Tragic Sense Of Life Part 19

May it not be that the Universe, our Universe--who knows if there are others?--began with a zero of spirit--and zero is not the same as nothing--and an infinite of matter, and that its goal is to end with an infinite of spirit and a zero of matter? Dreams!

May it be that everything has a soul and that this soul begs to be freed?

_Oh tierras de Alvargonzalez, en el corazon de Espana, tierras pobres, tierras tristes, tan tristes que tienen alma!_

sings our poet Antonio Machado in his _Campos de Castilla_.[50] Is the sadness of the field in the fields themselves or in us who look upon them? Do they not suffer? But what can an individual soul in a world of matter actually be? Is it the rock or the mountain that is the individual? Is it the tree?

And nevertheless the fact always remains that spirit and matter are at strife. This is the thought that Esp.r.o.nceda expressed when he wrote:

_Aqui, para vivir en santa calma, o sobra la materia, o sobra el alma._[51]

And is there not in the history of thought, or of human imagination if you prefer it, something that corresponds to this process of the reduction of matter, in the sense of a reduction of everything to consciousness?

Yes, there is, and its author is the first Christian mystic, St. Paul of Tarsus, the Apostle of the Gentiles, he who because he had never with his bodily eyes looked upon the face of the fleshly 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 (2 Cor. xii.). And this first Christian mystic dreamed also of a final triumph of spirit, of consciousness, and this is what in theology is technically called the apocatastasis or rest.i.tution.

In 1 Cor. xv. 26-28 he tells us that "the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death, for he hath put all things under his feet. But when he saith all things are put under him, 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 that put all things under him, that G.o.d may be all in all": _hina he ho theos panta en pasin_--that is to say, that the end is that G.o.d, Consciousness, will end by being all in all.

This doctrine is completed by Paul's teaching, in his Epistle to the Ephesians, with regard to the end of the whole history of the world. In this Epistle, as you know, he represents Christ--by whom "were all things created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible" (Col. i. 16)--as the head over all things (Eph. i. 22), and in him, in this head, we all shall be raised up that we may live in the communion of saints and that we "may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, and to know the love of Christ, which pa.s.seth 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, _anakephalaiosthai ta panta en Christo_. And this recapitulation--_anakephalaiosis_, anacefaleosis--the end of the world's history and of the human race, is merely another aspect of the apocatastasis. The apocatastasis, G.o.d's coming to be all in all, thus resolves itself into the anacefaleosis, the gathering together of all things in Christ, in Humanity--Humanity therefore being the end of creation. And does not this apocatastasis, this humanization or divinization of all things, do away with matter? But if matter, which is the principle of individuation, the scholastic _principium individuationis_, is once done away with, does not everything return to pure consciousness, which, in its pure purity, neither knows itself nor is it anything that can be conceived or felt? And if matter be abolished, what support is there left for spirit?

Thus a different train of thought leads us to the same difficulties, the same unthinkabilities.

It may be said, on the other hand, that the apocatastasis, G.o.d's coming to be all in all, presupposes that there was a time when He was not all in all. The supposition that all beings shall attain to the enjoyment of G.o.d implies the supposition that G.o.d shall attain to the enjoyment of all beings, for the beatific vision is mutual, and G.o.d is perfected in being better known, and His being is nourished and enriched with souls.

Following up the track of these wild dreams, we might imagine an unconscious G.o.d, slumbering in matter, and gradually wakening into consciousness of everything, consciousness of His own divinity; we might imagine the whole Universe becoming conscious of itself as a whole and becoming conscious of each of its const.i.tuent consciousnesses, becoming G.o.d. But in that case, how did this unconscious G.o.d begin? Is He not matter itself? G.o.d would thus be not the beginning but the end of the Universe; but can that be the end which was not the beginning? Or can 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 G.o.d who is in process of becoming a pantheist G.o.d? And if it is not so, if matter and pain are alien to G.o.d, wherefore, it will be asked, did G.o.d create the world? For what purpose did He make matter and introduce pain? Would it not have been better if He had not made anything? What added glory does He gain by the creation of angels or of men whose fall He must punish with eternal torment? Did He perhaps create evil for the sake of remedying it? Or was redemption His design, redemption complete and absolute, redemption of all things and of all men? For this hypothesis is neither more rational nor more pious than the other.

In so far as we attempt to represent eternal happiness to ourselves, we are confronted by a series of questions to which there is no satisfactory--that is, rational--answer, and it matters not whether the supposition from which we start be monotheist, or pantheist, or even panentheist.

Let us return to the Pauline apocatastasis.

Is it not possible that in becoming all in all G.o.d completes Himself, becomes at last fully G.o.d, an infinite consciousness embracing all consciousnesses? And what is an infinite consciousness? Since consciousness supposes limitation, or rather since consciousness is 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 a case, of what is consciousness the consciousness? Of its content? Or may it not rather be that, starting from chaos, from absolute unconsciousness, in the eternity of the past, we continually approach the apocatastasis or final apotheosis without ever reaching it?

May not this apocatastasis, this return of all things to G.o.d, be rather an ideal term to which we unceasingly approach--some of us with fleeter step than others--but which we are destined never to reach? May not the absolute and perfect eternal happiness be an eternal hope, which would die if it were 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 pa.s.s some time through the same degree of growth, whatever that degree may be, and yet without ever arriving at the infinite, at G.o.d, to whom they continually approach? Is not eternal happiness an eternal hope, with its eternal nucleus of sorrow in order that happiness shall not be swallowed up in nothingness?

Follow more questions to which there is no answer. "He shall be all in all," says the Apostle. But will His mode of being in each one be different or will it be the same for all alike? Will not G.o.d be wholly in one of the d.a.m.ned? Is He not in his soul? Is He not in what is called h.e.l.l? And in what sense is He in h.e.l.l?

Whence arise new problems, those relating to the opposition between heaven and h.e.l.l, between eternal happiness and eternal unhappiness.

May it not be that in the end all shall be saved, including Cain and Judas and Satan himself, as Origen's development of the Pauline apocatastasis led him to hope?

When our Catholic theologians seek to justify rationally--or in other words, ethically--the dogma of the eternity of the pains of h.e.l.l, they put forward reasons so specious, ridiculous, and childish, that it would appear impossible that they should ever have obtained currency. For to a.s.sert that since G.o.d is infinite, an offence committed against Him is infinite also and therefore 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 connection those words which Christ addressed to His Father are capable of application: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and no man who commits an offence against G.o.d or his neighbour knows what he does. In human ethics, or if you like in human police regulations--that which is called penal law and is anything but law[52] eternal punishment is a meaningless phrase.

"G.o.d is just and punishes us; that is all we need to know; as far as we are concerned the rest is merely curiosity." Such was the conclusion of Lamennais (_Essai_, etc., iv^e partie, chap, vii.), an opinion shared by many others. Calvin also held the same view. But is there anyone who is content with this? Pure curiosity!--to call this load that wellnigh crushes our heart pure curiosity!

May we not say, perhaps, that the evil man is annihilated because he wished to be annihilated, or that he did not wish strongly enough to eternalize himself because he was evil? 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 states pertain to the sphere of ethics, not of religion: or, rather, does not the doing good though being evil pertain to ethics, and the being good though doing evil to religion?

Shall we not perhaps be told, on the other hand, that if the sinner suffers an eternal punishment, it is because he does not cease to sin?--for the d.a.m.ned sin without ceasing. This, however, is no solution of the 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 the same way h.e.l.l has been conceived as a sort of police inst.i.tution, necessary in order to put fear into the world. And the worst of it is that it no longer intimidates, and therefore will have to be shut up.

But, on the other hand, as a religious conception and veiled in mystery, why not--although the idea revolts our feelings--an eternity of suffering? why not a G.o.d who is nourished by our suffering? Is our happiness the end of the Universe? or may we possibly sustain with our suffering some alien happiness? Let us read again in the _Eumenides_ of that terrible tragedian, aeschylus, those choruses of the Furies in which they curse the new G.o.ds for overturning the ancient laws and s.n.a.t.c.hing Orestes from their hands--impa.s.sioned invectives against the Apollinian redemption. Does not redemption tear man, their captive and plaything, from the hands of the G.o.ds, who delight and amuse themselves in his sufferings, like children, as the tragic poet says, torturing beetles? And let us remember the cry, "My G.o.d, my G.o.d, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Yes, why not an eternity of suffering? h.e.l.l is an eternalization of the soul, even though it be an eternity of pain. Is not pain essential to life?

Men go on inventing theories to explain what they call the origin of evil. And why not the origin of good? Why suppose that it is good that is positive and original, and evil that is negative and derivatory?

"Everything that is, in so far as it is, is good," St. Augustine 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 persist, and we call good everything that conspires to this end and bad everything that tends to lessen or destroy our consciousness. We suppose that human consciousness is an end and not a means to something else which may not be consciousness, whether human or superhuman.

All metaphysical optimism, such as that of Leibnitz, and all metaphysical pessimism, such as that of Schopenhauer, have no other foundation than this. For Leibnitz this world is the best 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 of G.o.d; while for Schopenhauer this world is the worst of all possible worlds, because it conspires to destroy will, because intelligence, representation, nullifies the will that begot it.

And similarly Franklin, who believed in another life, a.s.serted that he was willing to live this life over again, the life that he had actually lived, "from its beginning to the end"; while Leopardi, who did not believe in another life, a.s.serted that n.o.body would consent to live his life over again. These two views of life are not merely ethical, but religious; and the feeling of moral good, in so far as it is a teleological value, is of religious origin also.

And to return to our interrogations: Shall not all be saved, shall not all be made eternal, and eternal not in suffering but in happiness, those whom we call good and those whom we call bad alike?

And as regards this question of good and evil, does not the malice of him who judges enter in? Is the badness in the intention of him who does the deed or is it not rather in that of him who judges it to be bad? But the terrible thing is that man judges himself, creates himself his own judge.

Who then shall be saved? And now the imagination puts forth another possibility--neither more nor less rational than all those which have just been put forward interrogatively--and that is that only those are saved who have longed to be saved, that only those are eternalized who have lived in an agony of hunger for eternity and for eternalization. He who desires never to die and 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 pa.s.sionately, and with a pa.s.sion 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 not long for it.

And it is no injustice not to give a man that which he does not know how to desire, for "ask, and it shall be given you." It may be that to each will be given that which he desired. And perhaps the sin against the Holy Ghost--for which, according to the Evangelist, there is no remission--is none other than that of not desiring G.o.d, not longing to be made eternal.

As is your sort of mind So is your sort of search; you'll find What you desire, and that's to be A Christian,

said Robert Browning in _Christmas Eve and Easter Day_.

In his _Inferno_ Dante condemned the Epicureans, those who did not believe in another life, to something more terrible than the not having it, and that is the consciousness of not having it, and this he expressed in plastic form by picturing them shut up in their tombs for all eternity, without light, without air, without fire, without movement, without life (_Inferno_, x., 10-15).

What cruelty is there in denying to a man that which he did not or could not desire? In the sixth book of his _aeneid_ (426-429) the gentle Virgil makes us hear the plaintive voices and sobbing of the babes who weep upon the threshold of Hades,

_Continuo auditae voces, vagitus et ingens, Infantumque animae flentes in limine primo,_

unhappy in that they had but entered upon life and never known the sweetness of it, and whom, torn from their mothers' b.r.e.a.s.t.s, a dark day had cut off and drowned in bitter death--

_Quos dulcis vitae exsortes et at ubere raptos Abstulit atra dies et funere mersit acerbo._

But what life did they lose, if they neither knew life nor longed for it? And yet is it true that they never longed for it?

It may be said that others craved life on their behalf, that their parents longed for them to be eternal to the end that they might be gladdened by them in paradise. And so a fresh field is opened up for the imagination--namely, the consideration of the solidarity and representivity of eternal salvation.

There are many, indeed, who imagine the human race as one being, a collective and solidary individual, in whom each member may represent or may come to represent the total collectivity; and they imagine salvation as something collective. As something collective also, merit, and as something collective sin, and redemption. According to this mode of feeling and imagining, either all are saved or none is saved; redemption is total and it is mutual; each man is his neighbour's Christ.

And is there not perhaps a hint of this in the popular Catholic belief with regard to souls in purgatory, the belief that the living may devote suffrages and apply merits to the souls of their dead? This sense of the transmission of merits, both to the living and the dead, is general in popular Catholic piety.

Nor should it be forgotten that in the history of man's religious thought there has often presented itself the idea of an immortality restricted 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 were the heroes and demi-G.o.ds--which sometimes shelters itself behind the p.r.o.nouncement that there are many that are called and few that are chosen.

Recently, while I was engaged upon this essay, there came into my hands the third edition of the _Dialogue sur la vie et sur la mort_, by Charles Bonnefon, a book in which imaginative conceptions similar to those that I have been setting forth find succinct and suggestive expression. The soul cannot live without the body, Bonnefon says, nor the body without the soul, and thus neither birth nor death has any real existence--strictly speaking, there is no body, no soul, no birth, no death, all of which are abstractions and appearances, but only a thinking life, of which we form part and which can neither be born nor die. Hence he is led to deny human individuality and to a.s.sert that no one can say "I am" but only "we are," or, more correctly, "there is in us." It is humanity, the species, that thinks and loves in us. And souls are transmitted in the same way that bodies are transmitted. "The living thought or the thinking life which we are will find itself again immediately in a form a.n.a.logous to that which was our origin and corresponding with our being in the womb of a pregnant woman." Each of us, therefore, has lived before and will live again, although 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 n.o.body is born, n.o.body 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 elect he says that "they will be somewhat more necessary to G.o.d than we ourselves." And he closes this splendid dream by supposing that "it is not impossible that we shall arrive by a series of ascensions at the supreme happiness, and that our life shall be merged in the perfect Life as a drop of water in the sea.

Then we shall understand," he continues, "that everything was necessary, that every philosophy and every religion had its hour of truth, and that in all our wanderings and errors and in the darkest moments of our history we discerned the light of the distant beacon, and that we were all predestined to partic.i.p.ate in the Eternal Light. And if the G.o.d whom we shall find again possesses a body--and we cannot conceive a living G.o.d without a body--we, together with each of the myriads of races that the myriads of suns have brought forth, shall be the conscious cells of his body. If this dream should be fulfilled, an ocean of love would beat upon our sh.o.r.es and the end of every life would be to add a drop of water to this ocean's infinity." And what is this cosmic dream of Bonnefon's but the plastic representation of the Pauline apocatastasis?

Yes, this dream, which has its origin far back in the dawn of Christianity, is fundamentally the same as the Pauline anacefaleosis, the fusion of all men 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 subjection of all things to G.o.d, in order that G.o.d, Consciousness, may be all in all. And this supposes a collective redemption and a society beyond the grave.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, two pietists of Protestant origin, Johann Jakob Moser and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, gave a new force and value to the Pauline anacefaleosis. Moser "declared that his religion consisted not in holding certain doctrines to be true and in living a virtuous life conformably therewith, but in being reunited to G.o.d through Christ. But this demands the thorough knowledge--a knowledge that goes on increasing until the end of life--of one's own sins and also of the mercy and patience of G.o.d, the transformation of all natural feelings, the appropriation of the atonement wrought by the death of Christ, the enjoyment of peace with G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 not as the contemplation of G.o.d in His infinitude, but, taking the Epistle to the Ephesians as his authority, as the contemplation of G.o.d in the harmony of the creature with Christ. The commerce with all the saints was, according to him, essential to the content of eternal happiness. It was the realization of the kingdom of G.o.d, which thus comes to be the kingdom of Man. And in his exposition of these doctrines of the two pietists, Ritschl confesses _(op. cit._, iii., -- 46) that both witnesses have with these doctrines contributed something to Protestantism that is of like value with the theological method of Spener, another pietist.