"Take all in a word: the truth in God's breastLies trace for trace upon ours impressed:Though He is so bright and we so dim,We are made in His image to witness Him."A
"Take all in a word: the truth in God's breast
Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed:
Though He is so bright and we so dim,
We are made in His image to witness Him."A
A:Christmas-Eve.
A:Christmas-Eve.
The Pope recognizes clearly the inadequacy of human knowledge; but he also recognizes that it has a Divine source.
"Yet my poor spark had for its source, the sun;Thither I sent the great looks which compelLight from its fount: all that I do and amComes from the truth, or seen or else surmised,Remembered or divined, as mere man may."B
"Yet my poor spark had for its source, the sun;
Thither I sent the great looks which compel
Light from its fount: all that I do and am
Comes from the truth, or seen or else surmised,
Remembered or divined, as mere man may."B
B:The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 1285-1289.
B:The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 1285-1289.
The last words indicate a suspicion of a certain defect in knowledge, which is not recognized in human love; nevertheless, in these earlier poems, the poet does not analyze human nature into a finite and infinite, or seek to dispose of his difficulties by the deceptive solvent of a dualistic agnosticism. He treats spirit as a unity, and refuses to set love and reason against each other. Man'slife, for the poet, and not merely man's love, begins with God, and returns back to God in the rapt recognition of God's perfect being by reason, and in the identification of man's purposes with His by means of will and love.
"What is left for us, save, in growthOf soul, to rise up, far past both,From the gift looking to the giver,And from the cistern to the river,And from the finite to infinityAnd from man's dust to God's divinity?"C
"What is left for us, save, in growth
Of soul, to rise up, far past both,
From the gift looking to the giver,
And from the cistern to the river,
And from the finite to infinity
And from man's dust to God's divinity?"C
C:Christmas-Eve.
C:Christmas-Eve.
It is this movement of the absolute in man, this aspiration towards the full knowledge and perfect goodness which can never be completely attained, that constitutes man.
"Man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expectHe could not, what he knows now, know at first:What he considers that he knows to-day,Come but to-morrow, he will find mis-known;Getting increase of knowledge, since he learnsBecause he lives, which is to be a man,Set to instruct himself by his past self:First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn,Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind,Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law.God's gift was that man shall conceive of truthAnd yearn to gain it, catching at mistake,As midway help till he reach fact indeed?"A
"Man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect
He could not, what he knows now, know at first:
What he considers that he knows to-day,
Come but to-morrow, he will find mis-known;
Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns
Because he lives, which is to be a man,
Set to instruct himself by his past self:
First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn,
Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind,
Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law.
God's gift was that man shall conceive of truth
And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake,
As midway help till he reach fact indeed?"A
A:A Death in the Desert.
A:A Death in the Desert.
"Progress," the poet says, is "man's distinctive mark alone." The endlessness of the progress, the fact that every truth known to-day seems misknown to-morrow, that every ideal once achieved only points to another and becomes itself a stepping stone, does not, as in his later days, bring despair to him. For the consciousness of failure is possible in knowledge, as in morality, only because there has come a fuller light. Browning does not, as yet, dwell exclusively on the negative element in progress, or forget that it is possible only through a deeper positive. He does not think that, because we turn our backs on what we have gained, we are therefore not going forward; nay, he asserts thecontrary. Failure, even the failure of knowledge, is triumph's evidence in these earlier days; and complete failure, the unchecked rule of evil in any form, is therefore impossible. We deny
"Recognized truths, obedient to some truthUnrecognized yet, but perceptible,—Correct the portrait by the living face,Man's God, by God's God in the mind of man."A
"Recognized truths, obedient to some truth
Unrecognized yet, but perceptible,—
Correct the portrait by the living face,
Man's God, by God's God in the mind of man."A
A:The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 1871-1874.
A:The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 1871-1874.
Thus the poet ever returns to the conception of God in the mind of man. God is the beginning and the end; and man is the self-conscious worker of God's will, the free process whereby the last which is first, returns to itself. The process, the growth, is man's life and being; and it falls within the ideal, which is eternal and all in all. The spiritual life of man, which is both intellectual and moral, is a dying into the eternal, not to cease to be in it, but to live in it more fully; for spirits necessarily commune. He dies to the temporal interests and narrow ends of the exclusive self, and lives an ever-expanding life in the life of others, manifesting more and more that spiritual principle which is the life of God, who lives and loves in all things. "God is a being in whom we exist; with whom we are in principle one; with whom the human spirit is identical, in the sense that Heisall which the human spirit is capable of becoming."B
B: Green'sProlegomena to Ethics, p. 198.
B: Green'sProlegomena to Ethics, p. 198.
From this point of view, and in so far as Browningis loyal to the conception of the community of the divine and human, he is able to maintain his faith in God, not in spite of knowledge, but through the very movement of knowledge within him. He is not obliged, as in his later works, to look for proofs, either in nature, or elsewhere; nor to argue from the emotion of love in man, to a cause of that emotion. He needs no syllogistic process to arrive at God; for the very activity of his own spirit as intelligence, as the reason which thinks and acts, is the activity of God within him. Scepticism, is impossible, for the very act of doubting is the activity of reason, and a profession of the knowledge of the truth.
"IPut no such dreadful question to myself,Within whose circle of experience burnsThe central truth, Power, Wisdom, Goodness,—God:I must outlive a thing ere know it dead:When I outlive the faith there is a sun,When I lie, ashes to the very soul,—Someone, not I, must wail above the heap,'He died in dark whence never morn arose.'"A
"I
Put no such dreadful question to myself,
Within whose circle of experience burns
The central truth, Power, Wisdom, Goodness,—God:
I must outlive a thing ere know it dead:
When I outlive the faith there is a sun,
When I lie, ashes to the very soul,—
Someone, not I, must wail above the heap,
'He died in dark whence never morn arose.'"A
A:The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 1631-1639.
A:The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 1631-1639.
And this view of God as immanent in man's experience also forecloses all possibility of failure. Beneath the failure, the possibility of which is involved in a moral life, lies the divine element, working through contradiction to its own fulfilment. Failure is necessary for man, because he grows: but, for the same reason, the failure is not final. Thus, the poet, instead of denying the evidence of his intellect as to the existence of evil, or castingdoubt on the distinction between right and wrong, or reducing the chequered course of human history into a phantasmagoria of mere mental appearances, can regard the conflict between good and evil as real and earnest. He can look evil in the face, recognize its stubborn resistance to the good, and still regard the victory of the latter as sure and complete. He has not to reduce it into a phantom, or mere appearance, in order to give it a place within the divine order. He sees the night, but he also sees the day succeed it. Man falls into sin, but he cannot rest in it. It is contradictory to his nature, he cannot content himself with it, and he is driven through it. Mephistopheles promised more than he could perform, when he undertook to make Faust declare himself satisfied. There is not within the kingdom of evil what will satisfy the spirit of man, whose last law is goodness, whose nature, however obscured, is God's gift of Himself.
"While I see day succeed the deepest night—How can I speak but as I know?—my speechMust be, throughout the darkness. It will end:'The light that did burn, will burn!' Clouds obscure—But for which obscuration all were bright?Too hastily concluded! Sun—suffused,A cloud may soothe the eye made blind by blaze,—Better the very clarity of heaven:The soft streaks are the beautiful and dear.What but the weakness in a faith suppliesThe incentive to humanity, no strengthAbsolute, irresistible, comports?How can man love but what he yearns to help?And that which men think weakness within strength,But angels know for strength and stronger yet—What were it else but the first things made new,But repetition of the miracle,The divine instance of self-sacrificeThat never ends and aye begins for man?So, never I miss footing in the maze,No,—I have light nor fear the dark at all."A
"While I see day succeed the deepest night—
How can I speak but as I know?—my speech
Must be, throughout the darkness. It will end:
'The light that did burn, will burn!' Clouds obscure—
But for which obscuration all were bright?
Too hastily concluded! Sun—suffused,
A cloud may soothe the eye made blind by blaze,—
Better the very clarity of heaven:
The soft streaks are the beautiful and dear.
What but the weakness in a faith supplies
The incentive to humanity, no strength
Absolute, irresistible, comports?
How can man love but what he yearns to help?
And that which men think weakness within strength,
But angels know for strength and stronger yet—
What were it else but the first things made new,
But repetition of the miracle,
The divine instance of self-sacrifice
That never ends and aye begins for man?
So, never I miss footing in the maze,
No,—I have light nor fear the dark at all."A
A:The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 1640-1660.
A:The Ring and the Book—The Pope, 1640-1660.
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