Tragic Sense Of Life

ειν διασκοπειν τε και μυθολογειν περι τη? αποδημια? τη

ds God-for as Cicero said,[47] est enim pietas iustitia adversum deos-charity towards men. In God is resumed not only Humanity, but the whole Universe, and the Universe spiritualized and penetrated with consciousness, for a

more or less intimate union wit

be sacred, and that what was sacred to them was to the Romans impure: profana illic omnia qu? apud nos sacra, rursum conversa apud illos qu? nobis incesta. Therefore he, the Roman, describes the Jews as a people dominated by superstition and hostile to religion, gens superstitioni obnoxia, religionibus adversa, while as regards Christianity, with which he was very imperfectly acquainted, scarcely distinguishing it from Ju

e us and a desire to establish relations with this mysterious power. Nor is there much amiss with the statement of W. Hermann[48] that the religious longing of man is a desire for truth concerning his human existence. And to cut short these extraneous citations, I will end with one from the judicious and perspicacious Cournot: "Religious manifestations are the necessary consequence of man's predisposition to believe in the existence of an invisible, supernatural and miraculous

ibute to the Universe, to God, consciousness of self and of purpose. And it may be said that religion is simply union with God, each one interpreting God according to his own sense of Him. God gives transcendent meaning and fi

ut only in life. "He who possesses science and art, has religion; he who possesses neither science nor art, let him get r

to be possessed by Him. When his disciples, amazed at his saying that it was impossible for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven, asked Jesus who then could be saved, the Master replied that with men it was impossible but not with God; and then said Pe

that soul only that knows how to be so detached is that which attains to being lost in God, and only the soul that attains to being so lost succeeds in finding itself." Emphatically a true Spaniard, Molinos, and truly Spanish is this paradoxical expression of quietism or rather of nihilism-for he himself elsewhere speaks of annihilation-and not less Spanish, nay, perhaps even more Spanish, were the Jesuits who attacked him, uphold

mans were conceived as knights-errant, and so too were Arabs, Saracens, Turks, the Sultan and Saladin.... In this universal fraternity mingle angels, saints, miracles and paradise, strangely blended with the fantasy and voluptuousness of the Oriental world, and all baptized in the name of Chivalry." Thus, in his Storia della Letteratura italiana, ii., writes Francesco de Sanctis, and in an earlier passage he informs us that for that breed of men "in paradise itself the lover's delight was to look upon his lady-Madonna-and that he had no desire to go thither if he might not go in his lady's company." What,

f good and evil. Europe flocked to the University of Bologna in search of learning. Chivalry was succeeded by Platonism. Men sought to discover the mystery of the world and of life. But it was really in order to s

in this feeling and imagination religious experience consists-simply in

eligion as is the longing that there may be a God. The one does not exist apart from the other, the reason being that fundamentally they are one and the same thing. But as soon as we attempt to gi

evious assent melted away, assentio omnis illa illabitur (cap. xi., 25). And what happened to Cicero happens to us all, and it happened likewise to Swedenborg, the most daring visionary of the other world. Swedenborg admitted that he who discourses of life after death, putting aside all erudite notions concerning the soul and its mode of union with the body, believes that after death he shall live in a glorious joy and vision, as a man among angels; but when he begins to reflect upon the doctrine of the union of the soul with the body, or upon the hypotheti

rationalistic and liberal-Protestantism; take, for instance, the Dogmatik of Dr. Julius Kaftan, and of the 668 pages of which the sixth edition, that of 1909, consists, you will find only one, the last, that is devoted to this problem. And in this page, after affirming that Christ is not only the beginning and middle but also the end and consummation of History, and that those who are in Christ will attain to fullne

. True faith, true Christian piety, we shall be told, consists in resting upon the confidence that God, by the grace of Christ, will, in some way or another, make us live in Him, in His Son; that, as our destiny is in His almighty hands, we should surrender

re men and not merely thinking machines. There are books of theology-or of what passes for theology-full of disquisitions upon the conditions under which the bl

ualism, metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls from star to star, and the like; doctrines which as often as they are pronounced to be defeated and dead, are found to have come to life again, clothed in some more or less

l. But is extension, is matter, that which thinks and is spiritualized, or is thought that which is extended and materialized? The weightiest questions of metaphysics arise practically out of our desire to arrive at an understanding of the possibility of our immortality-from this fact they derive their value and cease to be merely the idle discussions of fruitless cur

so was inconsolable at the departure of Ulysses; in her sorrow she was dismayed at being immortal," said the gentle, the mystical Fénelon at the beginning

for thee and one for Moses and one for Elias," for he wished to eternalize that moment. And as they came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them that they should tell no man what they had seen until the Son of Man should have risen from the dead. And they, keeping this saying to themselv

. xxii.); and it was then that Jesus said that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. And the other life is not, in fact, thinkable to us except under the same forms as those of this earthly and transitory

rnity as opposed to time? Does the soul change or does it not change in the other life? If it does not change, how does it live? And if it changes, how does it preserv

, and because angels, like men, love themselves, and he who loves himself experiences changes of state; and he adds further that at times the angels are sad, and that he, Swedenborg, discoursed with som

nd an eternal life of absolute felicity, of

possessed by God and immerged in His glory.... Our attention cannot stay on the saint, because one finds him outside of himself, and subject by an unchangeable love to the source of his being and his happiness (Du culte qui est d? à Dieu). And these are the words of Bossuet, the antiquietist. This loving vision of God supposes an abs

s united. And one is raised to this rapture, according to the Spanish mystic, by the contemplation of the Humanity of Christ-that is to say, of something concrete and human; it is the vision of the living God, not of the idea of God. And in the 28th chapter she tells us that "though there were nothing else to delight the sight in heaven but the great beauty of the glorified bodies, that would be an excessive bliss, particularly the vision of the Humanity of Jesus Christ our Lord...." "This vision," she continues, "though imaginary, I did never see with my bodily eyes, nor, indeed, any other, but only with the eyes of the soul." And thus it is that in heaven the soul does not see God only, but everything in God, or rather it sees that everything is God, for God embraces all things. And this idea is further emphasized by Jacob B?hme. The saint tells us in the Moradas Setimas (vii. 2) that "this secret union takes place in the innermost centre of the soul, where God Himself must dwell." And she goes on to say that "the soul, I mean the spirit of the soul, is made one with God ..."; and this union may be likened to "two wax candles, the tips of which touch each other so closely that there is but one light; or again, the wick, the wax, and the light become one, but the one candle can again be separated from the other, and the two candles remain distinct; or the wick may

natural way of feeling. And hence a certain feeling which we not infrequently observe and which has more than once expressed itself in satires, not altogether free from irreverence

h differentiation. And hence the famous saying of Lessing which I have already quoted. There is a story told of an ancient Spaniard who accompanied Vasco Nú?ez de Balboa when he climbed that peak in Darien from which both the Atlantic and the Pacific are visible. On beholding the two oceans the old man fell on his knees and exclaimed, "I thank Thee, God, that Thou didst not let me die without having seen so great a wonder." But if this man had stayed there, very soon th

hension, as in any way different from a kind of Nirvana, a spiritual diffusion, a dissipation of energy in the e

ur longing? What difference is there between being absorbed by God and absorbing Him in ourself?

f the unbroken chain connecting the two? And it may be said that the problem for feeling resolves itself into the question as to whether there is a God, whether there is a human finality to the Universe. But what is finality? For just as it is always possible to ask the why of every why, so it is also always possible to ask the wherefore of every wherefore. Supposi

se in the sum of things save only to exist and happen as it does exist and happen? For him who places himself outside himself, none; but for him who lives and suffers and desires within himself-for him it is a question of life or death. Seek, therefore, thyself! But in finding oneself, does not one find one's own nothingness? "Having become a sinner in seeking himself, man has become wretched in finding himself," said Bossuet (Traité de la Concupiscence, chap. xi.).

refore should I work at it? Yes, yes, it may be that to accomplish my work-and what i

n myself, am I not loving myself more

on to this in his Consolatio ad Marciam (xxvi.); what he desired was to live this life again: ista moliri. And what Job asked for (xix. 25-7) was to see God in the flesh, not in the spi

is not to be ourselves. And is not eternal life perhaps eternal consciousness, not only seeing God, but seeing that we see Him, seeing ourselves at the same time and ourselves as distinct from Him? He who sleeps lives, but he has no consciousness of himself; and would anyone wish for an eternal sleep? When Circe advised Ulysses to descend to the abode of the dead i

sleep is to waking? May not all our life be a dream and death an awakening? But an awakening to what? And su

l happiness, of the enjoyment of God, as a beatific vision, as knowledge and comprehension of God, is a thing of rationalist origin, it is the kind of happiness that corresponds with the God-Idea of Aristoteli

is resting? "Delight is caused by the vision of God itself," the theologian continues. But does the soul feel itself distinct from God? "The delight that accompanies the activity of the understanding does not impede, but rather strengthens that activity," he says later on. Obviously! for what happiness were it else? And in order to save delectation, delight, pleasure, which, like pain, has always something material in it, and which we conceive of only as existing in a soul incarnate in a body, it was necessary to suppose that the soul in a state of blessednes

a man who beholds somewhat in his sleep retains on awakening nothing but the impression of the feeling in his mind, so it was

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n so far as He is infinite, but in so far as He can be manifested through the essence of the human mind, considered under the form of eternity-that is to say, that the intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love with which God loves Himself. And after these tragic, these desolating propositions, we are told in the last proposition of the whole book, that which closes and crowns this tremendous tragedy of the Ethic, that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself, and that our repression of our desires is not the cause of our enjoyment

not perhaps at the root of every passion something of curiosity? Did not our first parents, according to the Biblical story, fall because of their eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and to be as gods, knowers of this knowledge? The vision of God-that is to say, t

rfect dominion than knowledge; he who knows something, possesses it. Knowledge unites the knower with the known. "I contemplate thee and in contem

which they had so long and so laboriously sought to investigate on earth. In allusion to the study which Cauchy had made of the mechanistic theory of the reflection of light, Père Gratry threw out the suggestion that one on the greatest intellectual joys of the great geometrician in the future life would be to penetrate into the secret of light. To which Cauchy replied that it did not appear to him to be possible to know

on, intellectual love, or beatific vision, may mean for men of a superior order of intelligence, men whose ruli

his is continually being lost, dissipated by the diffusion of heat, and degraded, its tendency being to arrive at a dead-level and homogeneity. That which has value, and more than value, reality, for us, is the differential, which is the qualitative; pure, undifferentiated quantity is for us as if it did not exist, for it does not act. And the

ion of scientific philosophy with respect to a final state of stability and homogeneity and the mystical dream

d the fact is that just as there are theologians of God and the immortality of the soul, so there are also those whom Brunhes calls (op. cit., chap. xxvi., § 2) theologians of monism, and whom it would perhaps be better to call atheologians, people who pertinaci

mments, "resisting all wear and tear, or rather automatically repairing the rents that appear in it-what a splendid theme for oratorical amplification! But these same amplifications which served in the seventeenth century to prove the wisdom of the Creator have been used in our days as arguments for those who presume to do wi

used but abused by Spencer, of a primordial homogeneity, and his fantastic theory of the instability of the homogeneous. An instability that required the atheological agnosticism of Spencer in order to explain the inexplicable transition from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. For how, without any action from without, can any heterogeneity emerge

that things always were as they are now, that always there have been worlds in process of formation, in the nebulous stage, worlds completely

ce. If the Universe must be eternal, if within it and as regards each of its component worlds, periods in which the movement is towards homogeneity, towards the degradation of energy, must alternate with other periods in which the movement is t

n of the energy of our world and return to unconsciousness, or will it rather grow according as the utilizable energy diminishes and by virtue of the very efforts that it makes to retard this degradation and

does not tend to destruction), is directed towards retarding this fatal process of the degradation of energy. And organic lif

t loves us like a step-mother." The origin of human companionship was opposition to Nature; it was horror of impious Nature that first linked men together in the bonds of society. It is human society, in effect, the source

he forest, in the mountains, in the wind, in all material individualities and forms; and he imagines that a day may come when all these captive souls, as yet in the limbo of existence, will awaken to consciousness, and, emerging

ith a zero of spirit-and zero is not the same as nothing-and an infinite of matter,

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lds themselves or in us who look upon them? Do they not suffer? But what can an individual soul in a

spirit and matter are at strife. This is the t

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ou prefer it, something that corresponds to this process of the reductio

shly and mortal Christ, the ethical Christ, created within himself an immortal and religious Christ-he who was caught up into the third heaven and there beheld secret and unspeakable things

im, it is manifest that he is excepted, which did put all things under him. And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him

now the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge" (Eph. iii. 18, 19). And this gathering of us together in Christ, who is the head and, as it were, the compendium, of Humanity, is what the Apostle calls the gathering or collecting together or recapitulating of all things in Christ, ανακεφαλαιωσασθαι τα παντα εν Χριστω. And this recapitulation-ανακεφαλαιωσι?, anacefaleosis-the end of the world's history and of the human race, is merely another aspect of the apocatastasis. The apocatastasis, God's coming to be all in all, thus resolves itself into the ana

ht leads us to the same difficu

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

an it be that outside time, in eternity, there is a difference between beginning and end? "The soul of all things cannot be bound by that very thing-that is, matter-which it itself has bound," says Plotinus (Enn. ii., ix. 7). Or is it not rather the Consciousness of the Whole that strives to become the consciousness of each part and to make each partial consciousness conscious of itself-that is, of the total consciousness? Is not this universal soul a monotheist or solitary God who is in process of becoming a pantheist God? And if it is not so, if

ries of questions to which there is no satisfactory-that is, rational-answer, and it matters n

to the Pauline

consciousness of limitation, of distinction, does it not thereby exclude infinitude? What value has the notion of infinitude applied to consciousness? What is a consciousness that is all consciousness, without anything outside it that is not consciousness? In such

to be realized? Is it possible to be happy without hope? And there is no place for hope when once possession has been realized, for hope, desire, is killed by possession. May it not be, I say, that all souls grow without ceasing, some in a greater measure than others, but all having to pass some t

s mode of being in each one be different or will it be the same for all alike? Will not God be wholly in o

the opposition between heaven and hell, betwe

uding Cain and Judas and Satan himself, as Origen's de

demands an eternal punishment, is, apart from the inconceivability of an infinite offence, to be unaware that, in human ethics, if not in the human police system, the gravity of the offence is measured not by the dignity of the injured person but by the intention of the injurer, and that to speak of an infinite culpable intention is sheer nonsense, and nothing else. In this conne

e conclusion of Lamennais (Essai, etc., ive partie, chap, vii.), an opinion shared by many others. Calvin also held the same vie

May we not say that it is not believing in the other life that makes a man good, but rather that being good makes him believe in it? And what is being good and being evil? These

he problem, which derives all its absurdity from the fact that punishment has been conceived as vindictiveness or vengeance, not as correction, has been conceived after the fashion of barbarous peoples. And in

ng some alien happiness? Let us read again in the Eumenides of that terrible tragedian, ?schylus, those choruses of the Furies in which they curse the new gods for overturning the ancient laws and snatching Orestes from their hands-impassioned invectives against the Apollinian re

eternalization of the soul, even though it be an

tine affirmed. But why? What does "being good" mean? Good is good for something, conducive to an end, and to say that everything is good is equivalent to saying that everything is making for its end. But what is its end? Our desire is to eternalize ourselves, to persi

because it conspires to perpetuate consciousness, and, together with consciousness, will, because intelligence increases will and perfects it, because the end of man is the contemplation

m its beginning to the end"; while Leopardi, who did not believe in another life, asserted that nobody would consent to live his life over again. These tw

l not all be made eternal, and eternal not in suffering but in ha

the badness in the intention of him who does the deed or is it not rather in that of him who jud

believes that he shall never die in the spirit, desires it because he deserves it, or rather, only he desires personal immortality who carries his immortality within him. The man who does not long passionately, and with a passion that triumphs over all the dictates of reason, for his own immortality, is the man who does not deserve it, and because he does not deserve it he does

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not having it, and that is the consciousness of not having it, and this he expressed in plastic form by picturing them shut up

ire? In the sixth book of his ?neid (426-429) the gentle Virgil makes us hear th

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own the sweetness of it, and whom, torn from their mothers'

t? exsortes et

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her knew life nor longed for it? And yet

nal to the end that they might be gladdened by them in paradise. And so a fresh field is opened up fo

the total collectivity; and they imagine salvation as something collective. As something collective also, merit, and as something collective sin, and redemption

y, the belief that the living may devote suffrages and apply merits to the souls of their dead? This se

to a certain number of the elect, spirits representative of the rest and in a certain sense including them; an idea of pagan derivation-for such

hough he does not know it. "If humanity is gradually raised above itself, when the last man dies, the man who will contain all the rest of mankind in himself, who shall say that he may not have arrived at that higher order of humanity such as exists elsewhere, in heaven?... As we are all bound together in solidarity, we shall all, little by little, gather the fruits of our travail." According to this mode of imagining and thinking, since nobody is born, nobody dies, no single soul has finished its struggle but many times has been plunged into the midst of the human struggle "ever since the type of embryo corresponding with the same consciousness was represented in the succession of human phenomena." It is obvious that since Bonnefon begins by denying personal individuality, he leaves out of account our real longing, which is to save our individuality; but on the other hand, since he, Bonnefon, is a personal individual and feels this longing, he has recourse to the distinction between the called and the chosen, and to the idea of representative spirits, and he concedes to a certain number of men this representative individual immortality. Of these

n in Man, in the whole of Humanity embodied in a Person, who is Christ, and the fusion not only of all men but of all things, and the subsequent subject

ist, the enjoyment of peace with God in the permanent witness of the Holy Spirit to the remission of sins, the ordering of life according to the pattern of Christ, which is the fruit of faith alone, the drawing near to God and the intercourse of the soul with Him, the disposition to die in grace and the joyful expectation of the Judgement which will bestow blessedness in the more intimate enjoyment of God and in the commerce with all the saints" (Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. iii., § 43). The commerce with all the saints-that is to say, the eternal human society. And for his part, Oetinger considers eternal happiness no

all things in earth and in heaven, the visible and the invisible, in Christ, and also in the apocatastasis, the return of all things to God, to consciousness, in order that God may be all in all. And does not God's being all in all mean that all things shall acquire consciousness and that in this consciousness everything that

ngdom of heaven, will not individual differences, tainted as they are with deceit and even with sin, be obliterated, and in the perfect society will that alone remain of each man which was the essential part of him? Would it not perhaps result, acc

real union, a substantial and intimate union

creatures g

more than the

t has told us that where two or three are gathered to

g some who believe that the tendency of all human progress is the conversion of our species into one collective being with real consciousness-is not perhaps an indivi

ven who sees his brother suffering in hell, for the sin and the merit were common to both. We think with the thoughts of others and we f

pocatastasis. We Christians, said the Apostle (I Cor. xii. 27) are the body of Christ, me

hat is the slave of time and space, this I which reason tells me is a mere passing accident, but for the saving of which I live and suffer and hope and believe? Granting that the human final

ragedy, the very heart of it-the sacrifice of our own individual consciousness

ist, should we hesitate for a moment in surrendering ourselves utterly to Him? Would the stream that flows into the sea, and feels in the freshness of its waters the bitter

ye

ything, this is the c

nal lack of something and an eternal suffering. A suffering, a pain, thanks to which it grows without ceasing in consciousness and in longing. Do not write upon the gate of heaven that sentence which Dante placed over the threshold of hell, Lasciate ogni speranza! Do not destroy time! Our life is a hope which is continual

that makes the blessed in paradise go on living? If in paradise they do not suffer for want of God, how shall they love Him? And if even there, in the heaven of glory, while they behold God little by little and clo

life is that? Is there perhaps any greater joy than that of remembering misery-and to remember it is to feel it-

But has not the mythological dream its content of truth? Are not dream and myth perhaps reve

s concrete, conceivable, or in other words, rational, to our primary, primordial, and fundamental longing for an eternal life conscious of itself and of its personal individuality, es

verthe

understand the Universe. We must needs believe in it, and to believe in it is to be religious. Christianity, the only religion which we Europeans of the twentieth century are really capable of feeling, is, as Kierkegaard said,

y that he thought better of those who were confined in a lunatic asylum on account of religious mania than of those who, while professing the same religious principles, kept their wits and appeared to enjoy life very well outside of the asylums.[53] But those who are at large, are th

ish it from reason, unless we place ourselves outside

ntradictory dreams of our imagination upon the dictates of a sane reason. And a sane reason tells us that nothing can be built up without

d, with all other consciousnesses in the Supreme Consciousness, in God; we must needs believe in that other life in order that we may live this life, and endure it, and give it meaning and finality. And we must needs believe in th

life awaited us after death; and if it be that nothingness is the fate that awa

examination of the practical or

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