Tragic Sense Of Life Part 22

That saying, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," does not mean that G.o.d condemned man to work, but to the painfulness of it. It would have been no condemnation to have condemned man to work itself, for work is the only practical consolation for having been born. And, for a Christian, the proof that G.o.d did not condemn man to work itself consists in the saying of the Scripture that, before the Fall, while he was still in a state of innocence, G.o.d took man and put him in the garden "to dress it and to keep it" (Gen. ii. 15). And how, in fact, would man have pa.s.sed his time in Paradise if he had had no work to do in keeping it in order? And may it not be that the beatific vision itself is a kind of work?

And even if work were our punishment, we ought to strive to make it, the punishment itself, our consolation and our redemption; and if we must needs embrace some cross or other, there is for each one of us no better cross than the cross of our own civil calling. For Christ did not say, "Take up my cross and follow me," but "Take up thy cross and follow me": every man his own cross, for the Saviour's cross the Saviour alone can bear. And the imitation of Christ, therefore, does not consist in that monastic ideal so shiningly set forth in the book that commonly bears the name of a Kempis, an ideal only applicable to a very limited number of persons and therefore anti-Christian; but to imitate Christ is to take up each one his own cross, the cross of his own civil occupation--civil and not merely religions--as Christ took up his cross, the cross of his calling, and to embrace it and carry it, looking towards G.o.d and striving to make each act of this calling a true prayer.

In making shoes and because he makes them a man can gain heaven, provided that the shoemaker strives to be perfect, as a shoemaker, as our Father in heaven is perfect.

Fourier, the socialist dreamer, dreamed of making work attractive in his phalansteries by the free choice of vocations and in other ways. There is no other way than that of liberty. Wherein consists the charm of the game of chance, which is a kind of work, if not in the voluntary submission of the player to the liberty of Nature--that is, to chance?

But do not let us lose ourselves in a comparison between work and play.

And the sense of making ourselves irreplaceable, of not meriting death, of making our annihilation, if it is annihilation that awaits us, an injustice, ought to impel us not only to perform our own occupation religiously, from love of G.o.d and love of our eternity and eternalization, but to perform it pa.s.sionately, tragically if you like.

It ought to impel us to endeavour to stamp others with our seal, to perpetuate ourselves in them and in their children by dominating them, to leave on all things the imperishable impress of our signature. The most fruitful ethic is the ethic of mutual imposition.

Above all, we must recast in a positive form the negative commandments which we have inherited from the Ancient Law. Thus where it is written, "Thou shalt not lie!" let us understand, "Thou shalt always speak the truth, in season and out of season!" although it is we ourselves, and not others, who are judges in each case of this seasonableness. And for "Thou shalt not kill!" let us understand, "Thou shalt give life and increase it!" And for "Thou shalt not steal!" let us say, "Thou shalt increase the general wealth!" And for "Thou shalt not commit adultery!"

"Thou shalt give children, healthy, strong, and good, to thy country and to heaven!" And thus with all the other commandments.

He who does not lose his life shall not find it. Give yourself then to others, but in order to give yourself to them, first dominate them. For it is not possible to dominate except by being dominated. Everyone nourishes himself upon the flesh of that which he devours. In order that you may dominate your neighbour you must know and love him. It is by attempting to impose my ideas upon him that I become the recipient of his ideas. To love my neighbour is to wish that he may be like me, that he may be another I--that is to say, it is to wish that I may be he; it is to wish to obliterate the division between him and me, to suppress the evil. My endeavour to impose myself upon another, to be and live in him and by him, to make him mine--which is the same as making myself his--is that which gives religious meaning to human collectivity, to human solidarity.

The feeling of solidarity originates in myself; since I am a society, I feel the need of making myself master of human society; since I am a social product, I must socialize myself, and from myself I proceed to G.o.d--who is I projected to the All--and from G.o.d to each of my neighbours.

My immediate first impulse is to protest against the inquisitor and to prefer the merchant who comes to offer me his wares. But when my impressions are clarified by reflection, I begin to see that the inquisitor, when he acts from a right motive, treats me as a man, as an end in myself, and if he molests me it is from a charitable wish to save my soul; while the merchant, on the other hand, regards me merely as a customer, as a means to an end, and his indulgence and tolerance is at bottom nothing but a supreme indifference to my destiny. There is much more humanity in the inquisitor.

Similarly there is much more humanity in war than in peace.

Non-resistance to evil implies resistance to good, and to take the offensive, leaving the defensive out of the question, is perhaps the divinest thing in humanity. War is the school of fraternity and the bond of love; it is war that has brought peoples into touch with one another, by mutual aggression and collision, and has been the cause of their knowing and loving one another. Human love knows no purer embrace, or one more fruitful in its consequences, than that between victor and vanquished on the battlefield. And even the purified hate that springs from war is fruitful. War is, in its strictest sense, the sanctification of homicide; Cain is redeemed as a leader of armies. And if Cain had not killed his brother Abel, perhaps he would have died by the hand of Abel.

G.o.d revealed Himself above all in war; He began by being the G.o.d of battles; and one of the greatest services of the Cross is that, in the form of the sword-hilt, it protects the hand that wields the sword.

The enemies of the State say that Cain, the fratricide, was the founder of the State. And we must accept the fact and turn it to the glory of the State, the child of war. Civilization began on the day on which one man, by subjecting another to his will and compelling him to do the work of two, was enabled to devote himself to the contemplation of the world and to set his captive upon works of luxury. It was slavery that enabled Plato to speculate upon the ideal republic, and it was war that brought slavery about. Not without reason was Athena the G.o.ddess of war and of wisdom. But is there any need to repeat once again these obvious truths, which, though they have continually been forgotten, are continually rediscovered?

And the supreme commandment that arises out of love towards G.o.d, and the foundation of all morality, is this: Yield yourself up entirely, give your spirit to the end that you may save it, that you may eternalize it.

Such is the sacrifice of life.

The individual _qua_ individual, the wretched captive of the instinct of preservation and of the senses, cares only about preserving himself, and all his concern is that others should not force their way into his sphere, should not disturb him, should not interrupt his idleness; and in return for their abstention or for the sake of example he refrains from forcing himself upon them, from interrupting their idleness, from disturbing them, from taking possession of them. "Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you," he translates thus: I do not interfere with others--let them not interfere with me. And he shrinks and pines and perishes in this spiritual avarice and this repellent ethic of anarchic individualism: each one for himself. And as each one is not himself, he can hardly live for himself.

But as soon as the individual feels himself in society, he feels himself in G.o.d, and kindled by the instinct of perpetuation he glows with love towards G.o.d, and with a dominating charity he seeks to perpetuate himself in others, to perennialize his spirit, to eternalize it, to unnail G.o.d, and his sole desire is to seal his spirit upon other spirits and to receive their impress in return. He has shaken off the yoke of his spiritual sloth and avarice.

Sloth, it is said, is the mother of all the vices; and in fact sloth does engender two vices--avarice and envy--which in their turn are the source of all the rest. Sloth is the weight of matter, in itself inert, within us, and this sloth, while it professes to preserve us by economizing our forces, in reality attenuates us and reduces us to nothing.

In man there is either too much matter or too much spirit, or to put it better, either he feels a hunger for spirit--that is, for eternity--or he feels a hunger for matter--that is, submission to annihilation. When spirit is in excess and he feels a hunger for yet more of it, he pours it forth and scatters it abroad, and in scattering it abroad he amplifies it with that of others; and on the contrary, when a man is avaricious of himself and thinks that he will preserve himself better by withdrawing within himself, he ends by losing all--he is like the man who received the single talent: he buried it in order that he might not lose it, and in the end he was bereft of it. For to him that hath shall be given, but from him that hath but a little shall be taken away even the little that he hath.

Be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect, we are bidden, and this terrible precept--terrible because for us the infinite perfection of the Father is unattainable--must be our supreme rule of conduct. Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible that he achieves will be scarcely worth the trouble of achieving. It behoves us to aspire to the impossible, to the absolute and infinite perfection, and to say to the Father, "Father, I cannot--help Thou my impotence."

And He acting in us will achieve it for us.

And to be perfect is to be all, it is to be myself and to be all else, it is to be humanity, it is to be the Universe. And there is no other way of being all but to give oneself to all, and when all shall be in all, all will be in each one of us. The apocatastasis is more than a mystical dream: it is a rule of action, it is a beacon beckoning us to high exploits.

And from it springs the ethic of invasion, of domination, of aggression, of inquisition if you like. For true charity is a kind of invasion--it consists in putting my spirit into other spirits, in giving them my suffering as the food and consolation for their sufferings, in awakening their unrest with my unrest, in sharpening their hunger for G.o.d with my hunger for G.o.d. It is not charity to rock and lull our brothers to sleep in the inertia and drowsiness of matter, but rather to awaken them to the uneasiness and torment of spirit.

To the fourteen works of mercy which we learnt in the Catechism of Christian Doctrine there should sometimes be added yet another, that of awakening the sleeper. Sometimes, at any rate, and surely when the sleeper sleeps on the brink of a precipice, it is much more merciful to awaken him than to bury him after he is dead--let us leave the dead to bury their dead. It has been well said, "Whosoever loves thee dearly will make thee weep," and charity often causes weeping. "The love that does not mortify does not deserve so divine a name," said that ardent Portuguese apostle, Fr. Thome de Jesus,[57] who was also the author of this e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n--"O infinite fire, O eternal love, who weepest when thou hast naught to embrace and feed upon and many hearts to burn!" He who loves his neighbour burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood, in burning groans and distils itself in tears.

And to do this is generosity, one of the two mother virtues which are born when inertia, sloth, is overcome. Most of our miseries come from spiritual avarice.

The cure for suffering--which, as we have said, is the collision of consciousness with unconsciousness--is not to be submerged in unconsciousness, but to be raised to consciousness and to suffer more.

The evil of suffering is cured by more suffering, by higher suffering.

Do not take opium, but put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound, for when you sleep and no longer feel the suffering, you are not. And to be, that is imperative. Do not then close your eyes to the agonizing Sphinx, but look her in the face and let her seize you in her mouth and crunch you with her hundred thousand poisonous teeth and swallow you. And when she has swallowed you, you will know the sweetness of the taste of suffering.

The way thereto in practice is by the ethic of mutual imposition. Men should strive to impose themselves upon one another, to give their spirits to one another, to seal one another's souls.

There is matter for thought in the fact that the Christian ethic has been called an ethic of slaves. By whom? By anarchists! It is anarchism that is an ethic of slaves, for it is only the slave that chants the praises of anarchical liberty. Anarchism, no! but _panarchism_; not the creed of "Nor G.o.d nor master!" but that of "All G.o.ds and all masters!"

all striving to become G.o.ds, to become immortal, and achieving this by dominating others.

And there are so many ways of dominating. There is even a pa.s.sive way, or one at least that is apparently pa.s.sive, of fulfilling at times this law of life. Adaptation to environment, imitation, putting oneself in another's place, sympathy, in a word, besides being a manifestation of the unity of the species, is a mode of self-expansion, of being another.

To be conquered, or at least to seem to be conquered, is often to conquer; to take what is another's is a way of living in him.

And in speaking of domination, I do not mean the domination of the tiger. The fox also dominates by cunning, and the hare by flight, and the viper by poison, and the mosquito by its smallness, and the squid by the inky fluid with which it darkens the water and under cover of which it escapes. And no one is scandalized at this, for the same universal Father who gave its fierceness, its talons, and its jaws to the tiger, gave cunning to the fox, swift feet to the hare, poison to the viper, diminutiveness to the mosquito, and its inky fluid to the squid. And n.o.bleness or ign.o.bleness does not consist in the weapons we use, for every species and even every individual possesses its own, but rather in the way in which we use them, and above all in the cause in which we wield them.

And among the weapons of conquest must be included the weapon of patience and of resignation, but a pa.s.sionate patience and a pa.s.sionate resignation, containing within itself an active principle and antecedent longings. You remember that famous sonnet of Milton--Milton, the great fighter, the great Puritan disturber of the spiritual peace, the singer of Satan--who, when he considered how his light was spent and that one talent which it is death to hide lodged with him useless, heard the voice of Patience saying to him,

G.o.d doth not need Either man's work, or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best: his state Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed, And post o'er land and ocean without rest; They also serve who only stand and wait.

They also serve who only stand and wait--yes, but it is when they wait for Him pa.s.sionately, hungeringly, full of longing for immortality in Him.

And we must impose ourselves, even though it be by our patience. "My cup is small, but I drink out of my cup," said the egoistical poet of an avaricious people.[58] No, out of my cup all drink, for I wish all to drink out of it; I offer it to them, and my cup grows according to the number of those who drink out of it, and all, in putting it to their lips, leave in it something of their spirit. And while they drink out of my cup, I also drink out of theirs. For the more I belong to myself, and the more I am myself, the more I belong to others; out of the fullness of myself I overflow upon my brothers, and as I overflow upon them they enter into me.

"Be ye perfect, as your Father is perfect," we are bidden, and our Father is perfect because He is Himself and because He is in each one of His children who live and move and have their being in Him. And the end of perfection is that we all may be one (John xvii. 21), all one body in Christ (Rom. xii. 5), and that, at the last, when all things are subdued unto the Son, the Son himself may be subject to Him that put all things under him, that G.o.d may be all in all. And this is to make the Universe consciousness, to make Nature a society, and a human society. And then shall we be able confidently to call G.o.d Father.

I am aware that those who say that ethics is a science will say that all this commentary of mine is nothing but rhetoric; but each man has his own language and his own pa.s.sion--that is to say, each man who knows what pa.s.sion is--and as for the man who knows it not, nothing will it avail him to know science.

And the pa.s.sion that finds its expression in this rhetoric, the devotees of ethical science call egotism. But this egotism is the only true remedy for egoism, spiritual avarice, the vice of preserving and reserving oneself and of not striving to perennialize oneself by giving oneself.

"Be not, and ye shall be mightier than all that is," said Fr. Juan de los Angeles in one of his _Dialogos de la Conquista del Reina de Dios_ (_Dial._, iii., 8); but what does this "Be not" mean? May it not mean paradoxically--and such a mode of expression is common with the mystics--the contrary of that which, at a first and literal reading, it would appear to mean? Is not the whole ethic of submission and quietism an immense paradox, or rather a great tragic contradiction? Is not the monastic, the strictly monastic, ethic an absurdity? And by the monastic ethic I mean that of the solitary Carthusian, that of the hermit, who flees from the world--perhaps carrying it with him nevertheless--in order that he may live quite alone with a G.o.d who is lonely as himself; not that of the Dominican inquisitor who scoured Provence in search of Albigensian hearts to burn.

"Let G.o.d do it all," someone will say; but if man folds his arms, G.o.d will go to sleep.

This Carthusian ethic and that scientific ethic which is derived from ethical science--oh, this science of ethics! rational and rationalistic ethics! pedantry of pedantry, all is pedantry!--yes, this perhaps is egoism and coldness of heart.

There are some who say that they isolate themselves with G.o.d in order that they may the better work out their salvation, their redemption; but since sin is collective, redemption must be collective also. "The religious is the determination of the whole, and everything outside this is an illusion of the senses, and that is why the greatest criminal is at bottom innocent, a good-natured man and a saint" (Kierkegaard, _Afs.l.u.ttende_, etc., ii., ii., cap. iv., sect. 2, _a_).

Are we to understand, on the other hand, that men seek to gain the other, the eternal life, by renouncing this the temporal life? If the other life is anything, it must be a continuation of this, and only as such a continuation, more or less purified, is it mirrored in our desire; and if this is so, such as is this life of time, so will be the life of eternity.

"This world and the other are like the two wives of one husband--if he pleases one he makes the other envious," said an Arab thinker, quoted by Windelband (_Das Heilige_, in vol. ii. of _Praludien_); but such a thought could only have arisen in the mind of one who had failed to resolve the tragic conflict between his spirit and the world in a fruitful warfare, a practical contradiction. "Thy kingdom come" to us; so Christ taught us to pray to the Father, not "May we come to Thy kingdom"; and according to the primitive Christian belief the eternal life was to be realized on this earth itself and as a continuation of the earthly life. We were made men and not angels in order that we might seek our happiness through the medium of this life, and the Christ of the Christian Faith became, not an angelic, but a human, being, redeeming us by taking upon himself a real and effective body and not an appearance of one merely. And according to this same Faith, even the highest of the angelical hierarchy adore the Virgin, the supreme symbol of terrestrial Humanity. The angelical ideal, therefore, is not the Christian ideal, and still less is it the human ideal, nor can it be. An angel, moreover, is a neutral being, without s.e.x and without country.

It is impossible for us to feel the other life, the eternal life, I have already repeated more than once, as a life of angelical contemplation; it must be a life of action. Goethe said that "man must believe in immortality, since in his nature he has a right to it." And he added: "The conviction of our persistence arises in me from the concept of activity. If I work without ceasing to the end, Nature is obliged (_so ist die Natur verpflichtet_) to provide me with another form of existence, since my actual spirit can bear no more." Change Nature to G.o.d, and you have a thought that remains Christian in character, for the first Fathers of the Church did not believe that the immortality of the soul was a natural gift--that is to say, something rational--but a divine gift of grace. And that which is of grace is usually, in its essence, of justice, since justice is divine and gratuitous, not natural. And Goethe added: "I could begin nothing with an eternal happiness before me, unless new tasks and new difficulties were given me to overcome." And true it is that there is no happiness in a vacuity of contemplation.

But may there not be some justification for the morality of the hermit, of the Carthusian, the ethic of the Thebaid? Might we not say, perhaps, that it is necessary to preserve these exceptional types in order that they may stand as everlasting patterns for mankind? Do not men breed racehorses, which are useless for any practical kind of work, but which preserve the purity of the breed and become the sires of excellent hackneys and hunters? Is there not a luxury of ethics, not less justifiable than any other sort of luxury? But, on the other hand, is not all this substantially esthetics, and not ethics, still less religion? May not the contemplative, medieval, monastic ideal be esthetical, and not religious nor even ethical? And after all, those of the seekers after solitude who have related to us their conversation when they were alone with G.o.d have performed an eternalizing work, they have concerned themselves with the souls of others. And by this alone, that it has given us an Eckhart, a Seuse, a Tauler, a Ruysbroek, a Juan de la Cruz, a Catherine of Siena, an Angela of Foligno, a Teresa de Jesus, is the cloister justified.

But the chief of our Spanish Orders are the Predicadores, founded by Domingo de Guzman for the aggressive work of extirpating heresy; the Company of Jesus, a militia with the world as its field of operations (which explains its history); the order of the Escuelas Pias, also devoted to a work of an aggressive or invasive nature, that of instruction. I shall certainly be reminded that the reform of the contemplative Order of the Carmelites which Teresa de Jesus undertook was a Spanish work. Yes, Spanish it was, and in it men sought liberty.

It was, in fact, the yearning for liberty, for inward liberty, which, in the troubled days of the Inquisition, led many choice spirits to the cloister. They imprisoned themselves in order that they might be more free. "Is it not a fine thing that a poor nun of San Jose can attain to sovereignty over the whole earth and the elements?" said St. Teresa in her _Life_. It was the Pauline yearning for liberty, the longing to shake off the bondage of the external law, which was then very severe, and, as Maestro Fray Luis de Leon said, very stubborn.

But did they actually find liberty in the cloister? It is very doubtful if they did, and to-day it is impossible. For true liberty is not to rid oneself of the external law; liberty is consciousness of the law. Not he who has shaken off the yoke of the law is free, but he who has made himself master of the law. Liberty must be sought in the midst of the world, which is the domain of the law, and of sin, the offspring of the law. That which we must be freed from is sin, which is collective.

Instead of renouncing the world in order that we may dominate it--and who does not know the collective instinct of domination of those religious Orders whose members renounce the world?--what we ought to do is to dominate the world in order that we may be able to renounce it.

Not to seek poverty and submission, but to seek wealth in order that we may use it to increase human consciousness, and to seek power for the same end.