_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.