morality and religion in India from time immemorial: I mean the doctrine
of Karma. We are born, it says, with a heritage, a character imposed, and
a long task assigned, all due to the ignorance which in our past lives has
led us into all sorts of commitments. These obligations we must pay off,
relieving the pure spirit within us from its accumulated burdens, from
debts and assets both equally oppressive. We cannot disentangle ourselves
by mere frivolity, nor by suicide: frivolity would only involve us more
deeply in the toils of fate, and suicide would but truncate our misery and
leave us for ever a confessed failure. When life is understood to be a
process of redemption, its various phases are taken up in turn without
haste and without undue attachment; their coming and going have all the
keenness of pleasure, the holiness of sacrifice, and the beauty of art.
The point is to have expressed and discharged all that was latent in us;
and to this perfect relief various temperaments and various traditions
assign different names, calling it having one's day, or doing one's duty,
or realising one's ideal, or saving one's soul. The task in any case is
definite and imposed on us by nature, whether we recognise it or not;
therefore we can make true moral progress or fall into real errors. Wisdom
and genius lie in discerning this prescribed task and in doing it readily,
cleanly, and without distraction. Folly on the contrary imagines that any
scent is worth following, that we have an infinite nature, or no nature in
particular, that life begins without obligations and can do business
without capital, and that the will is vacuously free, instead of being a
specific burden and a tight hereditary knot to be unravelled. Some
philosophers without self-knowledge think that the variations and further
entanglements which the future may bring are the manifestation of spirit;
but they are, as Freud has indicated, imposed on living beings by external
pressure, and take shape in the realm of matter. It is only after the
organs of spirit are formed mechanically that spirit can exist, and can
distinguish the better from the worse in the fate of those organs, and
therefore in its own fate. Spirit has nothing to do with infinite
existence. Infinite existence is something physical and ambiguous; there
is no scale in it and no centre. The depths of the human heart are finite,
and they are dark only to ignorance. Deep and dark as a soul may be when
you look down into it from outside, it is something perfectly natural; and
the same understanding that can unearth our suppressed young passions, and
dispel our stubborn bad habits, can show us where our true good lies.
Nature has marked out the path for us beforehand; there are snares in it,
but also primroses, and it leads to peace.
V
THE PRESTIGE OF THE INFINITE
"The more complex the world becomes and the more it rises above the
indeterminate, so much the farther removed it is from God; that is to say,
so much the more impious it is." M. Julien Benda[12] is not led to this
startling utterance by any political or sentimental grudge. It is not the
late war, nor the peace of Versailles, nor the parlous state of the arts,
nor the decay of morality and prosperity that disgusts him with our
confused world. It is simply overmastering respect for the infinite. _La
Trahison des Clercs_, or Treason of the Levites, with which he had
previously upbraided the intellectuals of his time, now appears to consist
precisely in coveting a part in this world's inheritance, and forgetting
that the inheritance of the Levites is the Lord: which, being interpreted
philosophically, means that a philosopher is bound to measure all things
by the infinite.
This infinite is not rhetorical, as if we spoke of infinite thought or
infinite love: it is physico-mathematical. Nothing but number, M. Benda
tells us, seems to him intelligible. Time, space, volume, and complexity
(which appears to the senses as quality) stretch in a series of units,
positions, or degrees, to infinity, as number does: and in such
homogeneous series, infinite in both directions, there will be no fixed
point of origin for counting or surveying the whole and no particular
predominant scale. Every position will be essentially identical with every
other; every suggested structure will be collapsible and reversible; and
the position and relations of every unit will be indistinguishable from
those of every other. In the infinite, M. Benda says, the parts have no
identity: each number in the scale, as we begin counting from different
points of origin, bears also every other number.
This is no mere mathematical puzzle; the thought has a strange moral
eloquence. Seen in their infinite setting, which we may presume to be
their ultimate environment, all things lose their central position and
their dominant emphasis. The contrary of what we first think of them or of
ourselves--for instance that we are alive, while they are dead or
unborn--is also true. Egotism becomes absurd; pride and shame become the
vainest of illusions. If then it be repugnant to reason that the series of
numbers, moments, positions, and volumes should be limited--and the human
spirit has a great affinity to the infinite--all specific quality and
variety in things must be superficial and deeply unreal. They are masks in
the carnival of phenomena, to be observed without conviction, and secretly
dismissed as ironical by those who have laid up their treasure in the
infinite.
This mathematical dissolution of particulars is reinforced by moral
considerations which are more familiar. Existence--any specific fact
asserting itself in any particular place or moment--is inevitably
contingent, arbitrary, gratuitous, and insecure. A sense of insecurity is
likely to be the first wedge by which repentance penetrates into the
animal heart. If a man did not foresee death and fear it, he might never
come at all to the unnatural thought of renouncing life. In fact, he does
not often remember death: yet his whole gay world is secretly afraid of
being found out, of being foiled in the systematic bluff by which it lives
as if its life were immortal; and far more than the brave young man fears
death in his own person, the whole life of the world fears to be exorcised
by self-knowledge, and lost in air. And with good reason: because, whether
we stop to notice this circumstance or not, every fact, every laborious
beloved achievement of man or of nature, has come to exist against
infinite odds. In the dark grab-bag of Being, this chosen fact was
surrounded by innumerable possible variations or contradictions of it; and
each of those possibilities, happening not to be realised here and now,
yet possesses intrinsically exactly the same aptitude or claim to
existence. Nor are these claims and aptitudes merely imaginary and
practically contemptible. The flux of existence is continually repenting
of its choices, and giving everything actual the lie, by continually
substituting something else, no less specific and no less nugatory.
_This_ world, _any_ world, exists only by an unmerited privilege. Its
glory is offensive to the spirit, like the self-sufficiency of some
obstreperous nobody, who happens to have drawn the big prize in a lottery.
"The world", M. Benda writes, "inspires me with a double sentiment. I feel
it to be full of grandeur, because it has succeeded in asserting itself
and coming to exist; and I feel it to be pitiful, when I consider how it
hung on a mere nothing that this particular world should never have
existed." And though this so accidental world, by its manifold beauties
and excitements, may arouse our romantic enthusiasm, it is fundamentally
an _unholy_ world. Its creation, he adds in italics, "_is something which
reason would wish had never taken place_".
For we must not suppose that God, when God is defined as infinite Being,
can be the creator of the world. Such a notion would hopelessly destroy
that coherence in thought to which M. Benda aspires. The infinite cannot
be selective; it cannot possess a particular structure (such, for
instance, as the Trinity) nor a particular quality (such as goodness). It
cannot exert power or give direction. Nothing can be responsible for the
world except the world itself. It has created, or is creating, itself
perpetually by its own arbitrary act, by a groundless self-assertion which
may be called (somewhat metaphorically) will, or even original sin: the
original sin of existence, particularity, selfishness, or separation from
God. Existence, being absolutely contingent and ungrounded, is perfectly
free: and if it ties itself up in its own habits or laws, and becomes a
terrible nightmare to itself by its automatic monotony, that still is only
its own work and, figuratively speaking, its own fault. Nothing save its
own arbitrary and needless pressure keeps it going in that round. This
fatality is impressive, and popular religion has symbolised it in the
person of a deity far more often recognised and worshipped than infinite
Being. This popular deity, a symbol for the forces of nature and history,
the patron of human welfare and morality, M. Benda calls the imperial God.
"It is clear that these two Gods ... have nothing to do with one
another. The God whom Marshal de Villars, rising in his stirrups
and pointing his drawn sword heavenwards, thanks on the evening of
Denain, is one God: quite another is the God within whose bosom the
author of the _Imitation_, in a corner of his cell, feels the
nothingness of all human victories."
It follows from this, if we are coherent, that any "return to God" which
ascetic philosophy may bring about cannot be a social reform, a transition
to some better form of natural existence in a promised land, a renovated
earth, or a material or temporal heaven. Nor can the error of creation be
corrected violently by a second arbitrary act, such as suicide, or the
annihilation of the universe by some ultimate general collapse. If such
events happen, they still leave the door open to new creations and fresh
errors. But the marvel is (I will return to this point presently) that the
world, in the person of a human individual endowed with reason, may
perceive the error of its ways and correct it ideally, in the sphere of
estimation and worship. Such is the only possible salvation. Reason, in
order to save us, and we, in order to be saved, must both subsist: we must
both be incidents in the existing world. We may then, by the operation of
reason in us, recover our allegiance to the infinite, for we are bone of
its bone and flesh of its flesh: and by our secret sympathy with it we may
rescind every particular claim and dismiss silently every particular form
of being, as something unreal and unholy.
An even more cogent reason why M. Benda's God cannot have been the creator
of the world is that avowedly this God has never existed. We are expressly
warned that "if God is infinite Being he excludes existence, in so far as
to exist means to be distinct. In the sense which everybody attaches to
the word existence, God, as I conceive him, _does not exist_". Of course,
in the mind of a lover of the infinite, this fact is not derogatory to
God, but derogatory to existence. The infinite remains the first and the
ultimate term in thought, the fundamental dimension common to all things,
however otherwise they may be qualified; it remains the eternal background
against which they all are defined and into which they soon disappear.
Evidently, in this divine--because indestructible and necessary--dimension,
Being is incapable of making choices, adopting paths of evolution, or
exercising power; it knows nothing of phenomena; it is not their cause
nor their sanction. It is incapable of love, wrath, or any other passion.
"I will add", writes M. Benda, "something else which theories of an
impersonal deity have less often pointed out. Since infinity is
incompatible with personal being, God is incapable of morality." Thus mere
intuition and analysis of the infinite, since this infinite is itself
passive and indifferent, may prove a subtle antidote to passion, to folly,
and even to life.
I think M. Benda succeeds admirably in the purpose announced in his title
of rendering his discourse coherent. If once we accept his definitions,
his corollaries follow. Clearly and bravely he disengages his idea of
infinity from other properties usually assigned to the deity, such as
power, omniscience, goodness, and tutelary functions in respect to life,
or to some special human society. But coherence is not completeness, nor
even a reasonable measure of descriptive truth; and certain considerations
are omitted from M. Benda's view which are of such moment that, if they
were included, they might transform the whole issue. Perhaps the chief of
these omissions is that of an organ for thought. M. Benda throughout is
engaged simply in clarifying his own ideas, and repeatedly disclaims any
ulterior pretensions. He finds in the panorama of his thoughts an idea of
infinite Being, or God, and proceeds to study the relation of that
conception to all others. It is a task of critical analysis and religious
confession: and nothing could be more legitimate and, to some of us, more
interesting. But whence these various ideas, and whence the spell which
the idea of infinite Being in particular casts over the meditative mind?
Unless we can view these movements of thought in their natural setting and
order of genesis, we shall be in danger of turning autobiography into
cosmology and inwardness into folly.
One of the most notable points in M. Benda's analysis is his insistence on
the leap involved in passing from infinite Being to any particular fact or
system of facts; and again the leap involved in passing, when the
converted spirit "returns to God", from specific animal interests--no
matter how generous, social, or altruistic these interests may be--to
absolute renunciation and sympathy with the absolute. "That a will to
return to God should arise in the phenomenal world seems to be a miracle
no less wonderful (though it be less wondered at) than that the world
should arise in the bosom of God." "Love of man, charity, humanitarianism
are nothing but the selfishness of the race, by which each animal species
assures its specific existence." "To surrender one's individuality for the
benefit of a larger self is something quite different from
disinterestedness; it is the exact opposite." And certainly, if we
regarded infinite Being as a cosmological medium--say, empty space and
time--there would be a miraculous break, an unaccountable new beginning,
if that glassy expanse was suddenly wrinkled by something called energy.
But in fact there need never have been such a leap, or such a miracle,
because there could never have been such a transition. Infinite Being is
not a material vacuum "in the bosom" of which a world might arise. It is a
Platonic idea--though Plato never entertained it--an essence, non-existent
and immutable, not in the same field of reality at all as a world of
moving and colliding things. Such an essence is not conceivably the seat
of the variations that enliven the world. It is only in thought that we
may pass from infinite Being to an existing universe; and when we turn
from one to the other, and say that now energy has emerged from the bosom
of God, we are turning over a new leaf, or rather picking up an entirely
different volume. The natural world is composed of objects and events
which theory may regard as transformations of a hypothetical energy; an
energy which M. Benda--who when he comes down to the physical world is a
good materialist--conceives to have condensed and distributed itself into
matter, which in turn composed organisms and ultimately generated
consciousness and reason. But in whatever manner the natural world may
have evolved, it is found and posited by us in perception and action, not,
like infinite Being, defined in thought. This contrast is ontological, and
excludes any derivation of the one object from the other. M. Benda himself
tells us so; and we may wonder why he introduced infinite Being at all
into his description of the world. The reason doubtless is that he was not
engaged in describing the world, except by the way, but rather in
classifying and clarifying his ideas in view of determining his moral
allegiance. And he arranged his terms, whether ideal or materials, in a
single series, because they were alike present to his intuition, and he
was concerned to arrange them in a hierarchy, according to their moral
dignity.
Not only is infinite Being an incongruous and obstructive term to describe
the substance of the world (which, if it subtends the changes in the world
and causes them, must evidently change with them), but even mathematical
space and time, in their ideal infinity, may be very far from describing
truly the medium and groundwork of the universe. That is a question for
investigation and hypothesis, not for intuition. But in the life of
intuition, when that life takes a mathematical turn, empty space and time
and their definable structure may be important themes; while, when the
same life becomes a discipline of the affections, we see by this latest
example, as well as by many a renowned predecessor of M. Benda, that
infinite Being may dominate the scene.
Nor is this eventual dominance so foreign to the natural mind, or such a
miraculous conversion, as it might seem. Here, too, there is no derivation
of object from object, but an alternative for the mind. As M. Benda points
out, natural interests and sympathies may expand indefinitely, so as to
embrace a family, a nation, or the whole animate universe; we might even
be chiefly occupied with liberal pursuits, such as science or music; the
more we laboured at these things and delighted in them, the less ready
should we be for renunciation and detachment. Must conversion then descend
upon us from heaven like a thunderbolt? Far from it. We need not look for
the principle of spiritual life in the distance: we have it at home from
the beginning. Even the idea of infinite Being, though unnamed, is
probably familiar. Perhaps in the biography of the human race, or of each
budding mind, the infinite or indeterminate may have been the primary
datum. On that homogeneous sensuous background, blank at first but
secretly plastic, a spot here and a movement there may gradually have
become discernible, until the whole picture of nature and history had
shaped itself as we see it. A certain sense of that primitive datum, the
infinite or indeterminate, may always remain as it were the outstretched
canvas on which every picture is painted. And when the pictures vanish, as
in deep sleep, the ancient simplicity and quietness may be actually
recovered, in a conscious union with Brahma. So sensuous, so intimate, so
unsophisticated the "return to God" may be for the spirit, without
excluding the other avenues, intellectual and ascetic, by which this
return may be effected in waking life, though then not so much in act as
in intent only and allegiance.
I confess that formerly I had some difficulty in sharing the supreme
respect for infinite Being which animates so many saints: it seemed to me
the dazed, the empty, the deluded side of spirituality. Why rest in an
object which can be redeemed from blank negation only by a blank
intensity? But time has taught me not to despise any form of vital
imagination, any discipline which may achieve perfection after any kind.
Intuition is a broadly based activity; it engages elaborate organs and
sums up and synthesises accumulated impressions. It may therefore easily
pour the riches of its ancestry into the image or the sentiment which it
evokes, poor as this sentiment or image might seem if expressed in words.
In rapt or ecstatic moments, the vital momentum, often the moral escape,
is everything, and the achievement, apart from that blessed relief, little
or nothing. Infinite Being may profit in this way by offering a contrast
to infinite annoyance. Moreover, in my own way, I have discerned in pure
Being the involution of all forms. As felt, pure Being may be
indeterminate, but as conceived reflectively it includes all
determinations: so that when deployed into the realm of essence, infinite
or indeterminate Being truly contains entertainment for all eternity.
M. Benda feels this pregnancy of the infinite on the mathematical side;
but he hardly notices the fact, proclaimed so gloriously by Spinoza, that
the infinity of extension is only one of an infinity of infinites. There
is an aesthetic infinite, or many aesthetic infinites, composed of all the
forms which nature or imagination might exhibit; and where imagination
fails, there are infinite remainders of the unimagined. The version which
M. Benda gives us of infinite Being, limited to the mathematical
dimension, is therefore unnecessarily cold and stark. His one infinity is
monochrome, whereas the total infinity of essence, in which an infinity of
outlines is only one item, is infinitely many-coloured. Phenomena
therefore fall, in their essential variety, within and not without
infinite Being: so that in "returning to God" we might take the whole
world with us, not indeed in its blind movement and piecemeal
illumination, as events occur, but in an after-image and panoramic
portrait, as events are gathered together in the realm of truth.
On the whole I think M. Benda's two Gods are less unfriendly to one
another than his aggrieved tone might suggest. This pregnant little book
ends on a tragic note.
"Hitherto human self-assertion in the state or the family, while
serving the imperial God, has paid some grudging honours, at least
verbally, to the infinite God as well, under the guise of
liberalism, love of mankind, or the negation of classes. But today
this imperfect homage is retracted, and nothing is reverenced
except that which gives strength. If anyone preaches human
kindness, it is in order to establish a "strong" community
martially trained, like a super-state, to oppose everything not
included within it, and to become omnipotent in the art of
utilising the non-human forces of nature.... The will to return to
God may prove to have been, in the history of the phenomenal world,
a sublime accident."
Certainly the will to "return to God", if not an accident, is an incident
in the life of the world; and the whole world itself is a sublime
accident, in the sense that its existence is contingent, groundless, and
precarious. Yet so long as the imperial God continues successfully to keep
our world going, it will be no accident, but a natural necessity, that
many a mind should turn to the thought of the infinite with awe, with a
sense of liberation, and even with joy. The infinite God owes all his
worshippers, little as he may care for them, to the success of the
imperial God in creating reflective and speculative minds. Or (to drop
these mythological expressions which may become tiresome) philosophers owe
to nature and to the discipline of moral life their capacity to look
beyond nature and beyond morality. And while they may _look_ beyond, and
take comfort in the vision, they cannot _pass_ beyond. As M. Benda says,
the most faithful Levite can return to the infinite only in his thought;
in his life he must remain a lay creature. Yet nature, in forming the
human soul, unintentionally unlocked for the mind the doors to truth and
to essence, partly by obliging the soul to attend to things which are
outside, and partly by endowing the soul with far greater potentialities
of sensation and invention than daily life is likely to call forth. Our
minds are therefore naturally dissatisfied with their lot and
speculatively directed upon an outspread universe in which our persons
count for almost nothing. These insights are calculated to give our brutal
wills some pause. Intuition of the infinite and recourse to the infinite
for religious inspiration follow of themselves, and can never be
suppressed altogether, so long as life is conscious and experience
provokes reflection.
Spirit is certainly not one of the forces producing spirit, but neither is
it a contrary force. It is the actuality of feeling, of observation, of
meaning. Spirit has no unmannerly quarrel with its parents, its hosts, or
even its gaolers: they know not what they do. Yet spirit belongs
intrinsically to another sphere, and cannot help wondering at the world,
and suffering in it. The man in whom spirit is awake will continue to
live and act, but with a difference. In so far as he has become pure
spirit he will have transcended the fear of death or defeat; for now his
instinctive fear, which will subsist, will be neutralised by an equally
sincere consent to die and to fail. He will live henceforth in a truer and
more serene sympathy with nature than is possible to rival natural beings.
Natural beings are perpetually struggling to live only, and not to die; so
that their will is in hopeless rebellion against the divine decrees which
they must obey notwithstanding. The spiritual man, on the contrary, in so
far as he has already passed intellectually into the eternal world, no
longer endures unwillingly the continual death involved in living, or the
final death involved in having been born. He renounces everything
religiously in the very act of attaining it, resigning existence itself as
gladly as he accepts it, or even more gladly; because the emphasis which
action and passion lend to the passing moment seems to him arbitrary and
violent; and as each task or experience is dismissed in turn, he accounts
the end of it more blessed than the beginning.
[11] The following quotations are drawn from _Beyond the Pleasure
Principle_, by Sigmund Freud; authorised translation by C.J.M. Hubback.
The International Psycho-Analytic Press, 1922, pp. 29-48. The italics
are in the original.
[12] _Essai d'un Discours cohérent sur les Rapports de Dieu et du
Monde._ Par Julien Benda. Librairie Gallimard, Paris, 1931.