The Tragic Sense of Life

For there is another thing that is also called man, and it is the subject of not a few more or less scientific digressions. It is the featherless biped of the legend, the ζῷον πολιτικόν [political animal] of Aristotle, the social contractor of Rousseau, the homo oeconomicus [economic man] of the Manchester school, the homo sapiens of Linnaeus, or, if you like, the vertical mammal. A man who is not from here or from there, nor of this age or of another, who has neither sex nor country: an idea, in short. That is to say, a no-man.

Ours is the other one, the one of flesh and bone: I, you, my reader; that other man over there; all of us who weigh upon the earth.

And this concrete man, of flesh and bone, is at once the subject and the supreme object of all philosophy, whether certain self-styled philosophers like it or not.

In most of the histories of philosophy that I know, the systems are presented to us as arising one from another, and their authors, the philosophers, appear as little more than mere pretexts. The inner biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a secondary place. And yet it is this inner biography that explains the most to us.

It falls to us to say, first of all, that philosophy leans closer to poetry than to science. All the philosophical systems that have been forged, in any period whatever, as a supreme harmonizing of the final results of the particular sciences have had far less consistency and less life than those others that represented the integral longing of their author’s spirit.

And the reason is that the sciences, important as they are to us and indispensable as they are for our life and our thought, are in a certain sense more foreign to us than philosophy. They serve a more objective end—that is, one more outside of us. At bottom, they are a matter of economics. A new scientific discovery, of the kind we call theoretical, is like a mechanical discovery—the steam engine, the telephone, the phonograph, the airplane: a thing that is useful for something. Thus the telephone may serve us to communicate at a distance with the woman we love. But what use is she to us? One takes the electric tram to go and hear an opera, and asks oneself: which, in this case, is more useful, the tram or the opera?

Philosophy answers to the need to form for ourselves a unified and total conception of the world and of life, and, as a consequence of that conception, a feeling that gives rise to an inner attitude and even to action. But it turns out that this feeling, instead of being a consequence of that conception, is its cause. Our philosophy—that is, our way of understanding or not understanding the world and life—springs from our feeling toward life itself. And this, like everything affective, has subconscious roots, perhaps unconscious ones.

It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists; rather, it is our optimism or our pessimism—of physiological or perhaps pathological origin, the one as much as the other—that makes our ideas.

Man, they say, is a rational animal. I do not know why it has not been said that he is an affective or feeling animal. And perhaps what distinguishes him from the other animals is feeling rather than reason. I have more often seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly—but then, inwardly, perhaps the crab too solves quadratic equations.

And so what ought to matter most to us in a philosopher is the man.

Take Kant, the man Immanuel Kant, who was born and lived in Königsberg at the end of the eighteenth century and up to the threshold of the nineteenth. In the philosophy of this man Kant—a man of heart and head, that is, a man—there is a significant leap, as Kierkegaard would have said, another man—and what a man!—the leap from the Critique of Pure Reason to the Critique of Practical Reason.

The one God, the rational God, is the projection into infinity of the outside of man, man by definition—that is, of abstract man, of the man who is no man; and the other God, the God of feeling or of will, is the projection into infinity of the inside of man, man by life—of concrete man, of flesh and bone.

Kant rebuilt with his heart what he had torn down with his head. For we know, from the testimony of those who knew him and from his own testimony in his letters and private statements, that the man Kant—the somewhat selfish old bachelor who taught philosophy in Königsberg at the end of the century of the Encyclopedia and of the goddess Reason—was a man much preoccupied with the problem. I mean the one true vital problem, the one that reaches deepest into our very core: the problem of our individual and personal destiny, of the immortality of the soul. The man Kant could not resign himself to dying altogether.

Whoever reads the Critique of Practical Reason attentively and without blinkers will see that, strictly speaking, the existence of God is deduced in it from the immortality of the soul, and not the latter from the former. The categorical imperative leads us to a moral postulate which in turn demands, in the teleological or rather eschatological order, the immortality of the soul; and to sustain this immortality God appears. All the rest is the sleight of hand of a professional of philosophy.

The man Kant felt morality as the basis of eschatology, but the professor of philosophy inverted the terms.

Another professor, the professor and man William James, has said somewhere or other that for the generality of men God is the producer of immortality. Yes: for the generality of men, including the man Kant, the man James, and the man who is tracing these lines that you, reader, are reading.

One day, talking with a peasant, I put to him the hypothesis that there might indeed be a God who rules heaven and earth, a Consciousness of the Universe, but that the soul of each man was not for that reason immortal in the traditional and concrete sense. And he answered me: “Then what is God for?” And that is how the man Kant and the man James answered themselves in the hidden court of their conscience. Only, when they acted as professors, they had to justify rationally an attitude so little rational. Which does not mean, of course, that it is absurd.

Hegel made famous his aphorism that all that is rational is real and all that is real is rational; but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel, go on believing that the real, the really real, is irrational; that reason builds upon irrationalities. Hegel, a great definer, set out to reconstruct the universe with definitions, like that artillery sergeant who said that cannons are made by taking a hole and covering it with iron.

Another man, the man Joseph Butler, an Anglican bishop who lived at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and of whom the Catholic cardinal Newman says that he is the greatest name in the Anglican Church, wrote these pregnant words at the end of the first chapter of his great work on the analogy of religion (The Analogy of Religion), a chapter that deals with the future life: “This credibility of a future life, on which so much has been insisted here, however little it may satisfy our curiosity, seems to answer all the purposes of religion as well as a demonstrative proof would. In reality, a proof, even a demonstrative one, of a future life would not be a proof of religion.note

The man Butler, whose works the man Kant may perhaps have known, wanted to save faith in the immortality of the soul, and to that end he made it independent of faith in God. The first chapter of his Analogy deals, as I tell you, with the future life, and the second with the government of God by rewards and punishments. And the fact is that, at bottom, the good Anglican bishop deduces the existence of God from the immortality of the soul. And since the good Anglican bishop started from there, he did not have to make the leap that the good Lutheran philosopher had to make at the end of that same century. Bishop Butler was one man, and Professor Kant was another.

And to be a man is to be something concrete, unitary and substantive; it is to be a thing, res. And we already know what another man, the man Benedict Spinoza—that Portuguese Jew who was born and lived in Holland in the middle of the seventeenth century—wrote of every thing. Proposition 6 of Part III of his Ethics says: unaquaeque res, quatenus in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur; that is, each thing, insofar as it is in itself, strives to persevere in its being. Each thing insofar as it is in itself—that is, insofar as it is substance, since, according to him, substance is id quod in se est et per se concipitur: that which is by itself and is conceived by itself.

And man, this thing—is he a thing? Absurd as the question may seem, there are those who have asked it. Not long ago a certain doctrine that we used to call positivism went about the world, doing much good and much harm. And among the other harms it did was to bring us a kind of analysis under which facts were pulverized, reduced to a dust of facts. Most of what positivism called facts were nothing but fragments of facts. In psychology its effect was deleterious.

Starting from the evident fact that contradictory states file through our consciousness, they came not to see consciousness, the self, clearly. To ask someone about his self is like asking him about his body. And note that when I speak of the self I speak of the concrete and personal self—not of Fichte’s self, but of Fichte himself, the man Fichte.

And what determines a man, what makes him a man, one and not another, the one he is and not the one he is not, is a principle of unity and a principle of continuity. A principle of unity first in space, thanks to the body, and then in action and in purpose. When we walk, one foot does not go forward and the other backward; nor, when we look, does one eye look north and the other south—so long as we are healthy. At each moment of our life we have a purpose, and the synergy of our actions conspires toward it. Even if at the next moment we change our purpose.

And a principle of continuity in time. Without going into the discussion—an idle one—of whether or not I am the one I was twenty years ago, it is indisputable, it seems to me, that the one I am today derives, through a continuous series of states of consciousness, from the one who was in my body twenty years ago. Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is, at bottom, nothing but the effort of our memory to persevere, to become hope—the effort of our past to become future.

All this is a truism of the most glaring kind, I know; but the fact is that, knocking about the world, one comes across men who seem not to feel themselves. One of my best friends, with whom I walked every day for many years on end, used to tell me, whenever I spoke to him of this sense of one’s own personality: “Well, I don’t feel myself; I don’t know what that is.”

On one occasion this friend I am alluding to said to me: “I would like to be So-and-so” (here a name), and I said to him: that is what I can never manage to understand—that one should want to be someone else, anyone else. To want to be another is to want to cease being the one one is. I can understand someone wishing to have what another has, his wealth or his knowledge; but to be another is something I cannot understand.

It has been said more than once that every unhappy man would rather be who he is, even with his misfortunes, than be another without them. And that is because unhappy men, when they keep their sanity in their unhappiness—that is, when they strive to persevere in their being—prefer misfortune to non-existence. For myself I can say that when I was a young man, and even as a child, the moving pictures of hell that were painted for me never managed to stir me, for even then nothing seemed to me so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a furious hunger to be, an appetite for divinity, as our ascetic writer said.

To go to someone with the message that he should be another, that he should make himself another, is to go to him with the message that he should cease to be himself. Each of us defends his personality, and accepts a change in his way of thinking or feeling only insofar as that change can enter into the unity of his spirit and mesh with its continuity; insofar as that change can be harmonized and integrated with all the rest of his way of being, thinking and feeling, and can at the same time be linked to his memories. Neither of a man nor of a people—which is, in a certain sense, also a man—can one demand a change that breaks the unity and the continuity of his person.

It is true that there occurs in certain individuals what is called a change of personality; but this is a pathological case, and as such it is studied by alienists. In such changes of personality memory, the basis of consciousness, is completely ruined, and all that is left to the poor patient as a substratum of individual—though not personal—continuity is the physical organism. Such an illness is equivalent to death for the person who suffers it; the ones for whom it is not equivalent to his death are those who are to inherit from him, if he has any fortune. And that illness is nothing but a revolution, a true revolution.

An illness is, in a certain respect, an organic dissociation: it is some organ or element of the living body that rebels, breaks the vital synergy, and conspires toward an end different from the one toward which the other elements coordinated with it conspire. Its end may be, considered in itself—that is, in the abstract—higher, nobler, more… anything you like; but it is a different one. It may be better to fly and breathe in the air than to swim and breathe in the water; but if the fins of a fish took it into their heads to turn into wings, the fish, as a fish, would perish. And it is no use saying that it would end up becoming a bird, unless there was a process of continuity in it.

Everything in me that conspires to break the unity and continuity of my life conspires to destroy me, and therefore to destroy itself. Every individual in a people who conspires to break the spiritual unity and continuity of that people tends to destroy it and to destroy himself as part of that people. That some other people is better? Very well—though we do not quite understand what this business of better or worse means. That it is richer? Granted. That it is more cultured? Granted too. That it lives more happily? That, now… but, well, let it pass! That it conquers—what they call conquering—while we are conquered? Congratulations. All that is well and good, but it is another. And that is enough.

That another would fill the role I fill as well as I do, or better? That another would carry out my social function? Yes, but not I.

“I, I, I, always I!—some reader will say—and who are you?” I could answer him here with Obermann, with the enormous man Obermann: “To the universe, nothing; to myself, everything”; but no, I prefer to remind him of a doctrine of the man Kant, namely that we should regard our neighbors, other men, not as means but as ends. For it is not a question of me alone: it is a question of you, reader, who grumble so; it is a question of the other, of each and every one. Singular judgments have the value of universals, say the logicians. The singular is not particular; it is universal.note

Man is an end, not a means. All civilization is directed toward man, toward each man, toward each self. Or what is that idol—call it Humanity or whatever you will—to which each and every man must be sacrificed? For I sacrifice myself for my neighbors, for my fellow countrymen, for my children, and they in turn for theirs, and theirs for their own, and so on in an endless series of generations. And who receives the fruit of this sacrifice?

The same people who speak to us of this fantastic sacrifice, this dedication without an object, usually also speak to us of the right to life. And what is the right to life? They tell me I have come to fulfill some social end or other; but I feel that I, like each of my brothers, have come to fulfill myself, to live.

Yes, yes, I see it: an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a great deal of science, a great deal of art, a great deal of industry, a great deal of morality; and then, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, with museums, with libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will remain—for whom? Was man made for science, or was science made for man?

“Come now!—the same reader will exclaim again—we are back to that bit of the Catechism: Q. For whom did God make the world? A. For man.” Well, yes: that is how a man who is a man should answer. The ant, if it were aware of this and were a person, conscious of itself, would answer: for the ant; and it would answer rightly. The world is made for consciousness, for each consciousness.

A human soul is worth the whole universe, someone or other has said—and said it superbly. A human soul, mind you. Not a life. Not this life. And it happens that the less one believes in the soul—that is, in its conscious, personal and concrete immortality—the more the value of this poor passing life will be exaggerated. From this spring all the soft sentimentalities against war. Yes, one must not want to die—but it is the other death one must not want. “Whoever would save his life shall lose it,” says the Gospel; but it does not say whoever would save his soul, the immortal soul. Or the soul we believe, and want, to be immortal.

And none of the definers of objectivism notice—or rather, they do not want to notice—that when a man affirms his self, his personal consciousness, he affirms man, concrete and real man; he affirms true humanism—which is not the humanism of the things of man but of man—and in affirming man he affirms consciousness. For the only consciousness we are conscious of is that of man.

The world is for consciousness. Or rather, this for, this notion of purpose—and better than a notion, a feeling—this teleological feeling arises only where there is consciousness. Consciousness and purpose are, at bottom, the same thing.

If the sun had consciousness, it would doubtless think that it lived to give light to the worlds; but it would also think, and above all, that the worlds exist so that it may give them light and delight in giving them light, and so live. And it would think rightly.

And all this tragic battle of man to save himself, that immortal longing for immortality that made the man Kant take that immortal leap I was telling you about—all of it is nothing but a battle for consciousness. If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a flash of lightning between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence.

Someone may see an underlying contradiction in everything I am saying, longing at times for unending life and saying at others that this life does not have the value given to it. Contradiction? I should say so! The contradiction of my heart, which says yes, and my head, which says no! Contradiction, naturally. Who does not remember those words of the Gospel: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”? Contradiction! Naturally! Since we live only on contradictions, and by them; since life is tragedy, and tragedy is perpetual struggle, without victory or the hope of it; it is contradiction.

It is, as you see, a question of an affective value, and against affective values reasons are of no avail. For reasons are nothing more than reasons—that is, they are not even truths. There are definers of that sort, pedants by nature and by grace, who strike me like that gentleman who goes to console a father who has just lost a son, dead suddenly in the flower of his years, and says to him: “Patience, my friend, for we all have to die!” Would you be surprised if this father grew angry at such an impertinence? For it is an impertinence. Even an axiom can, in certain cases, become an impertinence.

There are people, in fact, who seem to think only with the brain, or with whatever other organ may be the specific one for thinking; while others think with the whole body and the whole soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with life. And the people who think only with the brain turn into definers; they become professionals of thought. And do you know what a professional is? Do you know what a product of the differentiation of labor is?

Here you have a professional boxer. He has learned to throw punches with such economy that he concentrates his strength in the punch and brings into play hardly any muscles but those needed to achieve the immediate and concrete aim of his action: to knock his opponent down. A blow struck by a non-professional may not have so much immediate objective effect; but it invigorates the one who strikes it far more, making him bring almost his whole body into play. The one is a boxer’s punch, the other a man’s. And it is well known that circus strongmen and fairground athletes are not usually healthy. They knock down their opponents, they lift enormous weights, but they die, either of consumption or of dyspepsia.

If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is, above all, a pedant—that is, an imitation of a man. The cultivation of any science—chemistry, physics, geometry, philology—may be, and even this only in a very restricted way and within very narrow limits, a work of differentiated specialization; but philosophy, like poetry, is either a work of integration, of reconciliation, or it is nothing but philosophastry, pseudo-philosophical erudition.

All knowledge has a purpose. Knowing for the sake of knowing is, say what one will, nothing but a gloomy begging of the question. One learns something either for an immediate practical end or to complete the rest of our knowledge. Even the doctrine that seems most theoretical to us—that is, of least immediate application to the non-intellectual needs of life—answers to a need (for that too is a need), an intellectual one: to a matter of economy in thinking, to a principle of unity and continuity of consciousness. But just as a piece of scientific knowledge has its purpose in the rest of knowledge, the philosophy one is to embrace has another, extrinsic purpose: it bears on our whole destiny, on our attitude toward life and the universe.

Little can be expected, for example, of a ruler who has never once, even in an obscure way, concerned himself with the first principle and the last end of all things, and above all of men—with their first why and their last wherefore.

And this supreme concern cannot be purely rational; it has to be affective. It is not enough to think our destiny; we must feel it. And he who, claiming to lead his fellow men, says and proclaims that he does not care in the least about what lies above the rooftops does not deserve to lead them. Which does not mean, of course, that any particular solution must be demanded of him. Solution! Is there one, by any chance?

For my part, I will never willingly surrender myself, and give my trust, to any leader of peoples who is not imbued with the conviction that in leading a people he is leading men, men of flesh and bone, men who are born, suffer, and, though they do not want to die, die; men who are ends in themselves, not merely means; men who must be what they are and not others; men, in short, who seek what we call happiness. It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice one generation of men to the generation that follows it when one has no feeling for the destiny of those who are sacrificed. Not for their memory, not for their names, but for them themselves.

All this talk of living on in one’s children, or in one’s works, or in the universe, is vague lucubration that satisfies only those who suffer from affective stupidity—who may, for the rest, be persons of a certain cerebral eminence. For one may have great talent, what we call great talent, and be stupid in feeling and even morally deficient. There have been such cases.

These affectively stupid people with talent are fond of saying that there is no use trying to delve into the unknowable or kicking against the pricks. It is as if one were to tell a man who has had to have a leg amputated that it does him no good to think about it. And we all lack something; only some feel it and others do not. Or they pretend not to feel it, and then they are hypocrites.

A pedant who saw Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him: “Why do you weep so, if it does no good?” And the sage answered him: “That is precisely why—because it does no good.” Of course weeping does some good, if only as relief; but the profound meaning of Solon’s answer to the impertinent fellow is plain to see. And I am convinced that we would resolve many things if we all went out into the street and, bringing our sorrows to light—which might turn out to be one single common sorrow—set ourselves together to weep for them, and to cry out to heaven, and to call upon God. Even if he did not hear us; though hear us he would.

Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those who have the tragic sense of life. I think now of Marcus Aurelius, Saint Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, René, Obermann, Thomson, Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard—men laden with wisdom rather than with knowledge.note

Some will think that any one of these men adopted his attitude—as if such attitudes could be adopted, the way one adopts a pose—to draw attention, or perhaps to ingratiate himself with the powerful, with his superiors perhaps; for there is nothing meaner than man when he sets about imputing motives to others. But honni soit qui mal y pense [shame on him who thinks ill of it]. And I say this so as not to set down here and now another proverb, a Spanish one, much more forceful, but one that perhaps borders on coarseness.

And there are also, I believe, peoples who have the tragic sense of life.

That is what we must now look at, beginning with this matter of health and illness.

Perhaps the reflections I have been making may seem to someone to be of a somewhat morbid character. Morbid? But what is this thing, illness? What is health?

And perhaps illness itself is the essential condition of what we call progress, and progress itself an illness.

Who does not know the mythical tragedy of Paradise? Our first parents lived there in a state of perfect health and perfect innocence, and Yahweh allowed them to eat of the tree of life, and had created everything for them; but he forbade them to taste the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But they, tempted by the serpent—the model of prudence for Christ—tasted the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and became subject to all illnesses and to the one that is the crown and consummation of them all, death, and to labor and to progress. For progress, according to this legend, springs from original sin.note

Do you want a version of our origin? Very well. According to it, what we come from is not, strictly speaking, man, but a kind of gorilla, orangutan, chimpanzee or some such thing, hydrocephalic or something of the sort. An anthropoid ape once had a sick offspring—sick from the strictly animal or zoological point of view, sick, truly sick—and that illness turned out to be, besides a weakness, an advantage in the struggle for persistence. The one vertical mammal, man, ended up standing upright. The erect posture freed his hands from having to bear his weight in walking, and he could oppose the thumb to the other four fingers, and grasp objects and make himself tools; and the hands, as is well known, are great forgers of intelligence.

The gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orangutan and their kin must regard man as a poor sick animal, one that even stores away its dead. What for?

And that first sickness, and all the sicknesses that follow it: are they not perhaps the chief element of progress? Arthritis, let us say, infects the blood. It puts ashes into it, the dregs of an imperfect organic combustion. But does this very impurity not perhaps make that blood more stimulating? Might not that impure blood, precisely because it is impure, provoke a keener cerebration? Chemically pure water is undrinkable. And is physiologically pure blood not perhaps also unfit for the brain of the vertical mammal who has to live by thought?

The history of medicine, moreover, teaches us that progress consists not so much in driving out of ourselves the germs of diseases, or rather the diseases themselves, as in accommodating them to our organism, perhaps enriching it, in steeping them in our blood. What else do vaccination and all the serums mean? What else does immunization over the course of time mean?

If this thing called health were not an abstract category, something that strictly speaking is never found, we could say that a perfectly healthy man would no longer be a man but an irrational animal. Irrational for want of any sickness to kindle his reason. And it is a real sickness, and a tragic one, that gives us the appetite to know for the sheer pleasure of knowing, for the delight of tasting the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει, “all men by nature strive to know.” So Aristotle begins his Metaphysics, and ever since it has been repeated thousands of times that curiosity, or the desire to know, is the origin of science. According to Genesis, it was this that led our first mother into sin.

But here we must distinguish between two things. One is the desire or appetite to know, apparently and at first sight for love of knowledge itself: the yearning to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The other is the need to know in order to live. The latter gives us direct and immediate knowledge, and in a certain sense, if it did not sound paradoxical, it might be called unconscious knowledge. Man shares it with the animals. What distinguishes us from them is reflective knowledge, the knowing of knowing itself.

Men have disputed much about the origin of knowledge, and they will go on disputing much, since the world was handed over to their disputes. But let us leave for later what knowledge may be in the deep heart of existence. This much is established and certain. In the apparent order of things, in the life of beings endowed with some knowing or perceiving, however hazy, or that seem by their acts to be endowed with it, knowledge shows itself to us bound up with the need to live and to procure the sustenance for living. It is a consequence of that very essence of being which, according to Spinoza, consists in the striving to persevere indefinitely in its own being.note

Such is what we may call the historical origin of knowledge, whatever its origin may be in another respect. Beings that seem endowed with perception perceive in order to be able to live, and they perceive only insofar as they need to in order to live. This knowledge began by being useful and later ceased to be so. But perhaps, hoarded up, it has come to form a store far exceeding what life requires.

There is, then, first the need to know in order to live. From it develops that other kind, which we might call knowledge of luxury or of excess, and which may in its turn come to constitute a new need.

But is this really a dead weight and a crude matter in science, or is it not rather the innermost source of its redemption? The fact is that so it is, and it is great foolishness to try to rebel against the very condition of life.

Knowledge is at the service of the need to live, and primarily at the service of the instinct of personal preservation. And this need and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge, giving them the reach they have. Man sees, hears, touches, tastes and smells what he needs to see, hear, touch, taste and smell in order to preserve his life. The impairment or loss of any one of these senses increases the dangers that surround his life. And if it does not increase them so much in the state of society in which we live, that is because some people see, hear, touch, taste or smell for others. A blind man on his own, without a guide, could not live long.

Man, then, in his state as an isolated individual, sees, hears, touches, tastes and smells no more than he needs in order to live and preserve himself. If he does not perceive colors below red or above violet, it is perhaps because the others are enough for him to preserve himself. And the senses themselves are apparatuses of simplification. They eliminate from objective reality everything we do not need to know in order to use objects for the preservation of life. In complete darkness, the animal that does not perish ends up going blind.

Knowledge, then, is primarily at the service of the instinct of preservation, which is rather, as we said with Spinoza, its very essence. And so it may be said that it is the instinct of preservation that makes for us the reality and truth of the perceptible world. From the unfathomable and unlimited field of the possible, it is this instinct that draws out and sets apart what exists for us. There exists for us, in fact, everything that in one way or another we need to know in order that we ourselves may exist. Objective existence, in our knowing, depends on our own personal existence.

But man neither lives alone nor is an isolated individual. He is a member of society, and there is no little truth in the saying that the individual, like the atom, is an abstraction. Yes: the atom outside the universe is as much an abstraction as the universe apart from the atoms. And if the individual is sustained by the instinct of preservation, society owes its being and its maintenance to the individual’s instinct of perpetuation. And from this instinct, or rather from society, reason springs.

Reason, what we call reason, reflex and reflective knowledge, the knowledge that distinguishes man, is a social product.

It owes its origin perhaps to language. We think articulately, that is, reflectively, thanks to articulate language, and this language sprang from the need to convey our thought to our neighbors. To think is to talk with oneself, and each of us talks with himself because we have had to talk with one another. In ordinary life it often happens that one finds an idea one was looking for, manages to give it form, that is, to obtain it, drawing it out of the nebula of obscure perceptions that it stands for. One does so thanks to the efforts one makes to present it to others. Thought is inner language, and inner language springs from outer language. From which it follows that reason is social and common.

There is a reality which, insofar as it is known, is the work of the instinct of personal preservation and of the senses that serve it. If so, must there not be another reality, no less real than that one? Insofar as it is known, it would be the work of the instinct of perpetuation, the instinct of the species, and would be at its service. The instinct of preservation, hunger, is the foundation of the human individual. The instinct of perpetuation, love, in its most rudimentary and physiological form, is the foundation of human society. And just as man knows what he needs to know in order to preserve himself, so society, or man as a social being, knows what it needs to know in order to perpetuate itself in society.

There is one world, the world of the senses, that is the child of hunger, and there is another world, the ideal, that is the child of love. There are senses at the service of knowing the world of the senses. In the same way there are senses at the service of knowing the ideal world, though today they are for the most part asleep, because social consciousness is barely dawning. And why should we deny objective reality to the creations of love, the instinct of perpetuation, when we grant it to those of hunger, the instinct of preservation? Suppose it is said that these other creations are only creations of our fantasy, without objective value. Can it not equally be said of the former that they are only creations of our senses?

Human society, as a society, has senses that the individual would lack but for it. Just so, the individual, man, who is in turn a kind of society, has senses that the cells composing him lack. The blind cells of hearing, in their dim consciousness, must know nothing of the existence of the visible world. If they were told of it, they would perhaps judge it an arbitrary creation of the deaf cells of sight. And these in their turn must judge the world of sound that the others create to be an illusion.

We mentioned earlier the parasites that live in the entrails of higher animals, on the nutritive juices these prepare. They need neither to see nor to hear, and so for them there exists no visible world and no world of sound. And if they had some sort of consciousness and realized that the creature at whose expense they live believes in another world, they would perhaps judge it the ravings of imagination. And so there are social parasites, as Mr. Balfour very rightly observes¹. They receive the motives of their moral conduct from the society in which they live, yet they deny that belief in God and in another life is needed as a foundation for good conduct and a bearable life. They can do so because society has already prepared for them the spiritual juices on which they live.note

Nor am I unaware that I may be told that all this is metaphor: hunger creating the world of the senses and love the ideal world, the blind cells of hearing and the deaf cells of sight, the spiritual parasites, and so on. So it is, and I claim to do nothing else than reason in metaphors. The fact is that this social sense, child of love, father of language and of reason and of the ideal world that springs from it, is at bottom nothing other than what we call fantasy or imagination. From fantasy springs reason.

And we shall see that it is this inner social faculty, the imagination that personalizes everything, that reveals to us the immortality of the soul and God, once it is put at the service of the instinct of perpetuation. God is thus a social product.

But that is for later.

And now: why does one philosophize? That is, why does one investigate the first principles and the final ends of things? Why does one seek disinterested truth? For that business of all men tending by nature to know is all very well. But what for?

Philosophers seek a theoretical or ideal starting point for their human work, the work of philosophizing. But they usually neglect to seek its practical and real starting point, its purpose. What is the purpose in doing philosophy, in thinking it out and then setting it forth to one’s fellows? What does the philosopher seek in it and by means of it? Truth for truth’s own sake? Truth, so as to subject our conduct to it and to determine by it our spiritual attitude toward life and the universe?

Philosophy is a human product of each philosopher, and each philosopher is a man of flesh and bone who addresses other men of flesh and bone like himself. And let him do what he will, he philosophizes not with reason alone but with the will, with feeling, with his flesh and his bones, with his whole soul and his whole body. It is man who philosophizes.

And I do not want to use “I” here and say that when I philosophize it is I who philosophize and not man. This concrete, circumscribed I, of flesh and bone, suffers from toothache and does not find life bearable if death is the annihilation of personal consciousness. I would not want it confused with that other I, the smuggled-in I, the I with a capital letter, the theoretical I that Fichte introduced into philosophy. Nor would I want it confused with Max Stirner’s Unique One, which is theoretical too. It is better to say “we.” But we who are circumscribed in space.note

To know for the sake of knowing! Truth for truth’s sake! That is inhuman. And if we say that theoretical philosophy is directed toward practice, truth toward the good, science toward morality, I shall ask: and the good, what is it for? Is it perhaps an end in itself? Nothing is good except what contributes to the preservation, perpetuation and enrichment of consciousness. The good is directed toward man, toward the maintenance and perfection of human society, which is made up of men. And this, what is it for? “Act in such a way that your action may serve as a norm for all men,” Kant tells us. Very well, and what for? There has to be a what-for.

At the starting point of every philosophy, the true starting point, the practical and not the theoretical one, there is a what-for. The philosopher philosophizes for something more than philosophizing. Primum vivere, deinde philosophari [First live, then philosophize], says the old Latin adage. The philosopher is a man before he is a philosopher, so he needs to live in order to be able to philosophize, and in fact he philosophizes in order to live. And he usually philosophizes either to resign himself to life, or to seek some purpose in it, or to amuse himself and forget his sorrows, or as sport and play.

I take up at random a book of metaphysics, the one nearest to hand, Time and Space: A Metaphysical Essay, by Shadworth H. Hodgson. I open it, and in the fifth paragraph of the first chapter of its first part I read: “Metaphysics is not, properly speaking, a science but a philosophy; that is, a science whose end is in itself, in the gratification and education of the minds that cultivate it, not in any external purpose, such as that of founding an art conducive to the welfare of life.” Let us examine this. We shall see first that metaphysics is not, speaking properly—properly speaking—a science, “that is,” that is, that it is a science whose end, et cetera.note

This is inevitable when one tries to pin down humanly this notion of a science, of a knowing, whose end is in itself. It is the notion of knowing for knowing’s sake, of attaining truth for truth’s own sake. Science exists only in personal consciousness, and thanks to it. Astronomy and mathematics have no reality other than the one they have as knowledge in the minds of those who learn and cultivate them.

The Englishman falls into that series of contradictions when he tries to explain to us this business of a science whose end is in itself. It is easily understood in an Englishman who is above all a man. Perhaps a German specialist would explain better this business of a science whose end is in itself, and of knowing for knowing’s sake. I mean a philosopher who has made philosophy his specialty and has buried his humanity in it, after first killing it.

Take the man Spinoza, that Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland. Read his Ethics for what it is, a despairing elegiac poem, and tell me whether you do not hear in it the mournful echo of the prophetic psalms, beneath the bare and seemingly serene propositions set out more geometrico [in the geometrical manner]. That is not the philosophy of resignation but the philosophy of despair. He wrote that the free man thinks of everything but death, and that his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life itself: homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat, et eius sapientia non mortis, sed vitae meditatio est (Ethics, part IV, prop.

Where do I come from, and where does the world come from in which I live and on which I live? Where am I going, and where is everything around me going? What does this mean? Such are the questions of man as soon as he frees himself from the brutalizing necessity of having to sustain himself materially. And if we look closely, we shall see that beneath these questions lies not so much the desire to know a why as the desire to know the what-for. It is not the cause we want to know, but the purpose.

This Ciceronian definition, which is the Stoic one, is also found in that formidable intellectualist Clement of Alexandria, canonized by the Catholic Church, who sets it out in chapter V of the first of his Stromata. But this same Christian philosopher (Christian?), in chapternote

Why do I want to know where I come from and where I am going, where what surrounds me comes from and where it is going, and what all this means? Because I do not want to die altogether, and I want to know whether I am to die for good or not. And if I do not die, what will become of me? And if I die, then nothing makes sense any more. And there are three solutions. a) Either I know that I die altogether, and then there is irremediable despair. Or b) I know that I do not die altogether, and then there is resignation. Or c) I cannot know either the one or the other, and then there is resignation in despair, or despair in resignation. That means a despairing resignation, or a resigned despair, and struggle.

What is wrong with Descartes’s Discourse on Method is not the preliminary methodical doubt. It is not that he began by wanting to doubt everything, which is no more than a mere device. It is that he wanted to begin by leaving himself out, leaving out Descartes, the real man of flesh and bone, the man who does not want to die, so as to be a mere thinker, that is, an abstraction. But the real man came back and got into his philosophy.

“Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée” [Good sense is the most evenly shared thing in the world]. So the Discourse on Method begins, and that good sense saved him. And he goes on talking about himself, about the man Descartes. He tells us, among other things, that he greatly esteemed eloquence and was in love with poetry, and that he delighted above all in mathematics because of the certainty and evidence of its reasonings. He revered our theology and aspired, as much as anyone else, to win heaven: et je prétendais autant qu’aucun autre à gagner le ciel. And it was this aspiration that prevented him from drawing all the consequences of methodical doubt. For the rest, I believe it a very laudable aspiration, and above all a very natural one.

And he arrives at the cogito ergo sum, which Saint Augustine had already anticipated. But the ego implicit in this enthymeme, ego cogito, ergo ego sum, is an ego, an unreal I, that is, an ideal one, and its sum, its existence, is something unreal too. “I think, therefore I am” can only mean “I think, therefore I am a thinking being.” The being of that “I am,” derived from “I think,” is nothing more than a knowing. That being is knowledge, but not life. And what is primary is not that I think but that I live, for those who do not think live too, even if that living is not true living. What contradictions, my God, when we try to marry life and reason!

The truth is sum, ergo cogito, I am, therefore I think, although not everything that is thinks. Is not the consciousness of thinking, first of all, consciousness of being? Is a pure thought possible, without consciousness of self, without personality? Can there be pure knowledge, without feeling, without the kind of materiality that feeling lends it? Is not thought felt? And does one not feel oneself at the same time as one knows oneself and wills oneself? Could not the man of the stove-room have said, “I feel, therefore I am”? Or “I will, therefore I am”? And to feel oneself: is it not to feel oneself imperishable? To will oneself: is it not to will oneself eternal, that is, not to want to die?

It was, moreover, the cogito that introduced a distinction which, though fruitful in truths, has also been fruitful in confusions: the distinction between object, cogito, and subject, sum. There is hardly a distinction that does not also serve to confuse. But we shall come back to this.

Let us rest for now in this strong suspicion. The longing not to die, the hunger for personal immortality, the striving with which we tend to persist indefinitely in our own being, which is our very essence according to the tragic Jew: that is the affective basis of all knowing. It is the inner personal starting point of all human philosophy, forged by a man and for men. And we shall see how the solution to that inner affective problem colors all the rest of philosophy, even when the solution is the despairing renunciation of solving it.

And this personal and affective starting point of all philosophy and all religion is the tragic sense of life. Let us look at it.

Let us pause over this immortal longing for immortality, even though the gnostics, or intellectuals, may say that what follows is rhetoric and not philosophy. The divine Plato, too, discoursing in his Phaedo on the immortality of the soul, said that it is fitting to make up legends about it, μυθολογεῖν.

Let us first recall once more, and it will not be the last time, what Spinoza says. Each being strives to persevere in its being, and this striving is its very actual essence and involves indefinite time. Finally, the mind, whether in its clear and distinct ideas or in its confused ones, tends to persevere in its being for an indefinite duration, and is aware of this effort. (Ethics, part III, propositions VI–IX.)

It is impossible for us, in fact, to conceive ourselves as not existing, and no effort is enough for consciousness to grasp absolute unconsciousness, its own annihilation. Try, reader, to picture to yourself, wide awake, what the state of your soul is in deep sleep. Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of non-consciousness, and you will see. The attempt to understand it causes the most anguished vertigo. We cannot conceive ourselves as not existing.

The visible universe, the one that is the child of the instinct of preservation, is too narrow for me. It is like a cage too small for me, and my soul beats against its bars as it flutters; I lack air to breathe in it. More, more, and ever more! I want to be myself, and, without ceasing to be myself, to be the others as well. I want to take into myself the totality of things visible and invisible, to extend myself into the boundlessness of space and prolong myself into the endlessness of time. If I am not everything, and forever, it is as though I were not. At the very least I want to be wholly myself, and to be so forever and ever. And to be wholly myself is to be all the others. All or nothing!

All or nothing! And what other meaning can Shakespeare’s To be or not to be have? It was the same poet who, in his Coriolanus (V, 4), had it said of Marcius that he needed only eternity to be a god: he wants nothing of a god but eternity. Eternity! Eternity! That is the longing. The thirst for eternity is what is called love among men, and whoever loves another wants to make himself eternal in that other. What is not eternal is not real either.

This tremendous vision of the flowing waves of life has wrung cries from the depths of the soul from the poets of every age. It runs from Pindar’s “dream of a shadow,” σκιᾶς ὄναρ, to Calderón’s “life is a dream” and Shakespeare’s “we are made of the stuff of dreams.” This last saying is even more tragic than the Castilian’s. The Castilian declares only our life to be a dream, and not us who dream it, but the Englishman makes us too a dream, a dream that dreams.note

The vanity of the world and how it passes, and love: these are the two radical, deep-rooted notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which one cannot sound without the other resounding at the same time. The sense of the vanity of the passing world drives us into love. Love is the only thing in which the vain and transitory is overcome, the only thing that fills life full and makes it eternal. In appearance, at least, for in reality... And love, above all when it struggles against destiny, plunges us into the sense of the vanity of this world of appearances. It opens to us a glimpse of another world in which destiny is overcome and freedom is the law.

Everything passes! Such is the refrain of those who have drunk from the fountain of life, mouth to the spout, of those who have tasted of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

To be, to be forever, to be without end! Thirst to be, thirst to be more! Hunger for God! Thirst for a love that makes eternal and is eternal! To be forever! To be God!

“You shall be as gods!” So Genesis (3:5) tells us the serpent said to the first pair of lovers. “If in this life alone we are to hope in Christ, we are the most pitiable of men,” wrote the Apostle (1 Cor. 15:19). And every religion begins, historically, in the cult of the dead, that is, of immortality.

The tragic Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam wrote that the free man thinks of nothing less than of death. But that free man is a dead man, freed from the mainspring of life, lacking love, a slave to his freedom. This thought that I must die, and the enigma of what will come after, is the very beating of my consciousness.

Like Pascal, I do not understand the man who claims not to care a straw about this matter. That negligence in a thing “where it is a question of themselves, of their eternity, of their all, irritates me more than it moves me; it astonishes and appalls me.” Whoever feels that way “is for me,” as for Pascal, whose words these are, “a monster.”note

It has been said a thousand times and in a thousand tones that it is the cult of dead ancestors that, as a rule, sets primitive religions going. Strictly speaking, one may say that what most sets man apart from the other animals is that he keeps his dead, in one way or another, instead of abandoning them to the neglect of his mother earth, the all-bearing. He is an animal that keeps its dead. And what does he keep them from, in this way? What is the poor creature protecting them from? The poor consciousness flees from its own annihilation. As soon as an animal spirit tears itself loose from the world as from a placenta, sees itself facing the world and knows itself to be distinct from it, it must want to have another life than that of the world itself.

When nothing was built for the living but huts of earth or straw cabins, which the weather has destroyed, burial mounds were raised for the dead, and stone was used for tombs before it was used for dwellings. It is the houses of the dead, not those of the living, that have conquered the centuries by their strength; not the dwellings of passage, but those of abiding.

This cult, not of death but of immortality, begins and preserves religions. In the delirium of destruction, Robespierre has the Convention declare the existence of the Supreme Being and “the consoling principle of the immortality of the soul.” The reason is that the Incorruptible was terrified at the idea of having to be corrupted one day.note

Sickness? Perhaps; but whoever takes no care over sickness neglects health, and man is an essentially and substantially sick animal. Sickness? Perhaps it is, like life itself, to which it is bound fast, and the only possible health is death; but that sickness is the wellspring of all mighty health. From the depths of this anguish, from the abyss of the sense of our mortality, one comes out into the light of another heaven, as Dante came out of the depths of hell to see the stars again: e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.note

Although this meditation on our mortality may at first fill us with anguish, in the end it fortifies us. Withdraw into yourself, reader, and imagine yourself slowly coming undone. The light goes out for you; things fall mute and give you no sound, wrapping you in silence; the objects you hold on to melt from between your hands; the ground slips from under your feet; your memories fade as in a swoon; everything goes dissolving into nothing, and you dissolve too; and not even the consciousness of nothingness remains to you, not even as the phantom handhold of a shadow.

I have heard tell of a poor reaper who died in a hospital bed. When the priest came to anoint his hands in extreme unction, he refused to open his right hand, in which he clutched a few dirty coins. He did not realize that very soon his hand would no longer be his, nor he his own. And so we close and clench not only our hand but our heart, trying to clutch the world in it.

A friend confessed to me that, foreseeing, in the full vigor of physical health, the nearness of a violent death, he thought of concentrating his life, living it in the few days he reckoned he had left, so as to write a book. Vanity of vanities!

When the body that sustains me dies—the body I call mine to distinguish it from myself, who am I—suppose my consciousness returns to the absolute unconsciousness from which it sprang, and the same befalls the consciousness of all my brothers in humanity. Then our toil-worn human race is nothing but an ill-fated procession of phantoms going from nothingness to nothingness, and humanitarianism is the most inhuman thing known.

And the remedy is not that of the popular song that says: Every time that I consider / that I shall have to die, / I spread my cloak upon the ground / and can never sleep enough.

No! The remedy is to consider it face to face, with one’s gaze fixed on the gaze of the Sphinx, for that is how the spell of its evil eye is broken.

If we all die utterly, what is it all for? What for? It is the Sphinx’s “What for?”, the “What for?” that gnaws at the marrow of our soul. It is the father of anguish, which gives us the love of hope.

Among the poetic laments of poor Cowper there are some lines written under the weight of delirium. In them, believing himself the target of divine vengeance, he exclaims that hell might afford a shelter to his miseries. Hell might afford my miseries a shelter.note

This is the Puritan feeling, the preoccupation with sin and predestination. But read these other, far more terrible words of Sénancour, expressive of Catholic despair, not Protestant, when he has his Obermann say (letter XC): “L’homme est périssable. Il se peut; mais périssons en résistant, et, si le néant nous est réservé, ne faisons pas que ce soit une justice” [Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if nothingness is what awaits us, let us not make it a justice]. And I must confess, indeed, however painful the confession, that never, in the days of the naive faith of my youth, did descriptions of the tortures of hell make me tremble, however gruesome they were. I always felt nothingness to be far more terrifying than hell.

What is this relish for living, la joie de vivre, that they talk to us about nowadays? Hunger for God, thirst for eternity, for survival, will always stifle in us that poor enjoyment of life that passes and does not remain. It is the unbridled love of life, the love that wants it unending, that most often drives us to the yearning for death. “Once I am annihilated, if indeed I die utterly,” we tell ourselves, “the world is over for me, it is finished. And why should it not be finished as soon as possible, so that no new consciousnesses come to suffer the grievous deception of a passing and merely apparent existence?

Already the poet of suffering, of annihilation—that Leopardi who, having lost the last illusion, that of believing himself eternal, Perì l’inganno estremo / ch’eterno io mi credei, spoke to his heart of l’infinita vanità del tutto [the infinite vanity of everything]—saw the close kinship between love and death. He saw how, when “a loving affection is born in the depths of the heart, languid and weary, together with it one feels in the breast a desire to die.”note

The problem is tragic, and eternal, and the more we try to flee from it, the more we run into it. It was the serene—serene?—Plato who, twenty-four centuries ago, in his dialogue on the immortality of the soul, let slip from his own soul that profound saying. He was speaking of how doubtful our dream of being immortal is, and of the risk that it may not be vain: beautiful is the risk!, καλὸς γὰρ ὁ κίνδυνος; beautiful is the chance we may run that our soul may never die. This saying is the seed of Pascal’s famous argument of the wager.note

I am the center of my universe, the center of the universe, and in my supreme distress I cry out with Michelet: “My self! They are snatching away my self!” What does it profit a man to gain the whole world if he loses his soul? (Matthew 16:26.) Egoism, you say? There is nothing more universal than the individual, for what belongs to each belongs to all. Each man is worth more than all humanity, and there is no use in sacrificing each to all, except insofar as all sacrifice themselves to each. What you call egoism is the principle of psychic gravity, the necessary postulate.

Take away one’s own persistence, and ponder what they tell you. Sacrifice yourself for your children! And you sacrifice yourself for them because they are yours, part and prolongation of you. They in turn will sacrifice themselves for theirs, and these for theirs, and so it will go on without end: a sterile sacrifice from which nobody benefits. I came into the world to make my self, and what will become of all our selves? Live for Truth, Goodness, Beauty! We shall see the supreme vanity and the supreme insincerity of this hypocritical position.

“That art thou!” they tell me, with the Upanishads. And I tell them: yes, I am that, when that is I, and everything is mine, and the totality of things is mine. And as mine I love it. I love my neighbor because he lives in me and as part of my consciousness; because he is like me, he is mine.note

Oh, if only one could prolong this sweet moment, and fall asleep in it, and in it make oneself eternal! Here and now, in this soft and diffuse light, in this pool of stillness, when the storm of the heart is calmed and the echoes of the world do not reach me! Insatiable desire sleeps and does not even dream; habit, holy habit, reigns in my eternity; disillusionments have died with memories, and fears with hopes!

And they come trying to deceive us with a deception of deceptions. They tell us that nothing is lost, that everything is transformed, shifts and changes; that not the least scrap of matter is annihilated, nor does the least little push of force vanish entirely. And there are those who claim to console us with this! Poor consolation! I am not troubled about my matter or my force, for they are not mine so long as I am not myself mine—that is, eternal. No, what I long for is not to be drowned in the great All, in infinite and eternal Matter or Force, or in God. It is not to be possessed by God, but to possess him, to make myself God without ceasing to be the I who am now telling you this.

Materialism? Materialism, you say? No doubt; but the point is that our spirit too is some kind of matter, or it is nothing. I tremble at the idea of having to tear myself away from my flesh; I tremble still more at the idea of having to tear myself away from everything perceptible and material, from all substance. Yes, perhaps this deserves the name of materialism. And if I cling to God with all my faculties and all my senses, it is so that he may carry me in his arms beyond death, looking into my eyes with his heaven when mine are about to go out forever. That I am deceiving myself? Do not talk to me of deception, and let me live!

They also call this pride—“stinking pride,” Leopardi called it—and they ask us who we are, vile earthworms, to aspire to immortality. By what grace? What for? By what right? “By what grace?” you ask—and by what grace do we live? “What for?”—and what are we for? “By what right?”—and by what right do we exist? Existing is as gratuitous as going on existing forever. Let us not speak of grace, or of right, or of the what-for of our longing, which is an end in itself, for we shall lose our reason in a whirlpool of absurdities. I claim no right or merit whatsoever; it is only a necessity; I need it in order to live.

And who are you? you ask me. And with Obermann I answer you: for the universe, nothing; for myself, everything! Pride? Is it pride to want to be immortal? Poor men! It is a tragic fate, no doubt, to have to found the affirmation of immortality on the shifting and crumbling stone of the desire for it. But it is a great blunder to condemn the longing because one believes it proved, without proving it, that it cannot be attained. That I am dreaming...? Let me dream; if that dream is my life, do not wake me from it. I believe in the immortal origin of this longing for immortality, which is the very substance of my soul. But do I really believe in it...? And what do you want to be immortal for? you ask me. What for?

But of these things one cannot speak.

The book of the Acts of the Apostles tells how, wherever Paul went, the zealous Jews stirred one another up against him to persecute him. They stoned him in Iconium and in Lystra, cities of Lycaonia, in spite of the wonders he worked in the latter; they scourged him in Philippi in Macedonia; and his own kinsmen persecuted him in Thessalonica and in Berea. But he came to Athens, the noble city of the intellectuals, over which the lofty soul of Plato kept watch—Plato of the beauty of the risk of being immortal. And there Paul disputed with Epicureans and Stoics, who said of him either, What does this babbler (σπερμολόγος) mean? or else, He seems to be a preacher of new gods!

Here, then, is Paul before the refined Athenians, before the graeculos [little Greeks], the cultured and tolerant men who admit every doctrine, study them all, and stone, scourge or imprison no one for professing this doctrine or that. Here he is, where freedom of conscience is respected and every opinion is heard and listened to. And he raises his voice there, in the midst of the Areopagus, and speaks to them as befitted the cultured citizens of Athens, and all of them, eager for the latest novelty, listen to him. But when he comes to speak to them of the resurrection of the dead, their patience and their tolerance run out; some mock him, and others tell him, “We will hear you on this again!”—meaning not to hear him.

Whatever the truth of Paul’s speech on the Areopagus, and even if it never took place, what is certain is that this admirable account shows how far Attic tolerance goes and where the patience of intellectuals ends. They all listen to you calmly, smiling, and at times they encourage you, saying: How curious! or else: How ingenious! or: How suggestive! or: How beautiful! or: What a pity that so much beauty is not true!

And even if this belief were absurd, why is it tolerated less that it be set before them than that many others, more absurd still, should be? Why this evident hostility to such a belief? Is it fear? Is it perhaps regret at not being able to share it?

And back come the sensible ones, those who will not let themselves be deceived, and they hammer at our ears with the singsong that there is no use in giving oneself up to madness and kicking against the pricks, for what cannot be is impossible. The manly thing, they say, is to resign oneself to fate; since we are not immortal, let us not want to be; let us submit to reason without anguishing over what cannot be helped, darkening and saddening life. That obsession, they add, is a sickness. Sickness, madness, reason... the same old refrain! Well then—no!

There you have that thief of energies, as he clumsily called Christ, who tried to wed nihilism with the struggle for existence, and he talks to you of courage. His heart asked him for the eternal all, while his head taught him nothingness, and in despair and madness, to defend himself against himself, he cursed what he most loved. Unable to be Christ, he blasphemed against Christ. Swollen with himself, he wanted himself unending and dreamed of eternal recurrence, a paltry imitation of immortality; and full of pity for himself, he abominated all pity. And there are those who say his is the philosophy of a strong man! No; it is not. My health and my strength drive me to perpetuate myself.note

Before this terrible mystery of mortality, face to face with the Sphinx, man adopts various attitudes and seeks in various ways to console himself for having been born. At one moment it occurs to him to take it as a game, and he tells himself, with Renan, that this universe is a spectacle God puts on for himself, and that we must serve the intentions of the great Choregus by helping to make the spectacle as brilliant and as varied as possible. And they have made of art a religion and a remedy for metaphysical ill, and they have invented the humbug of art for art’s sake.note

And it is not enough for them. Whoever tells you that he writes, paints, sculpts or sings for his own amusement is lying, if he gives the public what he does; he lies if he signs his writing, painting, statue or song. He wants, at the very least, to leave a shadow of his spirit, something that will survive him. If The Imitation of Christ is anonymous, it is because its author, seeking the eternity of the soul, did not trouble about that of the name. The man of letters who tells you he despises glory is lying like a scoundrel. Of Dante, who wrote those thirty-three powerful lines (Purgatorio XI, 85–117) on the vanity of worldly glory, Boccaccio says that he loved honors and pomp, perhaps more than befitted his illustrious virtue.note

When doubts invade us and cloud our faith in the immortality of the soul, the yearning to perpetuate our name and fame, to attain at least a shadow of immortality, gains vigor and painful force. Hence that tremendous struggle to single oneself out, to survive somehow in the memory of others and of those to come—a struggle a thousand times more terrible than the struggle for life. It gives tone, color and character to this society of ours, in which the medieval faith in the immortal soul is fading. Everyone wants to assert himself, if only in appearance.

Once hunger is satisfied—and it is soon satisfied—vanity springs up, the need (for it is a need) to impose oneself and survive in others. Man will often give up his life for his purse, but he gives up his purse for vanity. For lack of anything better, he prides himself even on his weaknesses and miseries, like the child who, to get himself noticed, struts about with a bandaged finger. And what is vanity but a yearning to survive oneself?

The same thing happens to the vain man as to the miser: he takes the means for the ends and, forgetting the ends, clings to the means and stops there. Seeming to be something, which leads to being it, ends up becoming our objective. We need others to believe us superior to them in order to believe ourselves so, and to base on this our faith in our own persistence, at least in the persistence of our fame. We are more grateful to have our talent in defending a cause praised than to have the truth or goodness of the cause acknowledged. A furious mania for originality blows through the modern world of minds, and each person places it in something different. We would rather talk nonsense with wit than be right in a pedestrian way.

What does that irritation mean when we believe someone has stolen from us a phrase, or a thought, or an image that we believed ours—when we are plagiarized? Stolen? Is it really ours, once we have given it to the public? We want it only as ours, and we are fonder of the counterfeit coin that keeps our stamp than of the piece of pure gold from which our effigy and our inscription have been worn away. It very commonly happens that it is when a writer’s name is no longer spoken that he most influences his people, his spirit spread and infused into the spirits of those who read him; whereas he was quoted when his sayings and thoughts, because they clashed with current ones, needed the guarantee of a name.

A tremendous passion, this: that our memory should survive, above the oblivion of others if possible. From it springs envy, to which is owed, according to the biblical account, the crime that opened human history: the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. It was not a struggle for bread; it was a struggle to survive in God, in the divine memory. Envy is a thousand times more terrible than hunger, because it is spiritual hunger. If what we call the problem of life, the problem of bread, were solved, the Earth would turn into a hell, because the struggle for survival would break out with greater force.

To the name we sacrifice not only life but happiness. Life, of course. “Let me die; let my fame live!” exclaims Rodrigo Arias in Las mocedades del Cid [The Youthful Deeds of the Cid], as he falls mortally wounded by Don Diego Ordóñez de Lara. One owes oneself to one’s name. “Courage, Girolamo, you will be remembered a long time; death is bitter, but fame eternal!” exclaimed Girolamo Olgiati, disciple of Cola Montano and slayer, in league with Lampugnani and Visconti, of Galeazzo Sforza, tyrant of Milan. There are those who long even for the scaffold to win fame, even if it is infamous: avidus malae famae [greedy for ill fame], as Tacitus said.note

And this Herostratism—what is it at bottom but a yearning for immortality, if not of substance and body, at least of name and shadow?note

And there are degrees in it. The man who despises the applause of today’s crowd is seeking to survive in renewed minorities over generations. “Posterity is a superimposition of minorities,” said Gounod. He wants to prolong himself in time rather than in space. The idols of the crowds are soon torn down by the crowds themselves, and their statue crumbles at the foot of the pedestal with no one looking at it. But those who win the hearts of the chosen will receive fervent worship for longer, if only in a chapel, small and secluded, but one that will survive the floods of oblivion.note

And again they grind at our ears with that refrain: pride! stinking pride! Pride, to want to leave an indelible name? Pride? It is as when people speak of the thirst for pleasures, and so interpret the thirst for riches. No, it is not so much a yearning to procure pleasures as terror of poverty that drives us poor men to seek money, just as it was not the desire for glory but terror of hell that drove men in the Middle Ages to the cloister, with its acedia. Nor is this pride; it is terror of nothingness. We tend to be everything, because we see in it the only remedy against being reduced to nothing. We want to save our memory, at least our memory. How long will it last?

All this that I confess is wretchedness, I know it well; but from the depths of this wretchedness new life springs, and only by draining the dregs of spiritual suffering can one come to taste the honey at the bottom of the cup of life. Anguish leads us to consolation.

Many quench this thirst for eternal life, the simple above all, at the spring of religious faith; but not everyone is granted to drink from it. The institution whose primary end is to protect this faith in the personal immortality of the soul is Catholicism. But Catholicism has tried to rationalize this faith by making religion into theology, seeking to give the vital belief a philosophy as its basis—and a thirteenth-century philosophy at that. Let us look at it, and see its consequences.

Let us come now to the Christian, Catholic, Pauline or Athanasian solution of our intimate vital problem, the hunger for immortality.

Christianity sprang from the confluence of two great spiritual currents, one Judaic and the other Hellenic, which had already influenced each other before, and Rome finished giving it a practical stamp and social permanence.

It has been asserted of primitive Christianity, perhaps hastily, that it was non-eschatological: that faith in another life after death does not clearly appear in it, but only faith in an imminent end of the world and the establishment of the kingdom of God, in what is called chiliasm. And were these not, at bottom, one and the same thing? Faith in the immortality of the soul, whose nature was perhaps not very precisely defined, may be said to be a kind of unspoken understanding, a tacit assumption, throughout the whole Gospel. What prevents many who read the Gospel today from seeing it is their own state of mind, the opposite of that of the Christians among whom the Gospel arose.note

And this was not a natural resurrection, no. Christian faith was born of the faith that Jesus did not remain dead, but that God raised him, and that this resurrection was a fact; but this did not imply a mere immortality of the soul in the philosophical manner (see Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, Prolegomena, 5, 4). For the first Fathers of the Church themselves, the immortality of the soul was not something natural. To demonstrate it, as Nemesius says, the teaching of the Divine Scriptures was enough; and according to Lactantius it was a gift of God—and as such, gratuitous. But more on this later.note

Christianity sprang, as we were saying, from a confluence of the two great spiritual processes, the Judaic and the Hellenic, each of which had arrived on its own, if not at a precise definition of another life, then at a precise longing for it. Among the Jews, faith in another life was neither general nor clear; but they were led to it by faith in a personal and living God, the forming of whom is their whole spiritual history.

Yahweh, the Jewish God, began as one god among many others, the god of the people of Israel, revealed amid the roar of the storm on Mount Sinai. But he was so jealous that he demanded that worship be rendered to him alone, and it was through monolatry that the Jews arrived at monotheism. He was worshiped as a living force, not as a metaphysical entity, and he was the god of battles. But this God, of social and warlike origin, to whose genesis we shall return, became more intimate and personal in the prophets; and in becoming more intimate and personal, he became more individual, and therefore more universal.

Hellenic culture, for its part, ended by discovering death, and to discover death is to discover the hunger for immortality. This longing does not appear in the Homeric poems, which are not something initial but something final: not the starting point of a civilization but its end. They mark the passage from the old religion of Nature, the religion of Zeus, to the more spiritual religion of Apollo, the religion of redemption. But underneath there always persisted the popular and inward religion of the Eleusinian mysteries, the cult of souls and of ancestors.note

Recall Plato’s Phaedo and the Neoplatonic lucubrations. There one already sees the yearning for personal immortality, a yearning which, not fully satisfied by reason, produced Hellenic pessimism. For, as Pfleiderer very rightly observes (Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtlicher Grundlage [Philosophy of Religion on a Historical Basis], 3, Berlin 1896), “no people came into the world as serene and sunny as the Greeks in the youthful days of their historical existence… but no people so completely changed its notion of the value of life.note

Thus Jews and Greeks, each by their own path, arrived at the true discovery of death. It is this discovery that brings peoples, as it brings individual men, into spiritual puberty, the puberty of the tragic sense of life, and that is when humanity begets the living God. It is the discovery of death that reveals God to us. And the death of the perfect man, of Christ, was the supreme revelation of death: the death of the man who ought not to have died, and died.

This discovery, the discovery of immortality, prepared by the Jewish and Hellenic religious processes, was what was specifically Christian. And it was carried out above all by Paul of Tarsus, that Hellenized Jewish Pharisee. Paul had not known Jesus personally, and that is why he discovered him as the Christ. “It may be said that the Apostle’s theology is, in general, the first Christian theology. For him it was a necessity; in a way it took the place of the personal knowledge of Jesus that he lacked,” says Weizsäcker (Das apostolische Zeitalter der christlichen Kirche [The Apostolic Age of the Christian Church], Freiburg im Breisgau 1892). He did not know Jesus, but he felt him reborn in himself, and could say, “I do not live in myself, but in Christ.”

And from this it may be affirmed that whoever does not believe in this bodily resurrection of Christ may be a lover of Christ, but not specifically a Christian. True, a Justin Martyr could say that “all who live according to reason are Christians, even if they are held to be atheists, like Socrates and Heraclitus and others such among the Greeks.” But is this martyr a martyr, that is, a witness, of Christianity? No.note

And the whole of Christology took shape around the dogma of the resurrection and immortality of Christ, a dogma born of Paul’s inward experience and the guarantee of the resurrection and immortality of every believer. The God-man, the incarnate Word, came to be so that man, in his own way, might become God, that is, immortal. And the Christian God, the Father of Christ, a necessarily anthropomorphic God, is the one who, as the Catechism of Christian Doctrine that they made us learn by heart at school says, created the world for man: for each man.

After Paul the years and the Christian generations rolled on, working around that central dogma and its consequences so as to secure faith in the immortality of the individual soul. Then came the Council of Nicaea, and in it that formidable Athanasius, whose very name is an emblem, the embodiment of popular faith. Athanasius was a man of little learning but of great faith, and above all of popular faith, filled with the hunger for immortality. And he opposed Arianism, which, like Unitarian and Socinian Protestantism, threatened the basis of that faith, even without knowing it or wanting to.note

This same Harnack, a Protestant rationalist, tells us that Arianism or Unitarianism would have been the death of Christianity, reducing it to cosmology and morality. He adds that it served only as a bridge to bring the learned to Catholicism, that is, from reason to faith. To this same learned historian of dogma it seems the sign of a perverse state of affairs that the man Athanasius, who saved Christianity as a religion of living communion with God, should have erased Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus. This is the Jesus whom neither Paul nor Athanasius knew personally, nor has Harnack himself.

And Athanasius had the supreme courage of faith, the courage to affirm things that contradict each other. “The perfect contradiction contained in the ὁμοούσιος [of one substance] brought in its train a whole army of contradictions, and the more so the further thought advanced,” says Harnack. Yes, so it was, and so it had to be. “Dogmatics took leave forever of clear thinking and tenable concepts, and grew accustomed to the contra-rational,” he adds. The truth is that it drew closer to life, which is contra-rational and opposed to clear thinking. Judgments of value are not only never rationalizable; they are anti-rational.

At Nicaea, then, as later at the Vatican, the idiots won—taking the word in its proper, primitive and etymological sense—the simple-hearted, the rough and headstrong bishops. They represented the genuine human spirit, the spirit of the people, which does not want to die, whatever reason may say, and which seeks a guarantee for its desire, as material a guarantee as possible.note

Quid ad aeternitatem? [What is this to eternity?] Here is the cardinal question. And the Creed ends with resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi, the resurrection of the dead and the life to come. In the cemetery of Mallona, now disused, in my native town of Bilbao, there is a quatrain engraved that says: Though we have been turned to dust, / in you, Lord, our hope confides / that we shall return to life clothed / in the flesh and skin that covered us. Or, as the Catechism says, with the same bodies and souls that they had. So much so that it is orthodox Catholic doctrine that the happiness of the blessed is not wholly perfect until they recover their bodies.

And to this central dogma of resurrection in Christ and through Christ there corresponds a sacrament that is central too, the axis of popular Catholic piety: the sacrament of the Eucharist. In it is administered the body of Christ, which is the bread of immortality.

It is the genuinely realist sacrament, dinglich as one would say in German, which it is no great violence to translate as “material.” It is the sacrament most genuinely ex opere operato [effective by the act performed], and among Protestants it has been replaced by the idealist sacrament of the word. At bottom it is a matter of eating and drinking God, the Eternalizer, of feeding on him. I say this with all possible respect, but without wishing to sacrifice the expressiveness of the phrase.

For what is specifically religious in Catholicism is immortalization, and not justification in the Protestant manner. Justification is rather ethical. And it is in Kant that Protestantism drew its penultimate conclusions, however much its orthodox may dislike it: religion depends on morality, and not morality on religion, as in Catholicism.

Among Catholics the preoccupation with sin has never been so anguished, or at least has never had so great a show of anguish. The sacrament of confession helps here. And perhaps it is that the primitive Jewish and pagan conception of sin persists at bottom more here than among the Protestants: sin as something material, infectious and hereditary, which is cured by baptism and absolution. In Adam all his descendants sinned, almost materially, and his sin was transmitted as a material illness is transmitted. Renan, whose upbringing was Catholic, was right, then, to turn on the Protestant Amiel, who accused him of not giving sin its due importance.note

In the first edition of Melanchthon’s Loci communes, that of 1521, the first Lutheran theological work, the author omits the Trinitarian and Christological speculations, the dogmatic basis of eschatology. And there is Dr. Hermann, professor at Marburg, the author of the book on the Christian’s communion with God (Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott). The first chapter of that book deals with the opposition between mysticism and the Christian religion, and in Harnack’s view it is the most perfect Lutheran handbook. Elsewhere¹, referring to this Christological or Athanasian speculation, Hermann tells us that “the effective knowledge of God and of Christ in which faith lives is something entirely different.note

And in a Protestant theologian, Ernst Troeltsch, I have read that the highest thing Protestantism has produced in the conceptual order lies in the art of music, where Bach gave it its most powerful artistic expression. That is what Protestantism dissolves into—heavenly music! And we can say, on the other hand, that the highest Catholic artistic expression, Spanish at least, lies in the most material, tangible and permanent of the arts—for sounds are carried away by the air—in sculpture and painting: in the Christ of Velázquez, in that Christ who is forever dying, without ever finishing dying, to give us life!note

And it is not that Catholicism abandons the ethical—no! There is no modern religion that can sidestep it. But this religion of ours is, at bottom and in large part, a compromise between eschatology and morality, with the former put at the service of the latter, though its doctors protest against this. What else is that horror of the eternal pains of hell, which is so ill reconciled with the Pauline apocatastasis? Let us hold to the words that the Theologia deutsch, the mystical handbook Luther read, puts into God’s mouth: “If I am to repay your wickedness, I must do it with good, for I neither am nor have anything else.”note

The true sin, perhaps the sin against the Holy Spirit that has no remission, is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for oneself. It has been heard here in our Spain that to be a liberal, that is, a heretic, is worse than to be a murderer, a thief or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose infallibility defends us from reason.

And why should the infallibility of a man, of the Pope, cause scandal? What difference does it make whether the infallible thing is a book, the Bible, or a society of men, the Church, or a single man? Does that change the rational difficulty in its essence? And since the infallibility of a book or of a society is no more rational than that of a single man, this supreme scandal for rationalism had to be laid down.

It is the vital asserting itself. In order to assert itself it creates a whole dogmatic construction, making use of the rational, its enemy, and the Church defends that construction against rationalism, against Protestantism and against modernism. It defends life. It stood in Galileo’s way, and it did right, for his discovery, at first and until it could be fitted into the economy of human knowledge, tended to shatter the anthropocentric belief that the universe was created for man. It opposed Darwin, and it did right, for Darwinism tends to shatter our belief that man is an exceptional animal, created expressly to be made eternal. And finally Pius IX, the first pontiff declared infallible, declared himself irreconcilable with so-called modern civilization. And he did right.

Loisy, the former Catholic abbé, said: “I say simply that the Church and theology have not favored the scientific movement, but have rather hindered it, as far as lay with them, on certain decisive occasions. I say, above all, that Catholic teaching has neither associated itself with that movement nor adapted itself to it. Theology has behaved, and behaves still, as if it possessed in itself a science of nature and a science of history, together with the general philosophy of these things that results from their scientific knowledge. One would say that the domain of theology and the domain of science, distinct in principle and even by definition of the Vatican Council, must not be distinct in practice.note

And so it has to be, and so it is, in the Church’s struggle with modernism, of which Loisy was doctor and leader.

The recent struggle against Kantian and fideist modernism is a struggle for life. Can life, life that seeks assurance of survival, possibly tolerate a Loisy, a Catholic priest, affirming that the resurrection of the Savior is not a fact of the historical order, demonstrable and demonstrated by the testimony of History alone? Read, on the other hand, E. Le Roy’s exposition of the central dogma, the resurrection of Jesus, in his excellent work Dogme et Critique [Dogma and Criticism], and tell me whether anything solid remains on which to rest our hope.note

But alas, we do not get it! Reason attacks, and faith, which does not feel secure without reason, has to make terms with it. And from this come the tragic contradictions and the lacerations of consciousness.

And as the first foundation stone, men sought the authority of tradition and the revelation of the word of God, and went as far as unanimous consent. Quod apud multos unum invenitur non est erratum, sed traditum [What is found to be one and the same among many is not error but tradition], said Tertullian. And Lamennais added, centuries later, that “certainty, the principle of life and of intelligence… is, if I may use the expression, a social product”¹. But here, as in so many other things, the supreme formula was given by that great Catholic of popular and vital Catholicism, Count Joseph de Maistre, when he wrote: “I do not believe it possible to point to a single universally useful opinion that is not true”². This is the Catholic sure bet: to deduce the truth of a principle from its supreme goodness or usefulness.

And so scholastic theology was forged, and out of it came its handmaid, the ancilla theologiae, scholastic philosophy too—and this handmaid turned out to answer back. Scholasticism was a magnificent cathedral, with every problem of architectural mechanics solved over the centuries, but a cathedral of adobe. Little by little it led to what they call natural theology, which is nothing but Christianity drained of its potency. Men sought to support the dogmas rationally as far as possible, to show at least that, though supra-rational, they were not contra-rational. And the dogmas have been given a philosophical foundation of thirteenth-century Aristotelian-Neoplatonic-Stoic philosophy, for such is Thomism, recommended by Leo XIII. And it is no longer a matter of getting the dogma accepted, but its medieval and Thomist philosophical interpretation.

But that is what implicit faith is for, the collier’s faith, the faith of those who, like Saint Teresa (Vida, chapter XXV, 2), do not wish to avail themselves of theology. “Do not ask me that, for I am ignorant; Holy Mother Church has doctors who will know how to answer you,” as we were made to learn in the catechism. For that, among other things, is why the priesthood was instituted: so that the teaching Church might be the depositary of theological secrets—a deposit rather than a river, reservoir instead of river, as Brooks said. “The work of Nicaea,” says Harnack (Dogmengeschichte II, 1, chap. VII 3), “was a triumph of the priesthood over the faith of the Christian people. The doctrine of the Logos had already become unintelligible to those who were not theologians.note

And why was this? Because faith, that is, life, no longer felt sure of itself. Neither traditionalism nor the theological positivism of Duns Scotus was enough for it; it wanted to rationalize itself. And it sought to lay its foundation not against reason, which is where it lies, but upon reason, that is, in reason itself. Scotus’s position, nominalist or positivist or voluntarist, held that law and truth depend less on essence than on the free and inscrutable will of God. By stressing the supreme irrationality of religion, it put religion in danger among most believers endowed with adult reason who were not colliers. Hence the triumph of Thomist theological rationalism.

The truth is that Catholicism oscillates between mysticism and the rationalism that it combats (see Weizsäcker, op. cit.). Mysticism is inward experience of the living God in Christ, an incommunicable experience, whose danger, moreover, is that of absorbing one’s own personality in God, which does not save our vital longing. Catholicism oscillates between religionized science and scientificized religion. Apocalyptic enthusiasm changed little by little into Neoplatonic mysticism, from which theology made it shrink back. People feared the excesses of fantasy, which supplanted faith by creating gnostic extravagances. But a certain pact had to be signed with gnosticism, and another with rationalism; neither fantasy nor reason would let itself be wholly vanquished.

At the cost, it must be said, of oppressing the mental needs of believers who have the use of adult reason. They are required to believe either everything or nothing: to accept the entire totality of dogmatics, or else lose all merit if they reject the smallest part of it.

The Catholic solution of our problem, our one vital problem, the problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of the individual soul, satisfies the will, and therefore life. But in trying to rationalize it through dogmatic theology, it does not satisfy reason. And reason has its demands, as imperious as those of life. It is no use trying to force oneself to recognize as supra-rational what clearly appears to us as contra-rational, nor is it any use for one who is not a collier to try to make himself one. Infallibility, a notion of Hellenic origin, is at bottom a rationalist category.

Let us now look, then, at the rationalist or scientific solution of our problem—or, better, its dissolution.

The great master of rationalist phenomenalism, David Hume, begins his essay “On the Immortality of the Soul” with these decisive words: “It seems difficult to prove the immortality of the soul by the mere light of reason. The arguments in its favor are commonly derived from metaphysical, moral or physical topics. But in reality it is the Gospel, and the Gospel alone, that has brought life and immortality to light.” This amounts to denying the rationality of the belief that the soul of each one of us is immortal.

Kant, who took Hume as the starting point for his critique, tried to establish the rationality of this longing and of the belief it implies. Such is the true origin, the inward origin, of his critique of practical reason, of his categorical imperative and of his God. But in spite of all this, Hume’s skeptical affirmation still stands, and there is no way whatever of proving the immortality of the soul rationally. There are, on the other hand, ways of proving its mortality rationally.

It would be not merely superfluous but even ridiculous for us to set out at length here how far individual human consciousness depends on the organization of the body. We need not show how it comes to birth little by little as the brain receives impressions from outside, how it is temporarily interrupted during sleep, fainting fits and other accidents, and how everything leads us to conjecture rationally that death brings with it the loss of consciousness. And just as before we were born we were not, and have no personal memory of that time, so after we die we shall not be. This is the rational.

What we call the soul is nothing more than a term designating individual consciousness in its integrity and its persistence. That it changes, and that just as it integrates so it disintegrates, is evident. For Aristotle it was the substantial form of the body, the entelechy, but not a substance. And more than one modern thinker has called it an epiphenomenon, an absurd term. It is enough to call it a phenomenon.

Rationalism, and by this I mean the doctrine that holds to nothing but reason, to objective truth, is necessarily materialist. And let the idealists not be scandalized.

Everything must be made clear, and the truth is that what we call materialism means for us nothing other than the doctrine that denies the immortality of the individual soul, the persistence of personal consciousness after death.

In another sense it may be said that, since we know no more about what matter is than about what spirit is, and since this matter business is for us nothing more than an idea, materialism is idealism. In fact, and for our problem—the most vital one, the only truly vital one—it comes to the same thing to say that everything is matter, or that everything is idea, or everything force, or whatever you like. Every monistic system will always appear to us materialist. Only dualist systems save the immortality of the soul: those that teach that human consciousness is something substantially distinct and different from all other phenomenal manifestations. And reason is naturally monist.

The supposedly rational doctrine of the substantiality of the soul and of its spirituality, with all the apparatus that goes with it, was born simply of men’s feeling that they needed to ground in reason their irresistible longing for immortality and the belief that follows from it. All the sophistries that set out to prove that the soul is a simple and incorruptible substance come from that source. More still: the very concept of substance, as scholasticism laid it down and defined it—a concept that does not stand up to criticism—is a theological concept designed to support faith in the immortality of the soul.

W. James, in the third of the lectures he devoted to pragmatism at the Lowell Institute in Boston in December 1906 and January 1907¹—which is the weakest thing in the whole work of the distinguished American thinker, something excessively weak—says this: “Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and made it technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are from all contact with them. But there is one case in which scholasticism has proved the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I mean certain disputes concerning the mystery of the Eucharist. Here substance would appear to have great pragmatic value.

Now, let us leave aside the question whether in sound theology—and I do not say in sound reason, for all this falls outside it—the substance of the body—the body, not the soul—of Christ can be confused with the very substance of divinity, that is, with God himself. Even so, it seems impossible that so ardent a longer for the immortality of the soul, a man like W. James, whose whole philosophy aims at nothing but establishing that belief rationally, should have failed to notice that the pragmatic application of the concept of substance to the doctrine of eucharistic transubstantiation is nothing but a consequence of its earlier application to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.

Read carefully, in the first part of the Summa theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, the first six articles of question LXXV, where he asks whether the human soul is a body, whether it is something subsistent, whether the soul of brute animals is so too, whether man is a soul, whether the soul is composed of matter and form, and whether it is incorruptible. Then say whether all of that is not subtly designed to support the belief that this incorruptible substantiality allows the soul to receive immortality from God—for clearly, since God created it when he infused it into the body, according to St. Thomas, he could annihilate it when he separated it from the body.

What unprejudiced reason can conclude that our soul is a substance from the fact that the consciousness of our identity—and this within very narrow and variable limits—persists through the changes of our body? One might as well speak of the substantial soul of a ship that leaves port, loses one plank today, which is replaced by another of the same shape and size, then loses another piece, and so on, one by one, all of them; and the same ship comes back, with the same shape, the same seagoing qualities, and everyone recognizes it as the same. What unprejudiced reason can conclude that the soul is simple from the fact that we have to judge and unify thoughts?

In books of spiritualist psychology, when they deal with the existence of the soul as a simple substance separable from the body, it is usual to employ some formula of this kind: There is in me a principle that thinks, wills and feels... Which involves begging the question. For it is not an immediate truth—far from it—that there is such a principle in me; the immediate truth is that I think, will and feel. And I, the I that thinks, wills and feels, am immediately my living body with the states of consciousness it bears. It is my living body that thinks, wills and feels. How? Somehow.

And then they go on to try to establish the substantiality of the soul by hypostatizing the states of consciousness, and they begin by saying that this substance must be simple—that is, by opposing thought to extension, in the manner of Cartesian dualism. And since our Balmes has been one of the spiritualists who have given the most concise and clear form to the argument for the simplicity of the soul, I shall take it from him just as he sets it out in chapter II of the Psychology in his Curso de Filosofía Elemental [Course of Elementary Philosophy]. “The human soul is simple,” he says, and adds: “That is simple which lacks parts, and the soul has none. Suppose there are in it the parts A, B, C; I ask: where does thought reside?note

Balmes, and with him the a priori spiritualists who try to rationalize faith in the immortality of the soul, leave aside the only rational explanation: that apperception and judgment are a resultant, that it is the component perceptions or ideas themselves that come into agreement. They begin by supposing something outside and distinct from the states of consciousness, something that is not the living body that bears them—something that is not I, but is in me.

The soul is simple, others say, because it turns back upon itself in its entirety. No: the state of consciousness A, in which I think of my previous state of consciousness B, is not that state itself. Or if I think of my soul, I think of an idea distinct from the act in which I think of it. To think that one is thinking, and nothing more, is not thinking.

The soul is the principle of life, they say. Yes; and the category of force or energy has also been devised as the principle of motion. But these are concepts, not phenomena, not external realities. Does the principle of motion move? And only what moves has external reality. Does the principle of life live? Hume was right to write: “I never come across this idea of myself; I only observe myself desiring or acting or feeling something.” The idea of something individual—of this inkwell in front of me, of that horse standing at the door of the house, of these two and not of any other individuals of their class—is the fact, the phenomenon itself. The idea of myself is me.

For scientific psychology—the only rational kind—the unity of consciousness is nothing but a phenomenal unity. No one can say that it is a substantial unity. More still, no one can say that it is a substance. For the notion of substance is a non-phenomenal category. It is the noumenon and belongs, strictly speaking, to the unknowable. That is, depending on how it is applied. But in its transcendent application it is something really unknowable and, strictly speaking, irrational. It is the very concept of substance that an unprejudiced reason reduces to a use far removed from that pragmatic application of it to which James referred.

Nor is this application saved by taking it idealistically, according to the Berkeleian principle that to be is to be perceived, esse est percipi. To say that everything is idea, or that everything is spirit, is the same as saying that everything is matter or that everything is force. For if, everything being idea or spirit, this diamond is idea or spirit just as my consciousness is, it is not clear why the diamond should not persist eternally, if my consciousness, by being idea or spirit, persists forever.

George Berkeley, Anglican bishop of Cloyne and brother in spirit of another Anglican bishop, Joseph Butler, wanted like him to save faith in the immortality of the soul. From the very first words of the Preface to his A treatise concerning the Principles of human Knowledge, he tells us that this treatise of his seems to him useful, especially for those tainted with skepticism or who need a demonstration of the existence and immateriality of God and of the natural immortality of the soul. In chapter CXL he establishes that we have an idea, or rather a notion, of spirit, knowing other spirits by means of our own; from which, he flatly asserts in the following paragraph, the natural immortality of the soul follows.

The question was complicated because consciousness was made a property of the soul, and the soul was something more than consciousness: a substantial form of the body, the source of all its organic functions. The soul not only thinks, feels and wills, but moves the body and gives rise to its vital functions; in the human soul the vegetative, animal and rational functions are united. Such is the doctrine. But the soul, once separated from the body, can no longer have vegetative and animal functions.

For reason, in short, a tangle of genuine confusions.

From the Renaissance onward, with the restoration of purely rational thought emancipated from all theology, the doctrine of the mortality of the soul was reestablished with Alexander of Aphrodisias, Pietro Pomponazzi and others. And strictly speaking, little or nothing can be added to what Pomponazzi wrote in his Tractatus de inmortalitate animae. That is reason, and there is no use turning it over and over.

There has been no lack, however, of people who have tried to support faith in the immortality of the soul empirically, and there is the work of Frederic W. H. Myers, Human personality and its survival of bodily death. No one has approached the two thick volumes of this work with greater yearning than I. In them the man who was the soul of the Society for Psychical Research summed up the formidable mass of data on every kind of presentiment, apparitions of the dead, phenomena of sleep, telepathy, hypnotism, sensory automatism, ecstasy and everything that makes up the spiritist arsenal.note

And if belief in the immortality of the soul has been unable to find rational empirical verification, neither does pantheism satisfy it. To say that everything is God, and that when we die we return to God—or rather, continue in him—is worth nothing to our longing. For if that is so, before we were born we were in God, and if at death we return to where we were before being born, then the human soul, individual consciousness, is perishable. And since we know very well that God, the personal and conscious God of Christian monotheism, is nothing but the producer and, above all, the guarantor of our immortality, it is said—and very rightly said—that pantheism is nothing but atheism in disguise. And I think it is not even disguised.

The science of religion, on the other hand—of religion as an individual and social psychic phenomenon, without going into the transcendent objective validity of religious affirmations—is a science that, in explaining the origin of the faith that the soul is something that can live separated from the body, has destroyed the rationality of this belief. However much the religious man may repeat with Schleiermacher, “science cannot teach you anything; let it learn from you,” inwardly he thinks otherwise.

From whatever side the matter is looked at, it always turns out that reason sets itself against this longing of ours for personal immortality, and contradicts it. And the fact is that, strictly speaking, reason is the enemy of life.

Intelligence is a terrible thing. It tends toward death, as memory tends toward stability. The living, what is absolutely unstable, what is absolutely individual, is, strictly speaking, unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce everything to entities and genera, so that each representation has one single, identical content in whatever place, time or relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that is the same in two successive moments of its being. My idea of God is different each time I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is what the intellect aspires to. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it; it wants to freeze the fleeting stream into blocks of ice, it wants to fix it.

One need only read Plato’s terrible Parmenides and reach its tragic conclusion that “the one exists and does not exist, and it and all the others exist and do not exist, appear and do not appear, in relation to themselves and to one another.” Everything vital is irrational, and everything rational is anti-vital, because reason is essentially skeptical.

The rational, in fact, is nothing but the relational; reason confines itself to relating irrational elements. Mathematics is the only perfect science insofar as it adds, subtracts, multiplies and divides numbers, but not real, solid things—insofar as it is the most formal of the sciences. Who can extract the cube root of this ash tree?

And yet we need logic, this terrible power, to transmit thoughts and perceptions, and even to think and perceive, for we think with words, we perceive with forms. To think is to talk to oneself, and speech is social, and thought and logic are social. But do they not perhaps have a content, an individual matter, that cannot be transmitted or translated? And is not their strength right here?

The truth is that man, a prisoner of logic, without which he cannot think, has always wanted to put it at the service of his longings, and above all of the fundamental longing. People always wanted to keep logic—especially in the Middle Ages—at the service of theology and jurisprudence, both of which started from what authority had established. Only very late did logic set itself the problem of knowledge, the problem of its own validity, the examination of its metalogical foundations.

“Western theology,” writes Stanley, “is essentially logical in form and is based on philosophy. The Latin theologian succeeded the Roman lawyer; the Eastern theologian, the Greek sophist.”¹note

And all the supposedly rational or logical lucubrations in support of our hunger for immortality are nothing but advocacy and sophistry.

What is proper to and characteristic of advocacy, in fact, is to put logic at the service of a thesis that has to be defended, whereas strictly scientific method starts from the facts, from the data that reality offers us, in order to reach a conclusion or not reach one. The important thing is to pose the problem well, and hence progress quite often consists in undoing what has been done. Advocacy always presupposes a begging of the question, and all its arguments are ad probandum [aimed at proving a set conclusion]. And supposedly rational theology is nothing but advocacy.

Theology starts from dogma, and dogma, δόγμα, in its original and most direct sense, means decree—something like the Latin placitum, what has seemed to the legislative authority that it ought to be law. Theology starts from this juridical concept. For the theologian, as for the lawyer, dogma, the law, is something given, a starting point that is not discussed except as to its application and its most correct sense. And hence the theological or lawyerly spirit is dogmatic in its principle, while the strictly scientific, purely rational spirit is skeptical, σκεπτικός, that is, investigative.

Take the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas, the classic monument of Catholic theology—that is, of Catholic advocacy—and open it anywhere. First the thesis: utrum..., whether such a thing is so or otherwise; next the objections: ad primum sic proceditur [thus we proceed to the first point]; then the replies to the objections: sed contra est... [but on the contrary...] or respondeo dicendum... [I answer that it must be said...]. Pure advocacy. And at the bottom of a great many of its arguments, perhaps most of them, you will find a logical fallacy that can be expressed more scholastico [in scholastic fashion] in this syllogism: I cannot understand this fact except by giving it this explanation; but I must understand it; therefore this must be its explanation. Or else I am left without understanding it.

This state of mind, in which it is assumed, more or less consciously, that we must know a solution, is accompanied by that business of the dire consequences. Pick up any apologetic book—that is, any book of lawyerly theology—and you will see how often you come across headings that read: “Dire Consequences of This Doctrine.” And the dire consequences of a doctrine will prove, at most, that the doctrine is dire, but not that it is false, for it remains to be proved that what is true is what suits us best. The identification of truth and the good is nothing but a pious wish. A.

No: for reason, truth is what can be shown to be, to exist, whether it consoles us or not. And reason is certainly not a consoling faculty. That terrible Latin poet Lucretius, beneath whose apparent serenity and Epicurean ataraxia so much despair lies hidden, said that piety consists in being able to contemplate everything with a serene soul, pacata posse mente omnia tueri. And it was this same Lucretius who wrote that religion can lead us into so many evils: tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. And the fact is that religion, and above all, later, the Christian religion, was, as the Apostle says, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the intellectuals.note

Speaking of the age of these men, the most genuinely rationalist age, Flaubert wrote these pregnant words to Madame Roger de Genettes: “You are right; one must speak of Lucretius with respect; I see no one comparable to him except Byron, and Byron has neither his gravity nor the sincerity of his sadness. The melancholy of the ancients seems to me deeper than that of the moderns, who all more or less take for granted an immortality beyond the black hole. But for the ancients this black hole was infinity itself; their dreams take shape and pass against a background of unchanging ebony.

Yes, Lucretius wanted to conclude, to solve, and, what is worse, he wanted to find consolation in reason. For there is also an anti-theological advocacy and an odium anti-theologicum [anti-theological hatred].

Many, very many men of science, the majority of those who call themselves rationalists, suffer from it.

The rationalist behaves rationally—that is, he is playing his proper part—so long as he confines himself to denying that reason satisfies our vital hunger for immortality. But soon, seized by rage at not being able to believe, he falls into the irritation of the odium anti-theologicum, and says with the Pharisees: “These common people who do not know the law are accursed.” There is much truth in those words of Soloviev: “I foresee the approach of times when Christians will gather again in the catacombs because the faith is persecuted—perhaps in a less brutal way than in Nero’s time, but with a rigor no less refined, by lies, mockery and every kind of hypocrisy.”note

The anti-theological hatred, the scientistic—I do not say scientific—rage against faith in another life, is evident. Take not the most serene scientific investigators, those who know how to doubt, but the fanatics of rationalism, and see with what coarse brutality they speak of faith. Vogt thought it probable that the apostles showed marked simian characteristics in the structure of their skulls; of the crudities of Haeckel, that supremely uncomprehending man, there is no need to speak; nor of those of Büchner; even Virchow is not free of them. And others do it more subtly.note

And the rationalists who do not fall into anti-theological rage insist on convincing man that there are reasons for living and consolation for having been born, even though a time must come, after some tens, hundreds or millions of centuries, when all human consciousness will have disappeared. And these reasons for living and acting, this thing some call humanism, are the marvel of the affective and emotional hollowness of rationalism and of its stupendous hypocrisy, bent on sacrificing sincerity to veracity and on not confessing that reason is an unconsoling and dissolving power.

Must I repeat once more what I have already said about all that business of forging culture, of progressing, of bringing about the good, truth and beauty, of bringing justice to the earth, of making life better for those who come after us, of serving I know not what destiny, without troubling ourselves about the ultimate end of each one of us? Must I speak to you again of the supreme emptiness of culture, of science, of art, of the good, of truth, of beauty, of justice...

Many and very varied are the rationalist inventions—more or less rational—with which, since the days of the Epicureans and Stoics, people have tried to find consolation in rational truth and to convince human beings that there are motives for acting and incentives for living, even if human consciousness is destined to disappear one day—though those who attempted it were not themselves convinced.

The Epicurean position, whose extreme and crudest form is “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die,” or the Horatian carpe diem, which could be translated “live for the day,” is at bottom no different from the Stoic position with its “do what your moral conscience dictates, and come what may afterwards.” Both positions have a common basis, and pleasure for its own sake is the same as duty for its own sake.

The most logical and consistent of atheists—I mean of those who deny that individual consciousness persists into an indefinite future—and at the same time the most pious of them, Spinoza, devoted the fifth and last part of his Ethics to elucidating the way that leads to freedom and to fixing the concept of happiness. The concept! The concept and not the feeling! For Spinoza, who was a terrible intellectualist, happiness, beatitudo [blessedness], is a concept, and the love of God an intellectual love.

And that most sorrowful and desolating voice of Spinoza is the very voice of reason. And the freedom he speaks of is a terrible freedom. And against Spinoza and his doctrine of happiness there is only one unanswerable argument: the argument ad hominem. Was he happy, Baruch Spinoza, while, to silence his inner unhappiness, he discoursed on happiness itself? Was he free?

In the scholium to proposition 41 of this same last and most tragic part of that formidable tragedy, his Ethics, the poor despairing Jew of Amsterdam speaks to us of the common persuasion of the multitude about eternal life. Let us hear him: “They seem to believe that piety and religion and everything that relates to strength of mind are burdens to be laid down after death, and they hope to receive the reward of their servitude, not of piety and religion.

When it is said of something that it does not even deserve refutation, you may be sure of this: either it is a signal piece of foolishness, in which case one need not even say that much about it, or it is something tremendous, the very key to the problem. And so it is in this case. For yes, poor Portuguese Jew exiled from Holland, yes: if someone becomes convinced, without a trace of doubt, without the slightest chink of saving uncertainty, that his soul is not immortal, and then prefers to be without a soul, amens, or irrational, or without reason, and prefers not to have been born, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, absurd in that. He, the poor intellectualist Jew who defined intellectual love and happiness—was he happy? For this, and nothing else, is the problem.

And there we have another rationalist. This one was not resigned and sad like Spinoza but rebellious, and he hypocritically feigned cheerfulness when he was no less in despair than the other. There you have Nietzsche, who mathematically (!!!) invented that imitation of the immortality of the soul called the eternal return, which is the most tremendous tragicomedy or comitragedy. Since the number of atoms or first irreducible elements is finite, in the eternal universe a combination like the present one must at some point occur again, and therefore what is happening now must be repeated an eternal number of times.

But the fact is that Spinoza and Nietzsche alike were, yes, rationalists, each in his own way; but they were not spiritual eunuchs. They had heart, feeling and, above all, hunger: a mad hunger for eternity, for immortality. The bodily eunuch does not feel the need to reproduce carnally, in the body, and the spiritual eunuch does not feel the hunger to perpetuate himself either.

It is true that there are those who assert that reason is enough for them, and who advise us to give up trying to penetrate the impenetrable. But some say they need no faith at all in an eternal personal life to find incentives for living and motives for action, and of these I do not know what to think.

More sincere, much more sincere, are those who say: “We must not talk about that, for it is a waste of time and saps the will; let us do our duty here, and then come what may.” But this sincerity hides a deeper insincerity. Does saying “We must not talk about that” somehow stop one from thinking about it? That it saps the will?… So what? That it unfits us for human action? So what? It is very easy to tell someone who has a mortal illness, one that condemns him to a short life, and who knows it, not to think about it. Meglio oprando obliar, senza indagarlo, / Questo enorme mister de l’universo!

“Better to forget by working, without inquiring into it, this enormous mystery of the universe,” wrote Carducci in his Maremma Idyll. It was the same Carducci who, at the end of his ode On Monte Mario, told us that the earth, mother of the fleeting soul, is to carry glory and suffering around the sun until, spent beneath the Equator, / at the calls of the fleeing warmth, / its withered offspring have only one woman left and one man, / who, standing upright among fragments of mountains, / in dead forests, livid, with glassy / eyes, will see you over immense ice, / O sun, go down!¹note

But is it possible to work at anything serious and lasting while forgetting the enormous mystery of the universe and without inquiring into it? Is it possible to contemplate everything with a serene soul, in the manner of Lucretian piety, thinking that one day all of this will no longer be reflected in any human consciousness?note

“Are you happy?” Cain asks Lucifer, prince of the intellectuals, in Byron’s poem, and Lucifer answers: “We are powerful.” Cain rejoins: “Are you happy?” Then the great Intellectual tells him: “No; are you?” And later this same Lucifer says to Adah, Cain’s sister and wife: “Choose between Love and Science, for there is no other choice.” And in this same stupendous poem Cain says that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a lying tree, because “we know nothing, and its promised science came at the price of death.” Lucifer replies: “It may be that death leads to the highest knowledge.” That is to say, to nothingness.note

In all these passages where I have put “science,” Lord Byron says Knowledge: what the French call science and the Germans Wissenschaft. Against it many set wisdom, the French sagesse and the German Weisheit. “Knowledge comes, but wisdom tarries, and brings a burdened breast, full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of its rest.” Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast, / Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest, says another lord, Tennyson, in his Locksley Hall. And what is this wisdom, which we must go and seek chiefly in the poets, leaving science behind?

I do not know why so many people were scandalized, or pretended to be, when Brunetière once again proclaimed the bankruptcy of science. For science as a substitute for religion, and reason as a substitute for faith, have always failed. Science may satisfy our growing logical or mental needs, our longing to know and to learn the truth, and in fact it does satisfy them in growing measure. But science does not satisfy our affective and volitional needs, our hunger for immortality; far from satisfying it, it contradicts it. Rational truth and life stand opposed. And is there any truth other than rational truth?note

It must be taken as settled, then, that reason, human reason, within its limits, does not prove rationally that the soul is immortal, or that human consciousness is to be indestructible through the course of time to come. Rather, it proves, within its limits, I repeat, that individual consciousness cannot persist after the death of the bodily organism on which it depends. And those limits, within which I say human reason proves this, are the limits of rationality, of what we know verifiably.

Rational dissolution ends by dissolving reason itself, in the most absolute skepticism, in the phenomenalism of Hume or the absolute contingentism of Stuart Mill, the most consistent and logical of the positivists. The supreme triumph of reason, which is an analytical faculty, that is, a destructive and dissolving one, is to call its own validity into doubt. When there is an ulcer in the stomach, the stomach ends by digesting itself. And reason ends by destroying the immediate and absolute validity of the concept of truth and of the concept of necessity. Both concepts are relative; there is neither absolute truth nor absolute necessity.

Absolute relativism, which is neither more nor less than skepticism in the most modern sense of the term, is the supreme triumph of reasoning reason.

Feeling does not manage to make consolation into truth, nor does reason manage to make truth into consolation. But the latter, reason, working upon truth itself, upon the very concept of reality, manages to sink itself in a profound skepticism. And in this abyss rational skepticism meets the despair of feeling, and it is from this meeting that there emerges a basis—a terrible basis!—for consolation. Let us see.

Parce unicae spes totius orbis. [Spare the one hope of the whole world.] / Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem (Against Marcion), 5.

So the vital longing for human immortality finds no rational confirmation, and neither does reason give us any incentive or consolation for living, or any true purpose for life. But see: at the bottom of the abyss the despair of feeling and will and rational skepticism meet face to face, and they embrace like brothers. And it is from this embrace, a tragic embrace, that is, one loving from the very depths, that a wellspring of life will flow, of a life serious and terrible. Skepticism, uncertainty, the last position that reason reaches by exercising its analysis upon itself, upon its own validity, is the foundation on which the despair of the vital feeling must found its hope.

Disillusioned, we had to abandon the position of those who want to make consolation into rational and logical truth, claiming to prove its rationality, or at least its non-irrationality. And we also had to abandon the position of those who wanted to make rational truth into consolation and a motive for living. Neither of these two positions satisfied us. The one is at odds with our reason, the other with our feeling. Peace between these two powers is impossible, and we must live by their war. And we must make this, war itself, the condition of our spiritual life.

Nor is there room here for that repugnant and vulgar expedient which politicians, more or less parliamentary ones, have invented, and which they call a formula of concord, one from which neither victors nor vanquished emerge. There is no place here for cozy compromises. Perhaps a degenerate and cowardly reason might go so far as to propose such a formula of settlement, for strictly speaking reason lives on formulas. But life, which cannot be put into formulas—life, which lives and wants to live forever—does not accept formulas. Its only formula is: all or nothing. Feeling does not compromise with half-measures.

Initium sapientiae timor Domini [The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom], it was said, perhaps meaning timor mortis [fear of death], or perhaps timor vitae [fear of life], which is the same thing. It always turns out that the beginning of wisdom is a fear.note

And this saving skepticism I am now going to speak to you about—can it be said to be doubt? It is doubt, yes, but it is much more than doubt. Doubt is often a very cold thing, hardly life-giving at all, and above all a somewhat artificial thing, especially since Descartes reduced it to the role of a method. The conflict between reason and life is something more than a doubt. For doubt easily comes down to being a comic element.

Descartes’ methodical doubt is a comic doubt, a purely theoretical, provisional doubt, that is, the doubt of a man who acts as if he doubted without doubting. And because it was a stove-room doubt, the man who concluded that he existed from the fact that he thought did not approve of “those turbulent (brouillons) and restless temperaments who, called neither by their birth nor by their fortune to the management of public affairs, never cease to devise in their minds some new reform.” And he was pained that there might be anything of this in his writing.note

This Cartesian doubt, methodical or theoretical, this stove-room philosophical doubt, is not doubt; it is not the skepticism, it is not the uncertainty I am speaking to you of here—no! This other doubt is a doubt of passion. It is the eternal conflict between reason and feeling, science and life, logic and biotics. For science destroys the concept of personality, reducing it to a complex in continual momentary flux. That is, it destroys the very affective basis of the life of the spirit, and the spirit, refusing to surrender, turns against reason.

And this doubt cannot avail itself of any provisional morality. It must found its morality, as we shall see, on the conflict itself, a morality of battle, and it must found religion upon itself. And it dwells in a house that is continually falling down and must continually be rebuilt. Continually the will—I mean the will never to die, the refusal to be resigned to death—builds the dwelling of life, and continually reason is battering it down with gales and downpours.

There is more still: in the concrete vital problem that concerns us, reason takes no position at all. Strictly speaking, it does something even worse than deny the immortality of the soul, which would be a solution: it fails to recognize the problem as vital desire presents it to us. In the rational and logical sense of the term problem, there is no such problem. This matter of the immortality of the soul, of the persistence of individual consciousness, is not rational; it falls outside reason. As a problem, and apart from whatever solution is given to it, it is irrational. Rationally, even posing it makes no sense. The immortality of the soul is as inconceivable as, strictly speaking, its absolute mortality is.

Let us hear brother Kierkegaard, who tells us: “It is precisely with respect to the problem of existence that the risk of abstraction shows itself. It resolves the difficulty by sidestepping it, and then boasts of having explained everything. It explains immortality in general, and does so splendidly, by identifying it with eternity—with eternity, which is essentially the medium of thought. But whether each singularly existing man is immortal, which is precisely the difficulty, abstraction does not trouble itself about; it does not interest it. Yet the difficulty of existence is the interest of the one who exists; to one who exists, existing is of infinite interest.

What intense passion—that is, what truth—there is in this bitter invective against Hegel, the prototype of the rationalist, who takes away our fever by taking away our life, and who promises us an abstract immortality instead of a concrete one, as if the hunger for it that consumes us were abstract and not concrete!

It may be said, yes, that once the dog is dead the rabies is over, and that after I die this hunger not to die will no longer torment me, and that the fear of death, or rather of nothingness, is an irrational fear. But… Yes, but… E pur si muove! [And yet it moves!] And it will go on moving. Why, it is the source of all movement!note

But I do not think brother Kierkegaard is entirely right, because the abstract thinker himself, the thinker of abstractions, thinks in order to exist, in order not to cease existing, or perhaps he thinks in order to forget that he will have to cease existing. Such is the root of the passion of abstract thought. And perhaps Hegel was as infinitely interested as Kierkegaard in his own concrete and singular existence, though he hid it to keep up the professional decorum of a philosopher of the State. The demands of the post.

Faith in immortality is irrational. And yet faith, life and reason need one another. This vital longing is not properly a problem. It cannot take on logical status, it cannot be formulated in propositions open to rational debate; but it presses itself upon us, as hunger does. Nor can a wolf that flings itself on its prey to devour it, or on the she-wolf to impregnate her, pose its impulse to itself rationally, as a logical problem. Reason and faith are two enemies that cannot sustain themselves without each other. The irrational demands to be rationalized, and reason can operate only on the irrational. They have to lean on each other and join together. But join together in struggle, since struggle is a mode of association.

In the world of living things, the struggle for existence, the struggle for life, establishes an association, and a very close one, not only among those who unite to fight another but among those who fight one another. And is there, perhaps, any closer association than the one formed between the animal that eats another and the one it eats, between the devourer and the devoured? And if this is plainly seen in the struggle of individuals among themselves, it is seen more plainly still in the struggle of peoples. War has always been the most complete factor of progress, even more than trade.

Christianity—the folly of the cross, the irrational faith that Christ had risen in order to raise us—was saved by rationalist Hellenic culture, and that culture by Christianity. Without the latter, without Christianity, the Renaissance would have been impossible; without the Gospel, without Saint Paul, the peoples who had passed through the Middle Ages would have understood neither Plato nor Aristotle. A purely rationalist tradition is as impossible as a purely religious one. It is often debated whether the Reformation was born as the daughter of the Renaissance or in protest against it, and one may say both, for the child is always born in protest against the father.

The fact is, as I say, that faith, life, cannot sustain itself except upon a reason that makes it transmissible—and above all transmissible from me to myself, that is, reflective and conscious. And reason in turn cannot sustain itself except upon faith, upon life, if only faith in reason, faith that reason serves for something more than knowing, that it serves for living. And yet faith is neither transmissible nor rational, and reason is not vital.

Will and intelligence need each other. The old aphorism nihil volitum quin praecognitum, nothing is willed that has not first been known, can be turned around to say nihil cognitum quin praevolitum, nothing is known that has not first been willed, and this is not as paradoxical as it seems at first sight. “The very knowledge of the spirit as such,” writes Vinet in his study of Cousin’s book on Pascal’s Pensées, “needs the heart. Without the desire to see, one does not see; in a great materialization of life and thought, one does not believe in the things of the spirit.” We shall see that to believe is, in the first instance, to want to believe.note

Will and intelligence seek opposite things: the former, to absorb the world into us, to make it our own; the latter, that we be absorbed into the world. Opposite? Are they not rather one and the same thing? No, they are not, though they may seem so. Intelligence is monist or pantheist; will is monotheist or egotist. Intelligence needs nothing outside itself on which to exercise itself; it merges with the ideas themselves, whereas will needs matter. To know something is to make myself into what I know; but for me to make use of it, to dominate it, it must remain distinct from me.

Philosophy and religion are enemies of each other, and because they are enemies they need each other. There is no religion without some philosophical basis, nor any philosophy without religious roots; each lives on its opposite. The history of philosophy is, strictly speaking, a history of religion. And the attacks directed at religion from a supposedly scientific or philosophical point of view are nothing but attacks from another, opposing, religious point of view.

The instinct to know and the instinct to live, or rather to survive, come into conflict. Dr. E. Mach, in his work on “The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical” (Die Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältniss des Physischen zum Psychischen), tells us in a note (I. L., § 12) that the investigator too, the scholar, der Forscher, fights in the battle for existence; that the paths of science too lead to the mouth; and that the pure instinct to know, der reine Erkenntnisstrieb, is still only an ideal under our present social conditions. And so it will always be. Primum vivere, deinde philosophari [First live, then philosophize], or perhaps better, primum supervivere or superesse [first survive].note

Any position of lasting agreement and harmony between reason and life, between philosophy and religion, becomes impossible. And the tragic history of human thought is nothing but the history of a struggle between reason and life. Reason is bent on rationalizing life, making it resign itself to the inevitable, to mortality; and life is bent on vitalizing reason, forcing it to serve as a support for its vital longings. And this is the history of philosophy, inseparable from the history of religion.

The feeling of the world, of objective reality, is necessarily subjective, human, anthropomorphic. And vitalism will always rise up against rationalism; the will will always stand up against reason. Hence the rhythm of the history of philosophy: the succession of periods in which life prevails, producing spiritualist forms, and others in which reason prevails, producing materialist forms, even though both kinds of forms of belief are disguised under other names. Neither reason nor life ever admits defeat. But we shall return to this in the next chapter.

The vital consequence of rationalism would be suicide. Kierkegaard puts it very well: “Suicide is the existence-consequence¹ of pure thought… We do not praise suicide, but we do praise passion. The thinker, on the other hand, is a curious animal who is very intelligent at certain times of the day but otherwise has nothing in common with man.” (Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, ch. 3, § 1.)

Since the thinker, in spite of everything, does not cease to be a man, he puts reason at the service of life, whether he knows it or not. Life deceives reason, and reason deceives life. Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy, at the service of life, forged a theological-evolutionist system of metaphysics, apparently rational, to serve as a support for our vital longing. That philosophy, the basis of orthodox Christian supernaturalism, whether Catholic or Protestant, was at bottom nothing but a ruse of life to force reason to support it. But reason supported it so thoroughly that it ended by pulverizing it.

I have read that the ex-Carmelite Hyacinthe Loyson said he could present himself before God with a quiet mind, for he was at peace with his conscience and with his reason. With what conscience? The religious one? Then I do not understand it. The fact is that no one can serve two masters, least of all when these two masters, though they may sign truces and armistices and compromises, are enemies because their interests are opposed.note

To all this, some will no doubt say that life ought to submit to reason. We shall answer that no one ought to do what he cannot do, and life cannot submit to reason. “It ought, therefore it can,” some Kantian will reply. And we shall counter-reply: “It cannot, therefore it ought not.” And it cannot, because the end of life is to live, not to understand.

Nor have there been lacking those who have spoken of the religious duty of resigning oneself to mortality. This is the very height of aberration and insincerity. And against this matter of sincerity someone will come and set truthfulness. So be it; but the two can very well be reconciled. Truthfulness, respect for what I believe to be rational, for what we logically call truth, moves me to affirm one thing in this case: that the immortality of the individual soul is a logical contradiction, something not only irrational but contra-rational. But sincerity leads me to affirm also that I do not resign myself to this other affirmation, and that I protest against its validity.

And life, defending itself, looks for reason’s weak spot and finds it in skepticism; it grabs hold of it and tries to save itself by clinging to that handhold. It needs the weakness of its adversary.

Nothing is certain; everything is up in the air. And Lamennais, swelling with passion, exclaims (Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion [Essay on Indifference in Matters of Religion], IIIe partie, chap. 67): “What! Shall we sink, all hope lost and blindly, into the silent depths of a universal skepticism? Shall we doubt whether we think, whether we feel, whether we are? Nature does not allow it; she obliges us to believe even when our reason is not convinced. Absolute certainty and absolute doubt are equally forbidden to us. We float in a vague middle between these two extremes, as between being and nothingness, for complete skepticism would be the extinction of intelligence and the total death of man.note

It is not, strictly speaking, that reason leads us to absolute skepticism—no! Reason does not lead me, and cannot lead me, to doubt that I exist. Where reason leads me is to vital skepticism; better still, to vital negation: not merely to doubt, but to deny that my consciousness survives my death. Vital skepticism comes from the clash between reason and desire. And from this clash, from this embrace between despair and skepticism, is born holy, sweet, saving uncertainty, our supreme consolation.

Suppose we had absolute, complete certainty that death is a complete, definitive and irrevocable annihilation of personal consciousness, a certainty like our certainty that the three angles of a triangle equal two right angles. Or suppose we had absolute, complete certainty that our personal consciousness continues beyond death in these or those conditions, bringing into it above all the strange and adventitious addition of eternal reward or punishment. Either certainty would make life equally impossible for us.

The “What if there is?” and the “What if there is not?” are the foundations of our inner life. There may perhaps be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction that the soul is mortal, and a vitalist who has never wavered in his faith in immortality. But that will mean at most that, just as there are monsters, there are also people who are stupid in affection or feeling, however much intelligence they have, and people who are stupid in intellect, however great their virtue. But in the normal run of things I cannot believe those who assure me that never, not in the most fleeting blink of an eye, not in the hours of greatest solitude and tribulation, has this murmur of uncertainty surfaced in their consciousness.

In chapter IX of the Gospel according to Mark we are told how a man brought his son to Jesus. The boy was possessed by a mute spirit which tore him wherever it seized him, making him foam at the mouth, gnash his teeth and waste away, and so the father wanted to present him to Jesus to be cured. And the Master, impatient with those men who wanted nothing but miracles and signs, exclaimed: “O faithless generation! How long shall I be with you? How long must I bear with you? Bring him to me!” (v. 19). And they brought him. The Master saw him rolling on the ground and asked his father how long this had been going on. The father answered that it had been since his son was a child, and Jesus said to him: “If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes” (v.note

Lord, I believe; come to the aid of my unbelief! This may seem a contradiction, for if he believes, if he trusts, how can he ask the Lord to come to the aid of his lack of trust? And yet it is this very contradiction that gives its whole, deepest human value to that cry from the depths of the possessed boy’s father. His faith is a faith founded on uncertainty. Because he believes—that is, because he wants to believe, because he needs his son to be cured—he asks the Lord to come to the help of his unbelief, of his doubt that such a cure can be brought about.

Tormented by agonizing doubts, August Hermann Francke decided to call upon God—a God in whom he no longer believed, or rather in whom he believed he did not believe—to have pity on him, on poor Francke the Pietist, if indeed he existed¹. And it was an analogous state of mind that inspired me to write the sonnet entitled “The Atheist’s Prayer,” which appears in my Rosario de sonetos líricos (Rosary of Lyric Sonnets) and ends thus: I suffer at your expense, / non-existent God, for if you existed / I too would truly exist.note

Yes: if the God who guarantees our personal immortality existed, then we would truly exist. And if not, not!

That terrible secret, that hidden will of God which finds expression in predestination, that idea which dictated to Luther his servum arbitrium [enslaved will] and gives Calvinism its tragic sense, that doubt about one’s own salvation—at bottom it is nothing but uncertainty, which, allied with despair, forms the basis of faith. Faith, some say, is not thinking about it: surrendering oneself trustingly into the arms of God, the secrets of whose providence are inscrutable. Yes, but unbelief is also not thinking about it.

And what but uncertainty, doubt, the voice of reason, was the abyss, the terrible gouffre before which Pascal trembled? And it was this that led him to formulate his terrible sentence: Il faut s’abêtir—one must make oneself stupid!

All of Jansenism, the Catholic adaptation of Calvinism, bears this same stamp. That Port-Royal which owed its existence to a Basque, the Abbé de Saint-Cyran—a Basque like Íñigo de Loyola, and like the one who writes these lines—always carries at its bottom a sediment of religious despair, of the suicide of reason. Íñigo, too, killed reason: he killed it in obedience.note

Out of despair one affirms, out of despair one denies, and out of despair one abstains from affirming and denying. Look at most of our atheists and you will see that they are atheists out of rage, rage at not being able to believe that there is a God. They are God’s personal enemies. They have substantivized and personalized Nothingness, and their no-God is an Anti-God.

And we need say nothing of that abject and ignoble phrase, “if there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.” This is the expression of the filthy skepticism of conservatives, of those who regard religion as an instrument of government and whose interest it is that there be a hell in the other life for those who oppose their worldly interests here. That repugnant Sadducee’s phrase is worthy of the unbelieving flatterer of the powerful to whom it is attributed.note

No, that is not the deep vital meaning. It is not a matter of a transcendent police force, nor of securing order—some order!—on earth with threats of punishment and the lure of reward, eternal ones, after death. All this is very base, that is to say, nothing more than politics, or, if you like, ethics. It is a matter of living.

And the strongest ground of uncertainty, what most shakes our vital desire, what most lends force to the dissolving work of reason, is when we set ourselves to consider what a life of the soul after death might be. For even if, by a mighty effort of faith, we overcome reason, which tells and teaches us that the soul is nothing but a function of the organized body, there still remains the task of imagining what an immortal and eternal life of the soul could be. In this imagining, contradictions and absurdities multiply, and one arrives, perhaps, at Kierkegaard’s conclusion: that if the mortality of the soul is terrible, its immortality is no less terrible.

But once the first difficulty is overcome, the only true one; once the obstacle of reason is overcome and faith is won—faith, however painful and wrapped in uncertainty, that our personal consciousness will persist after death—what difficulty, what obstacle is there to our imagining that persistence to the measure of our desire? Yes, we can imagine it as an eternal rejuvenation, as an eternal growing of ourselves, a going toward God, toward the Universal Consciousness, without ever reaching him; we can imagine it... Who can put fetters on the imagination once it has broken the chain of the rational?

I know I am being heavy, tiresome, perhaps tedious; but all of it is necessary. And I must repeat once more that it is not a matter of a transcendent police force, nor of making God a great Judge or Civil Guard; that is, it is not a matter of heaven and hell to prop up our poor worldly morality, nor is it a matter of anything selfish and personal. It is not I; it is the whole human race that is at stake; it is the ultimate purpose of all our culture. I am one; but all are I’s.

Do you remember the end of that “Song of the Wild Cock” which the despairing Leopardi—the victim of reason, who never managed to come to believe—wrote in prose? “A time will come,” he says, “when this Universe and Nature herself will have been extinguished. And just as of the greatest human kingdoms and empires, and of their marvelous deeds, which in another age were most famous, there remains today neither sign nor any fame, so likewise of the whole world, and of the infinite vicissitudes and calamities of created things, not a single trace will remain; but a naked silence and a most profound stillness will fill the immense space.note

I have brought the reader who has had the patience to read me this far through a series of painful reflections, always trying to give reason its due and to give feeling its due as well. I have not wanted to keep silent about what others keep silent about; I have wanted to lay bare not my own soul but the human soul, whatever it may be, and whether or not it is destined to disappear. And we have reached the bottom of the abyss, the irreconcilable conflict between reason and the vital feeling. And having got here, I have told you that we must accept the conflict as such and live by it.

I do not want to deceive anyone, or to pass off as philosophy what is perhaps nothing but poetry or phantasmagoria—mythology, in any case. The divine Plato, after discussing the immortality of the soul in his dialogue Phaedo—an ideal immortality, that is, a lying one—launched into setting out the myths about the other life, saying that one must also mythologize. Let us, then, mythologize.

Anyone who is looking for reasons—what we strictly call reasons: scientific arguments, technically logical considerations—may give up following me. In what remains of these reflections on the tragic sense, I am going to fish for the reader’s attention with a bare hook, without bait; whoever wants to bite, let him bite, but I deceive no one. Only at the end do I mean to gather everything together and maintain that this religious despair I was speaking of, which is nothing but the tragic sense of life itself, is, more or less veiled, the very ground of the consciousness of the cultured individuals and peoples of today—that is, of those individuals and those peoples who suffer neither from intellectual stupidity nor from stupidity of feeling.

And that sense is the source of heroic deeds.

If in what follows you come across arbitrary apothegms, abrupt transitions, breaks in continuity, veritable somersaults of thought, do not say you were deceived. We are going to enter—if you are willing to come with me—a field of contradictions between feeling and reasoning, and we shall have to make use of both.

What follows has come to me not from reason but from life, although in order to pass it on to you I have, in a certain way, to rationalize it. Most of it cannot be reduced to a theory or a logical system; but, like Walt Whitman, the enormous Yankee poet, I charge you not to found any school or theory on me. / I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me. (Myself and Mine.)

Nor are the fantasies that follow mine—no! They belong also to other men, not exactly other thinkers, who have gone before me in this vale of tears and have brought their life out into the open and given it expression. Their life, I say, and not their thought, except insofar as it was the thought of life: thought on an irrational basis.

Does this mean that everything we are about to see—the efforts of the irrational to express itself—lacks all rationality, all objective value? No. The absolutely, irrevocably irrational is inexpressible, is incommunicable. But the contra-rational is not. Perhaps there is no way to rationalize the irrational; but there is a way to rationalize the contra-rational, and that is by trying to set it forth. Since only the rational is intelligible, truly intelligible, and since the absurd, lacking sense as it does, is condemned to be incommunicable, you will see that whenever one manages to express something that seems irrational or absurd and to make it understood, it always resolves itself into something rational, even if it is only the negation of what is asserted.

The maddest dreams of fantasy have some ground of reason, and who knows whether everything a man can imagine has not happened, does not happen or will not happen at some time, in one world or another? The possible combinations are perhaps infinite. It only remains to know whether everything imaginable is possible.

It may also be said, and justly, that much of what I am going to set out is a repetition of ideas set out a hundred times before and refuted another hundred; but when an idea comes back again, it is because, strictly speaking, it was never truly refuted. I do not claim novelty for most of these fantasies, just as I do not claim either—of course!—that voices casting the same complaints to the wind have not sounded before mine. But the fact that the same eternal complaint can return, coming from another mouth, only means that the suffering persists.

And it is well to repeat once more the same eternal lamentations, those that were already old in the time of Job and Ecclesiastes—even if one repeats them in the same words—so that the progressives may see that this is something that never dies. Whoever makes his own the vanity of vanities of Ecclesiastes, or the complaints of Job, and repeats them, even word for word, performs a work of warning. We must keep repeating the memento mori [remember that you must die].

What for? you will say. If only so that some people will be irritated and see that this has not died, that as long as there are human beings it cannot die; so that they may be convinced that all the past centuries survive today, in the twentieth century, and all of them alive. When even a supposed error comes back, it is, believe me, because it has not ceased to be partly true—just as when someone reappears, it is because he did not wholly die.

Yes, I know that others before me have felt what I feel and express; that many others feel it today, though they keep it to themselves. Why do I not keep it to myself too? Well, because most of those who feel it do keep silent about it; but even while keeping silent, they obey in silence that voice from the depths. And I do not keep silent about it because for many it is what must not be said, the unspeakable—infandum—and I believe it is necessary to say again and again what must not be said. That it leads nowhere? Even if it led only to irritating the progressives, those who believe that truth is consolation, it would lead to no small thing. To irritating them, and to their saying: What a pity about the man! If only he put his intelligence to better use!...

And whoever goes on reading me will also see how hope can rise out of this abyss of despair, and how this critical position can be a source of action and of human work, deeply human, and of solidarity and even of progress. The reader who goes on reading me will see its pragmatic justification. And he will see how, in order to act, and to act effectively and morally, neither of the two opposing certainties is needed—neither that of faith nor that of reason—and still less (this in no case) is there any need to evade the problem of the immortality of the soul or to deform it idealistically, that is, hypocritically.

And since the sense of uncertainty, the inner struggle between reason and faith, and the passionate longing for eternal life are thus a basis for action and a foundation of morality, that feeling would, by the pragmatist’s standard, be justified. But let it be on record that I do not look for this practical consequence in order to justify it; I point to it because I find it through inner experience. I neither want nor ought to seek any justification for this state of inner struggle and uncertainty and longing; it is a fact, and that is enough.

Man, in fact, cannot resign himself to not knowing the motives of his own conduct. Someone who has been hypnotized and given the suggestion of this or that act afterwards invents reasons to justify it and make it logical in his own eyes and in those of others, not knowing, in reality, the true cause of his act. Just so every other man—who is hypnotized too, for life is a dream—looks for reasons for his conduct. And if chess pieces had consciousness, they would very likely attribute free will to their movements, that is, a purposive rationality.

Consequently, I believe I may suppose this. My reason, which is in a certain way part of the reason of my brothers in humanity, in time and in space, teaches me this absolute skepticism as regards the longing for unending life; and so it is my sense of life, which is the essence of life itself—my vitality, my unbridled appetite for living and my repugnance at dying, this refusal of mine to resign myself to death—that suggests to me the doctrines with which I try to counteract the work of reason. Do these doctrines have an objective value? someone will ask me; and I shall answer that I do not understand what this objective value of a doctrine is supposed to be.

Nor is anything gained by trotting out the ambiguous words pessimism and optimism, which often tell us the opposite of what the person using them meant to tell us. To label a doctrine pessimistic is not to condemn its validity, nor are the so-called optimists more effective in action. I believe, on the contrary, that many of the greatest heroes, perhaps the very greatest, have been men in despair, and that it was out of despair that they accomplished their deeds. And that, apart from this, and accepting these labels of optimism and pessimism, ambiguous though they are, there is room for a certain transcendent pessimism that begets a temporal and earthly optimism—this is something I propose to develop in the rest of this treatise.

Very different, I know well, is the position of our progressives, those of the central current of contemporary European thought; but I cannot bring myself to believe that these people do not deliberately close their eyes to the great problem, and that they do not live, at bottom, on a lie, trying to stifle the tragic sense of life.

These considerations are a kind of practical summary of the critique developed in the first six chapters of this treatise: a way of setting down the practical position to which that critique can lead someone who does not want to renounce life, and does not want to renounce reason either, and must live and act between these two opposing millstones that grind our soul. And with these considerations made, the reader who follows me from here on knows that I am going to lead him into a field of fantasies—fantasies not devoid of reason, for without reason nothing subsists, but founded on feeling.

Cain. Let me, or happy or unhappy, learn / To anticipate my immortality. / Lucifer. Thou didst before I came upon thee. / Cain. How? / Lucifer. By suffering. / (Lord Byron: Cain, act II, scene 1.)

Love, my readers and brothers, is the most tragic thing there is in the world and in life. Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion; love is consolation in desolation; it is the only medicine against death, being, as it is, death’s sister. Fratelli, a un tempo stesso, Amore e Morte / Ingenerò la sorte [Fate begot Love and Death as brothers, at one and the same time], as Leopardi sang.note

Love seeks furiously, through the beloved, something that lies beyond the beloved; and since it does not find it, it despairs.

Whenever we speak of love, sexual love comes to mind: the love between man and woman to perpetuate the human race on earth. And this is what makes it impossible to reduce love either to the purely intellective or to the purely volitional while leaving out its sentimental, or if you like its sensitive, side. For love, at bottom, is neither idea nor volition; it is rather desire, feeling; it is something carnal even in the spirit. Thanks to love we feel all that is flesh in the spirit.

Sexual love is the generative type of all other love. In love and through it we seek to perpetuate ourselves, and we perpetuate ourselves on earth only on condition of dying, of giving our life over to others. The humblest little animals, the lowest living things, multiply by dividing, by splitting, by ceasing to be the one they were before.

But when the vitality of the being that multiplies thus by dividing is at last exhausted, the species must from time to time renew the wellspring of life through unions of two declining individuals, through what is called conjugation in protozoa. They unite in order to divide again with more vigor. And every act of begetting is a ceasing to be, wholly or partly, what one was; a splitting; a partial death. To live is to give oneself, to perpetuate oneself, and to perpetuate oneself and give oneself is to die. Perhaps the supreme delight of begetting is nothing but a foretaste of death, the tearing apart of one’s own vital essence. We unite with another, but it is in order to split; that most intimate embrace is nothing but a most intimate tearing apart.

There is, no doubt, something tragically destructive at the bottom of love as it presents itself to us in its primitive animal form, in the invincible instinct that drives a male and a female to fuse their innermost beings in a furious embrace. The same thing that fuses their bodies separates their souls, in a certain respect; in embracing, they hate each other as much as they love each other, and above all they struggle, they struggle for a third, still without life. Love is a struggle, and there are animal species in which the male mistreats the female as he unites with her, and others in which the female devours the male once he has fertilized her.

Love has been called a mutual egoism. And in fact each of the lovers seeks to possess the other; and seeking through the other his own perpetuation, without thinking of it or intending it at the time, he consequently seeks his own pleasure. Each of the lovers is for the other an instrument of pleasure immediately, and of perpetuation mediately. And so they are tyrants and slaves; each of them at once tyrant and slave of the other.

Is it at all strange, then, that the deepest religious sense has condemned carnal love and exalted virginity? Avarice is the source of all sins, said the Apostle. And this is because avarice takes wealth, which is only a means, as an end; and the heart of sin is just this: taking means as ends, ignoring or despising the end. And carnal love, which takes as its end pleasure, which is only a means, and not perpetuation, which is the end—what is it but avarice? And it is possible that there are those who keep their virginity in order to perpetuate themselves the better. And to perpetuate something more human than the flesh.note

For what lovers perpetuate on earth is the flesh of suffering, is suffering, is death. Love is the brother, the son and at the same time the father of death, which is its sister, its mother and its daughter. And so there is in the depth of love a depth of eternal despair, from which hope and consolation spring. For from this carnal and primitive love I have been speaking of, this love of the whole body with its senses, which is the animal origin of human society—from this falling in love springs spiritual and sorrowful love.

This other form of love, this spiritual love, is born of suffering, is born of the death of carnal love; it is born too of the compassionate feeling of protection that parents experience before their helpless children. Lovers do not come to love each other with self-surrender, with a true fusion of their souls and not merely of their bodies, until the mighty pestle of suffering has crushed their hearts, grinding them together in one and the same mortar of sorrow. Sensual love fused their bodies but separated their souls; it kept them strangers to each other. But from that love they had a fruit of flesh, a child. And this child, begotten in death, perhaps fell ill and died.

All of which is felt still more clearly and strongly when there springs up, takes root and grows one of those tragic loves that must struggle against the adamantine laws of Destiny: one of those loves that are born at the wrong time or in the wrong way, before or after the moment, or outside the norm, in which the world, which is custom, would have welcomed them.

And maternal love—what is it but compassion for the weak, for the helpless, for the poor defenseless child who needs its mother’s milk and lap? And in woman all love is maternal.

To love in spirit is to feel compassion, and whoever feels more compassion loves more. Men burning with ardent charity toward their neighbors are so because they reached the bottom of their own misery, of their own seemingness, of their own nothingness; and then, turning their eyes, thus opened, toward their fellows, they saw that they too were miserable, mere seemings, doomed to annihilation, and they felt compassion for them and loved them.

Man yearns to be loved, or, what comes to the same thing, yearns to be the object of compassion. Man wants his sorrows and his sufferings to be felt and shared. There is more than a ruse for getting alms in the way beggars at the roadside show the passer-by their sore or their gangrenous stump. Alms are not so much help in bearing the hardships of life as compassion. The beggar is not grateful for the alms of someone who gives them with his face turned away, so as not to see him and to get him out of the way; rather, he is more grateful for compassion without help than for help without compassion, although in another respect he may prefer the latter.

Woman’s love above all, I was saying, is always compassionate at bottom; it is maternal. A woman yields to her lover because she feels him suffering with desire. Isabella felt compassion for Lorenzo, Juliet for Romeo, Francesca for Paolo. The woman seems to say: “Come, poor dear, and don’t suffer so on my account!” And that is why her love is more loving and purer than man’s, and braver and longer-lasting.note

Compassion, then, is the essence of spiritual human love, of love that is conscious of being love, of love that is not purely animal—of the love, in short, of a rational person. Love feels compassion, and feels more compassion the more it loves.

Inverting the nihil volitum quin praecognitum [nothing is willed that is not first known], I told you that nihil cognitum quin praevolitum: that nothing is known that has not in one way or another first been willed. And one may even add that nothing can be known well that is not loved, that is not the object of compassion.

As love grows, this burning yearning for the further beyond and the further within goes on extending to everything it sees; it comes to feel compassion for everything. As you go into yourself and delve deeper into yourself, you discover your own inanity: that you are not all that you are not, that you are not what you would like to be, that you are, in short, nothing but a mere nothing.

Spiritual love of oneself, the compassion one comes to feel for oneself, may perhaps be called egotism; but it is the most opposite thing there is to ordinary egoism. For from this love or compassion for yourself, from this intense despair—because just as before you were born you were not, so after you die you will not be—you pass on to feeling compassion for, that is, to loving, all your fellows and brothers in seemingness: wretched shadows filing past from their nothingness to their nothingness, sparks of consciousness that shine for a moment in the infinite and eternal darkness.

And if it is painful to have to cease to be one day, it would perhaps be more painful to go on being forever oneself, and nothing more than oneself, without being able to be another at the same time, without being able to be everything else at the same time, without being able to be everything.

If you look at the universe as closely and as inwardly as you can look at it, which is within yourself; if you feel, and not merely contemplate, all things in your consciousness, where every one of them has left its painful mark, you will reach the very depths of tedium—not of life only, but of something more: the tedium of existence, the well of vanity of vanities. And that is how you will come to feel compassion for everything, to universal love.

In order to love everything, to feel compassion for everything, human and extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within yourself, you must personalize everything. For love personalizes everything it loves, everything it feels compassion for. We feel compassion for—that is, we love—only what is like us, and insofar as it is like us, and all the more the more it resembles us. And so our compassion grows, and with it our love for things, as we discover the likenesses they have with us. Or rather, it is love itself, which by its nature tends to grow, that reveals these likenesses to us.

Consciousness, conscientia, is shared knowledge; it is a feeling-with, con-sentimiento; and to feel with, con-sentir, is to suffer with, com-padecer.note

Love personalizes whatever it loves. One can fall in love with an idea only by personalizing it. And when love is so great and so living, so strong and overflowing, that it loves everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers that the total All, the Universe, is also a Person, with a Consciousness—a Consciousness which in its turn suffers, feels compassion and loves, that is, which is consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe, which love discovers by personalizing whatever it loves, is what we call God.

God, then, is the personalization of the All, the eternal and infinite Consciousness of the Universe. It is a Consciousness held captive by matter and struggling to free itself from it. We personalize the All in order to save ourselves from nothingness, and the only truly mysterious mystery is the mystery of suffering.

Suffering is the path of consciousness, and it is through suffering that living beings come to be conscious of themselves. For to be conscious of oneself, to have personality, is to know and feel oneself distinct from other beings. One comes to feel this distinction only through collision, through suffering, greater or lesser, through the sensation of one’s own limit. Consciousness of oneself is nothing but consciousness of one’s own limitation. I feel myself when I feel that I am not the others; to know and feel how far I extend is to know where I cease to be, the point beyond which I am not.

And how is one to know that one exists without suffering, a little or a lot? How is one to turn back upon oneself, to attain reflective consciousness, except through suffering? When we enjoy, we forget ourselves, forget that we exist; we pass over into another, into what is not ours, and become alien-ated. And only in suffering do we withdraw into ourselves, return to ourselves, become ourselves. Nessun maggior dolore / che ricordarsi del tempo felice / nella miseria [There is no greater sorrow than to remember the happy time in misery], Dante has Francesca da Rimini say (Inferno, V, 121–123). But if there is no greater sorrow than to remember the happy time in misfortune, there is, on the other hand, no pleasure in remembering misfortune in the time of prosperity.note

“The bitterest sorrow among men is to aspire to much and be able to do nothing (πολλὰ φρονέοντα μηδενὸς κρατέειν),” as, according to Herodotus (Book IX, ch. 16), a Persian said to a Theban at a banquet. And so it is. We can embrace everything, or almost everything, with knowledge and desire; nothing, or almost nothing, with the will. And happiness is not contemplation—no!—if that contemplation means impotence. And out of this collision between our knowing and our power, compassion springs.

We feel compassion for what is like ourselves, and the more and the better we feel its likeness to us, the more compassion we feel for it. And if we may say that this likeness provokes our compassion, it can also be maintained that our store of compassion, ready to pour itself out over everything, is what makes us discover the likeness of things to ourselves, the common bond that unites us with them in suffering.

Our own struggle to gain, preserve and increase our own consciousness makes us discover, in the strivings and movements and revolutions of all things, a struggle to gain, preserve or increase consciousness, toward which everything tends. Beneath the acts of my nearest fellows, other men, I feel—or rather feel-with—a state of consciousness like mine beneath my own acts. When I hear my brother cry out in pain, my own pain awakens and cries out in the depths of my consciousness. And in the same way I feel the pain of animals, and that of a tree when a branch is torn from it, above all when my imagination is lively—imagination, which is the faculty of intuition, of inner vision.

Descending from ourselves, from our own human consciousness—the only thing we feel from within, the thing in which feeling oneself is one with being oneself—we suppose that all living things have some consciousness, more or less obscure, and so do the very rocks, which also live. And the evolution of organic beings is nothing but a struggle for fullness of consciousness through suffering, a constant aspiration to be others without ceasing to be what they are, to break their limits by limiting themselves.

And this process of personalization or subjectivization of everything external, phenomenal or objective, constitutes the very vital process of philosophy in the struggle of life against reason and of reason against life. We pointed this out in our previous chapter, and here we must confirm it by developing it further.

Giambattista Vico, with his profound aesthetic insight into the soul of antiquity, saw that man’s spontaneous philosophy was to make himself the rule of the universe, guided by an istinto d’animazione [instinct of animation]. Language, necessarily anthropomorphic, mythopoeic, engenders thought. “Poetic wisdom, which was the first wisdom of the gentiles,” he tells us in his Scienza Nuova [New Science], “must have begun with a metaphysics not reasoned and abstract, like that of the learned of today, but felt and imagined, as that of the first men must have been... This was their own poetry, which was a faculty born with them, for they were naturally furnished with such senses and such imaginations. It was born of ignorance of causes, which was for them the mother of wonder at everything, for, being ignorant of everything, they marveled intensely.note

And then Vico goes on to show us the age of reason, no longer that of imagination: this age of ours, in which our mind is too far withdrawn from the senses, even among the common people, “with so many abstractions as the languages are full of.” In this age it is “naturally denied us to form the vast image of such a lady as is called sympathetic Nature; for while the mouth calls her so, there is nothing of the sort in the mind, because the mind is in falsehood, in nothingness.” “Now,” Vico adds, “it is naturally denied us to enter into the vast imagination of those first men.” But is this true?

In vain did Comte declare that human thought had already left the theological age and was leaving the metaphysical to enter the positive; the three ages coexist and, even while opposing one another, lean on one another. Brand-new positivism is nothing but metaphysics as soon as it stops denying and affirms something, as soon as it becomes really positive. And metaphysics is always, at bottom, theology; and theology is born of imagination placed at the service of life, which wants to be immortal.

Our feeling of the world, on which our understanding of it is founded, is necessarily anthropomorphic and mythopoeic. When rationalism dawned with Thales of Miletus, this philosopher left behind Oceanus and Tethys, gods and parents of gods, to set up water as the principle of things; but this water was a god in disguise. Beneath nature, φύσις, and the world, κόσμος, mythic, anthropomorphic creations were throbbing. Language itself carried them within it. Socrates, as Xenophon tells us (Memorabilia I, 1, 6–9), distinguished among phenomena those within the reach of human study and those others that the gods have reserved for themselves, and he execrated Anaxagoras’s wish to explain everything rationally.

And the concept of God, forever reborn because it springs from the eternal sense of God in man—what is it but the eternal protest of life against reason, the never-conquered instinct of personalization? And what is the very notion of substance but the objectification of what is most subjective, which is the will, or consciousness? For consciousness, even before it knows itself as reason, feels itself, touches itself—or rather is itself—as will, and as will not to die. Hence that rhythm in the history of thought of which we were speaking. Positivism brought us an age of rationalism, that is, of materialism, mechanism or mortalism; and now, behold, vitalism, spiritualism, returns.

And it is no use trying to suppress this mythopoeic or anthropomorphic process and to rationalize our thought, as if one thought only in order to think and to know, and not in order to live. Language itself, with which we think, prevents us. Language, the substance of thought, is a system of metaphors with a mythic and anthropomorphic basis. To construct a purely rational philosophy, one would have to do it with algebraic formulas, or create a language for it—an inhuman language, that is, one unfit for the needs of life. That is what Dr. Richard Avenarius, professor of philosophy at Zurich, attempted in his “Critique of Pure Experience” (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung), so as to avoid preconceptions.note

To see clearly!... to see clearly! Only a pure thinker would see clearly—one who used algebra instead of language and could free himself from his own humanity, that is, an insubstantial being, merely objective: a non-being, in short. Whether reason likes it or not, we must think with life; and whether life likes it or not, we must rationalize thought.

This animation, this personification, is embedded in our very knowing. “Who rains? Who thunders?” old Strepsiades asks Socrates in Aristophanes’ The Clouds, and the philosopher answers him: “Not Zeus, but the clouds.” And Strepsiades: “But who but Zeus makes them move?” To which Socrates: “Nothing of the kind; it is the ethereal vortex.” “The Vortex?” Strepsiades adds. “I didn’t know that... So it is not Zeus, but the Vortex, that now rules in his place.” And the poor old man goes on personifying and animating the Vortex, which now reigns like a king not without consciousness of his royalty. And all of us, when we pass from some Zeus or other to some vortex or other—from God to matter, for example—do the same.

Man does not resign himself to being alone in the Universe as a consciousness, nor to being one more objective phenomenon. He wants to save his vital or passional subjectivity by making the whole Universe living, personal, animate. That is why, and that is what for, he has discovered God and substance—God and substance, which keep returning in his thought, disguised in one way or another. Because we are conscious, we feel ourselves exist, which is something very different from knowing ourselves to be existing; and we want to feel the existence of everything else, want each of the other individual things to be an I as well.

The most consistent idealism, though the most incongruous and wavering, is that of Berkeley, who denied the existence of matter, of something inert, extended and passive that might be the cause of our sensations and the substratum of external phenomena. At bottom it is nothing but an absolute spiritualism or dynamism: the supposition that every sensation comes to us, as from its cause, from another spirit, that is, from another consciousness. And in a certain way his doctrine joins hands with those of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. The doctrine of the Will of the first of these two, and that of the Unconscious of the other, are already potentially present in the Berkeleyan doctrine that to be is to be perceived.note

And as for Schopenhauer, there is no need to take pains to show how the will that he posits as the essence of things proceeds from consciousness. It is enough to read his book on the will in Nature to see how he attributed a certain spirit, and even a certain personality, to plants themselves. And this doctrine of his led him logically to pessimism, because what is most proper and most intimate to the will is to suffer. The will is a force that feels itself, that is, that suffers. And that enjoys, someone will add. But the point is that there can be no capacity for enjoyment without the capacity for suffering, and the faculty of enjoyment is the same as that of pain.

And it is very logical, too, that Schopenhauer, who drew pessimism from the voluntarist doctrine, the doctrine of the personalization of everything, should draw from both that the foundation of morality is compassion. Only his lack of social and historical sense—his not feeling humanity as a person too, though a collective one—his egoism, in short, prevented him from feeling God, prevented him from individualizing and personalizing the total and collective Will: the Will of the Universe.

One understands, on the other hand, his aversion to purely empirical evolutionist or transformist doctrines, as he came to see them set out by Lamarck and Darwin. Judging Darwin’s theory only from a long extract in the Times, he called it “shallow empiricism” (platter Empirismus) in one of his letters to Adam Ludwig von Doss (of 1 March 1860). For a voluntarist like Schopenhauer, indeed, a theory as sound and cautiously empirical and rational as Darwin’s left out of account the inner spring, the essential motive of evolution. For what, in fact, is the hidden force, the ultimate agent, by which organisms perpetuate themselves and strive to persist and propagate? Selection, adaptation, heredity are only external conditions.

And this force, this aspiration to consciousness, sympathy makes us discover in everything. It moves and stirs the tiniest living beings; it moves and stirs, perhaps, the very cells of our own bodily organism, which is a more or less unitary federation of living things; it moves the very corpuscles of our blood. Our life is made up of lives, our vital aspiration of aspirations, perhaps in the limbo of the subconscious. It is no more absurd a dream than so many dreams that pass for valid theories to believe that our cells, our corpuscles, have something like a consciousness, or a rudimentary basis of one—cellular, corpuscular. Or that they may come to have one.

Perhaps the immense Milky Way that we contemplate in the sky on clear nights, that enormous ring of which our planetary system is but a molecule, is in its turn a cell of the universe, of the Body of God. All the cells of our body conspire and concur by their activity to maintain and kindle our consciousness, our soul. And if the consciousnesses or souls of all of them entered wholly into ours, into the one they compose—if I were conscious of everything that happens in my bodily organism—I would feel the universe pass through me, and perhaps the painful sense of my limits would be erased.

Within us, obscure consciousnesses, elementary souls, are born and die at every instant, and this birth and death of theirs constitutes our life. And when they die abruptly, in a collision, they cause our pain. So in the bosom of God consciousnesses are born and die—die?—and their births and deaths constitute his life.

If there is a Universal and Supreme Consciousness, I am an idea in it; and can any idea be wholly extinguished in it? After I have died, God will go on remembering me; and to be remembered by God, to have my consciousness sustained by the Supreme Consciousness—is that not, perhaps, being?

And if someone were to say that God has made the universe, one can retort that our soul, too, has made our body as much as it has been made by it. If indeed there is a soul.

Compassion, love, reveals to us the whole universe struggling to gain, preserve and increase its consciousness, to become more and more conscious, feeling the pain of the discords that arise within it. When it does, compassion reveals to us the likeness of the whole universe to ourselves—that it is human—and makes us discover in it our Father, of whose flesh we are flesh; love makes us personalize the whole of which we form part.

At bottom, it comes to the same thing to say that God is eternally producing things as to say that things are eternally producing God. And belief in a personal and spiritual God rests on belief in our own personality and spirituality. Because we feel ourselves to be consciousness, we feel God to be consciousness, that is, a person; and because we long for our consciousness to be able to live and be independently of the body, we believe that the divine person lives and is independently of the universe, which is his state of consciousness ad extra [directed outward].

Of course the logicians will come and put before us all the evident rational difficulties that arise from this; but we have already said that, although it comes in rational forms, the content of all this is not, strictly speaking, rational. Every rational conception of God is in itself contradictory. Faith in God is born of love for God—we believe that he exists because we want him to exist—and it is perhaps born also of God’s love for us. Reason does not prove to us that God exists, but neither does it prove that he cannot exist.

But more on this later—more on faith in God being the personalization of the universe.

And recalling what we said elsewhere in this work, we can say that material things, insofar as they are known, spring into knowledge out of hunger; and out of hunger springs the perceptible or material universe into which we gather them. Ideal things spring from love, and from love springs God, into whom we gather those ideal things as into the Consciousness of the Universe. It is social consciousness, the child of love, of the instinct of perpetuation, that leads us to socialize everything, to see society in everything, and that shows us, in the end, how truly the whole of Nature is an infinite Society.

Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate, anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything, and even makes it human. And man’s task is to supernaturalize Nature, that is, to divinize it by humanizing it, to make it human—in short, to help it become conscious. Reason, for its part, mechanizes or materializes.

The individual—who is in a certain sense a society—and society—which is also an individual—are found united and fertilizing each other, inseparable, so that we cannot say where the one begins and the other ends; they are rather aspects of a single essence. In the same way spirit—the social element, which makes us conscious by relating us to others—and matter, the individual and individuating element, are found as one. Reason, intelligence and imagination are found as one, fertilizing one another. And the Universe and God are found as one.

Is all this true? And what is truth?—I shall ask in my turn, as Pilate asked. But not so as to wash my hands in turn without waiting for an answer.

Does truth lie in reason, or above reason, or beneath reason, or outside it in some way or other? Is only the rational true? May there not be a reality unattainable by reason by its very nature, and perhaps, by its very nature, opposed to it? And how are we to know that reality if it is only through reason that we know?

Our desire to live, our need for life, would like that to be true which makes us preserve and perpetuate ourselves, which sustains man and society. It would like the liquid that quenches our thirst when we drink it to be true water, because it quenches it; and whatever takes away our hunger to be true bread, because it takes it away.

The senses are at the service of the instinct of preservation, and whatever satisfies this need of ours to preserve ourselves, even without passing through the senses, is a kind of intimate penetration of reality into us. Is the process of assimilating food perhaps less real than the process of knowing the thing that nourishes us? It will be said that eating a loaf of bread is not the same as seeing it, touching it or tasting it; that in the one way it enters our body, but not for that reason our consciousness. Is this true? Does the bread that I have made my flesh and blood not enter my consciousness more than the other bread, of which, seeing and touching it, I say: “This is mine”?

There are those who live on air without knowing it. And so perhaps we live on God and in God—in God, the spirit and consciousness of society and of the whole Universe, insofar as the Universe too is a society.

God is felt only insofar as he is lived; and man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of his mouth (Matt. 4:4; Deut. 8:3).

And this personalization of the whole, of the Universe, to which love, compassion, leads us, is that of a person that embraces and encloses within itself the other persons that compose it.

It is the only way of giving the Universe purpose: by giving it consciousness. For where there is no consciousness there is no purpose either, since purpose presupposes an intention. And faith in God rests, as we shall see, on nothing but the vital need to give existence a purpose, to make it answer to an intention. Not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate what for, do we need God—to give meaning to the Universe.

Nor should it be surprising to hear it said that this consciousness of the Universe is composed and made up of the consciousnesses of the beings that form the Universe, of the consciousnesses of all beings, and is nevertheless a personal consciousness distinct from those that compose it. Only thus can we understand that in God we are, and move, and live. That great visionary Emanuel Swedenborg saw or glimpsed this when, in his book on heaven and hell (De Coelo et Inferno, 52), he tells us: “A whole angelic society sometimes appears in the form of a single angel, as the Lord has permitted me to see.note

Is it not perhaps that we live and love—that is, suffer and feel compassion—in that Great Person who envelops us all: all the persons who suffer and feel compassion, and all the beings who struggle to personalize themselves, to acquire consciousness of their suffering and their limitation? And are we not perhaps ideas of that total Great Consciousness which, by thinking us as existing, gives us existence? Is not our existing a being perceived and felt by God? And further on, this same visionary tells us, in his imaginative way, that each angel, each society of angels, and the whole of heaven seen together, present themselves in human form, and that by virtue of this human form of theirs the Lord governs heaven as a single man.

“God does not think, he creates; he does not exist, he is eternal,” wrote Kierkegaard (Afslutende uvidenskabelige Efterskrift [Concluding Unscientific Postscript]). But it is perhaps more exact to say with Mazzini, the mystic of the Italian city, that “God is great because he thinks by acting” (Ai giovani d’Italia [To the Young of Italy]). For in him thinking is creating, and he makes exist whatever he thinks as existing merely by thinking it, and the impossible is what is unthinkable by God. Is it not said in Scripture that God creates by his word, that is, by his thought, and that by this, by his Word, everything that exists was made? And does God forget what he has once thought? Do not all the thoughts that once pass through the Supreme Consciousness perhaps subsist in it? In him, who is eternal, is not all existence made eternal?note

Such is our longing to save consciousness, to give personal and human purpose to the Universe and to existence, that even in a supreme, most painful and heart-rending sacrifice we would bring ourselves to hear it said that if our consciousness vanishes it is in order to go and enrich the infinite and eternal Consciousness, that our souls serve as nourishment for the Universal Soul.

We have created God in order to save the Universe from nothingness, for what is not consciousness—and eternal consciousness, conscious of its eternity and eternally conscious—is nothing but appearance. The only thing truly real is what feels, suffers, feels compassion, loves and longs: it is consciousness; the only substantial thing is consciousness. And we need God in order to save consciousness; not in order to think existence, but in order to live it; not in order to know why and how it is, but in order to feel what it is for. Love is an absurdity if there is no God.

Let us now look at this matter of God: the logical God, or Supreme Reason, and the biotic God, the God of the heart, that is, Supreme Love.

I do not think it does violence to the truth to say that religious feeling is a sense of divinity, and that only by doing violence to ordinary human language can one speak of an atheistic religion. Although, clearly, everything will depend on the concept of God that we form. And that concept depends in turn on the concept of divinity.

It suits us, in fact, to begin with the sense of divinity, before capitalizing the concept of this quality and, by giving it the article, turning it into the Divinity, that is, into God. For man has gone to God by way of the divine, rather than deducing the divine from God.

Earlier, in the course of these somewhat wandering and at the same time insistent reflections on the tragic sense of life, I recalled Statius’s timor fecit deos [fear made the gods] in order to correct and limit it. Nor is this the place to trace once more the historical process by which peoples have arrived at the feeling and the concept of a personal God like that of Christianity. And I say peoples and not isolated individuals, because if there is a collective, social feeling and concept, it is that of God, even if the individual later individualizes it. Philosophy can have, and in fact has, an individual origin; theology is necessarily collective.note

Schleiermacher’s doctrine, which places the origin, or rather the essence, of religious feeling in the immediate and simple feeling of dependence, seems to be the most profound and exact explanation. Primitive man, living in society, feels himself dependent on mysterious powers that invisibly surround him. He feels himself in social communion not only with his fellows, other men, but with the whole of Nature, animate and inanimate, which means nothing other than that he personalizes everything. Not only is he conscious of the world, but he imagines that the world too is conscious, as he is.

The divine, then, was not something objective, but the subjectivity of consciousness projected outward, the personalization of the world. The concept of divinity arose from the sense of it, and the sense of divinity is nothing but that same obscure and nascent sense of personality poured out onto what lies outside. Nor, strictly speaking, can one speak of outside and inside, objective and subjective, when no such distinction was felt; and it is from that distinction, as it happens, that the sense and the concept of divinity proceed. The clearer the consciousness of the distinction between the objective and the subjective, the dimmer the sense of divinity in us.

It has been said, and apparently with complete justification, that Hellenic paganism is pantheistic rather than polytheistic. I do not know that belief in many gods, taking the concept of God as we take it today, has ever existed in a human head. And if by pantheism is meant the doctrine not that everything and each thing is God—a proposition I find unthinkable—but that everything is divine, one can say without much violence that paganism was pantheistic. The gods not only mingled among men but mingled with them; the gods begot children on mortal women, and mortal men begot demigods on goddesses.

What properly distinguished gods from men was that the gods were immortal. A god came to be an immortal man, and to divinize a man, to regard him as a God, was to hold that, strictly speaking, when he died he had not died. Certain heroes were believed to have gone alive to the kingdom of the dead. And this is a most important point for assessing the value of the divine.

In those republics of gods there was always some supreme god, some true monarch. It was divine monarchy that, by way of monolatry, led peoples to monotheism. Monarchy and monotheism are thus twins. Zeus, Jupiter, was on the way to becoming the sole god, just as Yahweh—who began as one among many gods—became the sole god, first of the people of Israel, then of humanity, and finally of the whole universe.

Like monarchy, monotheism had a military origin. “It is on the march and in time of war,” says Robertson Smith (The Prophets of Israel, Lecture I), “that a nomad people feels the urgent need of a central authority; and so it came about that, in the first beginnings of national organization around the sanctuary of the ark, Israel thought of itself as the host of Jehovah. The very name of Israel is martial and means God fights, and Jehovah in the Old Testament is Iahwé Zebahát, the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the battlefield that Jehovah’s presence was felt most clearly; but among primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in time of peace.”note

God, the one God, thus arose from the sense of divinity in man as a warrior God, monarchical and social. He revealed himself to the people, not to each individual. He was the God of a people, and jealously demanded that worship be paid to him alone. From this monolatry the passage was made to monotheism, largely through the individual action—more philosophical, perhaps, than theological—of the prophets. It was, in fact, the individual activity of the prophets that individualized the divinity. Above all by making it ethical.

And this God, thus arisen in human consciousness out of the sense of divinity, was then seized upon by reason, that is, by philosophy, which set out to define him, to turn him into an idea. For to define something is to idealize it, and for that one must leave aside its incommensurable or irrational element, its vital core. And the felt God—divinity felt as a single person and consciousness outside us, though enveloping and sustaining us—was turned into the idea of God.

The logical, rational God, the ens summum [highest being], the primum movens [prime mover], the Supreme Being of theological philosophy, the God reached by the three famous ways of negation, eminence and causality, viae negationis, eminentiae, causalitatis, is nothing but an idea of God, something dead. The traditional and so often debated proofs of his existence are at bottom nothing but a vain attempt to determine his essence; for, as Vinet very rightly observed, existence is drawn from essence, and to say that God exists without saying what God is and how he is amounts to saying nothing.

And this God, reached by eminence and by negation or removal of finite qualities, ends up being an unthinkable God, a pure idea, a God of whom, by reason of his very ideal excellence, we can say that he is nothing, as Scotus Eriugena already defined him: Deus propter excellentiam non immerito nihil vocatur [God, because of his excellence, is not unfittingly called nothing]. Or, in the words of the Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in his fifth epistle: “The divine darkness is the inaccessible light in which God is said to dwell.” The anthropomorphic and felt God, as he is purified of human attributes—finite, relative and temporal as such—evaporates into the God of deism or of pantheism.note

The supposed classical proofs of the existence of God all refer to this God-Idea, this logical God, the God reached by removal. Hence, strictly speaking, they prove nothing; that is, they prove nothing more than the existence of that idea of God.

I was a young man just beginning to be troubled by these eternal problems when, in a certain book whose author I do not care to remember, I read this: “God is a great X on the ultimate barrier of human knowledge; as science advances, the barrier recedes.” And I wrote in the margin: “On this side of the barrier, everything is explained without him; on the far side, neither with him nor without him; God, therefore, is superfluous.” And with respect to the God-Idea, the God of the proofs, I still hold the same opinion. Laplace is credited with saying that he had not needed the hypothesis of God to construct his system of the origin of the Universe, and that is quite true.note

It is no more conceivable that there should be an infinite, absolute and eternal Supreme Being, whose essence we do not know and who created the Universe, than that the material basis of the Universe itself, its matter, should be eternal and infinite and absolute. We understand the existence of the world not a whit better by telling ourselves that God created it. It is begging the question, or a merely verbal solution to cover up our ignorance. Strictly speaking, we deduce the existence of the Creator from the fact that what is created exists, and the Creator’s existence is not thereby rationally justified. From a fact one cannot derive a necessity—or else everything is necessary.

And if we pass from the Universe’s mode of being to what is called its order, which is supposed to require someone who ordered it, we may say that order is simply what there is, and we can conceive of no other. That proof from the order of the Universe implies a passage from the ideal order to the real one. It projects our mind outward, and it supposes that the rational explanation of a thing produces the thing itself. Human art, schooled by Nature, has a conscious making through which it understands the way things are made. We then transfer this artistic and conscious making to the consciousness of an artist, and no one knows from what nature he learned his art.

The by now classic comparison of the clock and the clockmaker cannot be applied to an absolute, infinite and eternal Being. It is, moreover, another way of explaining nothing. For to say that the world is as it is and not otherwise because God made it so is to say nothing, as long as we do not know for what reason he made it so. And if we know the reason God made it so, then God is superfluous, and the reason is enough. If everything were mathematics, if there were no irrational element, no one would have resorted to this explanation of a Supreme Orderer, which is nothing but the reason of the irrational and one more cover for our ignorance.

That by now classic supposed proof comes down, at bottom, to hypostatizing or substantivizing the explanation or reason of a phenomenon. It amounts to saying that Mechanics makes motion, Biology life, Philology language, Chemistry bodies, simply by capitalizing the science. The science is thereby turned into a power distinct from the phenomena from which we extract it and distinct from our mind, which does the extracting. But a God obtained in this way is nothing but reason hypostatized and projected into infinity. There is no way to feel him as something living and real, nor even to conceive of him except as a mere idea that will die with us.

The question is asked, moreover, whether any given thing that is imagined but does not exist fails to exist because God does not will it, or whether God does not will it because it does not exist. And with regard to the impossible, the question is whether it cannot be because God so wills, or whether God does not will it because in itself, by its very absurdity, it cannot be. God has to submit to the logical law of contradiction, and according to the theologians he cannot make two and two come to more or less than four. The law of necessity is above him, or is he himself.

The scholastic theologians have never managed to disentangle themselves from the difficulties they got into when they tried to reconcile human freedom with divine foreknowledge and with God’s knowledge of the contingent and free future. And this is because, strictly speaking, the rational God cannot be applied to the contingent at all, since the notion of contingency is at bottom nothing but the notion of irrationality.

The truth is that God cannot be God because he thinks, but because he acts, because he creates. He is not a contemplative God but an active one. A Reason-God, a theoretical or contemplative God like this God of theological rationalism, is a God who dissolves in his own contemplation. To this God corresponds, as we shall see, the beatific vision as the supreme expression of eternal happiness. He is, in short, a quietist God, just as reason is quietist by its very essence.

There remains the other famous proof, the one from the supposedly unanimous consent of all peoples in believing in a God. But strictly speaking this proof is not rational, and it does not favor the rational God who explains the Universe. It favors the God of the heart, who makes us live. We could call it rational only if we believed that reason is the more or less unanimous consent of the peoples, universal suffrage, and only if we made a reason out of the vox populi [voice of the people] that is said to be the vox Dei [voice of God].

So believed that tragic and ardent Lamennais, the man who said that life and truth are nothing but one and the same thing—would that it were so!—and who declared reason to be one, universal, perpetual and holy (Essai sur l’indifférence, Part IV, chap. VIII). And he glossed Lactantius’s “we must believe either everyone or no one”—aut omnibus credendum est aut nemini—and Heraclitus’s saying that every individual opinion is fallible, and Aristotle’s that the strongest proof is the consent of all men. Above all he glossed Pliny’s saying (in Paneg. Trajani LXII) that no one person ever deceived all, nor did all ever deceive one—nemo omnes, neminem omnes fefellerunt.—Would that it were so!note

Yes, let us suppose that this opinion of the ancients is universal and constant, the opinion which tells us that the divine pervades the whole of Nature. Let us suppose it is an ancestral dogma, πάτριος δόξα, as Aristotle says (Metaphysica, book VII, chap. VII). That would prove only that there is a motive leading peoples and individuals—whether all, or nearly all, or many—to believe in a God. But are there not, perhaps, illusions and fallacies grounded in human nature itself? Do not all peoples begin by believing that the Sun revolves around them? And is it not natural that we should all tend to believe what satisfies our longing? Shall we say with W. Hermann (see

A pious wish, no doubt, but not a reason in the strict sense. That holds unless we apply to it the Augustinian saying, which is not a reason either: “since you seek me, you have found me.” We would then be believing that it is God who makes us seek him.note

That famous argument from the supposedly unanimous consent of the peoples was the one the ancients, with a sure instinct, used most. Transferred from the collectivity to the individual, it is at bottom nothing but the so-called moral proof, the one Kant used in his Critique of Practical Reason, the one drawn from our conscience—or rather from our sense of divinity. It is not a strictly and specifically rational proof but a vital one. It cannot be applied to the logical God, the ens summum, the simplest and most abstract Being, the unmoved and impassible prime mover—in short, the Reason-God who neither suffers nor longs. It applies only to the biotic God, the most complex and most concrete Being, the God who undergoes, who suffers and longs in us and with us, the Father of Christ, to whom one cannot go except through the Man, through his Son (see

Take the unanimous consent—let us suppose it so!—of the peoples, that is, the universal longing of all human souls that have come to the consciousness of their humanity, a humanity that wants to be the end and meaning of the Universe. This longing is nothing but that very essence of the soul which consists in its striving to persist eternally and to keep the continuity of consciousness unbroken. It leads us to the human, anthropomorphic God, the projection of our consciousness onto the Consciousness of the Universe. It leads to the God who gives human purpose and meaning to the Universe, and who is not the ens summum, nor the primum movens, nor the creator of the Universe: he is not the Idea-God.

“There can be no doubt at all,” writes Ritschl (Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, III, chap. V), “that the old theology gave a very imperfect account of the spiritual personality of God when it limited it to the functions of knowing and willing. The religious conception cannot help applying to God the attribute of spiritual feeling as well. But the old theology held to the impression that feeling and affection are marks of a limited and created personality. It therefore transformed the religious conception of God’s blessedness, for example,note

The attributes of the living God, the Father of Christ, must be deduced from his historical revelation in the Gospel and in the consciousness of each Christian believer. They must not be deduced from metaphysical reasonings, which lead only to the God-Nothing of Scotus Eriugena, to the rational or pantheistic God, to the atheist God—in short, to a depersonalized Divinity.

The truth is that one does not reach the living God, the human God, by the road of reason, but by the road of love and of suffering. Reason, if anything, leads us away from him. It is not possible to know him first and love him afterward. One must begin by loving him, by longing for him, by hungering for him, before knowing him. Knowledge of God proceeds from love of God, and it is a knowledge that has little or nothing rational about it. For God is indefinable. To want to define God is to claim to limit him in our mind, and so to kill him. As soon as we try to define him, nothingness rises up before us.

The idea of God put forward by the so-called rational theodicy is nothing more than a hypothesis, like the idea of the ether, for example.

The ether is in fact nothing but a supposed entity. It has value only insofar as it explains what we try to explain by it—light, or electricity, or universal gravitation—and only insofar as these facts cannot be explained in some other way. And so the idea of God is likewise a hypothesis. It has value only insofar as it explains for us what we try to explain with it, the existence and essence of the Universe, and only as long as these are not better explained in some other way. And since in reality we explain the Universe neither better nor worse with that idea than without it, the idea of God, the supreme begging of the question, misses its mark.

But if the ether is only a hypothesis to explain light, air, by contrast, is something immediately felt. Even if it did not explain sound for us, we would always have the direct sensation of it, above all the sensation of its absence, in moments of suffocation, of hunger for air. In the same way God himself, and not merely the idea of God, can become an immediately felt reality. Even though his idea explains for us neither the existence nor the essence of the Universe, we sometimes have the direct feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation.

While I wandered through the fields of reason in search of God, I could not find him, because the idea of God did not deceive me, and I could not take an idea for God. It was then, as I roamed the wastelands of rationalism, that I told myself we should seek no consolation but the truth, meaning reason by that word. Yet I was not consoled. But as I sank into rational skepticism on the one hand and into the despair of feeling on the other, the hunger for God was kindled in me. The suffocation of my spirit made me feel his reality through his absence. And I wanted there to be a God, I wanted God to exist. And God does not exist; rather, he super-exists, and he is sustaining our existence, existing us.

God, who is Love, the Father of Love, is the son of love in us. There are shallow, external men, slaves of the reason that externalizes us, who think they have said something when they say that God did not make man in his image and likeness at all, but that it is man who makes his gods, or his God, in his own image and likeness. Frivolous as they are, they never notice that if the second is so, as it really is, this is because the first is no less true.

The Master of divinity told us to be perfect as our Father who is in heaven is perfect (Matt. 5:48). In the order of feeling and thinking, our perfection consists in striving hard for our imagination to reach the total imagination of the humanity of which we form part, in God.

The logical doctrine of the opposition between the extension and the comprehension of a concept is well known: as the one grows, the other shrinks. The most extensive and at the same time least comprehensive concept is that of entity or thing. It embraces everything that exists and has no mark other than being. The most comprehensive and least extensive concept is that of the universe, which applies only to itself and comprises all existing marks. And the logical or rational God, the God obtained by way of negation, the supreme entity, is submerged, as a reality, in nothingness. For pure being and pure nothingness, as Hegel taught, are identical.note

A universal and personal God, very different from the individual God of rigid metaphysical monotheism.

I must point out here once again that I set individuality against personality, although each needs the other. Individuality is, if I may put it this way, the container, and personality the content. Or I might also say, in a certain sense, that my personality is my comprehension: what I comprehend and enclose within me, which is in a certain way the whole Universe. My individuality is my extension. The one is what is infinite in me, and the other what is finite.

It was feeling God as Father that brought faith in the Trinity with it. For a Father God cannot be a bachelor God, that is, a solitary one. A father is always the father of a family. And feeling God as Father has been a perennial prompting to conceive of him not merely anthropomorphically, that is, as a human being—ánthropos—but andromorphically, as a male—aner. Christian popular imagination does in fact conceive of God the Father as a male. This is because the human being, homo, ἄνθρωπος, appears to us only as a man, vir, ἀνήρ, or as a woman, mulier, γυνή. To which we may add the child, who is neuter.

The cult of the Virgin, in fact—Mariolatry—has little by little raised the divine element in the Virgin in dignity, to the point of almost deifying her. It answers to nothing but the emotional need for God to be a perfect human being, for femininity to enter into God. Starting from the expression Mother of God, θεοτόκος, deipara, Catholic piety has gone on exalting the Virgin Mary until it declared her co-redemptrix and proclaimed as dogma her conception without stain of original sin. This places her between Humanity and Divinity, and nearer the latter than the former. And someone has voiced the suspicion that in time she may perhaps be made into something like one more divine person.

And perhaps the Trinity would not turn into a Quaternity on that account. If πνεῦμα, “spirit” in Greek, were feminine instead of neuter, who knows whether the Virgin Mary might not already have been made an incarnation, or humanization, of the Holy Spirit? The Gospel text according to Luke, verse 35 of chapter 1, narrates the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel, who says to her: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you,” πνεῦμα ἅγιον ἐπελεύσεται ἐπὶ σέ. That would have been enough for a fervent piety that always knows how to bend theological speculation to its desires. And a dogmatic labor would have been carried out parallel to the one that divinized Jesus, the Son, and identified him with the Word.

In any case, the cult of the Virgin, of the eternal feminine, or rather of the divine feminine, of divine motherhood, comes in to complete the personalization of God by making him a family.note

In one of my books (Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, part two, chap. LXVII) I have said that “God was and is masculine in our minds. His way of judging and condemning men is the way of a male, not of a human person above sex; the way of a Father.note

To this I must now add that not only can we not conceive of the whole and living God as solely male; we cannot conceive of him as solely an individual either, as the projection of a solitary self, outside society, of a self that is in reality abstract. My living self is a self that is really a we. My living, personal self lives only in the other selves, from them and through them. I come from a multitude of grandparents and carry them in me in concentrated form, and at the same time I carry in me, potentially, a multitude of grandchildren. And God, the projection of my self into the infinite—or rather I, the projection of God into the finite—is also a multitude.

The pagan sense of a living divinity met this need with polytheism. It is the ensemble of its gods, their commonwealth, that really constitutes its Divinity. The true God of Hellenic paganism is not so much Father Zeus (Jupiter) as the whole society of gods and demigods. Hence the solemnity of Demosthenes’ invocation when he called on all the gods and all the goddesses: τοῖς θεοῖς εὔχομαι πᾶσι καὶ πάσαις. Then the reasoners substantivized the term god, θεός, which is properly an adjective, a quality predicated of each of the gods, and added an article to it. In doing so they forged the god—ὁ θεός—abstract or dead, of philosophical rationalism: a quality made into a noun, and therefore lacking personality.

Within Greco-Latin paganism itself, the tendency toward a living monotheism can be seen in the way Zeus was conceived and felt as father. Homer calls him Ζεὺς πατήρ; among the Latins he is Iu-piter, that is, Iu-pater. He is the father of a whole extended family of gods and goddesses, who together with him make up the Divinity.

From the conjunction of pagan polytheism with Jewish monotheism, which had tried by other means to save the personality of God, there arose the sense of the Catholic God. He is a society, as the pagan God I spoke of was a society, and he is one, as the God of Israel finally came to be. And such is the Trinity. Its deepest meaning has seldom been understood by rationalist deism, which is more or less imbued with Christianity but always Unitarian or Socinian.note

The truth is that we feel God not so much as a superhuman consciousness as the very consciousness of the whole human race, past, present and future. We feel him as the collective consciousness of the entire race, and more still, as the total and infinite consciousness that embraces and sustains all consciousnesses, infra-human, human and perhaps super-human. The divinity that is in everything, from the lowest living form, that is, the least conscious, up to the highest, passing through our human consciousness: this divinity we feel personalized, conscious of itself, in God.

Deist rationalism conceives of God as the Reason of the Universe, but its logic leads it to conceive of him as an impersonal reason, that is, as an idea. Deist vitalism, on the other hand, feels and imagines God as Consciousness, and therefore as a person, or rather as a society of persons. The consciousness of each of us is, in fact, a society of persons. Several selves live in me, and even the selves of those with whom I live.

The God of deist rationalism, the God of the logical proofs of his existence, the ens realissimum [the most real being] and unmoved prime mover, is indeed nothing more than a supreme Reason. But he is so only in the sense in which we can call the law of universal gravitation the reason for the fall of bodies, since it is their explanation. Will anyone say that what we call the law of universal gravitation, or any other law, or some mathematical principle, is a reality in its own right and independent? That it is an angel, something conscious of itself and of others, a person? No, it is nothing but an idea with no reality outside the mind of whoever conceives it.

It is not human reason—a reason that in its turn rests on nothing but the irrational, on the whole of vital consciousness, on will and feeling—it is not this reason of ours that can prove to us the existence of a Supreme Reason. That Supreme Reason would in its turn have to rest on the Supreme Irrational, on the Universal Consciousness. What leads us to believe in the living God is the revelation of that Supreme Consciousness through feeling and imagination: through love, through faith, through the work of personalization.

And this God, the living God, your God, our God, is in me, is in you, lives in us, and we live and move and have our being in him. And he is in us through the hunger we have for him, through our longing, making himself desired. He is the God of the humble, for God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and the weak things to shame the strong, as the Apostle says (1 Cor. 1:27). And God is in each of us as each of us feels him and loves him.

Reason is an analytic, that is, a dissolving, force when it stops working on the form of intuitions—whether those of the individual instinct of preservation or those of the social instinct of perpetuation—and works instead on their substance, on their very matter. Reason orders the sense perceptions that give us the material world. But when its analysis is brought to bear on the reality of the perceptions themselves, it dissolves them for us and plunges us into a world of appearances, of shadows without substance; for outside the realm of form reason is nihilistic, annihilating. And it performs the same terrible office when we take it out of its own proper field and set it to scrutinize the imaginative intuitions that give us the spiritual world.

This vital need to live in an illogical, irrational, personal or divine world springs from so deep within man that all those who do not believe in God, or believe they do not believe in him, believe in some little godling, or at least some little demon, or an omen, or a horseshoe they happened to find by the roadside. They keep it over their heart to bring them good luck and defend them from that very reason whose faithful and devoted servants they imagine themselves to be.

The God we hunger for is the God to whom we pray, the God of the Pater noster, the Lord’s Prayer. He is the God whom we ask, first and above all, whether we realize it or not, to instill faith in us, faith in himself, to make us believe in him, to make himself in us. He is the God whom we ask that his name be hallowed and his will be done—his will, not his reason—on earth as it is in heaven. Yet we feel that his will can be nothing but the essence of our own will, the desire to persist eternally.

And such is the God of love. It is no use anyone asking us what he is like. Let each consult his own heart and let his fancy paint him for him in the far distances of the Universe, gazing at him through his millions of eyes, which are the bright stars of the night sky.

To define God? Yes, that is our longing. That was the longing of the man Jacob when, wrestling the whole night through until the break of dawn with that divine power, he said: Tell me, I beg you, your name! (Gen. 32:29). And listen to what that great Christian preacher, Frederick William Robertson, preached in Trinity Chapel, Brighton, on 10 June 1849, saying¹: “And this is our struggle—the struggle. Let a truthful man go down into the depths of his own being, and answer us: what is the cry that comes to him from the most real part of his nature? Is it a plea for daily bread? Jacob asked for this in his first communion with God; he asked for safety, for preservation.note

“We move through a world of mystery, and the deepest question is this: what is the being that is always near us, at times felt, never seen? What is it that has haunted us since childhood with a dream of something sovereignly beautiful that never becomes clear to us? What is it that at times passes over the soul like a desolation, like the breath of the wings of the Angel of Death, leaving us terrified and silent in our solitude—that which has touched us to the quick, so that the flesh has quivered with agony and our mortal affections have shrunk with pain? What is it that comes to us in aspirations of nobility and conceptions of superhuman excellence?

Thus Robertson. To which I must point out that “Tell me your name!” is at bottom nothing other than “Save my soul!” We ask him his name so that he may save our soul, so that he may save the human soul, so that he may save the human finality of the Universe. And if we are told that he is called He, that he is the ens realissimum [the most real being] or the Supreme Being or any other metaphysical name, we are not satisfied, for we know that every metaphysical name is an x, and we go on asking him his name. And there is only one name that satisfies our longing, and that name is Savior, Jesus. God is the love that saves.

“I will dare to say that the worm that loves in its clod would be more divine than a god without love amid his worlds,” says Robert Browning (Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day). The divine is love, the personalizing and eternalizing will, the will that feels hunger for eternity and for infinitude.

It is ourselves, it is our eternity that we seek in God; it is that he should make us divine. It was this same Browning who said (Saul, in Dramatic Lyrics): “’Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh that I seek / In the Godhead!”

“It is the weakness in strength that I cry out for; my flesh that I seek in the Divinity!”

But this God who saves us, this personal God, the Consciousness of the Universe that envelops and sustains our consciousnesses, this God who gives human finality to the whole of creation—does he exist? Do we have proofs of his existence?

The first thing that confronts us here is the meaning of this notion of existence. What is it to exist, and what are the things like of which we say that they do not exist?

To exist, in the etymological force of the word, is to be outside ourselves, outside our mind: ex sistere [to stand out]. But is there anything outside our mind, outside our consciousness, which embraces everything known? Undoubtedly there is. The matter of knowledge comes to us from outside. And what is that matter like? It is impossible to know, because to know is to inform matter, to give it form, and so it is not possible to know the formless as formless. That would be like having chaos in order.

This problem of the existence of God, a rationally insoluble problem, is at bottom nothing but the problem of consciousness, of the ex-sistence and not the insistence of consciousness. It is the very problem of the substantial existence of the soul, the very problem of the perpetuity of the human soul, the very problem of the human finality of the Universe. To believe in a living and personal God, in an eternal and universal consciousness that knows us and loves us, is to believe that the Universe exists for man. For man, or for a consciousness of the same order as the human, of the same nature though sublimated: a consciousness that may know us, and in whose bosom our memory may live forever.

Perhaps, in a supreme and desperate effort of resignation, we might bring ourselves (I have said it already) to make the sacrifice of our personality, if we knew that in dying it would enrich a Personality, a Supreme Consciousness; if we knew that the Universal Soul feeds on our souls and needs them. We might perhaps die in a desperate resignation or a resigned despair, handing over our soul to the soul of humanity, bequeathing our work, the work that bears the stamp of our person, if that humanity were in its turn to bequeath its soul to another soul when at last consciousness is extinguished on this Earth of suffering and yearnings. But what if it does not happen so?

And if the soul of humanity is eternal, if the collective human consciousness is eternal, if there is a Consciousness of the Universe and it is eternal, why should our own individual consciousness, yours, reader, and mine, not be so?

In all the vast universe, would this thing of consciousness that knows itself, wills itself and feels itself be an exception, tied to an organism that can live only within such and such degrees of heat, a passing phenomenon? No, it is not mere curiosity, this wanting to know whether or not the stars are inhabited by living, animate organisms, by consciousnesses akin to ours. And there is a deep longing in the dream of the transmigration of our souls through the stars that people the vast distances of the sky. The sense of the divine makes us desire and believe that everything is animate, that consciousness, in greater or lesser degree, extends to everything.

What would a universe be without any consciousness to reflect it and know it? What would objectified reason be, without will or feeling? For us, the same as nothingness; a thousand times more terrifying than nothingness.

If such a supposition becomes reality, our life lacks value and meaning.

It is not, then, rational necessity but vital anguish that leads us to believe in God. And to believe in God is, first and foremost (I must repeat it), to feel hunger for God, hunger for divinity, to feel his absence and emptiness, to want God to exist. And it is to want to save the human finality of the Universe. For one might even come to resign oneself to being absorbed by God, if our consciousness is grounded in a Consciousness, if consciousness is the end of the Universe.

“The wicked man said in his heart: there is no God.” And so it is in truth. For a righteous man may say to himself in his head: God does not exist! But only the wicked man can say it in his heart. Not to believe that there is a God, or to believe that there is not, is one thing; to resign oneself to there not being one is another, though inhuman and horrible; but not to want there to be one exceeds every other moral monstrosity. Although in fact those who deny God do so out of despair at not finding him.note

And now the rational, sphinx-like question comes again (the Sphinx, indeed, is reason): does God exist? This eternal and eternalizing person who gives meaning to the universe (and I will not add “human” meaning, for there is no other), is it something substantial outside our consciousness, outside our longing? Here is something insoluble, and it is better that it should be so. Let it suffice reason that it cannot prove the impossibility of his existence. To believe in God is to long for there to be one, and it is, besides, to behave as if there were; it is to live by that longing and make of it our inmost spring of action.

Sanctiusque ac reverentius visum de actis deorum credere quam scire. [It was held holier and more reverent to believe than to know concerning the deeds of the gods.] / Tacitus, Germania, 34.

To this God of the heart, or living God, one comes, and one returns to him after having left him for the logical or dead God, by the road of faith and not of rational or mathematical conviction.

And what is faith?

So asks the catechism of Christian doctrine that we were taught at school, and it answers thus: to believe what we did not see.

A dozen years ago now I corrected this in an essay, saying: “Not to believe (creer) what we did not see, no! But to create (crear) what we do not see.” And I have told you before that to believe in God is, in the first instance at least, to want there to be one, to long for the existence of God.note

The theological virtue of faith is, according to the Apostle Paul, whose definition serves as the basis for the traditional Christian disquisitions on it, “the substance of the things that are hoped for, the demonstration of what is not seen.” ἐλπιζομένων ὑπόστασις, πραγμάτων ἔλεγχος οὐ βλεπομένων (Hebrews 11:1).

The substance, or rather the sustenance or basis of hope, its guarantee. This connects faith with hope, and more than connects it: it subordinates faith to hope. And in fact it is not that we hope because we believe, but rather that we believe because we hope. It is hope in God, that is, the ardent longing that there be a God who guarantees the eternity of consciousness, that leads us to believe in him.

But faith, which is after all something compound, into which there enters a cognitive, logical or rational element together with an affective, biotic or feeling element, one that is strictly irrational, presents itself to us in the form of knowledge. Hence the insuperable difficulty of separating it from some dogma or other. Pure faith, free of dogmas, about which I wrote so much at one time, is a phantom. Nor did inventing that notion of faith in faith itself get us out of the difficulty. Faith needs some matter on which to exercise itself.

Believing is a form of knowing, even if it were nothing more than knowing our vital longing and even formulating it. Only, the term “believe” has in our ordinary language a double and even contradictory meaning. On the one hand it means the highest degree of the mind’s adherence to a piece of knowledge as true, and on the other a weak and wavering adherence. For if in one sense to believe something is the greatest assent one can give, the expression “I believe it is so, though I am not sure of it” is common and everyday.

This corresponds to what we said about uncertainty as the basis of faith. The most robust faith, insofar as it is distinct from all other knowledge that is not pistic, that is, of faith (“faithful,” as it were), is based on uncertainty. And this is because faith, the guarantee of what is hoped for, is not so much rational adherence to a theoretical principle as trust in the person who assures us of something. Faith presupposes an objective personal element. Rather than believing something, we believe someone who promises us or assures us of this or that. We believe a person, and we believe God insofar as he is a person and the personalization of the Universe.

This personal, or religious, element in faith is evident. Faith, it is commonly said, is not in itself either theoretical knowledge or rational adherence to a truth, nor is its essence sufficiently explained by trust in God. “Faith is inward submission to the spiritual authority of God, immediate obedience. And insofar as this obedience is the means of attaining a rational principle, faith is a personal conviction.” So says Seeberg¹.note

The faith that Saint Paul defined, the Greek πίστις, pistis, is better translated as trust. The word pistis, in fact, comes from the verb πείθω, peitho, which in its active voice means to persuade, and in the middle voice is equivalent to trusting someone, heeding him, relying on him, obeying. And fiarse, to rely on, fidare se, comes from the stem fid, whence fides, faith, and whence also confianza, trust. And the Greek stem πιθ, pith, and the Latin fid seem to be siblings. In short, the very word faith carries implicit in its origin the sense of trust, of surrender to another’s will, to a person. One trusts only persons. One trusts in Providence, which we conceive as something personal and conscious, not in Fate, which is something impersonal.

And this personal, or rather personifying, sense of faith betrays itself even in its lowest forms, for it is what produces faith in infused knowledge, in inspiration, in miracles. Well known, indeed, is the case of that Parisian doctor who, seeing that a folk healer in his neighborhood was taking his patients from him, moved to another neighborhood, the most distant one, where nobody knew him, advertised himself as a healer and behaved as one.

“There is a distinction in the geography of the world which appears when we set out the different thoughts and desires of men concerning their religion. Let us remember how the whole world is in general divided into two hemispheres in this respect. One half of the world, the great dark East, is mystical. It insists on not seeing anything too clearly. Put any one of the great ideas of life distinctly and clearly, and at once it seems to the Eastern mind not to be true.

We might rather say that throughout the whole world, in the East as in the West, the rationalists seek definition and believe in the concept, and the vitalists seek inspiration and believe in the person. The former study the Universe to wrest its secrets from it; the latter pray to the Consciousness of the Universe and try to put themselves in immediate relation with the Soul of the world, with God, in order to find a guarantee or substance for what they hope for, which is not to die, and a demonstration of what they do not see.

And since the person is a will, and the will always refers to the future, he who believes believes in what is to come, that is, in what he hopes for. Strictly speaking, one does not believe what is and what was except as a guarantee, as the substance, of what will be. For the Christian, to believe in the resurrection of Christ (that is, to believe the tradition and the Gospel, both of them personal powers, which tell him that Christ rose again) is to believe that he himself will rise again one day by the grace of Christ. And even scientific faith, for there is such a thing, refers to the future and is an act of trust.

To believe, I say again, is to give credit to someone, and it refers to a person. I say that I know there is an animal called a horse, and that it has these and those characteristics, because I have seen it; and I say that I believe in the existence of the one called the giraffe or the platypus, and that it is like this or that, because I believe those who claim to have seen it. Hence the element of uncertainty that faith carries with it, for a person may be mistaken or may deceive us.

But, on the other hand, this personal element in belief gives it an affective, loving character, and above all, in religious faith, a reference to what is hoped for. Hardly anyone would sacrifice his life to maintain that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, for such a truth does not need the sacrifice of our life. Many, on the other hand, have lost their lives maintaining their religious faith; and the fact is that martyrs make faith even more than faith makes martyrs.

Faith makes us live by showing us that life, though it depends on reason, has its wellspring and its strength elsewhere, in something supernatural and marvelous. A singularly balanced mind, one richly nourished on science, that of the mathematician Cournot, has already said that it is the tendency toward the supernatural and the marvelous that gives life, and that without it all the speculations of reason come to nothing but affliction of spirit (Traité de l’enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et dans l’histoire, § 329). And the fact is that we want to live.note

But although we say that faith is a matter of the will, it would perhaps be better to say that it is the will itself, the will not to die, or rather another power of the soul, distinct from intelligence, will and feeling. We would have, then, feeling, knowing, willing and believing, that is, creating. For neither feeling, nor intelligence, nor will creates; they work on matter already given, on matter given by faith. Faith is the creative power of man. But since it is more intimately related to the will than to any other of the powers, we present it in volitional form.

Faith, then, is, if not a creative power, the flower of the will, and its office is to create. Faith creates its object, in a certain sense. And faith in God consists in creating God; and since it is God who gives us faith in him, it is God who is continually creating himself in us. This is why Saint Augustine said: “I will seek you, Lord, by calling upon you, and I will call upon you by believing in you. My faith calls upon you, Lord, the faith you gave me, the faith you breathed into me through the humanity of your Son, through the ministry of your preacher” (Confessions, book I, chapter 1).

And God is created, that is, God creates himself in us, through compassion, through love. To believe in God is to love him and to fear him with love; and one begins by loving him even before knowing him, and it is by loving him that one ends by seeing him and discovering him in everything.

Those who say they believe in God and neither love him nor fear him do not believe in him, but in those who have taught them that God exists; and these, in their turn, all too often do not believe in him either. Those who, without passion of soul, without anguish, without uncertainty, without doubt, without despair in their consolation, believe that they believe in God, believe only in the idea God, not in God himself. And just as one may believe in him out of love, one may also believe out of fear, and even out of hatred, as that thief Vanni Fucci believed in him, whom Dante makes insult him with obscene gestures from Hell (Inferno XXV, 1–3). For the demons too believe in God, and so do many atheists.note

Is it not, perhaps, a way of believing in him, that fury with which he is denied and even insulted by those who do not want there to be one, since they cannot manage to believe in him? They want him to exist just as believers do; but being weak and passive men, or wicked ones, in whom reason is stronger than will, they feel themselves swept along by reason, much to their inward sorrow. And they despair, and deny out of despair; and in denying they affirm and believe what they deny, and God reveals himself in them, affirming himself through the denial of himself.

But to all this it will be said that to teach that faith creates its object is to teach that this object is an object only for faith, that it lacks objective reality outside faith itself; just as, on the other hand, to maintain that faith is needed to restrain or to console the common people is to declare the object of faith illusory. And the truth is that to believe in God today is, first and foremost, for intellectual believers, to want God to exist.

To want God to exist, and to behave and feel as if he existed. And it is by this road of wanting his existence, and acting in accordance with that desire, that we create God, that is, that God creates himself in us, manifests himself to us, opens and reveals himself to us. For God comes out to meet whoever seeks him with love and through love, and hides from whoever inquires after him through cold, unloving reason. God wants the heart to rest, but not the head; for in physical life the head sleeps and rests at times, while the heart keeps watch and works without ceasing.

And if I were asked how I believe in God, that is, how God creates himself in me and reveals himself to me, I shall perhaps have to make whoever I tell it to smile, or laugh, or even be scandalized.

I believe in God as I believe in my friends: because I feel the breath of his affection and his invisible, intangible hand that draws me and carries me and presses me hard; because I have an inward consciousness of a particular providence and of a universal mind that traces out my own destiny for me. And the concept of law—a concept, after all!—tells me nothing and teaches me nothing.

Time and again in my life I have found myself suspended over the abyss. Time and again I have found myself at crossroads where a whole sheaf of paths opened before me, and by taking one of them I renounced the others, for the roads of life cannot be retraced. And time and again, in such unique moments, I have felt the thrust of a force that was conscious, sovereign and loving. And the path of the Lord opens before one.

One may feel that the Universe calls one and guides one as one person does another, may hear within oneself its wordless voice saying: Go and preach to all the nations! How do you know that a man standing before you has a consciousness like yours, and that an animal also has one, more or less dim, but a stone does not? By the way the man behaves toward you as a man, like you, in your likeness; and by the way the stone does not behave toward you at all, but suffers your behavior.

There lies a formless mass. It seems to be a kind of animal; no limbs can be made out; I see only two eyes, and eyes that look at me with a human gaze, the gaze of a fellow being, a gaze that asks me for compassion, and I hear that it breathes. And I conclude that in that formless mass there is a consciousness. And so, and in no other way, does the starry sky look at the believer, with a superhuman, divine gaze that asks him for supreme compassion and supreme love; and in the serene night he hears the breathing of God, which touches him at the very core of his heart, and God reveals himself to him. It is the Universe that lives, suffers, loves and asks for love.

From loving these little tangible things that leave us as they came, with no attachment to us, we pass to loving the more permanent things that cannot be grasped with the hands. From loving goods we pass to loving the Good; from beautiful things, to Beauty; from the true, to Truth; from loving pleasures, to loving Happiness; and, finally, to loving Love. One goes out of oneself to enter more deeply into one’s supreme Self. Individual consciousness goes out of us to plunge into the Total Consciousness of which it forms part, but without dissolving in it. And God is nothing but the Love that springs from universal suffering and becomes consciousness.

Even this, it will be said, is moving within an iron circle, and such a God is not objective. And here it would be well to give reason its due and to examine what it means that something exists, that it is objective.

What, in fact, is it to exist, and when do we say that a thing exists? To exist is for something to be placed outside us in such a way that it preceded our perception of it and can go on subsisting outside when we disappear. And am I really sure that anything preceded me, or that anything will survive me? Can my consciousness know that there is something outside it? All that I know or can know is in my consciousness. Let us not entangle ourselves, then, in the insoluble problem of some other objectivity of our perceptions; let us say instead that whatever acts exists, and that to exist is to act.

And here it will be said again that it is not God but the idea of God that acts in us. And we will reply that it is God through his idea, and very often rather through himself. And they will retort again, demanding proofs of the objective truth of God’s existence, since we are asking for signs. And we will have to ask with Pilate: What is truth?

So indeed he asked, and without waiting for an answer he turned away to wash his hands, to clear himself of having let Christ be condemned to death. And so many ask “What is truth?” with no intention whatever of receiving an answer, and only in order to turn away and wash their hands of the crime of having helped to kill God in their own consciousness or in the consciousness of others.

What is truth? There are two kinds of truth: logical or objective truth, whose contrary is error, and moral or subjective truth, to which the lie is opposed. And in another essay I have already tried to show how error is the child of the lie¹.

Moral truth, the road that leads to the other truth, which is also moral, teaches us to cultivate science, which is first and foremost a school of sincerity and humility. Science teaches us, in fact, to submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge things as they are, that is, as they want to be, and not as we want them to be. In a religiously scientific inquiry it is the very data of reality, the perceptions we receive from the world, that come to be formulated as law in our mind; it is not we who formulate them. It is the numbers themselves that do mathematics in us.

For just as there is logical truth, to which error is opposed, and moral truth, to which the lie is opposed, there is also aesthetic truth or verisimilitude, to which nonsense is opposed, and religious truth, the truth of hope, to which the restlessness of absolute hopelessness is opposed. For aesthetic verisimilitude, that of what can be expressed with sense, is not logical truth, that of what is demonstrated with reasons; nor is religious truth, that of faith, the substance of what is hoped for, equivalent to moral truth: rather, it stands above it. He who affirms his faith on a basis of uncertainty does not lie, nor can he lie.

And not only does one not believe with reason, nor even above reason or below it: one believes against reason. Religious faith, it must be said once more, is not merely irrational; it is contra-rational. “Poetry is illusion before knowledge; religiousness, illusion after knowledge. Poetry and religiousness do away with the vaudeville of worldly wisdom about living. Every individual who does not live either poetically or religiously is a fool.” So Kierkegaard tells us (Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift [Concluding Unscientific Postscript], ch. 4, sect. II, A § 2), the same Kierkegaard who also tells us that Christianity is a desperate way out.

Along this whole road we always arrive at hope.

The mystery of love, which is a mystery of suffering, has a mysterious form, which is time. We tie yesterday to tomorrow with links of yearning, and the now is, strictly speaking, nothing other than the effort of the before to become after; the present is nothing but the striving of the past to become the future. The now is a point that vanishes no sooner than it is spoken, and yet in that point lies the whole of eternity, the substance of time.

All that has been can now be only as it was, and all that is can be only as it is. The possible is always relegated to what is to come, the only realm of freedom, where imagination, the creative and liberating power, the flesh of faith, moves at its ease.

Love always looks and tends toward the future, for its work is the work of our perpetuation; what is proper to love is to hope, and it feeds on hopes alone. And as soon as love sees its longing fulfilled, it grows sad and discovers at once that what it tended toward is not its proper end, that God set it there only as a lure to move it to the work, that its end lies further on; and it sets off again after it on its toilsome course of illusions and disillusions through life. And it goes on turning its failed hopes into memories, and from those memories it draws new hopes.

Love hopes—hopes always, never tiring of hoping—and love of God, our faith in God, is above all hope in him. For God does not die, and whoever hopes in God will live forever. And our fundamental hope, the root and trunk of all our hopes, is the hope of eternal life.

And if faith is the substance of hope, hope in turn is the form of faith. Before it gives us hope, faith is formless: vague, chaotic, potential. It is nothing but the possibility of believing, a longing to believe. But one has to believe in something, and one believes in what one hopes for; one believes in hope. One remembers the past, one knows the present; one believes only in the future. To believe what we have not seen is to believe what we shall see. Faith, then—I repeat it—is faith in hope; we believe what we hope for.note

Love makes us believe in God, in whom we hope and from whom we hope for the life to come; love makes us believe in what the dream of hope creates for us.

Faith is our longing for the eternal, for God; and hope is the longing of God, of the eternal, of our divinity, which comes out to meet faith and lifts us up. Man aspires to God through faith and says to him: “I believe—give me, Lord, something to believe in!” And God, his divinity, sends him hope in another life so that he may believe in it. Hope is the reward of faith. Only he who believes truly hopes, and only he who truly hopes believes. We believe only what we hope for, and we hope only for what we believe.

It was hope that called God Father, and it is hope that goes on giving him that name, pregnant with consolation and with mystery. Our father gave us life and gives us the bread to sustain it, and it is to our father that we pray to preserve it for us. And if Christ was the one who, with the fullest heart and the purest lips, called his Father and ours Father, and if Christian feeling reaches its summit in the feeling of the fatherhood of God, it is because in Christ the human race sublimated its hunger for eternity.

It will perhaps be said that this longing of faith, this hope, is more than anything else an aesthetic feeling. Perhaps that feeling does give it form as well, but without wholly satisfying it.

In art, indeed, we seek an imitation of eternalization. If in the beautiful the spirit grows quiet for a moment, and rests and finds relief, even if its anguish is not cured, it is because the beautiful is a revelation of the eternal, of the divine in things, and beauty is nothing but the perpetuation of the momentary. For just as truth is the end of rational knowledge, so beauty is the end of hope, which is perhaps irrational at bottom.

Nothing is lost, nothing passes away entirely, for everything is perpetuated in one way or another, and everything, after passing through time, returns to eternity. The temporal world has roots in eternity, and there yesterday is joined with today and tomorrow. The scenes pass before us as in a cinematograph, but the film remains one and whole beyond time.

The physicists say that not a single scrap of matter, not a single jot of energy, is lost, but that each is transformed and transmitted and persists. And is any form lost, then, however fleeting it may be? We must believe—believe it and hope it!—that no form is lost either. Somewhere it is filed away and perpetuated; there is a mirror of eternity in which all the images that file past through time are summed up, without losing themselves in one another.

And this individual essence of each thing, what makes it itself and not another—how is it revealed to us if not as beauty? What is the beauty of something if not its eternal ground, what unites its past with its future, what of it rests and remains in the heart of eternity? Or rather, what is it but the revelation of its divinity?

And this beauty, which is the root of eternity, is revealed to us through love. It is the greatest revelation of God’s love and the sign that we are to overcome time. It is love that reveals to us what is eternal in us and in our neighbors.

Is it the beautiful, the eternal in things, that awakens and kindles our love for them, or is it our love for things that reveals to us the beautiful, the eternal in them? Is not beauty perhaps a creation of love, just as the sensible world is a creation of the instinct of self-preservation, and the supersensible world of the instinct of perpetuation, and in the same sense? Is not beauty, and eternity with it, a creation of love? “Our outward man,” writes the Apostle (2 Cor. 4:16), “is wearing away, but the inward man is renewed day by day.” The man of passing appearances wears away and passes with them; but the man of reality remains and grows.

This suffering gives hope, which is what is beautiful in life, the supreme beauty, or in other words the supreme consolation. And since love is sorrowful, since it is compassion, pity, beauty springs from compassion and is nothing but the temporal consolation that compassion seeks for itself. A tragic consolation. And the supreme beauty is that of tragedy. Anguished at feeling that everything passes—that we pass, that what is ours passes, that all that surrounds us passes—we find that anguish itself reveals to us the consolation of what does not pass, of the eternal, of the beautiful.

And this beauty thus revealed, this perpetuation of the momentary, is carried out in practice, lives at all, only through the work of charity. Hope in action is charity, just as beauty in action is the good.

The root of charity—which makes eternal all it loves and draws out for us the beauty hidden in it, giving us the good—is the love of God, or, if you like, charity toward God, compassion for God. Love, compassion, personalizes everything, we said. Discovering suffering in everything and personalizing everything, it personalizes the Universe itself too, which also suffers, and it discloses God to us.

And men made a god of Christ, who suffered, and through him they discovered the eternal essence of a living, human God—that is, one who suffers (only the dead, the inhuman, does not suffer)—who loves, who thirsts for love, for compassion, who is a person. Whoever does not know the Son will never know the Father, and the Father is known only through the Son. Whoever does not know the Son of Man—who suffers anguish unto blood and the rending of the heart, who lives with his soul sorrowful unto death, who suffers pain that kills, and is raised again—will not know the Father, nor know anything of the suffering God.

The one who does not suffer—and does not suffer because he does not live—is that logical, frozen ens realissimum [most real being], the primum movens [prime mover], that impassible entity which, being impassible, is nothing but pure idea. The category does not suffer, but neither does it live or exist as a person. And how is the world to flow and live from an impassible idea? It would be nothing but the idea of the world itself. But the world suffers, and suffering is feeling the flesh of reality; it is the spirit feeling itself solid and substantial; it is touching oneself; it is immediate reality.

Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for only by suffering is one a person. And it is universal: what unites all of us beings is suffering, the universal or divine blood that flows through all. What we call will—what is it but suffering?

And suffering has its degrees, according to how deep it goes: from the suffering that floats on the sea of appearances down to eternal anguish, the source of the tragic sense of life, which comes to rest in the depths of the eternal and there awakens consolation; from the physical pain that makes our body recoil, to religious anguish, which makes us lie down in the bosom of God and be watered there by his divine tears.

Anguish is something far deeper, more inward and more spiritual than suffering. One often feels anguish even in the midst of what we call happiness, and because of happiness itself, to which one is not resigned and before which one trembles. Happy men who resign themselves to their apparent good fortune, a passing good fortune, would seem to be men without substance—or at least men who have not discovered it in themselves, who have never touched it. Such men are usually incapable of loving and of being loved, and they live, at bottom, with neither sorrow nor glory.

There is no true love except in suffering, and in this world one must choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. And love leads us to no happiness other than that of love itself, and its tragic consolation of uncertain hope. The moment love becomes happy and is satisfied, it no longer desires, and it is no longer love. The satisfied, the happy, do not love; they fall asleep in habit, which borders on annihilation. To grow used to things is already to begin not to be. Man is the more man—that is, the more divine—the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.

On coming into the world we are given a choice between love and happiness, and we want—poor things!—both: the happiness of loving and the love of happiness. But we should ask to be given love and not happiness, and not to be allowed to doze off in habit, for we might fall asleep altogether and, never waking, lose consciousness never to recover it. We must ask God to let us feel ourselves within ourselves, in our own suffering.

What is Destiny, what is Fate, but the brotherhood of love and suffering, and that terrible mystery that love, though it strives toward happiness, dies as soon as it touches it, and true happiness dies with it? Love and suffering beget each other; love is charity and compassion, and love that is not charitable and compassionate is not love. Love, in short, is resigned despair.

What mathematicians call a problem of maxima and minima, which is also called the law of economy, is the formula of every existential—that is, passional—movement. In material mechanics and in social mechanics, in industry and political economy, the whole problem comes down to obtaining the greatest possible useful result with the least possible effort: the most income with the least expenditure, the most pleasure with the least pain. And the terrible, 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 one must choose between the one and the other.

And there is something more anguishing than suffering.

That man expected, when he received the long-dreaded blow, to suffer so severely that he would succumb to the suffering. The blow fell on him, and he scarcely felt any pain. But afterwards, coming to himself and finding that he felt nothing, he was seized with terror—a tragic terror, the most terrifying of all—and he cried out, choking with anguish: “Then I do not exist!” What would terrify you more: to feel a pain that robbed you of your senses as a red-hot iron pierced your entrails, or to see them pierced like that without feeling any pain at all? Have you never felt the terror, the horrible terror, of finding yourself without tears and without pain?

To believe in God is to love him, and to love him is to feel him suffering, to feel compassion for him.

It may seem blasphemy, this saying that God suffers, since suffering implies limitation. And yet God, the consciousness of the Universe, is limited by the brute matter in which he lives, by the unconscious, from which he seeks to free himself and to free us. And we, in turn, must seek to free him from it. God suffers in each and all of us, in each and every consciousness imprisoned in transient matter, and we all suffer in him. Religious anguish is nothing but the divine suffering: feeling that God suffers in me and that I suffer in him.

Universal suffering is the anguish of everything at trying to be everything else without being able to achieve it—the anguish of each being what it is while being at the same time all that it is not, and being so forever. The essence of a being is not only the effort to persist forever, as Spinoza taught us, but also the effort to universalize itself; it is the hunger and thirst for eternity and infinity. Every created being strives not only to preserve itself in itself, but to perpetuate itself, and moreover to invade all the others, to be the others without ceasing to be itself, to extend its boundaries to infinity, but without breaking them.

And this vast I, into which each I wants to put the Universe—what is it but God? And because I aspire to him I love him, and this aspiration of mine to God is my love for him; and just as I suffer to be him, he too suffers to be me and each one of us.

I know well that, despite my warning that what we are attempting here is to give logical form to a system of alogical feelings, more than one reader will go on being scandalized at my speaking of a passible God, a God who suffers, and at my applying to God himself, as God, the passion of Christ. The God of so-called rational theology does indeed exclude all suffering. And the reader will think that this talk of suffering can have only a metaphorical value when applied to God, as it has, they say, when the Old Testament speaks to us of human passions in the God of Israel. For there can be no wrath, anger and vengeance without suffering.

The whole problem of the origin of evil is involved in this, the evil of guilt as much as the evil of punishment. For if God does not suffer, he makes others suffer; and if his life—since God lives—is not a gradual becoming of a total consciousness ever fuller, that is, ever more God, it is a gradual drawing of all things toward himself, a giving of himself to all, a making of the consciousness of each part enter into the consciousness of the whole, which is he himself, until he comes to be all in all, πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν [all things in all], in the expression of Saint Paul, the first Christian mystic. But more of this in the next essay, on the apocatastasis or beatific union.

For now, let us say that a tremendous current of suffering drives beings toward one another, and makes them love and seek one another, and try to complete one another, and each to be both itself and the others at once. In God everything lives, and in his suffering everything suffers; and in loving God we love his creatures in him, just as in loving creatures and feeling compassion for them we love God in them and feel compassion for him. The soul of each of us will not be free while anything is enslaved in this world of God’s; nor will God, who lives in the soul of each of us, be free until our soul is free.

And what is most immediate is to feel and love my own misery, my anguish—to feel compassion for myself, to have love for myself. And this compassion, when it is lively and superabundant, overflows from me to others, and out of the excess of my compassion for myself I feel compassion for my neighbors. My own misery is so great that the compassion it awakens in me for myself soon overflows, revealing to me the universal misery.

And charity—what is it but an overflowing of compassion? What is it but reflected suffering, which spills over and pours out into compassion for the ills of others and into the exercise of charity?

When the fullness of our compassion brings us to the consciousness of God within us, so great an anguish fills us at the divine misery poured out in everything that we have to pour it outward, and we do so in the form of charity. And in pouring it out thus we feel relief and the sorrowful sweetness of the good. It is what the mystic doctor Teresa of Jesus, who knew about sorrowful loves, called “delicious pain.” It is like someone who contemplates something beautiful and feels the need to let others share in it. For the impulse to produce, in which charity consists, is the work of sorrowful love.

We feel, indeed, a satisfaction in doing good when we have good to spare, when we are brimming with compassion; and we are brimming with it when God, filling our soul, gives us the sorrowful sensation of universal life, of the universal longing for eternal divinization. For we are not simply placed in the world beside others, with no common root with them, nor is their fate indifferent to us: their suffering pains us, their anguish is our anguish, and we feel our common origin and common suffering even without knowing it. It is suffering, and the compassion born of it, that reveal to us the brotherhood of all that exists as living and more or less conscious.

Charity, then, is the impulse to free myself and all my neighbors from suffering, and to free from it God, who embraces us all.

Suffering is something spiritual and the most immediate revelation of consciousness; perhaps our body was given to us only to give suffering occasion to show itself. Whoever had never suffered, little or much, would have no consciousness of himself. Man’s first cry at birth comes when the air, entering his chest and constraining him, seems to say to him: you have to breathe me in order to live!

The material or sensible world, the one our senses create for us, exists—we must believe by faith, whatever reason may teach us—only to embody and sustain the other world, the spiritual or imaginable world, the one that imagination creates for us. Consciousness strives to be ever more consciousness, to become conscious, to have full consciousness of all of itself, of its whole content.

Spirit finds itself limited by the matter in which it has to live and gain consciousness of itself, in the same way that thought is limited by the word, which is its social body. Without matter there is no spirit, but matter makes spirit suffer by limiting it. And suffering is nothing but the obstacle that matter sets before spirit; it is the collision of consciousness with the unconscious.

Suffering is, indeed, the barrier that unconsciousness—that is, matter—sets before consciousness, before spirit. It is the resistance to the will, the limit that the visible universe sets to God; it is the wall that consciousness runs up against when it tries to expand at the expense of unconsciousness; it is the resistance that unconsciousness puts up against becoming conscious.

Although we believe it on authority, we do not know that we have a heart, a stomach or lungs until they ache, weigh on us or distress us. It is physical pain, or at least discomfort, that reveals to us the existence of our own inner organs. And so it is also with spiritual suffering, with anguish: we do not realize that we have a soul until it hurts us.

It is anguish that makes consciousness turn back upon itself. The man without anguish knows what he does and what he thinks, but he does not truly know that he does it and thinks it. He thinks, but he does not think that he thinks, and his thoughts are as though they were not his. Nor does he belong to himself. For it is only through anguish, through the passion never to die, that a human spirit becomes master of itself.

Suffering, which is an undoing, makes us discover our inner depths; and in the supreme undoing, that of death, we shall come through the suffering of annihilation to the inmost depths of our temporal depths—to God, whom in spiritual anguish we breathe and learn to love.

This is how we must believe by faith, whatever reason may teach us.

The origin of evil, as many have seen since ancient times, is nothing but what by another name is called the inertia of matter, and in the spirit, sloth. Not for nothing has it been said that sloth is the mother of all vices. Without forgetting that the supreme sloth is that of not longing madly for immortality.

Consciousness—the yearning for more and more, ever more, the hunger for eternity and thirst for infinity, the craving for God—is never satisfied. Each consciousness wants to be itself and to be all the others without ceasing to be itself; it wants to be God. And matter, unconsciousness, tends to be less, ever less, to be nothing, its thirst being a thirst for rest. Spirit says: I want to be! And matter answers it: I do not want to!

And in the order of human life, the individual, moved by the mere instinct of self-preservation, which creates the material world, would tend toward destruction, toward nothingness, were it not for society. Society, giving him the instinct of perpetuation, which creates the spiritual world, carries and drives him toward the whole, toward immortalizing himself. And everything that man does as a mere individual, set against society, to preserve himself even at society’s expense, is bad; and everything he does as a social person, for the society in which he is included, to perpetuate himself in it and to perpetuate it, is good.

Whoever ties the work of love, of spiritualization, of liberation, to transitory and individual forms crucifies God in matter; everyone who makes the ideal serve his temporal interests or his worldly glory crucifies God in matter. Such a man is a deicide.

The work of charity, of the love of God, is to try to free him from brute matter, to try to spiritualize everything, to make everything conscious, to universalize everything. It is to dream that the rocks will come to speak, and to act in accordance with that dream: that all that exists should become conscious, that the Word should rise again.

One need only look at it in the Eucharistic symbol. They have imprisoned the Word in a piece of material bread, and they have imprisoned it there so that we may eat it, and by eating it make it ours, part of this body of ours in which the spirit dwells, so that it may stir in our heart and think in our brain and be consciousness. They have imprisoned it in that bread so that, buried in our body, it may rise again in our spirit.

For everything must be spiritualized. And this is achieved by giving to everyone and to everything my spirit, which grows the more I share it out. And to give my spirit is to invade that of others and make myself master of them.

In all this we must believe by faith, whatever reason may teach us.

And now we are going to see the practical consequences of all these more or less fantastic doctrines for logic, for aesthetics, and above all for ethics: their religious concretion. And then perhaps whoever, despite my warnings, has looked here for the scientific, or even philosophical, development of an irrational system may find them more justified.

I do not think it superfluous to refer the reader once more to all I said at the end of the sixth chapter, the one titled “In the Depths of the Abyss”; but now we are approaching the practical or pragmatic part of this whole treatise. Before that, however, we still have to see how religious feeling can take concrete form in the hopeful vision of another life.

καὶ γὰρ ἴσως καὶ μάλιστα πρέπει μέλλοντα ἐκεῖσε ἀποδημεῖν διασκοπεῖν τε καὶ μυθολογεῖν περὶ τῆς ἀποδημίας τῆς ἐκεῖ, ποίαν τινὰ αὐτὴν οἰόμεθα εἶναι. [For perhaps it is most fitting of all, for one who is about to journey there, to examine and tell stories about the journey there, and what sort of thing we think it is.] / Plato, Phaedo.note

The sense of divinity and of God, and the faith, hope and charity founded on it, found religion in their turn. From faith in God is born faith in men; from hope in him, hope in them; and from charity or piety toward God—for, as Cicero said (De natura deorum, bk. I, ch. 41), est enim pietas iustitia adversum deos [for piety is justice toward the gods]—charity toward men. In God are summed up not only Humanity but the whole Universe, and that Universe spiritualized and made inward, since Christian faith says that God will in the end be all in all.

And the relation with God, the more or less intimate union with him, is what we call religion.

What is religion? How does it differ from religiosity, and what relations hold between the two? Each of us defines religion according to how he feels it in himself, even more than according to how he observes it in others; nor can it be defined without feeling it in one way or another.

It would get us little to run through here, even cursorily, the main definitions of religion that have been given, each according to the feeling of the one defining it. Religion is described rather than defined, and felt rather than described. But if any of those definitions has lately come into vogue, it is Schleiermacher’s: that religion is the simple feeling of a relation of dependence on something higher than ourselves, and the desire to enter into relations with that mysterious power. Nor is W. Hermann’s saying a bad one (in the work already cited): that man’s religious longing is the desire for the truth of his human existence.note

Religion—from that of primitive man, who personalizes the whole Universe in the fetish—springs, indeed, from the vital need to give a human finality to the Universe, to God; and for that one must therefore attribute to him consciousness of himself and of his end. And one may say that religion is nothing but union with God, each of us feeling him as he feels him. God gives transcendent meaning and finality to life; but he gives it in relation to each one of us who believe in him. And so God is as much for man as man is for God, since he gave himself to man by becoming man, by becoming human, out of love for him.

And this religious longing to be united with God comes neither by science nor by art; it comes by life. “He who possesses science and art has religion; he who possesses neither, let him have religion,” said Goethe in one of his very frequent fits of paganism. And yet, despite what he said, he himself, Goethe…?

And to desire union with God is not to lose ourselves and be engulfed in him—for to lose oneself and be engulfed is always to go and dissolve in the dreamless sleep of nirvana; it is to possess him rather than to be possessed by him. When, in view of the human impossibility of a rich man’s entering the kingdom of heaven, his disciples asked Jesus who then could be saved, and the Master answered them that with men this was impossible, but not with God, Peter said to him: “Behold, we have left everything and followed you; what then shall we have?” And Jesus answered them, not that they would be engulfed in the Father, but that they would sit on twelve thrones to judge the twelve tribes of Israel (Matt. 19:23–26).

It was a Spaniard, and a very Spanish one, Miguel de Molinos, who in his Guía espiritual que desembaraza al alma y la conduce por el interior camino para alcanzar la perfecta contemplación y el rico tesoro de la paz interior (Spiritual Guide, Which Disentangles the Soul and Leads It along the Inward Way to Attain Perfect Contemplation and the Rich Treasure of Inner Peace) said (§ 175) “that whoever is to attain mystical knowledge must detach and strip himself of five things: first, of creatures; second, of temporal things; third, of the very gifts of the Holy Spirit; fourth, of self; and fifth, he must detach himself from God himself.”

When, at the beginning of the so-called modern age, with the Renaissance, pagan religious feeling comes back to life, it takes concrete form in the chivalric ideal with its codes of love and honor. But it is a Christianized, baptized paganism. “Woman, the lady—the donna—was the divinity of those rough hearts. Whoever searches the records of that first age will find this ideal of woman in its purity and in its omnipotence: the Universe is woman. And so it was at the beginning of the modern age in Germany, in France, in Provence, in Spain, in Italy. History was made in this image: Trojans and Romans were pictured as knights-errant, and so were the Arabs, Saracens, Turks, the Sultan and Saladin…

But as the Renaissance advanced, people passed from this religion of woman to the religion of science. Concupiscence ended in what it already was at bottom: curiosity, the yearning to taste the fruit of the tree of good and evil. Europe hurried to the University of Bologna to learn. Chivalry was succeeded by Platonism. People wanted to uncover the mystery of the world and of life. But at bottom it was in order to save life, which had sought to save itself through the cult of woman. Human consciousness wanted to penetrate the Universal Consciousness, but it did so, whether it knew it or not, in order to save itself.

The fact is that we feel and imagine the Universal Consciousness—and this feeling and imagining are religiousness—only in order to save our own individual consciousnesses. And how?

I must repeat once more that the longing for the immortality of the soul, for the persistence, in one form or another, of our personal and individual consciousness, is as much of the essence of religion as the longing that there be a God. The one does not occur without the other, and that is because at bottom the two are one and the same thing. But from the moment we try to make that first longing concrete and rational, to define it to ourselves, even more difficulties arise than arose when we tried to rationalize God.

To justify the immortal longing for immortality before our own poor reason, appeal has also been made to the consensus of mankind: Permanere animos arbitratur consensu nationum omnium [by the consensus of all nations, souls are held to survive], said Cicero, following the ancients (Tuscul. Quaest., XVI, 36). But this same compiler of their feelings confessed that while he was reading the arguments for the immortality of the soul in Plato’s Phaedo, he assented to them; yet as soon as he put the book down and began to turn the problem over in his mind, all that assent slipped away from him, assentio omnis illa illabitur [all that assent slips away] (chap.

Are we to accept a pure and naked faith in an eternal life without trying to picture it to ourselves? That is impossible; we cannot bring ourselves to it. And yet there are those who call themselves Christians and have all but set that picture aside. Take any book of the most enlightened Protestantism, that is, the most rationalist, the most cultured—the Dogmatik of Dr. Julius Kaftan, for example—and of the 668 pages of its sixth edition, that of 1909, only one, the last, is devoted to this problem.

Yes, the prudent thing, the rational thing, and some will say the pious thing, is not to try to penetrate mysteries that are barred to our knowledge, not to insist on achieving a tangible picture of eternal glory like that of a Divine Comedy. True faith, true Christian piety, we shall be told, consists in resting in the confidence that God, through the grace of Christ, will in one way or another make us live in him, his Son; that since our destiny is in his almighty hands, we should abandon ourselves to them, certain that he will do with us what is best for the final end of life, of the spirit and of the universe.

And yet men have not ceased trying to picture to themselves how that eternal life may be, nor will they ever cease trying, as long as they are men and not thinking machines. There are books of theology—or whatever it may be—full of disquisitions on the condition in which the blessed live, on the manner of their enjoyment, on the properties of the glorified body, since the soul cannot be conceived without some body.

And it is largely to this same need, a true need to form a concrete picture of what that other life may be, that the indestructible vitality of doctrines such as spiritism, metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls through the stars and others like them responds. These are doctrines which, as often as they are declared defeated and dead, are reborn just as often in one form or another, more or less new. And it is a signal blunder to try to dispense with them altogether and not look for their permanent core. Man will never resign himself to giving up a concrete picture of that other life.

But is an eternal and endless life after death even thinkable? What can the life of a disembodied spirit be? What can such a spirit be? What can a pure consciousness be, without a bodily organism? Descartes divided the world between thought and extension, a dualism imposed on him by the Christian dogma of the immortality of the soul. But is it extension, matter, that thinks or becomes spiritual, or is it thought that becomes extended and material? The gravest metaphysical questions arise in practice—and that is how they acquire their value, ceasing to be idle discussions of useless curiosity—when we try to account for the possibility of our immortality.

And even supposing a personal immortality, might we not feel it as something as terrible as its negation? “Calypso could not console herself for the departure of Ulysses; in her grief she found herself desolate at being immortal,” the gentle Fénelon, the mystic, tells us at the beginning of his Telemachus. Did it not come to be the doom of the ancient gods, as of the demons, that they were not allowed to kill themselves?

When Jesus, having taken Peter, James and John up a high mountain, was transfigured before them, his garments becoming shining white as snow, and Moses and Elijah appeared and talked with him, Peter said to the Master: “Master, it would be good for us to stay here and make three tabernacles, one for you and the other two for Moses and Elijah,” because he wanted to make that moment eternal. And as they came down from the mountain, Jesus ordered them to tell no one what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead. And they, keeping this saying, argued about what this rising from the dead might mean, as men who did not understand it.

Those three apostles did not understand what rising from the dead might be. Nor did those Sadducees who asked the Master whose wife, in the resurrection, the woman would be who had had several husbands in this life (Matt. 22)—which is when he said that God is not the God of the dead but of the living. And indeed no other life is thinkable for us except in the very forms of this earthly and passing one. Nor does all that about the grain and the wheat that springs from it shed any light on the mystery—the image with which the apostle Paul answers the question: “How will the dead rise? With what body will they come?” (1 Cor. 15:35).

How can a human soul live and enjoy God eternally without losing its individual personality, that is, without losing itself? What is it to enjoy God? What is eternity as opposed to time? Does the soul change or not change in the other life? If it does not change, how does it live? And if it changes, how does it keep its individuality over so long a time? The other life may exclude space, but it cannot exclude time, as Cournot, already cited, points out.

If there is life in heaven, there is change. Swedenborg pointed out that the angels change, because the delight of heavenly life would little by little lose its value if they always enjoyed it in its fullness, and because angels, like men, love themselves, and whoever loves himself undergoes alterations of state. And he adds that at times the angels grow sad, and that he, Swedenborg, spoke with some of them when they were sad (De coelo et inferno § 158, 160). In any case, it is impossible for us to conceive of life without change—change of growth or of decline, of sadness or of joy, of love or of hatred.

The fact is that an eternal life is unthinkable, and more unthinkable still is an eternal life of absolute happiness, of beatific vision.

And what is this beatific vision? We see, in the first place, that it is called vision and not action, which supposes something passive. And does this beatific vision not suppose the loss of one’s own consciousness? A saint in heaven, says Bossuet, is a being who scarcely feels himself, so possessed is he by God and so engulfed in his glory... One cannot stop at him, because one finds him outside himself, held by an unchangeable love to the source of his being and of his happiness. (Du culte qui est dû à Dieu.) And this is said by Bossuet the anti-quietist. That loving vision of God supposes an absorption in him.note

He who sees God dies, says Scripture (Judges 13:22); and is the eternal vision of God not perhaps an eternal death, a fainting away of the personality? But Saint Teresa, in chapter XX of her Life, describing the last degree of prayer—the rapture, transport, flight or ecstasy of the soul—tells us that the soul is lifted up as if by a cloud or a mighty eagle, but “you see yourself carried away and do not know where,” and it is “with delight,” and “if one does not resist, one does not lose one’s senses; at least in my case I was in such a state that I could understand I was being carried away”—that is, without loss of consciousness.

A beatific vision, a loving contemplation in which the soul is absorbed in God and as though lost in him, appears to our natural way of feeling either as self-annihilation or as prolonged tedium. Hence that feeling which we often observe, and which has been voiced more than once in satirical expressions not free of irreverence and perhaps of impiety: that the heaven of eternal glory is a dwelling of eternal boredom. And it is no use trying to disdain such feelings, so spontaneous and natural, or seeking to denigrate them.

Of course, those who feel this way are those who fail to realize that man’s supreme pleasure is to acquire and increase consciousness. Not precisely the pleasure of knowing, but of learning. Once we know a thing, we tend to forget it, to make our knowledge of it unconscious, if one may put it that way. Man’s pleasure, his purest delight, is bound up with the act of learning, of finding out, of acquiring knowledge, that is, with a differentiation. And hence Lessing’s famous saying, already cited.

A beatific vision of mental quiet, of full knowledge and not of gradual apprehension, is not hard to conceive of as simply a nirvana, a spiritual diffusion, a dissipation of energy in the bosom of God, a return to unconsciousness through lack of shock, of difference, that is, of activity.

Is it not perhaps the case that the very condition that makes our eternal union with God thinkable destroys our longing? What difference is there between being absorbed by God and absorbing him into oneself? Is it the little stream that is lost in the sea, or the sea in the little stream? It comes to the same thing.

What lies at the emotional bottom is our longing not to lose the sense of the continuity of our consciousness, not to break the chain of our memories, the sense of our own concrete personal identity, even though we may perhaps be gradually absorbed into him, enriching him. Who at eighty remembers the one he was at eight, even though he feels the chain between the two? And it might be said that the emotional problem comes down to whether there is a God, a human purpose to the Universe. But what is purpose? For just as it is always possible to ask for a why of every why, so it is always possible to ask for a what-for of every what-for. Supposing there is a God, what is God for? For himself, it will be said.

For one who places himself outside himself, in a hypothetical objective position—which is to say an inhuman one—the ultimate what-for is as unattainable and, strictly speaking, as absurd as the ultimate why. What difference does it make, indeed, that there should be no purpose at all? What logical contradiction is there in the Universe not being destined to any purpose, human or superhuman? In what way is it contrary to reason that all this should have no other object than to exist, passing as it exists and passes? That is for one who places himself outside himself; but for one who lives and suffers and longs within himself... for him it is a question of life or death.

Seek yourself, then! But on finding oneself, does one not come face to face with one’s own nothingness? “Man, having become a sinner by seeking himself, has become wretched by finding himself,” said Bossuet (Traité de la concupiscence, chap. XI). “Seek yourself!” begins with “Know yourself!” To which Carlyle replies (Past and Present, book III, chap. XI): “The latest gospel in this world is: know your work and do it! Know yourself...! This self of yours has tormented you for a long time; you will never come to know it, it seems to me. Do not think your task is to know yourself; you are an unknowable individual. Know what you can do, and do it like a Hercules. That will be best.”

And on the other hand, loving God in myself—is that not loving myself more than God, loving myself in God?

What in truth we long for after death is to go on living this life, this same mortal life, but without its evils, without tedium and without death. That is what Seneca, the Spaniard, expressed in his Consolation to Marcia (XXVI); that is what he wanted, to live this life again: ista moliri [to toil at these same things]. And that is what Job asked for (19:25–27): to see God in the flesh, not in spirit. And what else does that comic notion of the eternal return mean, which sprang from the tragic depths of poor Nietzsche, hungry for a concrete and temporal immortality?

That beatific vision presented to us as the first Catholic solution—how can it be fulfilled, I repeat, without drowning consciousness of self? Will it not be as in sleep, when we dream without knowing what we dream? Who would desire an eternal life like that? To think without knowing that one thinks is not to feel oneself, it is not to be oneself. And is eternal life not perhaps eternal consciousness—not only seeing God but seeing that one sees him, seeing oneself at the same time and as distinct from him? He who sleeps lives, but has no consciousness of himself; and would anyone want such a sleep to be eternal?

On the other hand, can we not perhaps imagine that this earthly life of ours is to the other life as sleep is here to waking? Might not our whole life be a dream, and death an awakening? But an awakening to what? And what if all this were only a dream of God’s, and God were one day to wake? Will he remember his dream?