Tragic Sense Of Life

de actis deorum credere quam

at leads us back to Him when we have left Him for the lifeless God of

at is

ristian Doctrine that was taught us at school, and the

not seen, no! but creating what we do not see." And I have already told you that believing in G

is of the traditional Christian disquisitions upon it, is "the substance of things hoped for, the

ordinates, faith to hope. And in fact we do not hope because we believe, but rather we believe because we hope. It is hope in Go

al element, is presented to us under the form of knowledge. And hence the insuperable difficulty of separating it from some dogma or other. Pure faith, free from dogmas, abo

tory sense. It may express, on the one hand, the highest degree of the mind's conviction of the truth of a thing, and, on the other hand, it may imply merely a weak and hesitating persuasion of its truth. F

say-is based on uncertainty. And this is because faith, the guarantee of things hoped for, is not so much rational adhesion to a theoretical principle as trust in a person who assures us of something. Faith supposes an objective,

nor yet is its essence sufficiently explained by defining it as trust in God. Seeberg says of faith that it is "the inward submission to the spiritual a

dare se, to trust, is derived from the root fid-whence fides, faith, and also confidence. The Greek root πιθ and the Latin fid are twin brothers. In the root of the word "faith" itself, therefore, there is implicit the idea of confidence, of surrender to the will of another, to a person. Confidence is place

and conducted himself as such. When he was denounced as an illegal practitioner he produced his doctor's certificate, and explained his action more or less as follows: "I am indeed a doctor, but if I had announced myself as such I should not have had as large a clientèle as I have as a quack-healer. Now that all my clients know that I have studied medicine, however, and that I am a properly qualified medical man, they will desert me in favour of

eres upon this matter. One half of the world-the great dim East-is mystic. It insists upon not seeing anything too clearly. Make any one of the great ideas of life distinct and clear, and immediately it seems to the Oriental to be untrue. He has

the banks of the Mississippi. Plenty of exceptions, of course, there are-mystics in Boston and St. Louis, hard-headed men of facts in Bombay and Calcutta. The two great dispositions cannot be shut off from one another by an ocean or a range of mountains. In some nations and places-as, for instance, among the Jews and in our own New England-they notably commingle. But in general they thus divide the world between them. The East lives in the moonlight of mystery, the West in the sunlight of scientific fact. Th

n the person. The former scrutinize the Universe in order that they may wrest its secrets from it; the latter pray to the Consciousness of the Universe, strive to place themselves in immediate

ll be. For the Christian, to believe in the resurrection of Christ-that is to say, in tradition and in the Gospel, which assure him that Christ has risen, both of them personal forces-is to believe that he himself will one day rise again by the grace of Christ. And eve

characteristics, because I have seen it; and I say that I believe in the existence of the giraffe or the ornithorhyncus, and that it possesses such and such qualities, because I b

or such a truth does not demand the sacrifice of our life; but, on the other hand, there are many who have lost their lives for the sake of maintaining their religious faith. Indeed it is truer to say that martyrs make faith than that faith makes martyrs. For faith is not the mere adherence of the intellect to an abstract pri

cian, a man of singularly well-balanced and scientifically equipped mind, has said that it is this tendency towards the supernatural and miraculous that gives life, and that when it is lacking, all

wing, willing, and believing or creating. For neither feeling, nor intelligence, nor will creates; they operate upon a material already given, upon the material given them by faith. Faith is the creative power in man. But since it has a more intimate relation with th

in us. Therefore St. Augustine said: "I will seek Thee, Lord, by calling upon Thee, and I will call upon Thee by believing in Thee. My faith calls upon Thee, Lord, the faith which Thou hast given me, with which Thou hast inspired me through the Humanity of Thy Son, through the ministry

ieve in God is to love Him, and in our love to fear Him; and we begin by loving Him even b

ve in God, but without any passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God-Idea, not in God Himself. And just as belief in God is born of

too, wish that God may exist; but being men of a weak and passive or of an evil disposition, in whom reason is stronger than will, they feel themselves caught in the grip of reason and haled along in their own despit

no objective reality; just as, on the other hand, to maintain that faith is necessary because it affords consolation to the masses of the people, or imposes a wholesome restraint

or God goes out to meet him who seeks Him with love and by love, and hides Himself from him who searches for Him with the cold and loveless reason. God wills that the heart should have rest, but not the head, reversing the order of the physical life in which the head sleeps and

creates Himself in me and reveals Himself to me-my answer may, perhaps

me, leading me, grasping me; because I possess an inner consciousness of a particular providence and of a universal mind that marks out f

ways and aware that in choosing one I should be renouncing all the others-for there is no turning back upon these roads of life; and once and again in such unique m

before you possesses a consciousness like you, and that an animal also possesses such a consciousness, more or less dimly, but not a stone? Because the man acts towards you like a man, like a being made in your likeness, and because the stone does not

hear it breathing. I conclude that in this formless mass there is a consciousness. In just such a way and none other, the starry-eyed heavens gaze down upon the believer, with a superhuman, a divine, gaze, a gaze that asks for su

ving beautiful things we come to love Beauty; from loving the true we come to love the Truth; from loving pleasures we come to love Happiness; and, last of all, we come to love Love. We emerge from ourselves in order to penetrate further into our supre

is not objective. And at this point it may not be out of place to give reason it

to subsist outside us after we have disappeared. But have I any certainty that anything has preceded me or that anything must survive me? Can my consciousness know that there is anything outside it? Everything that

od acting by His idea, but still very often it is rather God acting in us by Himself. And the retort will be a demand for proofs

llowed Christ to be condemned to death. And there are many who ask this question, What is truth? but without any intention of waiting for the answer, and solely in or

which is error, and the moral or subjective, the opposite of which is falsehood. And i

as they themselves choose to be and not as we would have them be. In a religiously scientific investigation, it is the data of reality themselves, it is the perceptions which we receive from the outside world, that formulate themselves in our mind as laws-it is not we ourselves who thus formulate

which is opposed to the inquietude of absolute despair. For esthetic verisimilitude, the expression of which is sensible, differs from logical truth, the demonstration of which is rational; and religious tru

dom of living plays its comedy. Every individual who does not live either poetically or religiously is a fool" (Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, chap. iv., sect. 2a, § 2). The same writer tells us that Christianity is a desperate sortie (salida). Even so, but it is only by the very desperateness of this sortie that we can win through

oute we always arriv

onging, and the now is, strictly, nothing but the endeavour of the before to make itself the after; the present is simply the determination of the past to

the possible is always relegated to the future, the sole domain of liberty, wherein imaginati

nto memories, and from these memories it draws fresh hopes. From the subterranean ore of memory we extract the jewelled visions of our future; imagination shapes our remembrances into hopes. And humanity is like a young girl full of longings, hungering for life and thirsting for love, who weaves her days with dreams, and hopes, hopes ever, hopes without ceasing, for the eternal and predestined lover, for him who, because he was destined for her from the beginning, from before the dawn of her remotest memory, from before her cradle-days, shall live with her and for her into the illimita

, above all, hope in Him. For God dies not, and he who hopes in God shall live for ever.

ility of believing, the longing to believe. But we must needs believe in something, and we believe in what we hope for, we believe in hope. We remember the past, we know the presen

whom we hope to receive life to come; love makes us b

aspires to God by faith and cries to Him: "I believe-give me, Lord, wherein to believe!" And God, the divinity in man, sends him hope in another life in order that he may bel

wherewith to sustain it, and we ask the father to preserve our life for us. And if Christ was he who, with the fullest heart and purest mouth, named with the name of Father

is more than anything else an esthetic feeling. Possibly the esth

though it finds therein no real cure for its distress, it is because the beautiful is the revelation of the eternal, of the divine in things, and beauty but

ugh time, returns to eternity. The temporal world has its roots in eternity, and in eternity yesterday is united with to-day and to-m

me are received. Every impression that reaches me remains stored up in my brain even though it may be so deep or so weak that it is buried in the depths of my subconsciousness; but from these depths it animates my life; and if the whole of my spirit, the total content of my soul, were to awake to full consciousness, all these dimly perceived and forgotten fugitive impressions would come to life again, including even those which I had never been aware of. I

e as beauty? What is the beauty of anything but its eternal essence, that which unites its past with its future, that

the supreme revelation of the love of God and the token of our ultimate victory

rpetuation? Is not beauty, and together with beauty eternity, a creation of love? "Though our outward man perish," says the Apostle, "yet the inward man is renewed day by day" (2 Cor. iv. 16). The man of passing appearances perishes and passes away with them; the man of reality remains and grows. "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for u

nd is simply the temporal consolation that compassion seeks. A tragic consolation! And the supreme beauty is that of tragedy. The consciousness that everything passes away, that we ourselves pass away, and that

only realizes itself practically, only lives through the work of c

ty, personalizes everything, we have said; in discovering the suffering in everything and in personalizing everything, it personalizes the Universe itself as well-for the Universe also suffers-and it discovers God to u

of a God who becomes man in order that He may suffer and die and rise again, because He has suffered and died, the scandal of a God subject to suffering and death. And this truth that God suffers-a truth that appals the mind of man-is the revelation of t

loves and thirsts for love, for pity, a God who is a person. Whosoever knows not the Son will never know the Father, and the Father is only known through the Son; whosoever knows not the Son of Man-he who suffers blood

t a pure idea. The category does not suffer, but neither does it live or exist as a person. And how is the world to derive its origin and life from an impassive idea? Such a world would be but the idea of t

rsons. And suffering is universal, suffering is that which unites all us living beings together; it is th

l anguish, the source of the tragic sense of life, which seeks a habitation in the depths of the eternal and there awakens consolation; from the p

self, to which we cannot resign ourselves and before which we tremble. The happy who resign themselves to their apparent happiness, to a transitory happiness, seem to be as men without substance, or, at any rate,

ts tragic consolation of uncertain hope. The moment love becomes happy and satisfied, it no longer desires and it is no longer love. The satisfied, the happy, do not love; they fall asleep in ha

piness. But we ought to ask for the gift of love and not of happiness, and to be preserved from dozing away into habit, lest we should fall into a fast sleep, a s

soon as it touches the happiness towards which it reaches out, and true happiness dies with it? Love and suffering mutually engender one anoth

the least possible effort, the greatest income with the least expenditure, the most pleasure with the least pain. And the terrible and tragic formula of the inner, spiritual life is either to obtain the most happiness with the least love, or the most love with the least happiness. And it is necessary to choose between the one and the other, and to know tha

he most terrible of all, and choking with anguish he cries out: "Can it be that I no longer exist?" Which would you find most appalling-to feel such a pain as would deprive you of your senses on being pierced through with a white-hot iron, or to see yourself thus pierced through without feeling any pain? Have you never felt the horrible terror of feeling yoursel

Him, and to love Him is to fe

e lives, by the unconscious, from which He seeks to liberate Himself and to liberate us. And we, in our turn, must seek to liberate Him. God suffers in each and all of us, in each and all

f; it is the hunger and thirst for eternity and infinity. Every created being tends not only to preserve itself in itself, but to perpetuate itself, and, moreover, to invade all other beings, to be others without ceasing to be itself, to extend its limits to the infinite, but without breaking them. It does not wish to throw down its walls and leave

nd because I aspire to God, I love Him; and this aspiration of mine towards God is my love for

theology excludes in effect all suffering. And the reader will no doubt think that this idea of suffering can have only a metaphorical value when applied to God, similar to that which is supposed to attach to those passages in the Old Testament which describe the human passions of the God of Israel.

is continually becoming fuller-that is to say, which is continually becoming more and more God-it is a process of drawing all things towards Himself, of imparting Himself to all, of constraining the consciousness of each part to enter into the consciousness

another, and to be each himself and others at the same time. In God everything lives, and in His suffering everything suffers, and in loving God we love His creatures in Him, just as in loving and pitying His creatures

this compassion is vital and superabundant, it overflows from me upon others, and from the excess of my own compassion I come to have compassion for my

reflected pity that overflows and pours itself out in a flood

charity. And in this pouring abroad of our pity we experience relief and the painful sweetness of goodness. This is what Teresa de Jesús, the mystical doctor, called "sweet-tasting suffering" (dolor sabroso), and she knew

ng no common root with them, neither is their lot indifferent to us, but their pain hurts us, their anguish fills us with anguish, and we feel our community of origin and of suffering even without knowing it. Suffering, and pity which is born of suffering, are what reveal to us the brotherhood of every existing thing that possesses life and mor

myself and all my fellows from suffering

might be enabled to manifest itself. A man who had never known suffering, either in greater or less degree, would scarcely possess consciousness of himself.

of its content. We must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us, that in the depths of our own bodies, in animals, in plants, in rocks, in everything that lives, in all the Universe, there is a spirit that strives to know itself, to acquire consciousness of itself, to be itself-for to be oneself is to know oneself-to be pure spirit; and since it can only achieve this by means of the body, by me

y the word in which as a social medium it is incarnated. Without matter there is no spirit, but matter makes spirit suffer by limit

will, the limit which the visible universe imposes upon God; it is the wall that consciousness runs up against when it seeks to ext

not cause us discomfort, suffering, or anguish. Physical suffering, or even discomfort, is what reveals to us our own internal core. An

now that he does it and that he thinks it. He thinks, but he does not think that he thinks, and his thoughts are as if they were not his. Neither do

dissolution, which is death, we shall, at last, through the pain of annihilation, arrive at th

with faith, whatever cou

of matter, and, as applied to the things of the spirit, sloth. And not without truth has it been said that sloth

consciousness seeks to be itself and to be all other consciousnesses without ceasing to be itself: it seeks to be God. And matter, unconsciousness,

ards immortalization. And everything that man does as a mere individual, opposed to society, for the sake of his own preservation, and at the expense of society, if need be, is bad; and everything that he does as a social person, for the sake of the society in which he himself is included, for the sake of its perpetuation and of the perpetuation of

y and individual forms, crucifies God in matter; he crucifies God who makes the ideal

everything, to spiritualize or universalize everything; it is to dream that the very rocks may find a voice and work in accordan

in to the end that we may eat it, and in eating it make it our own, part and parcel of our body in which the spirit dwells, and that it may beat in our heart and t

t, which grows the more the more it is distributed, to all men and to all things. And

d with faith, whatever co

ics, and, above all, to ethics-their religious concretion, in a word. And perhaps then they will gain more justification in the eyes of the

pter, that entitled "In the Depths of the Abyss"; but we now approach the practical or pragmatical part of this tre

TNO

tische Ethik in Systematische christliche R

nas, Summa, secunda secu

a Espa?a Moderna, March, 1906, vol. 207 (reprinted in th