Sanctius ac reverentius visum de actis deorum credere quam
scire.--TACITUS: _Germania_, 34.
The road that leads us to the living God, the God of the heart, and that
leads us back to Him when we have left Him for the lifeless God of
logic, is the road of faith, not of rational or mathematical conviction.
And what is faith?
This is the question propounded in the Catechism of Christian Doctrine
that was taught us at school, and the answer runs: Faith is believing
what we have not seen.
This, in an essay written some twelve years ago, I amended as follows:
"Believing what we have not seen, no! but creating what we do not see."
And I have already told you that believing in God is, in the first
instance at least, wishing that God may be, longing for the existence of
God.
The theological virtue of faith, according to the Apostle Paul, whose
definition serves as the basis of the traditional Christian
disquisitions upon it, is "the substance of things hoped for, the
evidence of things not seen," _elpizomevôn hupostasis, pragmatôn
elegchos ou blepomenôn_ (Heb. xi. 1).
The substance, or rather the support and basis, of hope, the guarantee
of it. That which connects, or, rather than connects, subordinates,
faith to hope. And in fact we do not hope because we believe, but rather
we believe because we hope. It is hope in God, it is the ardent longing
that there may be a God who guarantees the eternity of consciousness,
that leads us to believe in Him.
But faith, which after all is something compound, comprising a
cognitive, logical, or rational element together with an affective,
biotic, sentimental, and strictly irrational element, is presented to us
under the form of knowledge. And hence the insuperable difficulty of
separating it from some dogma or other. Pure faith, free from dogmas,
about which I wrote a great deal years ago, is a phantasm. Neither is
the difficulty overcome by inventing the theory of faith in faith
itself. Faith needs a matter to work upon.
Believing is a form of knowing, even if it be no more than a knowing and
even a formulating of our vital longing. In ordinary language the term
"believing," however, is used in a double and even a contradictory
sense. It may express, on the one hand, the highest degree of the mind's
conviction of the truth of a thing, and, on the other hand, it may imply
merely a weak and hesitating persuasion of its truth. For if in one
sense believing expresses the firmest kind of assent we are capable of
giving, the expression "I believe that it is so, although I am not sure
of it," is nevertheless common in ordinary speech.
And this agrees with what we have said above with respect to uncertainty
as the basis of faith. The most robust faith, in so far as it is
distinguished from all other knowledge that is not _pistic_ or of
faith--faithful, as we might say--is based on uncertainty. And this is
because faith, the guarantee of things hoped for, is not so much
rational adhesion to a theoretical principle as trust in a person who
assures us of something. Faith supposes an objective, personal element.
We do not so much believe something as believe someone who promises us
or assures us of this or the other thing. We believe in a person and in
God in so far as He is a person and a personalization of the Universe.
This personal or religious element in faith is evident. Faith, it is
said, is in itself neither theoretical knowledge nor rational adhesion
to a truth, nor yet is its essence sufficiently explained by defining it
as trust in God. Seeberg says of faith that it is "the inward submission
to the spiritual authority of God, immediate obedience. And in so far as
this obedience is the means of attaining a rational principle, faith is
a personal conviction."[44]
The faith which St. Paul defined, _pistis_ in Greek, is better
translated as trust, confidence. The word _pistis_ is derived from the
verb _peithô_, which in its active voice means to persuade and in its
middle voice to trust in someone, to esteem him as worthy of trust, to
place confidence in him, to obey. And _fidare se_, to trust, is derived
from the root _fid_--whence _fides_, faith, and also confidence. The
Greek root _pith_ and the Latin _fid_ are twin brothers. In the root of
the word "faith" itself, therefore, there is implicit the idea of
confidence, of surrender to the will of another, to a person. Confidence
is placed only in persons. We trust in Providence, which we conceive as
something personal and conscious, not in Fate, which is something
impersonal. And thus it is in the person who tells us the truth, in the
person who gives us hope, that we believe, not directly and immediately
in truth itself or in hope itself.
And this personal or rather personifying element in faith extends even
to the lowest forms of it, for it is this that produces faith in
pseudo-revelation, in inspiration, in miracle. There is a story of a
Parisian doctor, who, when he found that a quack-healer was drawing away
his clientèle, removed to a quarter of the city as distant as possible
from his former abode, where he was totally unknown, and here he gave
himself out as a quack-healer and conducted himself as such. When he was
denounced as an illegal practitioner he produced his doctor's
certificate, and explained his action more or less as follows: "I am
indeed a doctor, but if I had announced myself as such I should not
have had as large a clientèle as I have as a quack-healer. Now that all
my clients know that I have studied medicine, however, and that I am a
properly qualified medical man, they will desert me in favour of some
quack who can assure them that he has never studied, but cures simply by
inspiration." And true it is that a doctor is discredited when it is
proved that he has never studied medicine and possesses no qualifying
certificate, and that a quack is discredited when it is proved that he
has studied and is a qualified practitioner. For some believe in science
and in study, while others believe in the person, in inspiration, and
even in ignorance.
"There is one distinction in the world's geography which comes
immediately to our minds when we thus state the different thoughts and
desires of men concerning their religion. We remember how the whole
world is in general divided into two hemispheres upon this matter. One
half of the world--the great dim East--is mystic. It insists upon not
seeing anything too clearly. Make any one of the great ideas of life
distinct and clear, and immediately it seems to the Oriental to be
untrue. He has an instinct which tells him that the vastest thoughts are
too vast for the human mind, and that if they are made to present
themselves in forms of statement which the human mind can comprehend,
their nature is violated and their strength is lost.
"On the other hand, the Occidental, the man of the West, demands
clearness and is impatient with mystery. He loves a definite statement
as much as his brother of the East dislikes it. He insists on knowing
what the eternal and infinite forces mean to his personal life, how they
will make him personally happier and better, almost how they will build
the house over his head, and cook the dinner on his hearth. This is the
difference between the East and the West, between man on the banks of
the Ganges and man on the banks of the Mississippi. Plenty of
exceptions, of course, there are--mystics in Boston and St. Louis,
hard-headed men of facts in Bombay and Calcutta. The two great
dispositions cannot be shut off from one another by an ocean or a range
of mountains. In some nations and places--as, for instance, among the
Jews and in our own New England--they notably commingle. But in general
they thus divide the world between them. The East lives in the moonlight
of mystery, the West in the sunlight of scientific fact. The East cries
out to the Eternal for vague impulses. The West seizes the present with
light hands, and will not let it go till it has furnished it with
reasonable, intelligible motives. Each misunderstands, distrusts, and in
large degree despises the other. But the two hemispheres together, and
not either one by itself, make up the total world." Thus, in one of his
sermons, spoke the great Unitarian preacher Phillips Brooks, late Bishop
of Massachusetts (_The Mystery of Iniquity and Other Sermons_, sermon
xvi.).
We might rather say that throughout the whole world, in the East as well
as in the West, rationalists seek definition and believe in the concept,
while vitalists seek inspiration and believe in the person. The former
scrutinize the Universe in order that they may wrest its secrets from
it; the latter pray to the Consciousness of the Universe, strive to
place themselves in immediate relationship with the Soul of the World,
with God, in order that they may find the guarantee or substance of what
they hope for, which is not to die, and the evidence of what they do not
see.
And since a person is a will, and will always has reference to the
future, he who believes, believes in what is to come--that is, in what
he hopes for. We do not believe, strictly speaking, in what is or in
what was, except as the guarantee, as the substance, of what will be.
For the Christian, to believe in the resurrection of Christ--that is to
say, in tradition and in the Gospel, which assure him that Christ has
risen, both of them personal forces--is to believe that he himself will
one day rise again by the grace of Christ. And even scientific
faith--for such there is--refers to the future and is an act of trust.
The man of science believes that at a certain future date an eclipse of
the sun will take place; he believes that the laws which have governed
the world hitherto will continue to govern it.
To believe, I repeat, is to place confidence in someone, and it has
reference to a person. I say that I know that there is an animal called
the horse, and that it has such and such characteristics, because I have
seen it; and I say that I believe in the existence of the giraffe or the
ornithorhyncus, and that it possesses such and such qualities, because I
believe those who assure me that they have seen it. And hence the
element of uncertainty attached to faith, for it is possible that a
person may be deceived or that he may deceive us.
But, on the other hand, this personal element in belief gives it an
effective and loving character, and above all, in religious faith, a
reference to what is hoped for. Perhaps there is nobody who would
sacrifice his life for the sake of maintaining that the three angles of
a triangle are together equal to two right angles, for such a truth does
not demand the sacrifice of our life; but, on the other hand, there are
many who have lost their lives for the sake of maintaining their
religious faith. Indeed it is truer to say that martyrs make faith than
that faith makes martyrs. For faith is not the mere adherence of the
intellect to an abstract principle; it is not the recognition of a
theoretical truth, a process in which the will merely sets in motion our
faculty of comprehension; faith is an act of the will--it is a movement
of the soul towards a practical truth, towards a person, towards
something that makes us not merely comprehend life, but that makes us
live.[45]
Faith makes us live by showing us that life, although it is dependent
upon reason, has its well-spring and source of power elsewhere, in
something supernatural and miraculous. Cournot the mathematician, a man
of singularly well-balanced and scientifically equipped mind, has said
that it is this tendency towards the supernatural and miraculous that
gives life, and that when it is lacking, all the speculations of the
reason lead to nothing but affliction of spirit (_Traité de
l'enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et dans
l'histoire_, § 329). And in truth we wish to live.
But, although we have said that faith is a thing of the will, it would
perhaps be better to say that it is will itself--the will not to die,
or, rather, that it is some other psychic force distinct from
intelligence, will, and feeling. We should thus have feeling, knowing,
willing, and believing or creating. For neither feeling, nor
intelligence, nor will creates; they operate upon a material already
given, upon the material given them by faith. Faith is the creative
power in man. But since it has a more intimate relation with the will
than with any other of his faculties, we conceive it under the form of
volition. It should be borne in mind, however, that wishing to
believe--that is to say, wishing to create--is not precisely the same as
believing or creating, although it is its starting-point.
Faith, therefore, if not a creative force, is the fruit of the will, and
its function is to create. Faith, in a certain sense, creates its
object. And faith in God consists in creating God; and since it is God
who gives us faith in Himself, it is God who is continually creating
Himself in us. Therefore St. Augustine said: "I will seek Thee, Lord, by
calling upon Thee, and I will call upon Thee by believing in Thee. My
faith calls upon Thee, Lord, the faith which Thou hast given me, with
which Thou hast inspired me through the Humanity of Thy Son, through the
ministry of Thy preacher" (_Confessions_, book i., chap. i.). The power
of creating God in our own image and likeness, of personalizing the
Universe, simply means that we carry God within us, as the substance of
what we hope for, and that God is continually creating us in His own
image and likeness.
And we create God--that is to say, God creates Himself in us--by
compassion, by love. To believe in God is to love Him, and in our love
to fear Him; and we begin by loving Him even before knowing Him, and by
loving Him we come at last to see and discover Him in all things.
Those who say that they believe in God and yet neither love nor fear
Him, do not in fact believe in Him but in those who have taught them
that God exists, and these in their turn often enough do not believe in
Him either. Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any
passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty,
without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation,
believe only in the God-Idea, not in God Himself. And just as belief in
God is born of love, so also it may be born of fear, and even of hate,
and of such kind was the belief of Vanni Fucci, the thief, whom Dante
depicts insulting God with obscene gestures in Hell (_Inf._, xxv., 1-3).
For the devils also believe in God, and not a few atheists.
Is it not perhaps a mode of believing in God, this fury with which those
deny and even insult Him, who, because they cannot bring themselves to
believe in Him, wish that He may not exist? Like those who believe,
they, too, wish that God may exist; but being men of a weak and passive
or of an evil disposition, in whom reason is stronger than will, they
feel themselves caught in the grip of reason and haled along in their
own despite, and they fall into despair, and because of their despair
they deny, and in their denial they affirm and create the thing that
they deny, and God reveals Himself in them, affirming Himself by their
very denial of Him.
But it will be objected to all this that to demonstrate that faith
creates its own object is to demonstrate that this object is an object
for faith alone, that outside faith it has no objective reality; just
as, on the other hand, to maintain that faith is necessary because it
affords consolation to the masses of the people, or imposes a wholesome
restraint upon them, is to declare that the object of faith is illusory.
What is certain is that for thinking believers to-day, faith is, before
all and above all, wishing that God may exist.
Wishing that God may exist, and acting and feeling as if He did exist.
And desiring God's existence and acting conformably with this desire, is
the means whereby we create God--that is, whereby God creates Himself in
us, manifests Himself to us, opens and reveals Himself to us. For God
goes out to meet him who seeks Him with love and by love, and hides
Himself from him who searches for Him with the cold and loveless reason.
God wills that the heart should have rest, but not the head, reversing
the order of the physical life in which the head sleeps and rests at
times while the heart wakes and works unceasingly. And thus knowledge
without love leads us away from God; and love, even without knowledge,
and perhaps better without it, leads us to God, and through God to
wisdom. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God!
And if you should ask me how I believe in God--that is to say, how God
creates Himself in me and reveals Himself to me--my answer may, perhaps,
provoke your smiles or your laughter, or it may even scandalize you.
I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath
of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me,
leading me, grasping me; because I possess an inner consciousness of a
particular providence and of a universal mind that marks out for me the
course of my own destiny. And the concept of law--it is nothing but a
concept after all!--tells me nothing and teaches me nothing.
Once and again in my life I have seen myself suspended in a trance over
the abyss; once and again I have found myself at the cross-roads,
confronted by a choice of ways and aware that in choosing one I should
be renouncing all the others--for there is no turning back upon these
roads of life; and once and again in such unique moments as these I have
felt the impulse of a mighty power, conscious, sovereign, and loving.
And then, before the feet of the wayfarer, opens out the way of the
Lord.
It is possible for a man to feel the Universe calling to him and guiding
him as one person guides and calls to another, to hear within him its
voice speaking without words and saying: "Go and preach to all peoples!"
How do you know that the man you see before you possesses a
consciousness like you, and that an animal also possesses such a
consciousness, more or less dimly, but not a stone? Because the man acts
towards you like a man, like a being made in your likeness, and because
the stone does not act towards you at all, but suffers you to act upon
it. And in the same way I believe that the Universe possesses a certain
consciousness like myself, because its action towards me is a human
action, and I feel that it is a personality that environs me.
Here is a formless mass; it appears to be a kind of animal; it is
impossible to distinguish its members; I only see two eyes, eyes which
gaze at me with a human gaze, the gaze of a fellow-being, a gaze which
asks for pity; and I hear it breathing. I conclude that in this formless
mass there is a consciousness. In just such a way and none other, the
starry-eyed heavens gaze down upon the believer, with a superhuman, a
divine, gaze, a gaze that asks for supreme pity and supreme love, and in
the serenity of the night he hears the breathing of God, and God touches
him in his heart of hearts and reveals Himself to him. It is the
Universe, living, suffering, loving, and asking for love.
From loving little trifling material things, which lightly come and
lightly go, having no deep root in our affections, we come to love the
more lasting things, the things which our hands cannot grasp; from
loving goods we come to love the Good; from loving beautiful things we
come to love Beauty; from loving the true we come to love the Truth;
from loving pleasures we come to love Happiness; and, last of all, we
come to love Love. We emerge from ourselves in order to penetrate
further into our supreme I; individual consciousness emerges from us in
order to submerge itself in the total Consciousness of which we form a
part, but without being dissolved in it. And God is simply the Love that
springs from universal suffering and becomes consciousness.
But this, it will be said, is merely to revolve in an iron ring, for
such a God is not objective. And at this point it may not be out of
place to give reason its due and to examine exactly what is meant by a
thing existing, being objective.
What is it, in effect, to exist? and when do we say that a thing exists?
A thing exists when it is placed outside us, and in such a way that it
shall have preceded our perception of it and be capable of continuing to
subsist outside us after we have disappeared. But have I any certainty
that anything has preceded me or that anything must survive me? Can my
consciousness know that there is anything outside it? Everything that I
know or can know is within my consciousness. We will not entangle
ourselves, therefore, in the insoluble problem of an objectivity outside
our perceptions. Things exist in so far as they act. To exist is to act.
But now it will be said that it is not God, but the idea of God, that
acts in us. To which we shall reply that it is sometimes God acting by
His idea, but still very often it is rather God acting in us by Himself.
And the retort will be a demand for proofs of the objective truth of the
existence of God, since we ask for signs. And we shall have to answer
with Pilate: What is truth?
And having asked this question, Pilate turned away without waiting for
an answer and proceeded to wash his hands in order that he might
exculpate himself for having allowed Christ to be condemned to death.
And there are many who ask this question, What is truth? but without any
intention of waiting for the answer, and solely in order that they may
turn away and wash their hands of the crime of having helped to kill and
eject God from their own consciousness or from the consciousness of
others.
What is truth? There are two kinds of truth--the logical or objective,
the opposite of which is error, and the moral or subjective, the
opposite of which is falsehood. And in a previous essay I have
endeavoured to show that error is the fruit of falsehood.[46]
Moral truth, the road that leads to intellectual truth, which also is
moral, inculcates the study of science, which is over and above all a
school of sincerity and humility. Science teaches us, in effect, to
submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they
are--that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would
have them be. In a religiously scientific investigation, it is the data
of reality themselves, it is the perceptions which we receive from the
outside world, that formulate themselves in our mind as laws--it is not
we ourselves who thus formulate them. It is the numbers themselves which
in our mind create mathematics. Science is the most intimate school of
resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly
most insignificant of facts. And it is the gateway of religion; but
within the temple itself its function ceases.
And just as there is logical truth, opposed to error, and moral truth,
opposed to falsehood, so there is also esthetic truth or verisimilitude,
which is opposed to extravagance, and religious truth or hope, which is
opposed to the inquietude of absolute despair. For esthetic
verisimilitude, the expression of which is sensible, differs from
logical truth, the demonstration of which is rational; and religious
truth, the truth of faith, the substance of things hoped for, is not
equivalent to moral truth, but superimposes itself upon it. He who
affirms a faith built upon a basis of uncertainty does not and cannot
lie.
And not only do we not believe with reason, nor yet above reason nor
below reason, but we believe against reason. Religious faith, it must be
repeated yet again, is not only irrational, it is contra-rational.
Kierkegaard says: "Poetry is illusion before knowledge; religion
illusion after knowledge. Between poetry and religion the worldly wisdom
of living plays its comedy. Every individual who does not live either
poetically or religiously is a fool" (_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig
Efterskrift_, chap. iv., sect. 2a, § 2). The same writer tells us that
Christianity is a desperate sortie (_salida_). Even so, but it is only
by the very desperateness of this sortie that we can win through to
hope, to that hope whose vitalizing illusion is of more force than all
rational knowledge, and which assures us that there is always something
that cannot be reduced to reason. And of reason the same may be said as
was said of Christ: that he who is not with it is against it. That which
is not rational is contra-rational; and such is hope.
By this circuitous route we always arrive at hope in the end.
To the mystery of love, which is the mystery of suffering, belongs a
mysterious form, and this form is time. We join yesterday to to-morrow
with links of longing, and the now is, strictly, nothing but the
endeavour of the before to make itself the after; the present is simply
the determination of the past to become the future. The now is a point
which, if not sharply articulated, vanishes; and, nevertheless, in this
point is all eternity, the substance of time.
Everything that has been can be only as it was, and everything that is
can be only as it is; the possible is always relegated to the future,
the sole domain of liberty, wherein imagination, the creative and
liberating energy, the incarnation of faith, has space to roam at large.
Love ever looks and tends to the future, for its work is the work of our
perpetuation; the property of love is to hope, and only upon hopes does
it nourish itself. And thus when love sees the fruition of its desire it
becomes sad, for it then discovers that what it desired was not its true
end, and that God gave it this desire merely as a lure to spur it to
action; it discovers that its end is further on, and it sets out again
upon its toilsome pilgrimage through life, revolving through a constant
cycle of illusions and disillusions. And continually it transforms its
frustrated hopes into memories, and from these memories it draws fresh
hopes. From the subterranean ore of memory we extract the jewelled
visions of our future; imagination shapes our remembrances into hopes.
And humanity is like a young girl full of longings, hungering for life
and thirsting for love, who weaves her days with dreams, and hopes,
hopes ever, hopes without ceasing, for the eternal and predestined
lover, for him who, because he was destined for her from the beginning,
from before the dawn of her remotest memory, from before her
cradle-days, shall live with her and for her into the illimitable
future, beyond the stretch of her furthest hopes, beyond the grave
itself. And for this poor lovelorn humanity, as for the girl ever
awaiting her lover, there is no kinder wish than that when the winter of
life shall come it may find the sweet dreams of its spring changed into
memories sweeter still, and memories that shall burgeon into new hopes.
In the days when our summer is over, what a flow of calm felicity, of
resignation to destiny, must come from remembering hopes which have
never been realized and which, because they have never been realized,
preserve their pristine purity.
Love hopes, hopes ever and never wearies of hoping; and love of God, our
faith in God, is, above all, hope in Him. For God dies not, and he who
hopes in God shall live for ever. And our fundamental hope, the root and
stem of all our hopes, is the hope of eternal life.
And if faith is the substance of hope, hope in its turn is the form of
faith. Until it gives us hope, our faith is a formless faith, vague,
chaotic, potential; it is but the possibility of believing, the longing
to believe. But we must needs believe in something, and we believe in
what we hope for, we believe in hope. We remember the past, we know the
present, we only believe in the future. To believe what we have not seen
is to believe what we shall see. Faith, then, I repeat once again, is
faith in hope; we believe what we hope for.
Love makes us believe in God, in whom we hope and from whom we hope to
receive life to come; love makes us believe in that which the dream of
hope creates for us.
Faith is our longing for the eternal, for God; and hope is God's
longing, the longing of the eternal, of the divine in us, which advances
to meet our faith and uplifts us. Man aspires to God by faith and cries
to Him: "I believe--give me, Lord, wherein to believe!" And God, the
divinity in man, sends him hope in another life in order that he may
believe in it. Hope is the reward of faith. Only he who believes truly
hopes; and only he who truly hopes believes. We only believe what we
hope, and we only hope what we believe.
It was hope that called God by the name of Father; and this name, so
comforting yet so mysterious, is still bestowed upon Him by hope. The
father gave us life and gives bread wherewith to sustain it, and we ask
the father to preserve our life for us. And if Christ was he who, with
the fullest heart and purest mouth, named with the name of Father his
Father and ours, if the noblest feeling of Christianity is the feeling
of the Fatherhood of God, it is because in Christ the human race
sublimated its hunger for eternity.
It may perhaps be said that this longing of faith, that this hope, is
more than anything else an esthetic feeling. Possibly the esthetic
feeling enters into it, but without completely satisfying it.
We seek in art an image of eternalization. If for a brief moment our
spirit finds peace and rest and assuagement in the contemplation of the
beautiful, even though it finds therein no real cure for its distress,
it is because the beautiful is the revelation of the eternal, of the
divine in things, and beauty but the perpetuation of momentaneity. Just
as truth is the goal of rational knowledge, so beauty is the goal of
hope, which is perhaps in its essence irrational.
Nothing is lost, nothing wholly passes away, for in some way or another
everything is perpetuated; and everything, after passing through time,
returns to eternity. The temporal world has its roots in eternity, and
in eternity yesterday is united with to-day and to-morrow. The scenes of
life pass before us as in a cinematograph show, but on the further side
of time the film is one and indivisible.
Physicists affirm that not a single particle of matter nor a single
tremor of energy is lost, but that each is transformed and transmitted
and persists. And can it be that any form, however fugitive it may be,
is lost? We must needs believe--believe and hope!--that it is not, but
that somewhere it remains archived and perpetuated, and that there is
some mirror of eternity in which, without losing themselves in one
another, all the images that pass through time are received. Every
impression that reaches me remains stored up in my brain even though it
may be so deep or so weak that it is buried in the depths of my
subconsciousness; but from these depths it animates my life; and if the
whole of my spirit, the total content of my soul, were to awake to full
consciousness, all these dimly perceived and forgotten fugitive
impressions would come to life again, including even those which I had
never been aware of. I carry within me everything that has passed before
me, and I perpetuate it with myself, and it may be that it all goes into
my germs, and that all my ancestors live undiminished in me and will
continue so to live, united with me, in my descendants. And perhaps I,
the whole I, with all this universe of mine, enter into each one of my
actions, or, at all events, that which is essential in me enters into
them--that which makes me myself, my individual essence.
And how is this individual essence in each several thing--that which
makes it itself and not another--revealed to us save as beauty? What is
the beauty of anything but its eternal essence, that which unites its
past with its future, that element of it that rests and abides in the
womb of eternity? or, rather, what is it but the revelation of its
divinity?
And this beauty, which is the root of eternity, is revealed to us by
love; it is the supreme revelation of the love of God and the token of
our ultimate victory over time. It is love that reveals to us the
eternal in us and in our neighbours.
Is it the beautiful, the eternal, in things, that awakens and kindles
our love for them, or is it our love for things that reveals to us the
beautiful, the eternal, in them? Is not beauty perhaps a creation of
love, in the same way and in the same sense that the sensible world is a
creation of the instinct of preservation and the supersensible world of
that of perpetuation? Is not beauty, and together with beauty eternity,
a creation of love? "Though our outward man perish," says the Apostle,
"yet the inward man is renewed day by day" (2 Cor. iv. 16). The man of
passing appearances perishes and passes away with them; the man of
reality remains and grows. "For our light affliction, which is but for a
moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory"
(ver. 17). Our suffering causes us anguish, and this anguish, bursting
because of its own fullness, seems to us consolation. "While we look not
at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for
the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not
seen are eternal" (ver. 18).
This suffering gives hope, which is the beautiful in life, the supreme
beauty, or the supreme consolation. And since love is full of suffering,
since love is compassion and pity, beauty springs from compassion and is
simply the temporal consolation that compassion seeks. A tragic
consolation! And the supreme beauty is that of tragedy. The
consciousness that everything passes away, that we ourselves pass away,
and that everything that is ours and everything that environs us passes
away, fills us with anguish, and this anguish itself reveals to us the
consolation of that which does not pass away, of the eternal, of the
beautiful.
And this beauty thus revealed, this perpetuation of momentaneity, only
realizes itself practically, only lives through the work of charity.
Hope in action is charity, and beauty in action is goodness.
* * * * *
Charity, which eternalizes everything it loves, and in giving us the
goodness of it brings to light its hidden beauty, has its root in the
love of God, or, if you like, in charity towards God, in pity for God.
Love, pity, personalizes everything, we have said; in discovering the
suffering in everything and in personalizing everything, it personalizes
the Universe itself as well--for the Universe also suffers--and it
discovers God to us. For God is revealed to us because He suffers and
because we suffer; because He suffers He demands our love, and because
we suffer He gives us His love, and He covers our anguish with the
eternal and infinite anguish.
This was the scandal of Christianity among Jews and Greeks, among
Pharisees and Stoics, and this, which was its scandal of old, the
scandal of the Cross, is still its scandal to-day, and will continue to
be so, even among Christians themselves--the scandal of a God who
becomes man in order that He may suffer and die and rise again, because
He has suffered and died, the scandal of a God subject to suffering and
death. And this truth that God suffers--a truth that appals the mind of
man--is the revelation of the very heart of the Universe and of its
mystery, the revelation that God revealed to us when He sent His Son in
order that he might redeem us by suffering and dying. It was the
revelation of the divine in suffering, for only that which suffers is
divine.
And men made a god of this Christ who suffered, and through him they
discovered the eternal essence of a living, human God--that is, of a God
who suffers--it is only the dead, the inhuman, that does not suffer--a
God who loves and thirsts for love, for pity, a God who is a person.
Whosoever knows not the Son will never know the Father, and the Father
is only known through the Son; whosoever knows not the Son of Man--he
who suffers bloody anguish and the pangs of a breaking heart, whose soul
is heavy within him even unto death, who suffers the pain that kills and
brings to life again--will never know the Father, and can know nothing
of the suffering God.
He who does not suffer, and who does not suffer because he does not
live, is that logical and frozen _ens realissimum_, the _primum movens_,
that impassive entity, which because of its impassivity is nothing but a
pure idea. The category does not suffer, but neither does it live or
exist as a person. And how is the world to derive its origin and life
from an impassive idea? Such a world would be but the idea of the world.
But the world suffers, and suffering is the sense of the flesh of
reality; it is the spirit's sense of its mass and substance; it is the
self's sense of its own tangibility; it is immediate reality.
Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it
is only suffering that makes us persons. And suffering is universal,
suffering is that which unites all us living beings together; it is the
universal or divine blood that flows through us all. That which we call
will, what is it but suffering?
And suffering has its degrees, according to the depth of its
penetration, from the suffering that floats upon the sea of appearances
to the eternal anguish, the source of the tragic sense of life, which
seeks a habitation in the depths of the eternal and there awakens
consolation; from the physical suffering that contorts our bodies to the
religious anguish that flings us upon the bosom of God, there to be
watered by the divine tears.
Anguish is something far deeper, more intimate, and more spiritual than
suffering. We are wont to feel the touch of anguish even in the midst of
that which we call happiness, and even because of this happiness itself,
to which we cannot resign ourselves and before which we tremble. The
happy who resign themselves to their apparent happiness, to a transitory
happiness, seem to be as men without substance, or, at any rate, men who
have not discovered this substance in themselves, who have not touched
it. Such men are usually incapable of loving or of being loved, and they
go through life without really knowing either pain or bliss.
There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to
choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. And love leads us
to no other happiness than that of love itself and its tragic
consolation of uncertain hope. The moment love becomes happy and
satisfied, it no longer desires and it is no longer love. The
satisfied, the happy, do not love; they fall asleep in habit, near
neighbour to annihilation. To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to
be. Man is the more man--that is, the more divine--the greater his
capacity for suffering, or, rather, for anguish.
At our coming into the world it is given to us to choose between love
and happiness, and we wish--poor fools!--for both: the happiness of
loving and the love of happiness. But we ought to ask for the gift of
love and not of happiness, and to be preserved from dozing away into
habit, lest we should fall into a fast sleep, a sleep without waking,
and so lose our consciousness beyond power of recovery. We ought to ask
God to make us conscious of ourselves in ourselves, in our suffering.
What is Fate, what is Fatality, but the brotherhood of love and
suffering? What is it but that terrible mystery in virtue of which love
dies as soon as it touches the happiness towards which it reaches out,
and true happiness dies with it? Love and suffering mutually engender
one another, and love is charity and compassion, and the love that is
not charitable and compassionate is not love. Love, in a word, is
resigned despair.
That which the mathematicians call the problem of maxima and minima,
which is also called the law of economy, is the formula for all
existential--that is, passional--activity. In material mechanics and in
social mechanics, in industry and in political economy, every problem
resolves itself into an attempt to obtain the greatest possible
resulting utility with the least possible effort, the greatest income
with the least expenditure, the most pleasure with the least pain. And
the terrible and tragic formula of the inner, spiritual life is either
to obtain the most happiness with the least love, or the most love with
the least happiness. And it is necessary to choose between the one and
the other, and to know that he who approaches the infinite of love, the
love that is infinite, approaches the zero of happiness, the supreme
anguish. And in reaching this zero he is beyond the reach of the misery
that kills. "Be not, and thou shalt be mightier than aught that is,"
said Brother Juan de los Angeles in one of his _Diálogos de la conquista
del reino de Dios_ (Dial. iii. 8).
And there is something still more anguishing than suffering. A man about
to receive a much-dreaded blow expects to have to suffer so severely
that he may even succumb to the suffering, and when the blow falls he
feels scarcely any pain; but afterwards, when he has come to himself and
is conscious of his insensibility, he is seized with terror, a tragic
terror, the most terrible of all, and choking with anguish he cries out:
"Can it be that I no longer exist?" Which would you find most
appalling--to feel such a pain as would deprive you of your senses on
being pierced through with a white-hot iron, or to see yourself thus
pierced through without feeling any pain? Have you never felt the
horrible terror of feeling yourself incapable of suffering and of tears?
Suffering tells us that we exist; suffering tells us that those whom we
love exist; suffering tells us that the world in which we live exists;
and suffering tells us that God exists and suffers; but it is the
suffering of anguish, the anguish of surviving and being eternal.
Anguish discovers God to us and makes us love Him.
To believe in God is to love Him, and to love Him is to feel Him
suffering, to pity Him.
It may perhaps appear blasphemous to say that God suffers, for suffering
implies limitation. Nevertheless, God, the Consciousness of the
Universe, is limited by the brute matter in which He lives, by the
unconscious, from which He seeks to liberate Himself and to liberate us.
And we, in our turn, must seek to liberate Him. God suffers in each and
all of us, in each and all of the consciousnesses imprisoned in
transitory matter, and we all suffer in Him. Religious anguish is but
the divine suffering, the feeling that God suffers in me and that I
suffer in Him.
The universal suffering is the anguish of all in seeking to be all else
but without power to achieve it, the anguish of each in being he that he
is, being at the same time all that he is not, and being so for ever.
The essence of a being is not only its endeavour to persist for ever, as
Spinoza taught us, but also its endeavour to universalize itself; it is
the hunger and thirst for eternity and infinity. Every created being
tends not only to preserve itself in itself, but to perpetuate itself,
and, moreover, to invade all other beings, to be others without ceasing
to be itself, to extend its limits to the infinite, but without breaking
them. It does not wish to throw down its walls and leave everything laid
flat, common and undefended, confounding and losing its own
individuality, but it wishes to carry its walls to the extreme limits of
creation and to embrace everything within them. It seeks the maximum of
individuality with the maximum also of personality; it aspires to the
identification of the Universe with itself; it aspires to God.
And this vast I, within which each individual I seeks to put the
Universe--what is it but God? And because I aspire to God, I love Him;
and this aspiration of mine towards God is my love for Him, and just as
I suffer in being He, He also suffers in being I, and in being each one
of us.
I am well aware that in spite of my warning that I am attempting here to
give a logical form to a system of a-logical feelings, I shall be
scandalizing not a few of my readers in speaking of a God who suffers,
and in applying to God Himself, as God, the passion of Christ. The God
of so-called rational theology excludes in effect all suffering. And the
reader will no doubt think that this idea of suffering can have only a
metaphorical value when applied to God, similar to that which is
supposed to attach to those passages in the Old Testament which
describe the human passions of the God of Israel. For anger, wrath, and
vengeance are impossible without suffering. And as for saying that God
suffers through being bound by matter, I shall be told that, in the
words of Plotinus (_Second Ennead_, ix., 7), the Universal Soul cannot
be bound by the very thing--namely, bodies or matter--which is bound by
It.
Herein is involved the whole problem of the origin of evil, the evil of
sin no less than the evil of pain, for if God does not suffer, He causes
suffering; and if His life, since God lives, is not a process of
realizing in Himself a total consciousness which is continually becoming
fuller--that is to say, which is continually becoming more and more
God--it is a process of drawing all things towards Himself, of imparting
Himself to all, of constraining the consciousness of each part to enter
into the consciousness of the All, which is He Himself, until at last He
comes to be all in all--_panta en paot_, according to the expression of
St. Paul, the first Christian mystic. We will discuss this more fully,
however, in the next chapter on the apocatastasis or beatific union.
For the present let it suffice to say that there is a vast current of
suffering urging living beings towards one another, constraining them to
love one another and to seek one another, and to endeavour to complete
one another, and to be each himself and others at the same time. In God
everything lives, and in His suffering everything suffers, and in loving
God we love His creatures in Him, just as in loving and pitying His
creatures we love and pity God in them. No single soul can be free so
long as there is anything enslaved in God's world, neither can God
Himself, who lives in the soul of each one of us, be free so long as our
soul is not free.
My most immediate sensation is the sense and love of my own misery, my
anguish, the compassion I feel for myself, the love I bear for myself.
And when this compassion is vital and superabundant, it overflows from
me upon others, and from the excess of my own compassion I come to have
compassion for my neighbours. My own misery is so great that the
compassion for myself which it awakens within me soon overflows and
reveals to me the universal misery.
And what is charity but the overflow of pity? What is it but reflected
pity that overflows and pours itself out in a flood of pity for the woes
of others and in the exercise of charity?
When the overplus of our pity leads us to the consciousness of God
within us, it fills us with so great anguish for the misery shed abroad
in all things, that we have to pour our pity abroad, and this we do in
the form of charity. And in this pouring abroad of our pity we
experience relief and the painful sweetness of goodness. This is what
Teresa de Jesús, the mystical doctor, called "sweet-tasting suffering"
(_dolor sabroso_), and she knew also the lore of suffering loves. It is
as when one looks upon some thing of beauty and feels the necessity of
making others sharers in it. For the creative impulse, in which charity
consists, is the work of suffering love.
We feel, in effect, a satisfaction in doing good when good superabounds
within us, when we are swollen with pity; and we are swollen with pity
when God, filling our soul, gives us the suffering sensation of
universal life, of the universal longing for eternal divinization. For
we are not merely placed side by side with others in the world, having
no common root with them, neither is their lot indifferent to us, but
their pain hurts us, their anguish fills us with anguish, and we feel
our community of origin and of suffering even without knowing it.
Suffering, and pity which is born of suffering, are what reveal to us
the brotherhood of every existing thing that possesses life and more or
less of consciousness. "Brother Wolf" St. Francis of Assisi called the
poor wolf that feels a painful hunger for the sheep, and feels, too,
perhaps, the pain of having to devour them; and this brotherhood reveals
to us the Fatherhood of God, reveals to us that God is a Father and that
He exists. And as a Father He shelters our common misery.
Charity, then, is the impulse to liberate myself and all my fellows from
suffering, and to liberate God, who embraces us all.
Suffering is a spiritual thing. It is the most immediate revelation of
consciousness, and it may be that our body was given us simply in order
that suffering might be enabled to manifest itself. A man who had never
known suffering, either in greater or less degree, would scarcely
possess consciousness of himself. The child first cries at birth when
the air, entering into his lungs and limiting him, seems to say to him:
You have to breathe me in order that you may live!
We must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us,
that the material or sensible world which the senses create for us
exists solely in order to embody and sustain that other spiritual or
imaginable world which the imagination creates for us. Consciousness
tends to be ever more and more consciousness, to intensify its
consciousness, to acquire full consciousness of its complete self, of
the whole of its content. We must needs believe with faith, whatever
counsels reason may give us, that in the depths of our own bodies, in
animals, in plants, in rocks, in everything that lives, in all the
Universe, there is a spirit that strives to know itself, to acquire
consciousness of itself, to be itself--for to be oneself is to know
oneself--to be pure spirit; and since it can only achieve this by means
of the body, by means of matter, it creates and makes use of matter at
the same time that it remains the prisoner of it. The face can only see
itself when portrayed in the mirror, but in order to see itself it must
remain the prisoner of the mirror in which it sees itself, and the image
which it sees therein is as the mirror distorts it; and if the mirror
breaks, the image is broken; and if the mirror is blurred, the image is
blurred.
Spirit finds itself limited by the matter in which it has to live and
acquire consciousness of itself, just as thought is limited by the word
in which as a social medium it is incarnated. Without matter there is no
spirit, but matter makes spirit suffer by limiting it. And suffering is
simply the obstacle which matter opposes to spirit; it is the clash of
the conscious with the unconscious.
Suffering is, in effect, the barrier which unconsciousness, matter, sets
up against consciousness, spirit; it is the resistance to will, the
limit which the visible universe imposes upon God; it is the wall that
consciousness runs up against when it seeks to extend itself at the
expense of unconsciousness; it is the resistance which unconsciousness
opposes to its penetration by consciousness.
Although in deference to authority we may believe, we do not in fact
know, that we possess heart, stomach, or lungs so long as they do not
cause us discomfort, suffering, or anguish. Physical suffering, or even
discomfort, is what reveals to us our own internal core. And the same is
true of spiritual suffering and anguish, for we do not take account of
the fact that we possess a soul until it hurts us.
Anguish is that which makes consciousness return upon itself. He who
knows no anguish knows what he does and what he thinks, but he does not
truly know that he does it and that he thinks it. He thinks, but he does
not think that he thinks, and his thoughts are as if they were not his.
Neither does he properly belong to himself. For it is only anguish, it
is only the passionate longing never to die, that makes a human spirit
master of itself.
Pain, which is a kind of dissolution, makes us discover our internal
core; and in the supreme dissolution, which is death, we shall, at last,
through the pain of annihilation, arrive at the core of our temporal
core--at God, whom in our spiritual anguish we breathe and learn to
love.
Even so must we believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give
us.
The origin of evil, as many discovered of old, is nothing other than
what is called by another name the inertia of matter, and, as applied to
the things of the spirit, sloth. And not without truth has it been said
that sloth is the mother of all vices, not forgetting that the supreme
sloth is that of not longing madly for immortality.
Consciousness, the craving for more, more, always more, hunger of
eternity and thirst of infinity, appetite for God--these are never
satisfied. Each consciousness seeks to be itself and to be all other
consciousnesses without ceasing to be itself: it seeks to be God. And
matter, unconsciousness, tends to be less and less, tends to be nothing,
its thirst being a thirst for repose. Spirit says: I wish to be! and
matter answers: I wish not to be!
And in the order of human life, the individual would tend, under the
sole instigation of the instinct of preservation, the creator of the
material world, to destruction, to annihilation, if it were not for
society, which, in implanting in him the instinct of perpetuation, the
creator of the spiritual world, lifts and impels him towards the All,
towards immortalization. And everything that man does as a mere
individual, opposed to society, for the sake of his own preservation,
and at the expense of society, if need be, is bad; and everything that
he does as a social person, for the sake of the society in which he
himself is included, for the sake of its perpetuation and of the
perpetuation of himself in it, is good. And many of those who seem to be
the greatest egoists, trampling everything under their feet in their
zeal to bring their work to a successful issue, are in reality men
whose souls are aflame and overflowing with charity, for they subject
and subordinate their petty personal I to the social I that has a
mission to accomplish.
He who would tie the working of love, of spiritualization, of
liberation, to transitory and individual forms, crucifies God in matter;
he crucifies God who makes the ideal subservient to his own temporal
interests or worldly glory. And such a one is a deicide.
The work of charity, of the love of God, is to endeavour to liberate God
from brute matter, to endeavour to give consciousness to everything, to
spiritualize or universalize everything; it is to dream that the very
rocks may find a voice and work in accordance with the spirit of this
dream; it is to dream that everything that exists may become conscious,
that the Word may become life.
We have but to look at the eucharistic symbol to see an instance of it.
The Word has been imprisoned in a piece of material bread, and it has
been imprisoned therein to the end that we may eat it, and in eating it
make it our own, part and parcel of our body in which the spirit dwells,
and that it may beat in our heart and think in our brain and be
consciousness. It has been imprisoned in this bread in order that, after
being buried in our body, it may come to life again in our spirit.
And we must spiritualize everything. And this we shall accomplish by
giving our spirit, which grows the more the more it is distributed, to
all men and to all things. And we give our spirit when we invade other
spirits and make ourselves the master of them.
All this is to be believed with faith, whatever counsels reason may give
us.
* * * * *
And now we are about to see what practical consequences all these more
or less fantastical doctrines may have in regard to logic, to esthetics,
and, above all, to ethics--their religious concretion, in a word. And
perhaps then they will gain more justification in the eyes of the
reader who, in spite of my warnings, has hitherto been looking for the
scientific or even philosophic development of an irrational system.
I think it may not be superfluous to recall to the reader once again
what I said at the conclusion of the sixth chapter, that entitled "In
the Depths of the Abyss"; but we now approach the practical or
pragmatical part of this treatise. First, however, we must see how the
religious sense may become concrete in the hopeful vision of another
life.