First of all, I found myself thinking about a delightful revery by M.
Anatole France, in which he says that if he had been the Demiurge, he
would have put youth at the end of life instead of at the beginning,
and would have otherwise so ordered matters that every human being
should have three stages of development, somewhat corresponding to
those of the lepidoptera. Then it occurred to me that this fantasy was
in substance scarcely more than the delicate modification of a most
ancient doctrine, common to nearly all the higher forms of religion.
Western faiths especially teach that our life on earth is a larval
state of greedy helplessness, and that death is a pupa-sleep out of
which we should soar into everlasting light. They tell us that during
its sentient existence, the outer body should be thought of only as a
kind of caterpillar, and thereafter as a chrysalis;—and they aver that
we lose or gain, according to our behavior as larvæ, the power to
develop wings under the mortal wrapping. Also they tell us not to
trouble ourselves about the fact that we see no Psyché-imago detach
itself from the broken cocoon: this lack of visual evidence signifies
nothing, because we have only the purblind vision of grubs. Our eyes
are but half-evolved. Do not whole scales of colors invisibly exist
above and below the limits of our retinal sensibility? Even so the
butterfly-man exists,—although, as a matter of course, we cannot see
him.
But what would become of this human imago in a state of perfect bliss?
From the evolutional point of view the question has interest; and its
obvious answer was suggested to me by the history of those
silkworms,—which have been domesticated for only a few thousand years.
Consider the result of our celestial domestication for—let us
say—several millions of years: I mean the final consequence, to the
wishers, of being able to gratify every wish at will.
Those silkworms have all that they wish for,—even considerably more.
Their wants, though very simple, are fundamentally identical with the
necessities of mankind,—food, shelter, warmth, safety, and comfort. Our
endless social struggle is mainly for these things. Our dream of heaven
is the dream of obtaining them free of cost in pain; and the condition
of those silkworms is the realization, in a small way, of our imagined
Paradise. (I am not considering the fact that a vast majority of the
worms are predestined to torment and the second death; for my theme is
of heaven, not of lost souls. I am speaking of the elect—those worms
preördained to salvation and rebirth.) Probably they can feel only very
weak sensations: they are certainly incapable of prayer. But if they
were able to pray, they could not ask for anything more than they
already receive from the youth who feeds and tends them. He is their
providence,—a god of whose existence they can be aware in only the
vaguest possible way, but just such a god as they require. And we
should foolishly deem ourselves fortunate to be equally well cared-for
in proportion to our more complex wants. Do not our common forms of
prayer prove our desire for like attention? Is not the assertion of our
“need of divine love” an involuntary confession that we wish to be
treated like silkworms,—to live without pain by the help of gods? Yet
if the gods were to treat us as we want, we should presently afford
fresh evidence,—in the way of what is called “the evidence from
degeneration,”—that the great evolutional law is far above the gods.
An early stage of that degeneration would be represented by total
incapacity to help ourselves;—then we should begin to lose the use of
our higher sense-organs;—later on, the brain would shrink to a
vanishing pin-point of matter;—still later we should dwindle into mere
amorphous sacs, mere blind stomachs. Such would be the physical
consequence of that kind of divine love which we so lazily wish for.
The longing for perpetual bliss in perpetual peace might well seem a
malevolent inspiration from the Lords of Death and Darkness. All life
that feels and thinks has been, and can continue to be, only as the
product of struggle and pain,—only as the outcome of endless battle
with the Powers of the Universe. And cosmic law is uncompromising.
Whatever organ ceases to know pain,—whatever faculty ceases to be used
under the stimulus of pain,—must also cease to exist. Let pain and its
effort be suspended, and life must shrink back, first into protoplasmic
shapelessness, thereafter into dust.
Buddhism—which, in its own grand way, is a doctrine of
evolution—rationally proclaims its heaven but a higher stage of
development through pain, and teaches that even in paradise the
cessation of effort produces degradation. With equal reasonableness it
declares that the capacity for pain in the superhuman world increases
always in proportion to the capacity for pleasure. (There is little
fault to be found with this teaching from a scientific
standpoint,—since we know that higher evolution must involve an
increase of sensitivity to pain.) In the Heavens of Desire, says the
_Shōbō-nen-jō-kyō_, the pain of death is so great that all the agonies
of all the hells united could equal but one-sixteenth part of such
pain.[1]
[1] This statement refers only to the Heavens of Sensuous
Pleasure,—not to the Paradise of Amida, nor to those heavens into
which one enters by the Apparitional Birth. But even in the highest
and most immaterial zones of being,—in the Heavens of
Formlessness,—the cessation of effort and of the pain of effort,
involves the penalty of rebirth in a lower state of existence.
The foregoing comparison is unnecessarily strong; but the Buddhist
teaching about heaven is in substance eminently logical. The
suppression of pain—mental or physical,—in any conceivable state of
sentient existence, would necessarily involve the suppression also of
pleasure;—and certainly all progress, whether moral or material,
depends upon the power to meet and to master pain. In a
silkworm-paradise such as our mundane instincts lead us to desire, the
seraph freed from the necessity of toil, and able to satisfy his every
want at will, would lose his wings at last, and sink back to the
condition of a grub….