RELIGION, THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE BEYOND AND THE APOCATASTASIS

_Kai gar isôs kai malista prepei mellonta echeise apodêmein diaskopein te

kai muthologein peri tês apodêmias tês echei, poian tina autên oiometha

einai._--PLATO: _Phædo_.

Religion is founded upon faith, hope, and charity, which in their turn

are founded upon the feeling of divinity and of God. Of faith in God is

born our faith in men, of hope in God hope in men, and of charity or

piety towards God--for as Cicero said,[47] _est enim pietas iustitia

adversum deos_--charity towards men. In God is resumed not only

Humanity, but the whole Universe, and the Universe spiritualized and

penetrated with consciousness, for as the Christian Faith teaches, God

shall at last be all in all. St. Teresa said, and Miguel de Molinos

repeated with a harsher and more despairing inflection, that the soul

must realize that nothing exists but itself and God.

And this relation with God, this more or less intimate union with Him,

is what we call religion.

What is religion? In what does it differ from the religious sense and

how are the two related? Every man's definition of religion is based

upon his own inward experience of it rather than upon his observation of

it in others, nor indeed is it possible to define it without in some way

or another experiencing it. Tacitus said (_Hist._ v. 4), speaking of the

Jews, that they regarded as profane everything that the Romans held to

be sacred, and that what was sacred to them was to the Romans impure:

_profana illic omnia quæ apud nos sacra, rursum conversa apud illos quæ

nobis incesta_. Therefore he, the Roman, describes the Jews as a people

dominated by superstition and hostile to religion, _gens superstitioni

obnoxia, religionibus adversa_, while as regards Christianity, with

which he was very imperfectly acquainted, scarcely distinguishing it

from Judaism, he deemed it to be a pernicious superstition, _existialis

superstitio_, inspired by a hatred of mankind, _odium generis humani_

(_Ab excessu Aug._, xv., 44). And there have been many others who have

shared his opinion. But where does religion end and superstition begin,

or perhaps rather we should say at what point does superstition merge

into religion? What is the criterion by means of which we discriminate

between them?

It would be of little profit to recapitulate here, even summarily, the

principal definitions, each bearing the impress of the personal feeling

of its definer, which have been given of religion. Religion is better

described than defined and better felt than described. But if there is

any one definition that latterly has obtained acceptance, it is that of

Schleiermacher, to the effect that religion consists in the simple

feeling of a relationship of dependence upon something above us and a

desire to establish relations with this mysterious power. Nor is there

much amiss with the statement of W. Hermann[48] that the religious

longing of man is a desire for truth concerning his human existence. And

to cut short these extraneous citations, I will end with one from the

judicious and perspicacious Cournot: "Religious manifestations are the

necessary consequence of man's predisposition to believe in the

existence of an invisible, supernatural and miraculous world, a

predisposition which it has been possible to consider sometimes as a

reminiscence of an anterior state, sometimes as an intimation of a

future destiny" (_Traité de l'enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans

les sciences et dans l'histoire_, § 396). And it is this problem of

human destiny, of eternal life, or of the human finality of the Universe

or of God, that we have now reached. All the highways of religion lead

up to this, for it is the very essence of all religion.

Beginning with the savage's personalization of the whole Universe in his

fetich, religion has its roots in the vital necessity of giving human

finality to the Universe, to God, and this necessity obliges it,

therefore, to attribute to the Universe, to God, consciousness of self

and of purpose. And it may be said that religion is simply union with

God, each one interpreting God according to his own sense of Him. God

gives transcendent meaning and finality to life; but He gives it

relatively to each one of us who believe in Him. And thus God is for man

as much as man is for God, for God in becoming man, in becoming human,

has given Himself to man because of His love of him.

And this religious longing for union with God is a longing for a union

that cannot be consummated in science or in art, but only in life. "He

who possesses science and art, has religion; he who possesses neither

science nor art, let him get religion," said Goethe in one of his

frequent accesses of paganism. And yet in spite of what he said, he

himself, Goethe...?

And to wish that we may be united with God is not to wish that we may be

lost and submerged in Him, for this loss and submersion of self ends at

last in the complete dissolution of self in the dreamless sleep of

Nirvana; it is to wish to possess Him rather than to be possessed by

Him. When his disciples, amazed at his saying that it was impossible for

a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven, asked Jesus who then

could be saved, the Master replied that with men it was impossible but

not with God; and then said Peter, "Behold, we have forsaken all and

followed thee; what shall we have therefore?" And the reply of Jesus

was, not that they should be absorbed in the Father, but that they

should sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel

(Matt. xix. 23-26).

It was a Spaniard, and very emphatically a Spaniard, Miguel de Molinos,

who said in his _Guía Espiritual_[49] that "he who would attain to the

mystical science must abandon and be detached from five things: first,

from creatures; second, from temporal things; third, from the very gifts

of the Holy Spirit; fourth, from himself; and fifth, he must be detached

even from God." And he adds that "this last is the completest of all,

because that soul only that knows how to be so detached is that which

attains to being lost in God, and only the soul that attains to being so

lost succeeds in finding itself." Emphatically a true Spaniard, Molinos,

and truly Spanish is this paradoxical expression of quietism or rather

of nihilism--for he himself elsewhere speaks of annihilation--and not

less Spanish, nay, perhaps even more Spanish, were the Jesuits who

attacked him, upholding the prerogatives of the All against the claims

of Nothingness. For religion is not the longing for self-annihilation,

but for self-completion, it is the longing not for death but for life.

"The eternal religion of the inward essence of man ... the individual

dream of the heart, is the worship of his own being, the adoration of

life," as the tortured soul of Flaubert was intimately aware (_Par les

champs et par les grèves_, vii.).

When at the beginning of the so-called modern age, at the Renaissance,

the pagan sense of religion came to life again, it took concrete form in

the knightly ideal with its codes of love and honour. But it was a

paganism Christianized, baptized. "Woman--_la donna_--was the divinity

enshrined within those savage breasts. Whosoever will investigate the

memorials of primitive times will find this ideal of woman in its full

force and purity; the Universe is woman. And so it was in Germany, in

France, in Provence, in Spain, in Italy, at the beginning of the modern

age. History was cast in this mould; Trojans and Romans were conceived

as knights-errant, and so too were Arabs, Saracens, Turks, the Sultan

and Saladin.... In this universal fraternity mingle angels, saints,

miracles and paradise, strangely blended with the fantasy and

voluptuousness of the Oriental world, and all baptized in the name of

Chivalry." Thus, in his _Storia della Letteratura italiana_, ii., writes

Francesco de Sanctis, and in an earlier passage he informs us that for

that breed of men "in paradise itself the lover's delight was to look

upon his lady--_Madonna_--and that he had no desire to go thither if he

might not go in his lady's company." What, in fact, was Chivalry--which

Cervantes, intending to kill it, afterwards purified and Christianized

in _Don Quixote_--but a real though distorted religion, a hybrid between

paganism and Christianity, whose gospel perhaps was the legend of

Tristan and Iseult? And did not even the Christianity of the

mystics--those knights-errant of the spirit--possibly reach its

culminating-point in the worship of the divine woman, the Virgin Mary?

What else was the Mariolatry of a St. Bonaventura, the troubadour of

Mary? And this sentiment found its inspiration in love of the fountain

of life, of that which saves us from death.

But as the Renaissance advanced men turned from the religion of woman to

the religion of science; desire, the foundation of which was curiosity,

ended in curiosity, in eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of

good and evil. Europe flocked to the University of Bologna in search of

learning. Chivalry was succeeded by Platonism. Men sought to discover

the mystery of the world and of life. But it was really in order to save

life, which they had also sought to save in the worship of woman. Human

consciousness sought to penetrate the Universal Consciousness, but its

real object, whether it was aware of it or not, was to save itself.

For the truth is that we feel and imagine the Universal

Consciousness--and in this feeling and imagination religious experience

consists--simply in order that thereby we may save our own individual

consciousnesses. And how?

Once again I must repeat that the longing for the immortality of the

soul, for the permanence, in some form or another, of our personal and

individual consciousness, is as much of the essence of religion as is

the longing that there may be a God. The one does not exist apart from

the other, the reason being that fundamentally they are one and the same

thing. But as soon as we attempt to give a concrete and rational form to

this longing for immortality and permanence, to define it to ourselves,

we encounter even more difficulties than we encountered in our attempt

to rationalize God.

The universal consent of mankind has again been invoked as a means of

justifying this immortal longing for immortality to our own feeble

reason. _Permanere animos arbitratur consensu nationum omnium_, said

Cicero, echoing the opinion of the ancients (_Tuscul. Quæst._, xvi.,

36). But this same recorder of his own feelings confessed that, although

when he read the arguments in favour of the immortality of the soul in

the _Phædo_ of Plato he was compelled to assent to them, as soon as he

put the book aside and began to revolve the problem in his own mind, all

his previous assent melted away, _assentio omnis illa illabitur_ (cap.

xi., 25). And what happened to Cicero happens to us all, and it happened

likewise to Swedenborg, the most daring visionary of the other world.

Swedenborg admitted that he who discourses of life after death, putting

aside all erudite notions concerning the soul and its mode of union with

the body, believes that after death he shall live in a glorious joy and

vision, as a man among angels; but when he begins to reflect upon the

doctrine of the union of the soul with the body, or upon the

hypothetical opinion concerning the soul, doubts arise in him as to

whether the soul is thus or otherwise, and when these doubts arise, his

former idea is dissipated (_De cælo et inferno_, § 183). Nevertheless,

as Cournot says, "it is the destiny that awaits me, _me_ or my _person_,

that moves, perturbs and consoles me, that makes me capable of

abnegation and sacrifice, whatever be the origin, the nature or the

essence of this inexplicable bond of union, in the absence of which the

philosophers are pleased to determine that my person must disappear"

(_Traité_, etc., § 297).

Must we then embrace the pure and naked faith in an eternal life without

trying to represent it to ourselves? This is impossible; it is beyond

our power to bring ourselves or accustom ourselves to do so. And

nevertheless there are some who call themselves Christians and yet leave

almost altogether on one side this question of representation. Take any

work of theology informed by the most enlightened--that is, the most

rationalistic and liberal--Protestantism; take, for instance, the

_Dogmatik_ of Dr. Julius Kaftan, and of the 668 pages of which the sixth

edition, that of 1909, consists, you will find only one, the last, that

is devoted to this problem. And in this page, after affirming that

Christ is not only the beginning and middle but also the end and

consummation of History, and that those who are in Christ will attain to

fullness of life, the eternal life of those who are in Christ, not a

single word as to what that life may be. Half a dozen words at most

about eternal death, that is, hell, "for its existence is demanded by

the moral character of faith and of Christian hope." Its moral

character, eh? not its religious character, for I am not aware that the

latter knows any such exigency. And all this inspired by a prudent

agnostic parsimony.

Yes, the prudent, the rational, and, some will say, the pious,

attitude, is not to seek to penetrate into mysteries that are hidden

from our knowledge, not to insist upon shaping a plastic representation

of eternal glory, such as that of the _Divina Commedia_. True faith,

true Christian piety, we shall be told, consists in resting upon the

confidence that God, by the grace of Christ, will, in some way or

another, make us live in Him, in His Son; that, as our destiny is in His

almighty hands, we should surrender ourselves to Him, in the full

assurance that He will do with us what is best for the ultimate end of

life, of spirit and of the universe. Such is the teaching that has

traversed many centuries, and was notably prominent in the period

between Luther and Kant.

And nevertheless men have not ceased endeavouring to imagine to

themselves what this eternal life may be, nor will they cease their

endeavours so long as they are men and not merely thinking machines.

There are books of theology--or of what passes for theology--full of

disquisitions upon the conditions under which the blessed dead live in

paradise, upon their mode of enjoyment, upon the properties of the

glorious body, for without some form of body the soul cannot be

conceived.

And to this same necessity, the real necessity of forming to ourselves a

concrete representation of what this other life may be, must in great

part be referred the indestructible vitality of doctrines such as those

of spiritualism, metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls from star

to star, and the like; doctrines which as often as they are pronounced

to be defeated and dead, are found to have come to life again, clothed

in some more or less new form. And it is merely supine to be content to

ignore them and not to seek to discover their permanent and living

essence. Man will never willingly abandon his attempt to form a concrete

representation of the other life.

But is an eternal and endless life after death indeed thinkable? How

can we conceive the life of a disembodied spirit? How can we conceive

such a spirit? How can we conceive a pure consciousness, without a

corporal organism? Descartes divided the world into thought and

extension, a dualism which was imposed upon him by the Christian dogma

of the immortality of the soul. But is extension, is matter, that which

thinks and is spiritualized, or is thought that which is extended and

materialized? The weightiest questions of metaphysics arise practically

out of our desire to arrive at an understanding of the possibility of

our immortality--from this fact they derive their value and cease to be

merely the idle discussions of fruitless curiosity. For the truth is

that metaphysics has no value save in so far as it attempts to explain

in what way our vital longing can or cannot be realized. And thus it is

that there is and always will be a rational metaphysic and a vital

metaphysic, in perennial conflict with one another, the one setting out

from the notion of cause, the other from the notion of substance.

And even if we were to succeed in imagining personal immortality, might

we not possibly feel it to be something no less terrible than its

negation? "Calypso was inconsolable at the departure of Ulysses; in her

sorrow she was dismayed at being immortal," said the gentle, the

mystical Fénelon at the beginning of his _Télémaque_. Was it not a kind

of doom that the ancient gods, no less than the demons, were subject

to--the deprivation of the power to commit suicide?

When Jesus took Peter and James and John up into a high mountain and was

transfigured before them, his raiment shining as white as snow, and

Moses and Elias appeared and talked with him, Peter said to the Master:

"Master, it is good for us to be here; and let us make three

tabernacles; one for thee and one for Moses and one for Elias," for he

wished to eternalize that moment. And as they came down from the

mountain, Jesus charged them that they should tell no man what they had

seen until the Son of Man should have risen from the dead. And they,

keeping this saying to themselves, questioned one with another what this

rising from the dead should mean, as men not understanding the purport

of it. And it was after this that Jesus met the father whose son was

possessed with a dumb spirit and who cried out to him, "Lord, I believe;

help thou mine unbelief" (Mark ix.).

Those three apostles did not understand what this rising from the dead

meant. Neither did those Sadducees who asked the Master whose wife she

should be in the resurrection who in this life had had seven husbands

(Matt. xxii.); and it was then that Jesus said that God is not the God

of the dead, but of the living. And the other life is not, in fact,

thinkable to us except under the same forms as those of this earthly and

transitory life. Nor is the mystery at all clarified by that metaphor of

the grain and the wheat that it bears, with which Paul answers the

question, "How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?"

(1 Cor. xv. 35).

How can a human soul live and enjoy God eternally without losing its

individual personality--that is to say, without losing itself? What is

it to enjoy God? What is eternity as opposed to time? Does the soul

change or does it not change in the other life? If it does not change,

how does it live? And if it changes, how does it preserve its

individuality through so vast a period of time? For though the other

life may exclude space, it cannot exclude time, as Cournot observes in

the work quoted above.

If there is life in heaven there is change. Swedenborg remarked that the

angels change, because the delight of the celestial life would gradually

lose its value if they always enjoyed it in its fullness, and because

angels, like men, love themselves, and he who loves himself experiences

changes of state; and he adds further that at times the angels are sad,

and that he, Swedenborg, discoursed with some when they were sad (_De

Cælo et Inferno_, §§ 158, 160). In any case, it is impossible for us to

conceive life without change, change of growth or of diminution, of

sadness or of joy, of love or of hate.

In effect, an eternal life is unthinkable and an eternal life of

absolute felicity, of beatific vision, is more unthinkable still.

And what precisely is this beatific vision? We observe in the first

place that it is called vision and not action, something passive being

therefore presupposed. And does not this beatific vision suppose loss of

personal consciousness? A saint in heaven, says Bossuet, is a being who

is scarcely sensible of himself, so completely is he possessed by God

and immerged in His glory.... Our attention cannot stay on the saint,

because one finds him outside of himself, and subject by an unchangeable

love to the source of his being and his happiness (_Du culte qui est dû

à Dieu_). And these are the words of Bossuet, the antiquietist. This

loving vision of God supposes an absorption in Him. He who in a state of

blessedness enjoys God in His fullness must perforce neither think of

himself, nor remember himself, nor have any consciousness of himself,

but be in perpetual ecstasy (_ekstasis_) outside of himself, in a

condition of alienation. And the ecstasy that the mystics describe is a

prelude of this vision.

He who sees God shall die, say the Scriptures (Judg. xiii. 22); and may

it not be that the eternal vision of God is an eternal death, a swooning

away of the personality? But St. Teresa, in her description of the last

state of prayer, the rapture, transport, flight, or ecstasy of the soul,

tells us that the soul is borne as upon a cloud or a mighty eagle, "but

you see yourself carried away and know not whither," and it is "with

delight," and "if you do not resist, the senses are not lost, at least I

was so much myself as to be able to perceive that I was being lifted up

"--that is to say, without losing consciousness. And God "appears to be

not content with thus attracting the soul to Himself in so real a way,

but wishes to have the body also, though it be mortal and of earth so

foul." "Ofttimes the soul is absorbed--or, to speak more correctly, the

Lord absorbs it in Himself; and when He has held it thus for a moment,

the will alone remains in union with Him"--not the intelligence alone.

We see, therefore, that it is not so much vision as a union of the will,

and meanwhile, "the understanding and memory are distraught ... like one

who has slept long and dreamed and is hardly yet awake." It is "a soft

flight, a delicious flight, a noiseless flight." And in this delicious

flight the consciousness of self is preserved, the awareness of

distinction from God with whom one is united. And one is raised to this

rapture, according to the Spanish mystic, by the contemplation of the

Humanity of Christ--that is to say, of something concrete and human; it

is the vision of the living God, not of the idea of God. And in the 28th

chapter she tells us that "though there were nothing else to delight the

sight in heaven but the great beauty of the glorified bodies, that would

be an excessive bliss, particularly the vision of the Humanity of Jesus

Christ our Lord...." "This vision," she continues, "though imaginary, I

did never see with my bodily eyes, nor, indeed, any other, but only with

the eyes of the soul." And thus it is that in heaven the soul does not

see God only, but everything in God, or rather it sees that everything

is God, for God embraces all things. And this idea is further emphasized

by Jacob Böhme. The saint tells us in the _Moradas Setimas_ (vii. 2)

that "this secret union takes place in the innermost centre of the soul,

where God Himself must dwell." And she goes on to say that "the soul, I

mean the spirit of the soul, is made one with God ..."; and this union

may be likened to "two wax candles, the tips of which touch each other

so closely that there is but one light; or again, the wick, the wax,

and the light become one, but the one candle can again be separated from

the other, and the two candles remain distinct; or the wick may be

withdrawn from the wax." But there is another more intimate union, and

this is "like rain falling from heaven into a river or stream, becoming

one and the same liquid, so that the river and the rain-water cannot be

divided; or it resembles a streamlet flowing into the sea, which cannot

afterwards be disunited from it; or it may be likened to a room into

which a bright light enters through two windows--though divided when it

enters, the light becomes one and the same." And what difference is

there between this and the internal and mystical silence of Miguel de

Molinos, the third and most perfect degree of which is the silence of

thought? (_Guía Espiritual_, book i., chap. xvii., § 128). Do we not

here very closely approach the view that "nothingness is the way to

attain to that high state of a mind reformed"? (book iii., chap. xx., §

196). And what marvel is it that Amiel in his _Journal Intime_ should

twice have made use of the Spanish word _nada_, nothing, doubtless

because he found none more expressive in any other language? And

nevertheless, if we read our mystical doctor, St. Teresa, with care, we

shall see that the sensitive element is never excluded, the element of

delight--that is to say, the element of personal consciousness. The soul

allows itself to be absorbed in God in order that it may absorb Him, in

order that it may acquire consciousness of its own divinity.

A beatific vision, a loving contemplation in which the soul is absorbed

in God and, as it were, lost in Him, appears either as an annihilation

of self or as a prolonged tedium to our natural way of feeling. And

hence a certain feeling which we not infrequently observe and which has

more than once expressed itself in satires, not altogether free from

irreverence or perhaps impiety, with reference to the heaven of eternal

glory as a place of eternal boredom. And it is useless to despise

feelings such as these, so wholly natural and spontaneous.

It is clear that those who feel thus have failed to take note of the

fact that man's highest pleasure consists in acquiring and intensifying

consciousness. Not the pleasure of knowing, exactly, but rather that of

learning. In knowing a thing we tend to forget it, to convert it, if the

expression may be allowed, into unconscious knowledge. Man's pleasure,

his purest delight, is allied with the act of learning, of getting at

the truth of things, of acquiring knowledge with differentiation. And

hence the famous saying of Lessing which I have already quoted. There is

a story told of an ancient Spaniard who accompanied Vasco Núñez de

Balboa when he climbed that peak in Darien from which both the Atlantic

and the Pacific are visible. On beholding the two oceans the old man

fell on his knees and exclaimed, "I thank Thee, God, that Thou didst not

let me die without having seen so great a wonder." But if this man had

stayed there, very soon the wonder would have ceased to be wonderful,

and with the wonder the pleasure, too, would have vanished. His joy was

the joy of discovery. And perhaps the joy of the beatific vision may be

not exactly that of the contemplation of the supreme Truth, whole and

entire (for this the soul could not endure), but rather that of a

continual discovery of the Truth, of a ceaseless act of learning

involving an effort which keeps the sense of personal consciousness

continually active.

It is difficult for us to conceive a beatific vision of mental quiet, of

full knowledge and not of gradual apprehension, as in any way different

from a kind of Nirvana, a spiritual diffusion, a dissipation of energy

in the essence of God, a return to unconsciousness induced by the

absence of shock, of difference--in a word, of activity.

May it not be that the very condition which makes our eternal union with

God thinkable destroys our longing? What difference is there between

being absorbed by God and absorbing Him in ourself? Is it the stream

that is lost in the sea or the sea that is lost in the stream? It is all

the same.

Our fundamental feeling is our longing not to lose the sense of the

continuity of our consciousness, not to break the concatenation of our

memories, the feeling of our own personal concrete identity, even though

we may be gradually being absorbed in God, enriching Him. Who at eighty

years of age remembers the child that he was at eight, conscious though

he may be of the unbroken chain connecting the two? And it may be said

that the problem for feeling resolves itself into the question as to

whether there is a God, whether there is a human finality to the

Universe. But what is finality? For just as it is always possible to ask

the why of every why, so it is also always possible to ask the wherefore

of every wherefore. Supposing that there is a God, then wherefore God?

For Himself, it will be said. And someone is sure to reply: What is the

difference between this consciousness and no-consciousness? But it will

always be true, as Plotinus has said (_Enn_., ii., ix., 8), that to ask

why God made the world is the same as to ask why there is a soul. Or

rather, not why, but wherefore (_dia ti_).

For him who places himself outside himself, in an objective hypothetical

position--which is as much as to say in an inhuman position--the

ultimate wherefore is as inaccessible--and strictly, as absurd--as the

ultimate why. What difference in effect does it make if there is not any

finality? What logical contradiction is involved in the Universe not

being destined to any finality, either human or superhuman? What

objection is there in reason to there being no other purpose in the sum

of things save only to exist and happen as it does exist and happen? For

him who places himself outside himself, none; but for him who lives and

suffers and desires within himself--for him it is a question of life or

death. Seek, therefore, thyself! But in finding oneself, does not one

find one's own nothingness? "Having become a sinner in seeking himself,

man has become wretched in finding himself," said Bossuet (_Traité de la

Concupiscence_, chap. xi.). "Seek thyself" begins with "Know thyself."

To which Carlyle answers (_Past and Present_, book iii., chap. xi.):

"The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. 'Know

thyself': long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee; thou

wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this

of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou

canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules. That will be thy better

plan."

Yes, but what I work at, will not that too be lost in the end? And if it

be lost, wherefore should I work at it? Yes, yes, it may be that to

accomplish my work--and what is my work?--without thinking about myself,

is to love God. And what is it to love God?

And on the other hand, in loving God in myself, am I not loving myself

more than God, am I not loving myself in God?

What we really long for after death is to go on living this life, this

same mortal life, but without its ills, without its tedium, and without

death. Seneca, the Spaniard, gave expression to this in his _Consolatio

ad Marciam_ (xxvi.); what he desired was to live this life again: _ista

moliri_. And what Job asked for (xix. 25-7) was to see God in the flesh,

not in the spirit. And what but that is the meaning of that comic

conception of _eternal recurrence_ which issued from the tragic soul of

poor Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality?

And this beatific vision which is the primary Catholic solution of the

problem, how can it be realized, I ask again, without obliteration of

the consciousness of self? Will it not be like a sleep in which we

dream without knowing what we dream? Who would wish for an eternal life

like that? To think without knowing that we think is not to be sensible

of ourselves, it is not to be ourselves. And is not eternal life perhaps

eternal consciousness, not only seeing God, but seeing that we see Him,

seeing ourselves at the same time and ourselves as distinct from Him? He

who sleeps lives, but he has no consciousness of himself; and would

anyone wish for an eternal sleep? When Circe advised Ulysses to descend

to the abode of the dead in order to consult the soothsayer Teiresias,

she told him that Teiresias alone among the shades of the dead was

possessed of understanding, for all the others flitted about like

shadows (_Odyssey_, x., 487-495). And can it be said that the others,

apart from Teiresias, had really overcome death? Is it to overcome death

to flit about like shadows without understanding?

And on the other hand, may we not imagine that possibly this earthly

life of ours is to the other life what sleep is to waking? May not all

our life be a dream and death an awakening? But an awakening to what?

And supposing that everything is but the dream of God and that God one

day will awaken? Will He remember His dream?

Aristotle, the rationalist, tells in his _Ethics_ of the superior

happiness of the contemplative life, _bios theôrêtikos_; and all

rationalists are wont to place happiness in knowledge. And the

conception of eternal happiness, of the enjoyment of God, as a beatific

vision, as knowledge and comprehension of God, is a thing of rationalist

origin, it is the kind of happiness that corresponds with the God-Idea

of Aristotelianism. But the truth is that, in addition to vision,

happiness demands delight, and this is a thing which has very little to

do, with rationalism and is only attainable when we feel ourselves

distinct from God.

Our Aristotelian Catholic theologian, the author of the endeavour to

rationalize Catholic feeling, St. Thomas Aquinas, tells us in his

_Summa_ (_prima secundæ partis, quæstio_ iv., _art_. i) that "delight is

requisite for happiness. For delight is caused by the fact of desire

resting in attained good. Hence, since happiness is nothing but the

attainment of the Sovereign Good, there cannot be happiness without

concomitant delight." But where is the delight of him who rests? To

rest, _requiescere_--is not that to sleep and not to possess even the

consciousness that one is resting? "Delight is caused by the vision of

God itself," the theologian continues. But does the soul feel itself

distinct from God? "The delight that accompanies the activity of the

understanding does not impede, but rather strengthens that activity," he

says later on. Obviously! for what happiness were it else? And in order

to save delectation, delight, pleasure, which, like pain, has always

something material in it, and which we conceive of only as existing in a

soul incarnate in a body, it was necessary to suppose that the soul in a

state of blessedness is united with its body. Apart from some kind of

body, how is delight possible? The immortality of the pure soul, without

some sort of body or spirit-covering, is not true immortality. And at

bottom, what we long for is a prolongation of this life, this life and

no other, this life of flesh and suffering, this life which we imprecate

at times simply because it comes to an end. The majority of suicides

would not take their lives if they had the assurance that they would

never die on this earth. The self-slayer kills himself because he will

not wait for death.

When in the thirty-third canto of the _Paradiso_, Dante relates how he

attained to the vision of God, he tells us that just as a man who

beholds somewhat in his sleep retains on awakening nothing but the

impression of the feeling in his mind, so it was with him, for when the

vision had all but passed away the sweetness that sprang from it still

distilled itself in his heart.

_Cotal son to, che quasi tutta cessa

mia visione ed ancor mi distilla

nel cuor lo dulce che nacque da essa_

like snow that melts in the sun--

_cosi la neve al sol si disigilla_.

That is to say, that the vision, the intellectual content, passes, and

that which remains is the delight, the _passione impressa_, the

emotional, the irrational--in a word, the corporeal.

What we desire is not merely spiritual felicity, not merely vision, but

delight, bodily happiness. The other happiness, the rationalist

_beatitude_, the happiness of being submerged in understanding, can

only--I will not say satisfy or deceive, for I do not believe that it

ever satisfied or deceived even a Spinoza. At the conclusion of his

_Ethic_, in propositions xxxv. and xxxvi. of the fifth part, Spinoza,

affirms that God loves Himself with an infinite intellectual love; that

the intellectual love of the mind towards God is the selfsame love with

which God loves Himself, not in so far as He is infinite, but in so far

as He can be manifested through the essence of the human mind,

considered under the form of eternity--that is to say, that the

intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love

with which God loves Himself. And after these tragic, these desolating

propositions, we are told in the last proposition of the whole book,

that which closes and crowns this tremendous tragedy of the _Ethic_,

that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself, and that

our repression of our desires is not the cause of our enjoyment of

virtue, but rather because we find enjoyment in virtue we are able to

repress our desires. Intellectual love! intellectual love! what is this

intellectual love? Something of the nature of a red flavour, or a bitter

sound, or an aromatic colour, or rather something of the same sort as a

love-stricken triangle or an enraged ellipse--a pure metaphor, but a

tragic metaphor. And a metaphor corresponding tragically with that

saying that the heart also has its reasons. Reasons of the heart! loves

of the head! intellectual delight! delicious intellection!--tragedy,

tragedy, tragedy!

And nevertheless there is something which may be called intellectual

love, and that is the love of understanding, that which Aristotle meant

by the contemplative life, for there is something of action and of love

in the act of understanding, and the beatific vision is the vision of

the total truth. Is there not perhaps at the root of every passion

something of curiosity? Did not our first parents, according to the

Biblical story, fall because of their eagerness to taste of the fruit of

the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and to be as gods, knowers

of this knowledge? The vision of God--that is to say, the vision of the

Universe itself, in its soul, in its inmost essence--would not that

appease all our longing? And this vision can fail to satisfy only men of

a gross mind who do not perceive that the greatest joy of man is to be

more man--that is, more God--and that man is more God the more

consciousness he has.

And this intellectual love, which is nothing but the so-called platonic

love, is a means to dominion and possession. There is, in fact, no more

perfect dominion than knowledge; he who knows something, possesses it.

Knowledge unites the knower with the known. "I contemplate thee and in

contemplating thee I make thee mine"--such is the formula. And to know

God, what can that be but to possess Him? He who knows God is thereby

himself God.

In _La Dégradation de l'énergie_ (iv^e partie, chap. xviii., 2) B.

Brunhes relates a story concerning the great Catholic mathematician

Cauchy, communicated to him by M. Sarrau, who had it from Père Gratry.

While Cauchy and Père Gratry were walking in the gardens of the

Luxumbourg, their conversation turned upon the happiness which those in

heaven would have in knowing at last, without any obscurity or

limitation, the truths which they had so long and so laboriously sought

to investigate on earth. In allusion to the study which Cauchy had made

of the mechanistic theory of the reflection of light, Père Gratry threw

out the suggestion that one on the greatest intellectual joys of the

great geometrician in the future life would be to penetrate into the

secret of light. To which Cauchy replied that it did not appear to him

to be possible to know more about this than he himself already knew,

neither could he conceive how the most perfect intelligence could arrive

at a clearer comprehension of the mystery of reflection than that

manifested in his own explanation of it, seeing that he had furnished a

mechanistic theory of the phenomenon. "His piety," Brunhes adds, "did

not extend to a belief that God Himself could have created anything

different or anything better."

From this narrative two points of interest emerge. The first is the idea

expressed in it as to what contemplation, intellectual love, or beatific

vision, may mean for men of a superior order of intelligence, men whose

ruling passion is knowledge; and the second is the implicit faith shown

in the mechanistic explanation of the world.

This mechanistic tendency of the intellect coheres with the well-known

formula, "Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is

transformed"--a formula by means of which it has been sought to

interpret the ambiguous principle of the conservation of energy,

forgetting that practically, for us, for men, energy is utilizable

energy, and that this is continually being lost, dissipated by the

diffusion of heat, and degraded, its tendency being to arrive at a

dead-level and homogeneity. That which has value, and more than value,

reality, for us, is the differential, which is the qualitative; pure,

undifferentiated quantity is for us as if it did not exist, for it does

not act. And the material Universe, the body of the Universe, would

appear to be gradually proceeding--unaffected by the retarding action of

living organisms or even by the conscious action of man--towards a state

of perfect stability, of homogeneity (_vide_ Brunhes, _op. cit._) For,

while spirit tends towards concentration, material energy tends towards

diffusion.

And may not this have an intimate relation with our problem? May there

not be a connection between this conclusion of scientific philosophy

with respect to a final state of stability and homogeneity and the

mystical dream of the apocatastasis? May not this death of the body of

the Universe be the final triumph of its spirit, of God?

It is manifest that there is an intimate relation between the religious

need of an eternal life after death and the conclusions--always

provisional--at which scientific philosophy arrives with respect to the

probable future of the material or sensible Universe. And the fact is

that just as there are theologians of God and the immortality of the

soul, so there are also those whom Brunhes calls (_op. cit._, chap.

xxvi., § 2) theologians of monism, and whom it would perhaps be better

to call atheologians, people who pertinaciously adhere to the spirit of

_a priori_ affirmation; and this becomes intolerable, Brunhes adds, when

they harbour the pretension of despising theology. A notable type of

these gentlemen may be found in Haeckel, who has succeeded in solving

the riddles of Nature!

These atheologians have seized upon the principle of the conservation of

energy, the "Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is

transformed" formula, the theological origin of which is seen in

Descartes, and have made use of it as a means whereby we are able to

dispense with God. "The world built to last," Brunhes comments,

"resisting all wear and tear, or rather automatically repairing the

rents that appear in it--what a splendid theme for oratorical

amplification! But these same amplifications which served in the

seventeenth century to prove the wisdom of the Creator have been used in

our days as arguments for those who presume to do without Him." It is

the old story: so-called scientific philosophy, the origin and

inspiration of which is fundamentally theological or religious, ending

in an atheology or irreligion, which is itself nothing else but theology

and religion. Let us call to mind the comments of Ritschl upon this

head, already quoted in this work.

To-day the last word of science, or rather of scientific philosophy,

appears to be that, by virtue of the degradation of energy, of the

predominance of irreversible phenomena, the material, sensible world is

travelling towards a condition of ultimate levelness, a kind of final

homogeneity. And this brings to our mind the hypothesis, not only so

much used but abused by Spencer, of a primordial homogeneity, and his

fantastic theory of the instability of the homogeneous. An instability

that required the atheological agnosticism of Spencer in order to

explain the inexplicable transition from the homogeneous to the

heterogeneous. For how, without any action from without, can any

heterogeneity emerge from perfect and absolute homogeneity? But as it

was necessary to get rid of every kind of creation, "the unemployed

engineer turned metaphysician," as Papini called him, invented the

theory of the instability of the homogeneous, which is more ... what

shall I say? more mystical, and even more mythological if you like, than

the creative action of God.

The Italian positivist, Roberto Ardigo, was nearer the mark when,

objecting to Spencer's theory, he said that the most natural supposition

was that things always were as they are now, that always there have been

worlds in process of formation, in the nebulous stage, worlds

completely formed and worlds in process of dissolution; that

heterogeneity, in short, is eternal. Another way, it will be seen, of

not solving the riddle.

Is this perhaps the solution? But in that case the Universe would be

infinite, and in reality we are unable to conceive a Universe that is

both eternal and limited such as that which served as the basis of

Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence. If the Universe must be

eternal, if within it and as regards each of its component worlds,

periods in which the movement is towards homogeneity, towards the

degradation of energy, must alternate with other periods in which the

movement is towards heterogeneity, then it is necessary that the

Universe should be infinite, that there should be scope, always and in

each world, for some action coming from without. And, in fact, the body

of God cannot be other than eternal and infinite.

But as far as our own world is concerned, its gradual

levelling-down--or, we might say, its death--appears to be proved. And

how will this process affect the fate of our spirit? Will it wane with

the degradation of the energy of our world and return to

unconsciousness, or will it rather grow according as the utilizable

energy diminishes and by virtue of the very efforts that it makes to

retard this degradation and to dominate Nature?--for this it is that

constitutes the life of the spirit. May it be that consciousness and its

extended support are two powers in contraposition, the one growing at

the expense of the other?

The fact is that the best of our scientific work, the best of our

industry (that part of it I mean--and it is a large part--that does not

tend to destruction), is directed towards retarding this fatal process

of the degradation of energy. And organic life, the support of our

consciousness, is itself an effort to avoid, so far as it is possible,

this fatal period, to postpone it.

It is useless to seek to deceive ourselves with pagan pæans in praise

of Nature, for as Leopardi, that Christian atheist, said with profound

truth in his stupendous poem _La Ginestra_, Nature "gives us life like a

mother, but loves us like a step-mother." The origin of human

companionship was opposition to Nature; it was horror of impious Nature

that first linked men together in the bonds of society. It is human

society, in effect, the source of reflective consciousness and of the

craving for immortality, that inaugurates the state of grace upon the

state of Nature; and it is man who, by humanizing and spiritualizing

Nature by his industry, supernaturalizes her.

In two amazing sonnets which he called _Redemption_, the tragic

Portuguese poet, Antero de Quental, embodied his dream of a spirit

imprisoned, not in atoms or ions or crystals, but--as is natural in a

poet--in the sea, in trees, in the forest, in the mountains, in the

wind, in all material individualities and forms; and he imagines that a

day may come when all these captive souls, as yet in the limbo of

existence, will awaken to consciousness, and, emerging as pure thought

from the forms that imprisoned them, they will see these forms, the

creatures of illusion, fall away and dissolve like a baseless vision. It

is a magnificent dream of the penetration of everything by

consciousness.

May it not be that the Universe, our Universe--who knows if there are

others?--began with a zero of spirit--and zero is not the same as

nothing--and an infinite of matter, and that its goal is to end with an

infinite of spirit and a zero of matter? Dreams!

May it be that everything has a soul and that this soul begs to be

freed?

_Oh tierras de Alvargonzález,

en el corazón de España,

tierras pobres, tierras tristes,

tan tristes que tienen alma!_

sings our poet Antonio Machado in his _Campos de Castilla_.[50] Is the

sadness of the field in the fields themselves or in us who look upon

them? Do they not suffer? But what can an individual soul in a world of

matter actually be? Is it the rock or the mountain that is the

individual? Is it the tree?

And nevertheless the fact always remains that spirit and matter are at

strife. This is the thought that Espronceda expressed when he wrote:

_Aquí, para vivir en santa calma,

o sobra la materia, o sobra el alma._[51]

And is there not in the history of thought, or of human imagination if

you prefer it, something that corresponds to this process of the

reduction of matter, in the sense of a reduction of everything to

consciousness?

Yes, there is, and its author is the first Christian mystic, St. Paul of

Tarsus, the Apostle of the Gentiles, he who because he had never with

his bodily eyes looked upon the face of the fleshly and mortal Christ,

the ethical Christ, created within himself an immortal and religious

Christ--he who was caught up into the third heaven and there beheld

secret and unspeakable things (2 Cor. xii.). And this first Christian

mystic dreamed also of a final triumph of spirit, of consciousness, and

this is what in theology is technically called the apocatastasis or

restitution.

In 1 Cor. xv. 26-28 he tells us that "the last enemy that shall be

destroyed is death, for he hath put all things under his feet. But when

he saith all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is

excepted, which did put all things under him. And when all things shall

be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto

him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all": _hina hê

ho theos panta en pasin_--that is to say, that the end is that God,

Consciousness, will end by being all in all.

This doctrine is completed by Paul's teaching, in his Epistle to the

Ephesians, with regard to the end of the whole history of the world. In

this Epistle, as you know, he represents Christ--by whom "were all

things created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and

invisible" (Col. i. 16)--as the head over all things (Eph. i. 22), and

in him, in this head, we all shall be raised up that we may live in the

communion of saints and that we "may be able to comprehend with all

saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, and to

know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge" (Eph. iii. 18, 19).

And this gathering of us together in Christ, who is the head and, as it

were, the compendium, of Humanity, is what the Apostle calls the

gathering or collecting together or recapitulating of all things in

Christ, _anakephalaiôsthai ta panta en Christô_. And this

recapitulation--_anakephalaiôsis_, anacefaleosis--the end of the world's

history and of the human race, is merely another aspect of the

apocatastasis. The apocatastasis, God's coming to be all in all, thus

resolves itself into the anacefaleosis, the gathering together of all

things in Christ, in Humanity--Humanity therefore being the end of

creation. And does not this apocatastasis, this humanization or

divinization of all things, do away with matter? But if matter, which is

the principle of individuation, the scholastic _principium

individuationis_, is once done away with, does not everything return to

pure consciousness, which, in its pure purity, neither knows itself nor

is it anything that can be conceived or felt? And if matter be

abolished, what support is there left for spirit?

Thus a different train of thought leads us to the same difficulties, the

same unthinkabilities.

It may be said, on the other hand, that the apocatastasis, God's coming

to be all in all, presupposes that there was a time when He was not all

in all. The supposition that all beings shall attain to the enjoyment of

God implies the supposition that God shall attain to the enjoyment of

all beings, for the beatific vision is mutual, and God is perfected in

being better known, and His being is nourished and enriched with souls.

Following up the track of these wild dreams, we might imagine an

unconscious God, slumbering in matter, and gradually wakening into

consciousness of everything, consciousness of His own divinity; we might

imagine the whole Universe becoming conscious of itself as a whole and

becoming conscious of each of its constituent consciousnesses, becoming

God. But in that case, how did this unconscious God begin? Is He not

matter itself? God would thus be not the beginning but the end of the

Universe; but can that be the end which was not the beginning? Or can it

be that outside time, in eternity, there is a difference between

beginning and end? "The soul of all things cannot be bound by that very

thing--that is, matter--which it itself has bound," says Plotinus

(_Enn._ ii., ix. 7). Or is it not rather the Consciousness of the Whole

that strives to become the consciousness of each part and to make each

partial consciousness conscious of itself--that is, of the total

consciousness? Is not this universal soul a monotheist or solitary God

who is in process of becoming a pantheist God? And if it is not so, if

matter and pain are alien to God, wherefore, it will be asked, did God

create the world? For what purpose did He make matter and introduce

pain? Would it not have been better if He had not made anything? What

added glory does He gain by the creation of angels or of men whose fall

He must punish with eternal torment? Did He perhaps create evil for the

sake of remedying it? Or was redemption His design, redemption complete

and absolute, redemption of all things and of all men? For this

hypothesis is neither more rational nor more pious than the other.

In so far as we attempt to represent eternal happiness to ourselves, we

are confronted by a series of questions to which there is no

satisfactory--that is, rational--answer, and it matters not whether the

supposition from which we start be monotheist, or pantheist, or even

panentheist.

Let us return to the Pauline apocatastasis.

Is it not possible that in becoming all in all God completes Himself,

becomes at last fully God, an infinite consciousness embracing all

consciousnesses? And what is an infinite consciousness? Since

consciousness supposes limitation, or rather since consciousness is

consciousness of limitation, of distinction, does it not thereby exclude

infinitude? What value has the notion of infinitude applied to

consciousness? What is a consciousness that is all consciousness,

without anything outside it that is not consciousness? In such a case,

of what is consciousness the consciousness? Of its content? Or may it

not rather be that, starting from chaos, from absolute unconsciousness,

in the eternity of the past, we continually approach the apocatastasis

or final apotheosis without ever reaching it?

May not this apocatastasis, this return of all things to God, be rather

an ideal term to which we unceasingly approach--some of us with fleeter

step than others--but which we are destined never to reach? May not the

absolute and perfect eternal happiness be an eternal hope, which would

die if it were to be realized? Is it possible to be happy without hope?

And there is no place for hope when once possession has been realized,

for hope, desire, is killed by possession. May it not be, I say, that

all souls grow without ceasing, some in a greater measure than others,

but all having to pass some time through the same degree of growth,

whatever that degree may be, and yet without ever arriving at the

infinite, at God, to whom they continually approach? Is not eternal

happiness an eternal hope, with its eternal nucleus of sorrow in order

that happiness shall not be swallowed up in nothingness?

Follow more questions to which there is no answer. "He shall be all in

all," says the Apostle. But will His mode of being in each one be

different or will it be the same for all alike? Will not God be wholly

in one of the damned? Is He not in his soul? Is He not in what is called

hell? And in what sense is He in hell?

Whence arise new problems, those relating to the opposition between

heaven and hell, between eternal happiness and eternal unhappiness.

May it not be that in the end all shall be saved, including Cain and

Judas and Satan himself, as Origen's development of the Pauline

apocatastasis led him to hope?

When our Catholic theologians seek to justify rationally--or in other

words, ethically--the dogma of the eternity of the pains of hell, they

put forward reasons so specious, ridiculous, and childish, that it would

appear impossible that they should ever have obtained currency. For to

assert that since God is infinite, an offence committed against Him is

infinite also and therefore demands an eternal punishment, is, apart

from the inconceivability of an infinite offence, to be unaware that, in

human ethics, if not in the human police system, the gravity of the

offence is measured not by the dignity of the injured person but by the

intention of the injurer, and that to speak of an infinite culpable

intention is sheer nonsense, and nothing else. In this connection those

words which Christ addressed to His Father are capable of application:

"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and no man who

commits an offence against God or his neighbour knows what he does. In

human ethics, or if you like in human police regulations--that which is

called penal law and is anything but law[52] eternal punishment is a

meaningless phrase.

"God is just and punishes us; that is all we need to know; as far as we

are concerned the rest is merely curiosity." Such was the conclusion of

Lamennais (_Essai_, etc., iv^e partie, chap, vii.), an opinion shared by

many others. Calvin also held the same view. But is there anyone who is

content with this? Pure curiosity!--to call this load that wellnigh

crushes our heart pure curiosity!

May we not say, perhaps, that the evil man is annihilated because he

wished to be annihilated, or that he did not wish strongly enough to

eternalize himself because he was evil? May we not say that it is not

believing in the other life that makes a man good, but rather that being

good makes him believe in it? And what is being good and being evil?

These states pertain to the sphere of ethics, not of religion: or,

rather, does not the doing good though being evil pertain to ethics, and

the being good though doing evil to religion?

Shall we not perhaps be told, on the other hand, that if the sinner

suffers an eternal punishment, it is because he does not cease to

sin?--for the damned sin without ceasing. This, however, is no solution

of the problem, which derives all its absurdity from the fact that

punishment has been conceived as vindictiveness or vengeance, not as

correction, has been conceived after the fashion of barbarous peoples.

And in the same way hell has been conceived as a sort of police

institution, necessary in order to put fear into the world. And the

worst of it is that it no longer intimidates, and therefore will have to

be shut up.

But, on the other hand, as a religious conception and veiled in mystery,

why not--although the idea revolts our feelings--an eternity of

suffering? why not a God who is nourished by our suffering? Is our

happiness the end of the Universe? or may we possibly sustain with our

suffering some alien happiness? Let us read again in the _Eumenides_ of

that terrible tragedian, Æschylus, those choruses of the Furies in

which they curse the new gods for overturning the ancient laws and

snatching Orestes from their hands--impassioned invectives against the

Apollinian redemption. Does not redemption tear man, their captive and

plaything, from the hands of the gods, who delight and amuse themselves

in his sufferings, like children, as the tragic poet says, torturing

beetles? And let us remember the cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou

forsaken me?"

Yes, why not an eternity of suffering? Hell is an eternalization of the

soul, even though it be an eternity of pain. Is not pain essential to

life?

Men go on inventing theories to explain what they call the origin of

evil. And why not the origin of good? Why suppose that it is good that

is positive and original, and evil that is negative and derivatory?

"Everything that is, in so far as it is, is good," St. Augustine

affirmed. But why? What does "being good" mean? Good is good for

something, conducive to an end, and to say that everything is good is

equivalent to saying that everything is making for its end. But what is

its end? Our desire is to eternalize ourselves, to persist, and we call

good everything that conspires to this end and bad everything that tends

to lessen or destroy our consciousness. We suppose that human

consciousness is an end and not a means to something else which may not

be consciousness, whether human or superhuman.

All metaphysical optimism, such as that of Leibnitz, and all

metaphysical pessimism, such as that of Schopenhauer, have no other

foundation than this. For Leibnitz this world is the best because it

conspires to perpetuate consciousness, and, together with consciousness,

will, because intelligence increases will and perfects it, because the

end of man is the contemplation of God; while for Schopenhauer this

world is the worst of all possible worlds, because it conspires to

destroy will, because intelligence, representation, nullifies the will

that begot it.

And similarly Franklin, who believed in another life, asserted that he

was willing to live this life over again, the life that he had actually

lived, "from its beginning to the end"; while Leopardi, who did not

believe in another life, asserted that nobody would consent to live his

life over again. These two views of life are not merely ethical, but

religious; and the feeling of moral good, in so far as it is a

teleological value, is of religious origin also.

And to return to our interrogations: Shall not all be saved, shall not

all be made eternal, and eternal not in suffering but in happiness,

those whom we call good and those whom we call bad alike?

And as regards this question of good and evil, does not the malice of

him who judges enter in? Is the badness in the intention of him who does

the deed or is it not rather in that of him who judges it to be bad? But

the terrible thing is that man judges himself, creates himself his own

judge.

Who then shall be saved? And now the imagination puts forth another

possibility--neither more nor less rational than all those which have

just been put forward interrogatively--and that is that only those are

saved who have longed to be saved, that only those are eternalized who

have lived in an agony of hunger for eternity and for eternalization. He

who desires never to die and believes that he shall never die in the

spirit, desires it because he deserves it, or rather, only he desires

personal immortality who carries his immortality within him. The man who

does not long passionately, and with a passion that triumphs over all

the dictates of reason, for his own immortality, is the man who does not

deserve it, and because he does not deserve it he does not long for it.

And it is no injustice not to give a man that which he does not know how

to desire, for "ask, and it shall be given you." It may be that to each

will be given that which he desired. And perhaps the sin against the

Holy Ghost--for which, according to the Evangelist, there is no

remission--is none other than that of not desiring God, not longing to

be made eternal.

As is your sort of mind

So is your sort of search; you'll find

What you desire, and that's to be

A Christian,

said Robert Browning in _Christmas Eve and Easter Day_.

In his _Inferno_ Dante condemned the Epicureans, those who did not

believe in another life, to something more terrible than the not having

it, and that is the consciousness of not having it, and this he

expressed in plastic form by picturing them shut up in their tombs for

all eternity, without light, without air, without fire, without

movement, without life (_Inferno_, x., 10-15).

What cruelty is there in denying to a man that which he did not or could

not desire? In the sixth book of his _Æneid_ (426-429) the gentle Virgil

makes us hear the plaintive voices and sobbing of the babes who weep

upon the threshold of Hades,

_Continuo àuditæ voces, vagitus et ingens,

Infantumque animæ flentes in limine primo,_

unhappy in that they had but entered upon life and never known the

sweetness of it, and whom, torn from their mothers' breasts, a dark day

had cut off and drowned in bitter death--

_Quos dulcis vitæ exsortes et at ubere raptos

Abstulit atra dies et funere mersit acerbo._

But what life did they lose, if they neither knew life nor longed for

it? And yet is it true that they never longed for it?

It may be said that others craved life on their behalf, that their

parents longed for them to be eternal to the end that they might be

gladdened by them in paradise. And so a fresh field is opened up for the

imagination--namely, the consideration of the solidarity and

representivity of eternal salvation.

There are many, indeed, who imagine the human race as one being, a

collective and solidary individual, in whom each member may represent or

may come to represent the total collectivity; and they imagine salvation

as something collective. As something collective also, merit, and as

something collective sin, and redemption. According to this mode of

feeling and imagining, either all are saved or none is saved; redemption

is total and it is mutual; each man is his neighbour's Christ.

And is there not perhaps a hint of this in the popular Catholic belief

with regard to souls in purgatory, the belief that the living may devote

suffrages and apply merits to the souls of their dead? This sense of the

transmission of merits, both to the living and the dead, is general in

popular Catholic piety.

Nor should it be forgotten that in the history of man's religious

thought there has often presented itself the idea of an immortality

restricted to a certain number of the elect, spirits representative of

the rest and in a certain sense including them; an idea of pagan

derivation--for such were the heroes and demi-gods--which sometimes

shelters itself behind the pronouncement that there are many that are

called and few that are chosen.

Recently, while I was engaged upon this essay, there came into my hands

the third edition of the _Dialogue sur la vie et sur la mort_, by

Charles Bonnefon, a book in which imaginative conceptions similar to

those that I have been setting forth find succinct and suggestive

expression. The soul cannot live without the body, Bonnefon says, nor

the body without the soul, and thus neither birth nor death has any real

existence--strictly speaking, there is no body, no soul, no birth, no

death, all of which are abstractions and appearances, but only a

thinking life, of which we form part and which can neither be born nor

die. Hence he is led to deny human individuality and to assert that no

one can say "I am" but only "we are," or, more correctly, "there is in

us." It is humanity, the species, that thinks and loves in us. And souls

are transmitted in the same way that bodies are transmitted. "The living

thought or the thinking life which we are will find itself again

immediately in a form analogous to that which was our origin and

corresponding with our being in the womb of a pregnant woman." Each of

us, therefore, has lived before and will live again, although he does

not know it. "If humanity is gradually raised above itself, when the

last man dies, the man who will contain all the rest of mankind in

himself, who shall say that he may not have arrived at that higher order

of humanity such as exists elsewhere, in heaven?... As we are all bound

together in solidarity, we shall all, little by little, gather the

fruits of our travail." According to this mode of imagining and

thinking, since nobody is born, nobody dies, no single soul has finished

its struggle but many times has been plunged into the midst of the human

struggle "ever since the type of embryo corresponding with the same

consciousness was represented in the succession of human phenomena." It

is obvious that since Bonnefon begins by denying personal individuality,

he leaves out of account our real longing, which is to save our

individuality; but on the other hand, since he, Bonnefon, is a personal

individual and feels this longing, he has recourse to the distinction

between the called and the chosen, and to the idea of representative

spirits, and he concedes to a certain number of men this representative

individual immortality. Of these elect he says that "they will be

somewhat more necessary to God than we ourselves." And he closes this

splendid dream by supposing that "it is not impossible that we shall

arrive by a series of ascensions at the supreme happiness, and that our

life shall be merged in the perfect Life as a drop of water in the sea.

Then we shall understand," he continues, "that everything was

necessary, that every philosophy and every religion had its hour of

truth, and that in all our wanderings and errors and in the darkest

moments of our history we discerned the light of the distant beacon, and

that we were all predestined to participate in the Eternal Light. And if

the God whom we shall find again possesses a body--and we cannot

conceive a living God without a body--we, together with each of the

myriads of races that the myriads of suns have brought forth, shall be

the conscious cells of his body. If this dream should be fulfilled, an

ocean of love would beat upon our shores and the end of every life would

be to add a drop of water to this ocean's infinity." And what is this

cosmic dream of Bonnefon's but the plastic representation of the Pauline

apocatastasis?

Yes, this dream, which has its origin far back in the dawn of

Christianity, is fundamentally the same as the Pauline anacefaleosis,

the fusion of all men in Man, in the whole of Humanity embodied in a

Person, who is Christ, and the fusion not only of all men but of all

things, and the subsequent subjection of all things to God, in order

that God, Consciousness, may be all in all. And this supposes a

collective redemption and a society beyond the grave.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, two pietists of Protestant

origin, Johann Jakob Moser and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, gave a new

force and value to the Pauline anacefaleosis. Moser "declared that his

religion consisted not in holding certain doctrines to be true and in

living a virtuous life conformably therewith, but in being reunited to

God through Christ. But this demands the thorough knowledge--a knowledge

that goes on increasing until the end of life--of one's own sins and

also of the mercy and patience of God, the transformation of all natural

feelings, the appropriation of the atonement wrought by the death of

Christ, the enjoyment of peace with God in the permanent witness of the

Holy Spirit to the remission of sins, the ordering of life according to

the pattern of Christ, which is the fruit of faith alone, the drawing

near to God and the intercourse of the soul with Him, the disposition to

die in grace and the joyful expectation of the Judgement which will

bestow blessedness in the more intimate enjoyment of God and in the

_commerce with all the saints_" (Ritschl, _Geschichte des Pietismus_,

vol. iii., § 43). The commerce with all the saints--that is to say, the

eternal human society. And for his part, Oetinger considers eternal

happiness not as the contemplation of God in His infinitude, but, taking

the Epistle to the Ephesians as his authority, as the contemplation of

God in the harmony of the creature with Christ. The commerce with all

the saints was, according to him, essential to the content of eternal

happiness. It was the realization of the kingdom of God, which thus

comes to be the kingdom of Man. And in his exposition of these doctrines

of the two pietists, Ritschl confesses _(op. cit._, iii., § 46) that

both witnesses have with these doctrines contributed something to

Protestantism that is of like value with the theological method of

Spener, another pietist.

We see, therefore, that the Christian, mystical, inward longing ever

since St. Paul, has been to give human finality, or divine finality, to

the Universe, to save human consciousness, and to save it by converting

all humanity into a person. This longing is expressed in the

anacefaleosis, the gathering together of all things, all things in earth

and in heaven, the visible and the invisible, in Christ, and also in the

apocatastasis, the return of all things to God, to consciousness, in

order that God may be all in all. And does not God's being all in all

mean that all things shall acquire consciousness and that in this

consciousness everything that has happened will come to life again, and

that everything that has existed in time will be eternalized? And within

the all, all individual consciousnesses, those which have been, those

that are, and those that will be, and as they have been, as they are,

and as they will be, will exist in a condition of society and

solidarity.

But does not this awakening to consciousness of everything that has

been, necessarily involve a fusion of the identical, an amalgamation of

like things? In this conversion of the human race into a true society in

Christ, a communion of saints, a kingdom of heaven, will not individual

differences, tainted as they are with deceit and even with sin, be

obliterated, and in the perfect society will that alone remain of each

man which was the essential part of him? Would it not perhaps result,

according to Bonnefon's supposition, that this consciousness that lived

in the twentieth century in this corner of this earth would feel itself

to be the same with other such consciousnesses as have lived in other

centuries and perhaps in other worlds?

And how can we conceive of an effective and real union, a substantial

and intimate union, soul with soul, of all those who have been?

If any two creatures grew into one

They would do more than the world has done,

said Browning in _The Flight of the Duchess_; and Christ has told us

that where two or three are gathered together in His name, there is He

in the midst of them.

Heaven, then, so it is believed by many, is society, a more perfect

society than that of this world; it is human society fused into a

person. And there are not wanting some who believe that the tendency of

all human progress is the conversion of our species into one collective

being with real consciousness--is not perhaps an individual human

organism a kind of confederation of cells?--and that when it shall have

acquired full consciousness, all those who have existed will come to

life again in it.

Heaven, so many think, is society. Just as no one can live in isolation,

so no one can survive in isolation. No one can enjoy God in heaven who

sees his brother suffering in hell, for the sin and the merit were

common to both. We think with the thoughts of others and we feel with

the feelings of others. To see God when God shall be all in all is to

see all things in God and to live in God with all things.

This splendid dream of the final solidarity of mankind is the Pauline

anacefaleosis and apocatastasis. We Christians, said the Apostle (I Cor.

xii. 27) are the body of Christ, members of Him, flesh of His flesh and

bone of His bone (Eph. v. 30), branches of the vine.

But in this final solidarization, in this true and supreme

_Christination_ of all creatures, what becomes of each individual

consciousness? what becomes of Me, of this poor fragile I, this I that

is the slave of time and space, this I which reason tells me is a mere

passing accident, but for the saving of which I live and suffer and hope

and believe? Granting that the human finality of the Universe is saved,

that consciousness is saved, would I resign myself to make the sacrifice

of this poor I, by which and by which alone I know this finality and

this consciousness?

And here, facing this supreme religious sacrifice, we reach the summit

of the tragedy, the very heart of it--the sacrifice of our own

individual consciousness upon the altar of the perfected Human

Consciousness, of the Divine Consciousness.

But is there really a tragedy? If we could attain to a clear vision of

this anacefaleosis, if we could succeed in understanding and feeling

that we were going to enrich Christ, should we hesitate for a moment in

surrendering ourselves utterly to Him? Would the stream that flows into

the sea, and feels in the freshness of its waters the bitterness of the

salt of the ocean, wish to flow back to its source? would it wish to

return to the cloud which drew its life from the sea? is not its joy to

feel itself absorbed?

And yet....

Yes, in spite of everything, this is the climax of the tragedy.

And the soul, my soul at least, longs for something else, not

absorption, not quietude, not peace, not appeasement, it longs ever to

approach and never to arrive, it longs for a never-ending longing, for

an eternal hope which is eternally renewed but never wholly fulfilled.

And together with all this, it longs for an eternal lack of something

and an eternal suffering. A suffering, a pain, thanks to which it grows

without ceasing in consciousness and in longing. Do not write upon the

gate of heaven that sentence which Dante placed over the threshold of

hell, _Lasciate ogni speranza!_ Do not destroy time! Our life is a hope

which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its

turn begets hope. Give us leave to live! The eternity that is like an

eternal present, without memory and without hope, is death. Thus do

ideas exist, but not thus do men live. Thus do ideas exist in the

God-Idea, but not thus can men live in the living God, in the God-Man.

An eternal purgatory, then, rather than a heaven of glory; an eternal

ascent. If there is an end of all suffering, however pure and

spiritualized we may suppose it to be, if there is an end of all desire,

what is it that makes the blessed in paradise go on living? If in

paradise they do not suffer for want of God, how shall they love Him?

And if even there, in the heaven of glory, while they behold God little

by little and closer and closer, yet without ever wholly attaining to

Him, there does not always remain something more for them to know and

desire, if there does not always remain a substratum of doubt, how shall

they not fall asleep?

Or, to sum up, if in heaven there does not remain something of this

innermost tragedy of the soul, what sort of a life is that? Is there

perhaps any greater joy than that of remembering misery--and to remember

it is to feel it--in time of felicity? Does not the prison haunt the

freed prisoner? Does he not miss his former dreams of liberty?

* * * * *

Mythological dreams! it will be said. And I have not pretended that they

are anything else. But has not the mythological dream its content of

truth? Are not dream and myth perhaps revelations of an inexpressible

truth, of an irrational truth, of a truth that cannot be proven?

Mythology! Perhaps; but, as in the days of Plato, we must needs

mythologize when we come to deal with the other life. But we have just

seen that whenever we seek to give a form that is concrete, conceivable,

or in other words, rational, to our primary, primordial, and fundamental

longing for an eternal life conscious of itself and of its personal

individuality, esthetic, logical, and ethical absurdities are multiplied

and there is no way of conceiving the beatific vision and the

apocatastasis that is free from contradictions and inconsistencies.

And nevertheless!...

Nevertheless, yes, we must needs long for it, however absurd it may

appear to us; nay, more, we must needs believe in it, in some way or

another, in order that we may live. In order that we may live, eh? not

in order that we may understand the Universe. We must needs believe in

it, and to believe in it is to be religious. Christianity, the only

religion which we Europeans of the twentieth century are really capable

of feeling, is, as Kierkegaard said, a desperate sortie (_Afsluttende

uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, ii., i., cap. i.), a sortie which can be

successful only by means of the martyrdom of faith, which is, according

to this same tragic thinker, the crucifixion of reason.

Not without reason did he who had the right to do so speak of the

foolishness of the cross. Foolishness, without doubt, foolishness. And

the American humorist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, was not altogether wide of

the mark in making one of the characters in his ingenious conversations

say that he thought better of those who were confined in a lunatic

asylum on account of religious mania than of those who, while professing

the same religious principles, kept their wits and appeared to enjoy

life very well outside of the asylums.[53] But those who are at large,

are they not really, thanks to God, mad too? Are there not mild

madnesses, which not only permit us to mix with our neighbours without

danger to society, but which rather enable us to do so, for by means of

them we are able to attribute a meaning and finality to life and society

themselves?

And after all, what is madness and how can we distinguish it from

reason, unless we place ourselves outside both the one and the other,

which for us is impossible?

Madness perhaps it is, and great madness, to seek to penetrate into the

mystery of the Beyond; madness to seek to superimpose the

self-contradictory dreams of our imagination upon the dictates of a sane

reason. And a sane reason tells us that nothing can be built up without

foundations, and that it is not merely an idle but a subversive task to

fill the void of the unknown with fantasies. And nevertheless....

We must needs believe in the other life, in the eternal life beyond the

grave, and in an individual and personal life, in a life in which each

one of us may feel his consciousness and fed that it is united, without

being confounded, with all other consciousnesses in the Supreme

Consciousness, in God; we must needs believe in that other life in order

that we may live this life, and endure it, and give it meaning and

finality. And we must needs believe in that other life, perhaps, in

order that we may deserve it, in order that we may obtain it, for it may

be that he neither deserves it nor will obtain it who does not

passionately desire it above reason and, if need be, against reason.

And above all, we must feel and act as if an endless continuation of

our earthly life awaited us after death; and if it be that nothingness

is the fate that awaits us we must not, in the words of _Obermann_, so

act that it shall be a just fate.

And this leads us directly to the examination of the practical or

ethical aspect of our sole problem.