideality, this aridity and poverty of inward life, which
is implied by not longing for another and transcendental life, all this
practical materialism, is dismaying to the mind of whosoever meditates
a little upon the worth of human life. For my own part, I have very
little hope of peoples who fall into this materialistic attitude.
Understand me clearly: I am not assuring you, nor can I assure you,
that there is another life; I myself am not convinced that there is;
but I cannot conceive that a man, a true man, should not merely resign
himself to the enjoyment of this life only, but that he should renounce
and even spurn another life. And as for this idea that we shall
continue to live in our works, in our children, in the memory of other
generations, and that everything renews and transforms itself, and that
we shall help to build up a more perfect society--all this appears
to me to be the most miserable subterfuge for escaping the depths of
despair.
This is the reason why the radicalism of certain sections of the masses
dismays me and why I cannot hope that anything fruitful will come
of it. The radicalism of the masses in Spain, and perhaps in other
so-called Latin, or, more strictly speaking, Catholic, countries, is
lacking in the spirit and substance of religion. The weak point in our
socialism is its confused notion of the supreme end of the individual
life.
Let us better the economic condition of man--good! Let us put an end to
the division between rich and poor--exactly! Let us realize a state in
which a moderate amount of work will be sufficient to satisfy all our
wants--very good! And then? We have now created a society such as Bebel
or Kropotkin dreamed of, and what is to happen to each one of us in
this society? What is to be the end of this society? What shall we live
for?
“Get rich!” said Guizon, the Calvinist, to the Catholic bourgeoisie of
France; “get rich!” Very good. And then, when we have got rich?...
A country in which the people think only of getting rich is a country
... well, I would rather not inquire what kind of a country it is.
Suffice it to say that I at any rate should die in it of cold, of
shame, of disgust.
And if a country which is solely preoccupied with getting rich is
abhorrent to me, still more abhorrent is the country in which the
dominant preoccupation is that of enjoyment, of diversion. In other
words, of self-stupefaction.
A collective patriotic enthusiasm, an imperialistic instinct, a
passionate desire to influence other peoples and to impress your own
stamp upon them--this, after all, is something. But this enthusiasm,
this instinct, this desire, lives and burns in those peoples which
preserve the inward spring of religion, an underlying inextinguishable
thirst for eternity.
The people that is satisfied with this life lives, strictly speaking,
on the defensive, and the people that lives on the defensive ends
by being absorbed and dominated by those in whom the aggressive and
dominating instinct is uppermost. The so-called struggle for life
is efficacious only when the struggle is for predominance, not for
preservation. The essence of being, as Spinoza showed, consists not
so much in the effort to persist in mere being as in the effort to
become more, to become everything. It is the appetite for infinity and
eternity.
I do not know what is to be hoped from peoples that have been
materialized by a long indoctrination of implicit Catholic faith, whose
beliefs are a matter of routine, in whom the inner spring appears to be
exhausted--that inward disquietude which distinguishes the essentially
Protestant spirit. I do not know what is to be hoped from peoples in
whom centuries of a religion more social than individual, characterized
rather by ritual and ceremony and externality and authority than by
inward struggle, have resulted in generating a kind of free-thinking
that issues in indifference and in resignation to the life of this
world.
From the superstition of a ridiculous and childish heaven and hell they
have fallen into the superstition of a gross and unspiritual earth.