L'homme est périssable. II se peut; mais périssons en résistant,
et, si le néant nous est reservé, ne faisons pas que ce soit une
justice.--SÉNANCOUR: _Obermann_, lettre xc.
Several times in the devious course of these essays I have defined, in
spite of my horror of definitions, my own position with regard to the
problem that I have been examining; but I know there will always be some
dissatisfied reader, educated in some dogmatism or other, who will say:
"This man comes to no conclusion, he vacillates--now he seems to affirm
one thing and then its contrary--he is full of contradictions--I can't
label him. What is he?" Just this--one who affirms contraries, a man of
contradiction and strife, as Jeremiah said of himself; one who says one
thing with his heart and the contrary with his head, and for whom this
conflict is the very stuff of life. And that is as clear as the water
that flows from the melted snow upon the mountain tops.
I shall be told that this is an untenable position, that a foundation
must be laid upon which to build our action and our works, that it is
impossible to live by contradictions, that unity and clarity are
essential conditions of life and thought, and that it is necessary to
unify thought. And this leaves us as we were before. For it is precisely
this inner contradiction that unifies my life and gives it its practical
purpose.
Or rather it is the conflict itself, it is this self-same passionate
uncertainty, that unifies my action and makes me live and work.
We think in order that we may live, I have said; but perhaps it were
more correct to say that we think because we live, and the form of our
thought corresponds with that of our life. Once more I must repeat that
our ethical and philosophical doctrines in general are usually merely
the justification _a posteriori_ of our conduct, of our actions. Our
doctrines are usually the means we seek in order to explain and justify
to others and to ourselves our own mode of action. And this, be it
observed, not merely for others, but for ourselves. The man who does not
really know why he acts as he does and not otherwise, feels the
necessity of explaining to himself the motive of his action and so he
forges a motive. What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are
usually but the pretexts for it. The very same reason which one man may
regard as a motive for taking care to prolong his life may be regarded
by another man as a motive for shooting himself.
Nevertheless it cannot be denied that reasons, ideas, have an influence
upon human actions, and sometimes even determine them, by a process
analogous to that of suggestion upon a hypnotized person, and this is so
because of the tendency in every idea to resolve itself into action--an
idea being simply an inchoate or abortive act. It was this notion that
suggested to Fouillée his theory of idea-forces. But ordinarily ideas
are forces which we accommodate to other forces, deeper and much less
conscious.
But putting all this aside for the present, what I wish to establish is
that uncertainty, doubt, perpetual wrestling with the mystery of our
final destiny, mental despair, and the lack of any solid and stable
dogmatic foundation, may be the basis of an ethic.
He who bases or thinks that he bases his conduct--his inward or his
outward conduct, his feeling or his action--upon a dogma or theoretical
principle which he deems incontrovertible, runs the risk of becoming a
fanatic, and moreover, the moment that this dogma is weakened or
shattered, the morality based upon it gives way. If, the earth that he
thought firm begins to rock, he himself trembles at the earthquake, for
we do not all come up to the standard of the ideal Stoic who remains
undaunted among the ruins of a world shattered into atoms. Happily the
stuff that is underneath a man's ideas will save him. For if a man
should tell you that he does not defraud or cuckold his best friend only
because he is afraid of hell, you may depend upon it that neither would
he do so even if he were to cease to believe in hell, but that he would
invent some other excuse instead. And this is all to the honour of the
human race.
But he who believes that he is sailing, perhaps without a set course, on
an unstable and sinkable raft, must not be dismayed if the raft gives
way beneath his feet and threatens to sink. Such a one thinks that he
acts, not because he deems his principle of action to be true, but in
order to make it true, in order to prove its truth, in order to create
his own spiritual world.
My conduct must be the best proof, the moral proof, of my supreme
desire; and if I do not end by convincing myself, within the bounds of
the ultimate and irremediable uncertainty, of the truth of what I hope
for, it is because my conduct is not sufficiently pure. Virtue,
therefore, is not based upon dogma, but dogma upon virtue, and it is not
faith that creates martyrs but martyrs who create faith. There is no
security or repose--so far as security and repose are obtainable in this
life, so essentially insecure and unreposeful--save in conduct that is
passionately good.
Conduct, practice, is the proof of doctrine, theory. "If any man will do
His will--the will of Him that sent me," said Jesus, "he shall know of
the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself" (John
vii. 17); and there is a well-known saying of Pascal: "Begin by taking
holy water and you will end by becoming a believer." And pursuing a
similar train of thought, Johann Jakob Moser, the pietist, was of the
opinion that no atheist or naturalist had the right to regard the
Christian religion as void of truth so long as he had not put it to the
proof by keeping its precepts and commandments (Ritschl, _Geschichte des
Pietismus_, book vii., 43).
What is our heart's truth, anti-rational though it be? The immortality
of the human soul, the truth of the persistence of our consciousness
without any termination whatsoever, the truth of the human finality of
the Universe. And what is its moral proof? We may formulate it thus: Act
so that in your own judgement and in the judgement of others you may
merit eternity, act so that you may become irreplaceable, act so that
you may not merit death. Or perhaps thus: Act as if you were to die
to-morrow, but to die in order to survive and be eternalized. The end of
morality is to give personal, human finality to the Universe; to
discover the finality that belongs to it--if indeed it has any
finality--and to discover it by acting.
More than a century ago, in 1804, in Letter XC of that series that
constitutes the immense monody of his _Obermann_, Sénancour wrote the
words which I have put at the head of this chapter--and of all the
spiritual descendants of the patriarchal Rousseau, Sénancour was the
most profound and the most intense; of all the men of heart and feeling
that France has produced, not excluding Pascal, he was the most tragic.
"Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if it
is nothingness that awaits us, do not let us so act that it shall be a
just fate." Change this sentence from its negative to the positive
form--"And if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it
shall be an unjust fate"--and you get the firmest basis of action for
the man who cannot or will not be a dogmatist.
That which is irreligious and demoniacal, that which incapacitates us
for action and leaves us without any ideal defence against our evil
tendencies, is the pessimism that Goethe puts into the mouth of
Mephistopheles when he makes him say, "All that has achieved existence
deserves to be destroyed" (_denn alles was ensteht ist wert doss es
zugrunde geht_). This is the pessimism which we men call evil, and not
that other pessimism that consists in lamenting what it fears to be true
and struggling against this fear--namely, that everything is doomed to
annihilation in the end. Mephistopheles asserts that everything that
exists deserves to be destroyed, annihilated, but not that everything
will be destroyed or annihilated; and we assert that everything that
exists deserves to be exalted and eternalized, even though no such fate
is in store for it. The moral attitude is the reverse of this.
Yes, everything deserves to be eternalized, absolutely everything, even
evil itself, for that which we call evil would lose its evilness in
being eternalized, because it would lose its temporal nature. For the
essence of evil consists in its temporal nature, in its not applying
itself to any ultimate and permanent end.
And it might not be superfluous here to say something about that
distinction, more overlaid with confusion than any other, between what
we are accustomed to call optimism and pessimism, a confusion not less
than that which exists with regard to the distinction between
individualism and socialism. Indeed, it is scarcely possible to form a
clear idea as to what pessimism really is.
I have just this very day read in the _Nation_ (July 6, 1912) an
article, entitled "A Dramatic Inferno," that deals with an English
translation of the works of Strindberg, and it opens with the following
judicious observations: "If there were in the world a sincere and total
pessimism, it would of necessity be silent. The despair which finds a
voice is a social mood, it is the cry of misery which brother utters to
brother when both are stumbling through a valley of shadows which is
peopled with--comrades. In its anguish it bears witness to something
that is good in life, for it presupposes sympathy ... The real gloom,
the sincere despair, is dumb and blind; it writes no books, and feels no
impulse to burden an intolerable universe with a monument more lasting
than brass." Doubtless there is something of sophistry in this
criticism, for the man who is really in pain weeps and even cries aloud,
even if he is alone and there is nobody to hear him, simply as a means
of alleviating his pain, although this perhaps may be a result of social
habits. But does not the lion, alone in the desert, roar if he has an
aching tooth? But apart from this, it cannot be denied that there is a
substance of truth underlying these remarks. The pessimism that protests
and defends itself cannot be truly said to be pessimism. And, in truth,
still less is it pessimism to hold that nothing ought to perish although
all things may be doomed to annihilation, while on the other hand it is
pessimism to affirm that all things ought to be annihilated even though
nothing may perish.
Pessimism, moreover, may possess different values. There is a
eudemonistic or economic pessimism, that which denies happiness; there
is an ethical pessimism, that which denies the triumph of moral good;
and there is a religious pessimism, that which despairs of the human
finality of the Universe, of the eternal salvation of the individual
soul.
All men deserve to be saved, but, as I have said in the previous
chapter, he above all deserves immortality who desires it passionately
and even in the face of reason. An English writer, H.G. Wells, who has
taken upon himself the rôle of the prophet (a thing not uncommon in his
country), tells us in _Anticipations_ that "active and capable men of
all forms of religious profession tend in practice to disregard the
question of immortality altogether." And this is because the religious
professions of these active and capable men to whom Wells refers are
usually simply a lie, and their lives are a lie, too, if they seek to
base them upon religion. But it may be that at bottom there is not so
much truth in what Wells asserts as he and others imagine. These active
and capable men live in the midst of a society imbued with Christian
principles, surrounded by institutions and social feelings that are the
product of Christianity, and faith in the immortality of the soul exists
deep down in their own souls like a subterranean river, neither seen nor
heard, but watering the roots of their deeds and their motives.
It must be admitted that there exists in truth no more solid foundation
for morality than the foundation of the Catholic ethic. The end of man
is eternal happiness, which consists in the vision and enjoyment of God
_in sæcula sæculorum_. Where it errs, however, is in the choice of the
means conducive to this end; for to make the attainment of eternal
happiness dependent upon believing or not believing in the Procession of
the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son and not from the Father
alone, or in the Divinity of Jesus, or in the theory of the Hypostatic
Union, or even in the existence of God, is, as a moment's reflection
will show, nothing less than monstrous. A human God--and that is the
only kind of God we are able to conceive--would never reject him who was
unable to believe in Him with his head, and it is not in his head but in
his heart that the wicked man says that there is no God, which is
equivalent to saying that he wishes that there may not be a God. If any
belief could be bound up with the attainment of eternal happiness it
would be the belief in this happiness itself and in the possibility of
it.
And what shall we say of that other proposition of the king of pedants,
to the effect that we have not come into the world to be happy but to
fulfil our duty (_Wir sind nicht auf der Welt, um glücklich zu sein,
sondern um unsere Schuldigkeit zu tun_)? If we are in the world _for_
something (_um etwas_), whence can this _for_ be derived but from the
very essence of our own will, which asks for happiness and not duty as
the ultimate end? And if it is sought to attribute some other value to
this _for_, an objective value, as some Sadducean pedant would say, then
it must be recognized that the objective reality, that which would
remain even though humanity should disappear, is as indifferent to our
duty as to our happiness, is as little concerned with our morality as
with our felicity. I am not aware that Jupiter, Uranus, or Sirius would
allow their course to be affected by the fact that we are or are not
fulfilling our duty any more than by the fact that we are or are not
happy.
Such considerations must appear to these pedants to be characterized by
a ridiculous vulgarity and a dilettante superficiality. (The
intellectual world is divided into two classes--dilettanti on the one
hand, and pedants on the other.) What choice, then, have we? The modern
man is he who resigns himself to the truth and is content to be ignorant
of the synthesis of culture--witness what Windelband says on this head
in his study of the fate of Hölderlin (_Praeludien_, i.). Yes, these men
of culture are resigned, but there remain a few poor savages like
ourselves for whom resignation is impossible. We do not resign ourselves
to the idea of having one day to disappear, and the criticism of the
great Pedant does not console us.
The quintessence of common sense was expressed by Galileo Galilei when
he said: "Some perhaps will say that the bitterest pain is the loss of
life, but I say that there are others more bitter; for whosoever is
deprived of life is deprived at the same time of the power to lament,
not only this, but any other loss whatsoever." Whether Galileo was
conscious or not of the humour of this sentence I do not know, but it is
a tragic humour.
But, to turn back, I repeat that if the attainment of eternal happiness
could be bound up with any particular belief, it would be with the
belief in the possibility of its realization. And yet, strictly
speaking, not even with this. The reasonable man says in his head,
"There is no other life after this," but only the wicked says it in his
heart. But since the wicked man is possibly only a man who has been
driven to despair, will a human God condemn him because of his despair?
His despair alone is misfortune enough.
But in any event let us adopt the Calderónian formula in _La Vida es
Sueño_:
_Que estoy soñando y que quiero
obrar hacer bien, pues no se pierde
el hacer bien aun en sueños_[54]
But are good deeds really not lost? Did Calderón know? And he added:
_Acudamos a lo eterno
que es la fama vividora
donde ni duermen las dichas
no las grandezas reposan_[55]
Is it really so? Did Calderón know?
Calderón had faith, robust Catholic faith; but for him who lacks faith,
for him who cannot believe in what Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca
believed, there always remains the attitude of _Obermann_.
If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it; let
us fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory; let us
fight against it quixotically.
And not only do we fight against destiny in longing for what is
irrational, but in acting in such a way that we make ourselves
irreplaceable, in impressing our seal and mark upon others, in acting
upon our neighbours in order to dominate them, in giving ourselves to
them in order that we may eternalize ourselves so far as we can.
Our greatest endeavour must be to make ourselves irreplaceable; to make
the theoretical fact--if this expression does not involve a
contradiction in terms--the fact that each one of us is unique and
irreplaceable, that no one else can fill the gap that will be left when
we die, a practical truth.
For in fact each man is unique and irreplaceable; there cannot be any
other I; each one of us--our soul, that is, not our life--is worth the
whole Universe. I say the spirit and not the life, for the ridiculously
exaggerated value which those attach to human life who, not really
believing in the spirit--that is to say, in their personal
immortality--tirade against war and the death penalty, for example, is a
value which they attach to it precisely because they do not really
believe in the spirit of which life is the servant. For life is of use
only in so far as it serves its lord and master, spirit, and if the
master perishes with the servant, neither the one nor the other is of
any great value.
And to act in such a way as to make our annihilation an injustice, in
such a way as to make our brothers, our sons, and our brothers' sons,
and their sons' sons, feel that we ought not to have died, is something
that is within the reach of all.
The essence of the doctrine of the Christian redemption is in the fact
that he who suffered agony and death was the unique man--that is, Man,
the Son of Man, or the Son of God; that he, because he was sinless, did
not deserve to have died; and that this propitiatory divine victim died
in order that he might rise again and that he might raise us up from the
dead, in order that he might deliver us from death by applying his
merits to us and showing us the way of life. And the Christ who gave
himself for his brothers in humanity with an absolute self-abnegation is
the pattern for our action to shape itself on.
All of us, each one of us, can and ought to determine to give as much
of himself as he possibly can--nay, to give more than he can, to exceed
himself, to go beyond himself, to make himself irreplaceable, to give
himself to others in order that he may receive himself back again from
them. And each one in his own civil calling or office. The word office,
_officium_, means obligation, debt, but in the concrete, and that is
what it always ought to mean in practice. We ought not so much to try to
seek that particular calling which we think most fitting and suitable
for ourselves, as to make a calling of that employment in which chance,
Providence, or our own will has placed us.
Perhaps Luther rendered no greater service to Christian civilization
than that of establishing the religious value of the civil occupation,
of shattering the monastic and medieval idea of the religious calling,
an idea involved in the mist of human passions and imaginations and the
cause of terrible life tragedies. If we could but enter into the
cloister and examine the religious vocation of those whom the
self-interest of their parents had forced as children into a novice's
cell and who had suddenly awakened to the life of the world--if indeed
they ever do awake!--or of those whom their own self-delusions had led
into it! Luther saw this life of the cloister at close quarters and
suffered it himself, and therefore he was able to understand and feel
the religious value of the civil calling, to which no man is bound by
perpetual vows.
All that the Apostle said in the fourth chapter of his Epistle to the
Ephesians with regard to the respective functions of Christians in the
Church must be transferred and applied to the civil or
non-ecclesiastical life, for to-day among ourselves the
Christian--whether he know it or not, and whether he like it or not--is
the citizen, and just as the Apostle exclaimed, "I am a Roman citizen!"
each one of us, even the atheist, might exclaim "I am a Christian!" And
this demands the _civilizing_, in the sense of dis-ecclesiasticizing, of
Christianity, which was Luther's task, although he himself eventually
became the founder of a Church.
There is a common English phrase, "the right man in the right place." To
which we might rejoin, "Cobbler, to thy last!" Who knows what is the
post that suits him best and for which he is most fitted? Does a man
himself know it better than others or do they know it better than he?
Who can measure capacities and aptitudes? The religious attitude,
undoubtedly, is to endeavour to make the occupation in which we find
ourselves our vocation, and only in the last resort to change it for
another.
This question of the proper vocation is possibly the gravest and most
deep-seated of social problems, that which is at the root of all the
others. That which is known _par excellence_ as the social question is
perhaps not so much a problem of the distribution of wealth, of the
products of labour, as a problem of the distribution of avocations, of
the modes of production. It is not aptitude--a thing impossible to
ascertain without first putting it to the test and not always clearly
indicated in a man, for with regard to the majority of callings a man is
not born but made--it is not special aptitude, but rather social,
political, and customary reasons that determine a man's occupation. At
certain times and in certain countries it is caste and heredity; at
other times and in other places, the guild or corporation; in later
times machinery--in almost all cases necessity; liberty scarcely ever.
And the tragedy of it culminates in those occupations, pandering to
evil, in which the soul is sacrificed for the sake of the livelihood, in
which the workman works with the consciousness, not of the uselessness
merely, but of the social perversity, of his work, manufacturing the
poison that will kill him, the weapon, perchance, with which his
children will be murdered. This, and not the question of wages, is the
gravest problem.
I shall never forget a scene of which I was a witness that took place
on the banks of the river that flows through Bilbao, my native town. A
workman was hammering at something in a shipwright's yard, working
without putting his heart into his work, as if he lacked energy or
worked merely for the sake of getting a wage, when suddenly a woman's
voice was heard crying, "Help! help!" A child had fallen into the river.
Instantly the man was transformed. With an admirable energy,
promptitude, and sang-froid he threw off his clothes and plunged into
the water to rescue the drowning infant.
Possibly the reason why there is less bitterness in the agrarian
socialist movement than in that of the towns is that the field labourer,
although his wages and his standard of living are no better than those
of the miner or artisan, has a clearer consciousness of the social value
of his work. Sowing corn is a different thing from extracting diamonds
from the earth.
And it may be that the greatest social progress consists in a certain
indifferentiation of labour, in the facility for exchanging one kind of
work for another, and that other not perhaps a more lucrative, but a
nobler one--for there are degrees of nobility in labour. But unhappily
it is only too seldom that a man who keeps to one occupation without
changing is concerned with making a religious vocation of it, or that
the man who changes his occupation for another does so from any
religious motive.
And do you not know cases in which a man, justifying his action on the
ground that the professional organism to which he belongs and in which
he works is badly organized and does not function as it ought, will
evade the strict performance of his duty on the pretext that he is
thereby fulfilling a higher duty? Is not this insistence upon the
literal carrying out of orders called disciplinarianism, and do not
people speak disparagingly of bureaucracy and the Pharisaism of public
officials? And cases occur not unlike that of an intelligent and
studious military officer who should discover the deficiencies of his
country's military organization and denounce them to his superiors and
perhaps to the public--thereby fulfilling his duty--and who, when on
active service, should refuse to carry out an operation which he was
ordered to undertake, believing that there was but scant probability of
success or rather certainty of failure, so long as these deficiencies
remained unremedied. He would deserve to be shot. And as for this
question of Pharisaism ...
And there is always a way of obeying an order while yet retaining the
command, a way of carrying out what one believes to be an absurd
operation while correcting its absurdity, even though it involve one's
own death. When in my bureaucratic capacity I have come across some
legislative ordinance that has fallen into desuetude because of its
manifest absurdity, I have always endeavoured to apply it. There is
nothing worse than a loaded pistol which nobody uses left lying in some
corner of the house; a child finds it, begins to play with it, and kills
its own father. Laws that have fallen into desuetude are the most
terrible of all laws, when the cause of the desuetude is the badness of
the law.
And these are not groundless suppositions, and least of all in our
country. For there are many who, while they go about looking out for I
know not what ideal--that is to say, fictitious duties and
responsibilities--neglect the duty of putting their whole soul into the
immediate and concrete business which furnishes them with a living; and
the rest, the immense majority, perform their task perfunctorily, merely
for the sake of nominally complying with their duty--_para cumplir_, a
terribly immoral phrase--in order to get themselves out of a difficulty,
to get the job done, to qualify for their wages without earning them,
whether these wages be pecuniary or otherwise.
Here you have a shoemaker who lives by making shoes, and makes them with
just enough care and attention to keep his clientèle together without
losing custom. Another shoemaker lives on a somewhat higher spiritual
plane, for he has a proper love for his work, and out of pride or a
sense of honour strives for the reputation of being the best shoemaker
in the town or in the kingdom, even though this reputation brings him no
increase of custom or profit, but only renown and prestige. But there is
a still higher degree of moral perfection in this business of
shoemaking, and that is for the shoemaker to aspire to become for his
fellow-townsmen the one and only shoemaker, indispensable and
irreplaceable, the shoemaker who looks after their footgear so well that
they will feel a definite loss when he dies--when he is "dead to them,"
not merely "dead"[56]--and they will feel that he ought not to have
died. And this will result from the fact that in working for them he was
anxious to spare them any discomfort and to make sure that it should not
be any preoccupation with their feet that should prevent them from being
at leisure to contemplate the higher truths; he shod them for the love
of them and for the love of God in them--he shod them religiously.
I have chosen this example deliberately, although it may perhaps appear
to you somewhat pedestrian. For the fact is that in this business of
shoemaking, the religious, as opposed to the ethical, sense is at a very
low ebb.
Working men group themselves in associations, they form co-operative
societies and unions for defence, they fight very justly and nobly for
the betterment of their class; but it is not clear that these
associations have any great influence on their moral attitude towards
their work. They have succeeded in compelling employers to employ only
such workmen, and no others, as the respective unions shall designate in
each particular case; but in the selection of those designated they pay
little heed to their technical fitness. Often the employer finds it
almost impossible to dismiss an inefficient workman on account of his
inefficiency, for his fellow-workers take his part. Their work,
moreover, is often perfunctory, performed merely as a pretext for
receiving a wage, and instances even occur when they deliberately
mishandle it in order to injure their employer.
In attempting to justify this state of things, it may be said that the
employers are a hundred times more blameworthy than the workmen, for
they are not concerned to give a better wage to the man who does better
work, or to foster the general education and technical proficiency of
the workman, or to ensure the intrinsic goodness of the article
produced. The improvement of the product--which, apart from reasons of
industrial and mercantile competition, ought to be in itself and for the
good of the consumers, for charity's sake, the chief end of the
business--is not so regarded either by employers or employed, and this
is because neither the one nor the other have any religious sense of
their social function. Neither of them seek to make themselves
irreplaceable. The evil is aggravated when the business takes the
unhappy form of the impersonal limited company, for where there is no
longer any personal signature there is no longer any of that pride which
seeks to give the signature prestige, a pride which in its way is a
substitute for the craving for eternalization. With the disappearance of
the concrete individuality, the basis of all religion, the religious
sense of the business calling disappears also.
And what has been said of employers and workmen applies still more to
members of the liberal professions and public functionaries. There is
scarcely a single servant of the State who feels the religious bearing
of his official and public duties. Nothing could be more unsatisfactory,
nothing more confused, than the feeling among our people with regard to
their duties towards the State, and this sense of duty is still further
obliterated by the attitude of the Catholic Church, whose action so far
as the State is concerned is in strict truth anarchical. It is no
uncommon thing to find among its ministers upholders of the moral
lawfulness of smuggling and contraband as if in disobeying the legally
constituted authority the smuggler and contrabandist did not sin against
the Fourth Commandment of the law of God, which in commanding us to
honour our father and mother commands us to obey all lawful authority in
so far as the ordinances of such authority are not contrary (and the
levying of these contributions is certainly not contrary) to the law of
God.
There are many who, since it is written "In the sweat of thy face shalt
thou eat bread," regard work as a punishment, and therefore they
attribute merely an economico-political, or at best an esthetic, value
to the work of everyday life. For those who take this view--and it is
the view principally held by the Jesuits--the business of life is
twofold: there is the inferior and transitory business of winning a
livelihood, of winning bread for ourselves and our children in an
honourable, manner--and the elasticity of this honour is well known; and
there is the grand business of our salvation, of winning eternal glory.
This inferior or worldly business is to be undertaken not only so as to
permit us, without deceiving or seriously injuring our neighbours, to
live decently in accordance with our social position, but also so as to
afford us the greatest possible amount of time for attending to the
other main business of our life. And there are others who, rising
somewhat above this conception of the work of our civil occupation, a
conception which is economical rather than ethical, attain to an
esthetic conception and sense of it, and this involves endeavouring to
acquire distinction and renown in our occupation, the converting of it
into an art for art's sake, for beauty's sake. But it is necessary to
rise still higher than this, to attain to an ethical sense of our civil
calling, to a sense which derives from our religious sense, from our
hunger of eternalization. To work at our ordinary civil occupation, with
eyes fixed on God, for the love of God, which is equivalent to saying
for the love of our eternalization, is to make of this work a work of
religion.
That saying, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," does not
mean that God condemned man to work, but to the painfulness of it. It
would have been no condemnation to have condemned man to work itself,
for work is the only practical consolation for having been born. And,
for a Christian, the proof that God did not condemn man to work itself
consists in the saying of the Scripture that, before the Fall, while he
was still in a state of innocence, God took man and put him in the
garden "to dress it and to keep it" (Gen. ii. 15). And how, in fact,
would man have passed his time in Paradise if he had had no work to do
in keeping it in order? And may it not be that the beatific vision
itself is a kind of work?
And even if work were our punishment, we ought to strive to make it, the
punishment itself, our consolation and our redemption; and if we must
needs embrace some cross or other, there is for each one of us no better
cross than the cross of our own civil calling. For Christ did not say,
"Take up my cross and follow me," but "Take up thy cross and follow me":
every man his own cross, for the Saviour's cross the Saviour alone can
bear. And the imitation of Christ, therefore, does not consist in that
monastic ideal so shiningly set forth in the book that commonly bears
the name of à Kempis, an ideal only applicable to a very limited number
of persons and therefore anti-Christian; but to imitate Christ is to
take up each one his own cross, the cross of his own civil
occupation--civil and not merely religions--as Christ took up his cross,
the cross of his calling, and to embrace it and carry it, looking
towards God and striving to make each act of this calling a true prayer.
In making shoes and because he makes them a man can gain heaven,
provided that the shoemaker strives to be perfect, as a shoemaker, as
our Father in heaven is perfect.
Fourier, the socialist dreamer, dreamed of making work attractive in his
phalansteries by the free choice of vocations and in other ways. There
is no other way than that of liberty. Wherein consists the charm of the
game of chance, which is a kind of work, if not in the voluntary
submission of the player to the liberty of Nature--that is, to chance?
But do not let us lose ourselves in a comparison between work and play.
And the sense of making ourselves irreplaceable, of not meriting death,
of making our annihilation, if it is annihilation that awaits us, an
injustice, ought to impel us not only to perform our own occupation
religiously, from love of God and love of our eternity and
eternalization, but to perform it passionately, tragically if you like.
It ought to impel us to endeavour to stamp others with our seal, to
perpetuate ourselves in them and in their children by dominating them,
to leave on all things the imperishable impress of our signature. The
most fruitful ethic is the ethic of mutual imposition.
Above all, we must recast in a positive form the negative commandments
which we have inherited from the Ancient Law. Thus where it is written,
"Thou shalt not lie!" let us understand, "Thou shalt always speak the
truth, in season and out of season!" although it is we ourselves, and
not others, who are judges in each case of this seasonableness. And for
"Thou shalt not kill!" let us understand, "Thou shalt give life and
increase it!" And for "Thou shalt not steal!" let us say, "Thou shalt
increase the general wealth!" And for "Thou shalt not commit adultery!"
"Thou shalt give children, healthy, strong, and good, to thy country and
to heaven!" And thus with all the other commandments.
He who does not lose his life shall not find it. Give yourself then to
others, but in order to give yourself to them, first dominate them. For
it is not possible to dominate except by being dominated. Everyone
nourishes himself upon the flesh of that which he devours. In order that
you may dominate your neighbour you must know and love him. It is by
attempting to impose my ideas upon him that I become the recipient of
his ideas. To love my neighbour is to wish that he may be like me, that
he may be another I--that is to say, it is to wish that I may be he; it
is to wish to obliterate the division between him and me, to suppress
the evil. My endeavour to impose myself upon another, to be and live in
him and by him, to make him mine--which is the same as making myself
his--is that which gives religious meaning to human collectivity, to
human solidarity.
The feeling of solidarity originates in myself; since I am a society, I
feel the need of making myself master of human society; since I am a
social product, I must socialize myself, and from myself I proceed to
God--who is I projected to the All--and from God to each of my
neighbours.
My immediate first impulse is to protest against the inquisitor and to
prefer the merchant who comes to offer me his wares. But when my
impressions are clarified by reflection, I begin to see that the
inquisitor, when he acts from a right motive, treats me as a man, as an
end in myself, and if he molests me it is from a charitable wish to save
my soul; while the merchant, on the other hand, regards me merely as a
customer, as a means to an end, and his indulgence and tolerance is at
bottom nothing but a supreme indifference to my destiny. There is much
more humanity in the inquisitor.
Similarly there is much more humanity in war than in peace.
Non-resistance to evil implies resistance to good, and to take the
offensive, leaving the defensive out of the question, is perhaps the
divinest thing in humanity. War is the school of fraternity and the bond
of love; it is war that has brought peoples into touch with one
another, by mutual aggression and collision, and has been the cause of
their knowing and loving one another. Human love knows no purer embrace,
or one more fruitful in its consequences, than that between victor and
vanquished on the battlefield. And even the purified hate that springs
from war is fruitful. War is, in its strictest sense, the sanctification
of homicide; Cain is redeemed as a leader of armies. And if Cain had not
killed his brother Abel, perhaps he would have died by the hand of Abel.
God revealed Himself above all in war; He began by being the God of
battles; and one of the greatest services of the Cross is that, in the
form of the sword-hilt, it protects the hand that wields the sword.
The enemies of the State say that Cain, the fratricide, was the founder
of the State. And we must accept the fact and turn it to the glory of
the State, the child of war. Civilization began on the day on which one
man, by subjecting another to his will and compelling him to do the work
of two, was enabled to devote himself to the contemplation of the world
and to set his captive upon works of luxury. It was slavery that enabled
Plato to speculate upon the ideal republic, and it was war that brought
slavery about. Not without reason was Athena the goddess of war and of
wisdom. But is there any need to repeat once again these obvious truths,
which, though they have continually been forgotten, are continually
rediscovered?
And the supreme commandment that arises out of love towards God, and the
foundation of all morality, is this: Yield yourself up entirely, give
your spirit to the end that you may save it, that you may eternalize it.
Such is the sacrifice of life.
The individual _quâ_ individual, the wretched captive of the instinct of
preservation and of the senses, cares only about preserving himself, and
all his concern is that others should not force their way into his
sphere, should not disturb him, should not interrupt his idleness; and
in return for their abstention or for the sake of example he refrains
from forcing himself upon them, from interrupting their idleness, from
disturbing them, from taking possession of them. "Do not do unto others
what you would not have them do unto you," he translates thus: I do not
interfere with others--let them not interfere with me. And he shrinks
and pines and perishes in this spiritual avarice and this repellent
ethic of anarchic individualism: each one for himself. And as each one
is not himself, he can hardly live for himself.
But as soon as the individual feels himself in society, he feels himself
in God, and kindled by the instinct of perpetuation he glows with love
towards God, and with a dominating charity he seeks to perpetuate
himself in others, to perennialize his spirit, to eternalize it, to
unnail God, and his sole desire is to seal his spirit upon other spirits
and to receive their impress in return. He has shaken off the yoke of
his spiritual sloth and avarice.
Sloth, it is said, is the mother of all the vices; and in fact sloth
does engender two vices--avarice and envy--which in their turn are the
source of all the rest. Sloth is the weight of matter, in itself inert,
within us, and this sloth, while it professes to preserve us by
economizing our forces, in reality attenuates us and reduces us to
nothing.
In man there is either too much matter or too much spirit, or to put it
better, either he feels a hunger for spirit--that is, for eternity--or
he feels a hunger for matter--that is, submission to annihilation. When
spirit is in excess and he feels a hunger for yet more of it, he pours
it forth and scatters it abroad, and in scattering it abroad he
amplifies it with that of others; and on the contrary, when a man is
avaricious of himself and thinks that he will preserve himself better by
withdrawing within himself, he ends by losing all--he is like the man
who received the single talent: he buried it in order that he might not
lose it, and in the end he was bereft of it. For to him that hath shall
be given, but from him that hath but a little shall be taken away even
the little that he hath.
Be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect, we are bidden,
and this terrible precept--terrible because for us the infinite
perfection of the Father is unattainable--must be our supreme rule of
conduct. Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible that he
achieves will be scarcely worth the trouble of achieving. It behoves us
to aspire to the impossible, to the absolute and infinite perfection,
and to say to the Father, "Father, I cannot--help Thou my impotence."
And He acting in us will achieve it for us.
And to be perfect is to be all, it is to be myself and to be all else,
it is to be humanity, it is to be the Universe. And there is no other
way of being all but to give oneself to all, and when all shall be in
all, all will be in each one of us. The apocatastasis is more than a
mystical dream: it is a rule of action, it is a beacon beckoning us to
high exploits.
And from it springs the ethic of invasion, of domination, of aggression,
of inquisition if you like. For true charity is a kind of invasion--it
consists in putting my spirit into other spirits, in giving them my
suffering as the food and consolation for their sufferings, in awakening
their unrest with my unrest, in sharpening their hunger for God with my
hunger for God. It is not charity to rock and lull our brothers to sleep
in the inertia and drowsiness of matter, but rather to awaken them to
the uneasiness and torment of spirit.
To the fourteen works of mercy which we learnt in the Catechism of
Christian Doctrine there should sometimes be added yet another, that of
awakening the sleeper. Sometimes, at any rate, and surely when the
sleeper sleeps on the brink of a precipice, it is much more merciful to
awaken him than to bury him after he is dead--let us leave the dead to
bury their dead. It has been well said, "Whosoever loves thee dearly
will make thee weep," and charity often causes weeping. "The love that
does not mortify does not deserve so divine a name," said that ardent
Portuguese apostle, Fr. Thomé de Jesús,[57] who was also the author of
this ejaculation--"O infinite fire, O eternal love, who weepest when
thou hast naught to embrace and feed upon and many hearts to burn!" He
who loves his neighbour burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood,
in burning groans and distils itself in tears.
And to do this is generosity, one of the two mother virtues which are
born when inertia, sloth, is overcome. Most of our miseries come from
spiritual avarice.
The cure for suffering--which, as we have said, is the collision of
consciousness with unconsciousness--is not to be submerged in
unconsciousness, but to be raised to consciousness and to suffer more.
The evil of suffering is cured by more suffering, by higher suffering.
Do not take opium, but put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound, for
when you sleep and no longer feel the suffering, you are not. And to be,
that is imperative. Do not then close your eyes to the agonizing Sphinx,
but look her in the face and let her seize you in her mouth and crunch
you with her hundred thousand poisonous teeth and swallow you. And when
she has swallowed you, you will know the sweetness of the taste of
suffering.
The way thereto in practice is by the ethic of mutual imposition. Men
should strive to impose themselves upon one another, to give their
spirits to one another, to seal one another's souls.
There is matter for thought in the fact that the Christian ethic has
been called an ethic of slaves. By whom? By anarchists! It is anarchism
that is an ethic of slaves, for it is only the slave that chants the
praises of anarchical liberty. Anarchism, no! but _panarchism_; not the
creed of "Nor God nor master!" but that of "All gods and all masters!"
all striving to become gods, to become immortal, and achieving this by
dominating others.
And there are so many ways of dominating. There is even a passive way,
or one at least that is apparently passive, of fulfilling at times this
law of life. Adaptation to environment, imitation, putting oneself in
another's place, sympathy, in a word, besides being a manifestation of
the unity of the species, is a mode of self-expansion, of being another.
To be conquered, or at least to seem to be conquered, is often to
conquer; to take what is another's is a way of living in him.
And in speaking of domination, I do not mean the domination of the
tiger. The fox also dominates by cunning, and the hare by flight, and
the viper by poison, and the mosquito by its smallness, and the squid by
the inky fluid with which it darkens the water and under cover of which
it escapes. And no one is scandalized at this, for the same universal
Father who gave its fierceness, its talons, and its jaws to the tiger,
gave cunning to the fox, swift feet to the hare, poison to the viper,
diminutiveness to the mosquito, and its inky fluid to the squid. And
nobleness or ignobleness does not consist in the weapons we use, for
every species and even every individual possesses its own, but rather in
the way in which we use them, and above all in the cause in which we
wield them.
And among the weapons of conquest must be included the weapon of
patience and of resignation, but a passionate patience and a passionate
resignation, containing within itself an active principle and antecedent
longings. You remember that famous sonnet of Milton--Milton, the great
fighter, the great Puritan disturber of the spiritual peace, the singer
of Satan--who, when he considered how his light was spent and that one
talent which it is death to hide lodged with him useless, heard the
voice of Patience saying to him,
God doth not need
Either man's work, or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best: his state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.
They also serve who only stand and wait--yes, but it is when they wait
for Him passionately, hungeringly, full of longing for immortality in
Him.
And we must impose ourselves, even though it be by our patience. "My cup
is small, but I drink out of my cup," said the egoistical poet of an
avaricious people.[58] No, out of my cup all drink, for I wish all to
drink out of it; I offer it to them, and my cup grows according to the
number of those who drink out of it, and all, in putting it to their
lips, leave in it something of their spirit. And while they drink out of
my cup, I also drink out of theirs. For the more I belong to myself, and
the more I am myself, the more I belong to others; out of the fullness
of myself I overflow upon my brothers, and as I overflow upon them they
enter into me.
"Be ye perfect, as your Father is perfect," we are bidden, and our
Father is perfect because He is Himself and because He is in each one of
His children who live and move and have their being in Him. And the end
of perfection is that we all may be one (John xvii. 21), all one body in
Christ (Rom. xii. 5), and that, at the last, when all things are subdued
unto the Son, the Son himself may be subject to Him that put all things
under him, that God may be all in all. And this is to make the Universe
consciousness, to make Nature a society, and a human society. And then
shall we be able confidently to call God Father.
I am aware that those who say that ethics is a science will say that
all this commentary of mine is nothing but rhetoric; but each man has
his own language and his own passion--that is to say, each man who knows
what passion is--and as for the man who knows it not, nothing will it
avail him to know science.
And the passion that finds its expression in this rhetoric, the devotees
of ethical science call egotism. But this egotism is the only true
remedy for egoism, spiritual avarice, the vice of preserving and
reserving oneself and of not striving to perennialize oneself by giving
oneself.
"Be not, and ye shall be mightier than all that is," said Fr. Juan de
los Angeles in one of his _Diálogos de la Conquista del Reina de Dios_
(_Dial._, iii., 8); but what does this "Be not" mean? May it not mean
paradoxically--and such a mode of expression is common with the
mystics--the contrary of that which, at a first and literal reading, it
would appear to mean? Is not the whole ethic of submission and quietism
an immense paradox, or rather a great tragic contradiction? Is not the
monastic, the strictly monastic, ethic an absurdity? And by the monastic
ethic I mean that of the solitary Carthusian, that of the hermit, who
flees from the world--perhaps carrying it with him nevertheless--in
order that he may live quite alone with a God who is lonely as himself;
not that of the Dominican inquisitor who scoured Provence in search of
Albigensian hearts to burn.
"Let God do it all," someone will say; but if man folds his arms, God
will go to sleep.
This Carthusian ethic and that scientific ethic which is derived from
ethical science--oh, this science of ethics! rational and rationalistic
ethics! pedantry of pedantry, all is pedantry!--yes, this perhaps is
egoism and coldness of heart.
There are some who say that they isolate themselves with God in order
that they may the better work out their salvation, their redemption; but
since sin is collective, redemption must be collective also. "The
religious is the determination of the whole, and everything outside this
is an illusion of the senses, and that is why the greatest criminal is
at bottom innocent, a good-natured man and a saint" (Kierkegaard,
_Afsluttende_, etc., ii., ii., cap. iv., sect. 2, _a_).
Are we to understand, on the other hand, that men seek to gain the
other, the eternal life, by renouncing this the temporal life? If the
other life is anything, it must be a continuation of this, and only as
such a continuation, more or less purified, is it mirrored in our
desire; and if this is so, such as is this life of time, so will be the
life of eternity.
"This world and the other are like the two wives of one husband--if he
pleases one he makes the other envious," said an Arab thinker, quoted by
Windelband (_Das Heilige_, in vol. ii. of _Präludien_); but such a
thought could only have arisen in the mind of one who had failed to
resolve the tragic conflict between his spirit and the world in a
fruitful warfare, a practical contradiction. "Thy kingdom come" to us;
so Christ taught us to pray to the Father, not "May we come to Thy
kingdom"; and according to the primitive Christian belief the eternal
life was to be realized on this earth itself and as a continuation of
the earthly life. We were made men and not angels in order that we might
seek our happiness through the medium of this life, and the Christ of
the Christian Faith became, not an angelic, but a human, being,
redeeming us by taking upon himself a real and effective body and not an
appearance of one merely. And according to this same Faith, even the
highest of the angelical hierarchy adore the Virgin, the supreme symbol
of terrestrial Humanity. The angelical ideal, therefore, is not the
Christian ideal, and still less is it the human ideal, nor can it be. An
angel, moreover, is a neutral being, without sex and without country.
It is impossible for us to feel the other life, the eternal life, I have
already repeated more than once, as a life of angelical contemplation;
it must be a life of action. Goethe said that "man must believe in
immortality, since in his nature he has a right to it." And he added:
"The conviction of our persistence arises in me from the concept of
activity. If I work without ceasing to the end, Nature is obliged (_so
ist die Natur verpflichtet_) to provide me with another form of
existence, since my actual spirit can bear no more." Change Nature to
God, and you have a thought that remains Christian in character, for the
first Fathers of the Church did not believe that the immortality of the
soul was a natural gift--that is to say, something rational--but a
divine gift of grace. And that which is of grace is usually, in its
essence, of justice, since justice is divine and gratuitous, not
natural. And Goethe added: "I could begin nothing with an eternal
happiness before me, unless new tasks and new difficulties were given me
to overcome." And true it is that there is no happiness in a vacuity of
contemplation.
But may there not be some justification for the morality of the hermit,
of the Carthusian, the ethic of the Thebaid? Might we not say, perhaps,
that it is necessary to preserve these exceptional types in order that
they may stand as everlasting patterns for mankind? Do not men breed
racehorses, which are useless for any practical kind of work, but which
preserve the purity of the breed and become the sires of excellent
hackneys and hunters? Is there not a luxury of ethics, not less
justifiable than any other sort of luxury? But, on the other hand, is
not all this substantially esthetics, and not ethics, still less
religion? May not the contemplative, medieval, monastic ideal be
esthetical, and not religious nor even ethical? And after all, those of
the seekers after solitude who have related to us their conversation
when they were alone with God have performed an eternalizing work, they
have concerned themselves with the souls of others. And by this alone,
that it has given us an Eckhart, a Seuse, a Tauler, a Ruysbroek, a Juan
de la Cruz, a Catherine of Siena, an Angela of Foligno, a Teresa de
Jesús, is the cloister justified.
But the chief of our Spanish Orders are the Predicadores, founded by
Domingo de Guzmán for the aggressive work of extirpating heresy; the
Company of Jesus, a militia with the world as its field of operations
(which explains its history); the order of the Escuelas Pías, also
devoted to a work of an aggressive or invasive nature, that of
instruction. I shall certainly be reminded that the reform of the
contemplative Order of the Carmelites which Teresa de Jesús undertook
was a Spanish work. Yes, Spanish it was, and in it men sought liberty.
It was, in fact, the yearning for liberty, for inward liberty, which, in
the troubled days of the Inquisition, led many choice spirits to the
cloister. They imprisoned themselves in order that they might be more
free. "Is it not a fine thing that a poor nun of San José can attain to
sovereignty over the whole earth and the elements?" said St. Teresa in
her _Life_. It was the Pauline yearning for liberty, the longing to
shake off the bondage of the external law, which was then very severe,
and, as Maestro Fray Luis de León said, very stubborn.
But did they actually find liberty in the cloister? It is very doubtful
if they did, and to-day it is impossible. For true liberty is not to rid
oneself of the external law; liberty is consciousness of the law. Not he
who has shaken off the yoke of the law is free, but he who has made
himself master of the law. Liberty must be sought in the midst of the
world, which is the domain of the law, and of sin, the offspring of the
law. That which we must be freed from is sin, which is collective.
Instead of renouncing the world in order that we may dominate it--and
who does not know the collective instinct of domination of those
religious Orders whose members renounce the world?--what we ought to do
is to dominate the world in order that we may be able to renounce it.
Not to seek poverty and submission, but to seek wealth in order that we
may use it to increase human consciousness, and to seek power for the
same end.
It is curious that monks and anarchists should be at enmity with each
other, when fundamentally they both profess the same ethic and are
related by close ties of kinship. Anarchism tends to become a kind of
atheistic monachism and a religious, rather than an ethical or
economico-social, doctrine. The one party starts from the assumption
that man is naturally evil, born in original sin, and that it is through
grace that he becomes good, if indeed he ever does become good; and the
other from the assumption that man is naturally good and is subsequently
perverted by society. And these two theories really amount to the same
thing, for in both the individual is opposed to society, as if the
individual had preceded society and therefore were destined to survive
it. And both ethics are ethics of the cloister.
And the fact that guilt is collective must not actuate me to throw mine
upon the shoulders of others, but rather to take upon myself the burden
of the guilt of others, the guilt of all men; not to merge and sink my
guilt in the total mass of guilt, but to make this total guilt my own;
not to dismiss and banish my own guilt, but to open the doors of my
heart to the guilt of all men, to centre it within myself and
appropriate it to myself. And each one of us ought to help to remedy the
guilt, and just because others do not do so. The fact that society is
guilty aggravates the guilt of each member of it. "Someone ought to do
it, but why should I? is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed
amiability. Someone ought to do it, so why not I? is the cry of some
earnest servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous
duty. Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral
evolution." Thus spoke Mrs. Annie Besant in her autobiography. Thus
spoke theosophy.
The fact that society is guilty aggravates the guilt of each one, and he
is most guilty who most is sensible of the guilt. Christ, the innocent,
since he best knew the intensity of the guilt, was in a certain sense
the most guilty. In him the culpability, together with the divinity, of
humanity arrived at the consciousness of itself. Many are wont to be
amused when they read how, because of the most trifling faults, faults
at which a man of the world would merely smile, the greatest saints
counted themselves the greatest sinners. But the intensity of the fault
is not measured by the external act, but by the consciousness of it, and
an act for which the conscience of one man suffers acutely makes
scarcely any impression on the conscience of another. And in a saint,
conscience may be developed so fully and to such a degree of
sensitiveness that the slightest sin may cause him more remorse than his
crime causes the greatest criminal. And sin rests upon our consciousness
of it, it is in him who judges and in so far as he judges. When a man
commits a vicious act believing in good faith that he is doing a
virtuous action, we cannot hold him morally guilty, while on the other
hand that man is guilty who commits an act which he believes to be
wrong, even though in itself the act is indifferent or perhaps
beneficent. The act passes away, the intention remains, and the evil of
the evil act is that it corrupts the intention, that in knowingly doing
wrong a man is predisposed to go on doing it, that it blurs the
conscience. And doing evil is not the same as being evil. Evil blurs the
conscience, and not only the moral conscience but the general, psychical
consciousness. And everything that exalts and expands consciousness is
good, while that which depresses and diminishes it is evil.
And here we might raise the question which, according to Plato, was
propounded by Socrates, as to whether virtue is knowledge, which is
equivalent to asking whether virtue is rational.
The ethicists--those who maintain that ethics is a science, those whom
the reading of these divagations will provoke to exclaim, "Rhetoric,
rhetoric, rhetoric!"--would appear to think that virtue is the fruit of
knowledge, of rational study, and that even mathematics help us to be
better men. I do not know, but for my part I feel that virtue, like
religion, like the longing never to die--and all these are fundamentally
the same thing--is the fruit of passion.
But, I shall be asked, What then is passion? I do not know, or rather, I
know full well, because I feel it, and since I feel it there is no need
for me to define it to myself. Nay, more; I fear that if I were to
arrive at a definition of it, I should cease to feel it and to possess
it. Passion is like suffering, and like suffering it creates its object.
It is easier for the fire to find something to burn than for something
combustible to find the fire.
That this may appear empty and sophistical well I know. And I shall also
be told that there is the science of passion and the passion of science,
and that it is in the moral sphere that reason and life unite together.
I do not know, I do not know, I do not know.... And perhaps I may be
saying fundamentally the same thing, although more confusedly, that my
imaginary adversaries say, only more clearly, more definitely, and more
rationally, those adversaries whom I imagine in order that I may have
someone to fight. I do not know, I do not know.... But what they say
freezes me and sounds to me as though it proceeded from emptiness of
feeling.
And, returning to our former question, Is virtue knowledge?--Is
knowledge virtue? For they are two distinct questions. Virtue may be a
science, the science of acting rightly, without every other science
being therefore virtue. The virtue of Machiavelli is a science, and it
cannot be said that his _virtu_ is always moral virtue It is well known,
moreover, that the cleverest and the most learned men are not the best.
No, no, no! Physiology does not teach us how to digest, nor logic how to
discourse, nor esthetics how to feel beauty or express it, nor ethics
how to be good. And indeed it is well if they do not teach us how to be
hypocrites; for pedantry, whether it be the pedantry of logic, or of
esthetics, or of ethics, is at bottom nothing but hypocrisy.
Reason perhaps teaches certain bourgeois virtues, but it does not make
either heroes or saints. Perhaps the saint is he who does good not for
good's sake, but for God's sake, for the sake of eternalization.
Perhaps, on the other hand, culture, or as I should say Culture--oh,
this culture!--which is primarily the work of philosophers and men of
science, is a thing which neither heroes nor saints have had any share
in the making of. For saints have concerned themselves very little with
the progress of human culture; they have concerned themselves rather
with the salvation of the individual souls of those amongst whom they
lived. Of what account in the history of human culture is our San Juan
de la Cruz, for example--that fiery little monk, as culture, in perhaps
somewhat uncultured phrase, has called him--compared with Descartes?
All those saints, burning with religious charity towards their
neighbours, hungering for their own and others' eternalization, who went
about burning hearts, inquisitors, it may be--what have all those saints
done for the progress of the science of ethics? Did any of them discover
the categorical imperative, like the old bachelor of Königsberg, who, if
he was not a saint, deserved to be one?
The son of a famous professor of ethics, one who scarcely ever opened
his lips without mentioning the categorical imperative, was lamenting to
me one day the fact that he lived in a desolating dryness of spirit, in
a state of inward emptiness. And I was constrained to answer him thus:
"My friend, your father had a subterranean river flowing through his
spirit, a fresh current fed by the beliefs of his early childhood, by
hopes in the beyond; and while he thought that he was nourishing his
soul with this categorical imperative or something of that sort, he was
in reality nourishing it with those waters which had their spring in his
childish days. And it may be that to you he has given the flower of his
spirit, his rational doctrines of ethics, but not the root, not the
subterranean source, not the irrational substratum."
How was it that Krausism took root here in Spain, while Kantism and
Hegelianism did not, although the two latter systems are much more
profound, morally and philosophically, than the first? Because in
transplanting the first, its roots were transplanted with it. The
philosophical thought of a people or a period is, as it were, the
flower, the thing that is external and above ground; but this flower, or
fruit if you prefer it, draws its sap from the root of the plant, and
this root, which is in and under the ground, is the religious sense. The
philosophical thought of Kant, the supreme flower of the mental
evolution of the Germanic people, has its roots in the religious feeling
of Luther, and it is not possible for Kantism, especially the practical
part of it, to take root and bring forth flower and fruit in peoples who
have not undergone the experience of the Reformation and who perhaps
were incapable of experiencing it. Kantism is Protestant, and we
Spaniards are fundamentally Catholic. And if Krause struck some roots
here--more numerous and more permanent than is commonly supposed--it is
because Krause had roots in pietism, and pietism, as Ritschl has
demonstrated in his _Geschichte des Pietismus_, has specifically
Catholic roots and may be described as the irruption, or rather the
persistence, of Catholic mysticism in the heart of Protestant
rationalism. And this explains why not a few Catholic thinkers in Spain
became followers of Krause.
And since we Spaniards are Catholic--whether we know it or not, and
whether we like it or not--and although some of us may claim to be
rationalists or atheists, perhaps the greatest service we can render to
the cause of culture, and of what is of more value than culture,
religiousness--if indeed they are not the same thing--is in endeavouring
to formulate clearly to ourselves this subconscious, social, or popular
Catholicism of ours. And that is what I have attempted to do in this
work.
What I call the tragic sense of life in men and peoples is at any rate
our tragic sense of life, that of Spaniards and the Spanish people, as
it is reflected in my consciousness, which is a Spanish consciousness,
made in Spain. And this tragic sense of life is essentially the Catholic
sense of it, for Catholicism, and above all popular Catholicism, is
tragic. The people abhors comedy. When Pilate--the type of the refined
gentleman, the superior person, the esthete, the rationalist if you
like--proposes to give the people comedy and mockingly presents Christ
to them, saying, "Behold the man!" the people mutinies and shouts
"Crucify him! Crucify him!" The people does not want comedy but tragedy.
And that which Dante, the great Catholic, called the Divine Comedy, is
the most tragical tragedy that has ever been written.
And as I have endeavoured in these essays to exhibit the soul of a
Spaniard, and therewithal the Spanish soul, I have curtailed the number
of quotations from Spanish writers, while scattering with perhaps too
lavish a hand those from the writers of other countries. For all human
souls are brother-souls.
And there is one figure, a comically tragic figure, a figure in which
is revealed all that is profoundly tragic in the human comedy, the
figure of Our Lord Don Quixote, the Spanish Christ, who resumes and
includes in himself the immortal soul of my people. Perhaps the passion
and death of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance is the passion and
death of the Spanish people, its death and resurrection. And there is a
Quixotesque philosophy and even a Quixotesque metaphysic, there is a
Quixotesque logic, and also a Quixotesque ethic and a Quixotesque
religious sense--the religious sense of Spanish Catholicism. This is the
philosophy, this is the logic, this is the ethic, this is the religious
sense, that I have endeavoured to outline, to suggest rather than to
develop, in this work. To develop it rationally, no; the Quixotesque
madness does not submit to scientific logic.
And now, before concluding and bidding my readers farewell, it remains
for me to speak of the rôle that is reserved for Don Quixote in the
modern European tragi-comedy.
Let us see, in the next and last essay, what this may be.