para penser cual tú, sólo es precisono tener nada más que inteligencia?[8]
para penser cual tú, sólo es precisono tener nada más que inteligencia?[8]
para penser cual tú, sólo es precisono tener nada más que inteligencia?[8]
There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain or with whatever other organ may be the specific organ for thinking; while others think with the whole body and with the whole soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life. And the people who think only with the brain become definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought. And you know what a professional is....
If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything rather than a philosopher; he is, above all, a pedant, that is to say, a caricature of a man. The cultivation of any science—of chemistry, of physics, of geometry, of philology—may be, though within very narrow limits and restrictions, a work of differentiated specialization; but philosophy, like poetry, is either a work of integration and harmony or else it is mere philosophism, pseudo-philosophical erudition.
All knowledge has an ultimate object. Knowing for the sake of knowing is, say what you will, nothing but a solemn begging of the question. We learn a thing either for an immediate practical end, or in order to complete the rest of our knowledge. Even the ideas that appear to us most theoretical—that is to say, of least immediate application to the non-intellectualnecessities of life—answer to an intellectual necessity, which is also a real necessity, to a principle of unity and continuity of consciousness. But just as scientific knowledge has its finality in the rest of our knowledge, the philosophy which we may be forced to choose has another extrinsic finality—it refers to our whole destiny, to our attitude towards life and the universe. And the most tragic problem of philosophy is that of reconciling intellectual necessities of the heart and the will. For it is just here that every philosophy that claims to resolve the eternal and tragic contradiction that is the very basis of our existence breaks down. But do all men confront this contradiction?
Little can be hoped for from a ruler, for example, who has not been preoccupied at some time or other, even if only in some dim way, with the first beginning and ultimate end of all things, and, above all, of men, with their first “why” and their ultimate “wherefore.”
And this supreme preoccupation cannot be purely rational, it must be affective. It is not enough to think about our destiny, it must be felt. And the would-be leader of men who says and proclaims that he pays no heed to the things of the spirit, does not deserve to lead them. Which does not mean, of course, that any determinate solution is to be required of him. Solution? Is there, indeed, any?
For my part, I will never willingly yield myself, nor entrust my confidence, to any popular leader who has not a real conviction that the leader of a people is a leader of men—men of flesh and bone; men who are born, suffer, and, although they may not wish to die, die; men who are ends in themselves, not merelymeans; men who have to be themselves and not others; men, in short, who seek that which we call happiness. It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice one generation of men to the generation following when there is no regard for the destiny of those sacrificed—not merely for their memory, for their names, but for themselves.
All this idea that a man lives in his children, or in his works, or in the universe, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only those who suffer from affective stupidity and who may, for the rest, be persons of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess a great talent or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid as far as the feelings are concerned, and even morally imbecile. There have been instances.
Those who are mentally talented and affectively stupid usually say that it is useless to seek to delve into the unknowable or to kick against the pricks. It is as if one should say to a man whose leg has been amputated that it is useless to think about it. And we all lack something; only some of us feel it and others do not. Or they pretend not to feel it, and then they are hypocrites.
There is something which, for want of a better name, we will call the tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of life itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy, more or less formulated, more or less conscious. And this sense may be possessed, and is possessed, not only by individual men but by whole peoples. And this sense does not flow from ideas but rather determines them, although afterwards, of course, these ideas react upon the sense and confirm it. Sometimes this sense may proceed from a casual illness—from dyspepsia, for example—but at other times it is constitutional. And it is useless to speak of men who are healthy and men who are unhealthy. Apart from there being no normal standard of health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And, further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, when compared with the ass or the crab, already a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.
Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those who possess the tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau,René,Obermann, Thomson,[9]Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard—men laden with wisdom rather than with knowledge.
And there are, I believe, also peoples who possess this tragic sense of life.
The great master of rationalist phenomenalism, David Hume, begins his essay “On the Immortality of the Soul” with these decisive words: “It appears difficult by the mere light of reason to prove the immortality of the soul. The arguments in favour of it are commonly derived from metaphysical, moral, or physical considerations. But it is really the Gospel, and only the Gospel, that has brought to light life and immortality.” Which is equivalent 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 criticism, attempted to establish the rationality of this longing for immortality and the belief that it imports, and that is the real origin, the inward origin, of his “Critique of Practical Reason” and of his categorical imperative and of his God. But in spite of all this, the sceptical affirmation of Hume remains unshaken. There is no way of rationally proving the immortality of the soul. There are, on the other hand, ways of rationally proving its mortality.
It would be not merely superfluous but ridiculous to explain here at length how far the individual human consciousness depends upon the organization of the body, how it comes gradually to birth according as the brain receives impressions from without, how it istemporally interrupted during sleep, swoons, and other accidents, and how everything leads us to the rational conjecture that death carries with it loss of consciousness. And just as before our birth we were not, nor have we any personal pre-natal memory, so after our death we shall no longer be. This is the rational position.
Rationalism—and by rationalism I mean the doctrine that abides solely by reason, by objective truth—is necessarily materialist. And let not idealists be scandalized thereby.
The truth is—it is necessary to state it clearly—that what we call materialism means for us nothing else but the doctrine which 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 what spirit is, and since matter is for us no more than an idea, materialism is idealism. In fact, and as regards our problem—the most vital, the only really vital problem—it is all the same to say that everything is matter as to say that everything is idea, or everything energy, or what you please. Every monist system will always seem to us materialist. The immortality of the soul is saved only by the dualist systems—those which teach that human consciousness is something substantially distinct and different from other manifestations of phenomena. And reason is naturally monist. For it is the function of reason to understand and explain the universe, and in order to understand and explain it, it is in no way necessary for the soul to be an imperishable substance. For the purpose of understanding and explaining our psychic life, for psychology, the hypothesis of the soul is unnecessary.
All the attempts to substantivate consciousness, making it independent of extension—it will be remembered that Descartes opposed thought to extension—are but sophistical subtleties intended to establish the rationality of faith in the immortality of the soul. It is sought to give the value of objective reality to that which does not possess it, to that of which the reality exists only in thought. And the immortality that we crave is a phenomenal reality, it is a continuation of this life.
From whatever side we look at it, it is always found that reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts it. And in strict truth, reason is the enemy of life. All that is vital is anti-rational, and all that is rational is anti-vital, for reason is essentially sceptical.
Rationalists persist in endeavouring to convince men that there are motives for living and that there is a consolation for having been born, even though there must come a time, at the end of some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all human consciousness shall have ceased to exist. And these motives for living and working, this thing which some call humanism, illustrate the amazing affectional and emotional hollowness of rationalism and of its stupendous hypocrisy—a hypocrisy that is resolved to sacrifice sincerity to veracity and not to confess that reason is a dissolvent and disconsolatory power.
Must I repeat again what I have already said about all this idea of creating culture, of progressing,of realizing good, truth, and beauty, of establishing justice on earth, of ameliorating life for those who shall come after us, of subserving I know not what destiny, divorced from all preoccupation with the ultimate end of each one of us? Must I again declare to you the supreme vacuity of culture, of art, of good, of truth, of beauty, of justice ... of all these beautiful conceptions, if at the last end of everything, in four days or in four million centuries—it matters not which—no human consciousness shall exist to appropriate this culture, this science, art, good, truth, beauty, justice, and all the rest?
Many and various have been the rationalist devices—more or less rational—from the days of the Epicureans and the Stoics, by means of which it has been sought to discover rational consolation in truth and to convince men—though the convincers were themselves unconvinced—that there are motives for working and lures for living, even though the human consciousness be destined ultimately to disappear.
The Epicurean attitude, the extreme and grossest expression of which is “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” or the Horatiancarpe diem, which may be rendered by “Live for the day,” is not radically different from the Stoic attitude with its “Do what your conscience tells you, and afterward let it be as it may be.” Both attitudes have a common base, and pleasure for pleasure’s sake comes to the same thing as duty for duty’s sake.
It is true that there are people who assert that reason suffices them, and they counsel us not to seek to penetrate into the impenetrable. But of those who saythat they have no need of any faith in eternal personal life in order to find incentives to living and motives for action, I know not well how to think. A man blind from birth may also assure us that he feels no great desire to enjoy the world of sight nor suffers any great anguish from not having enjoyed it, and we must needs believe him, fornihil volitum quin præcognitum, nothing can be willed that is not previously known. But I cannot be persuaded that he who has once in his life, either in his youth or at some other point of time, cherished the belief in the immortality of the soul, will ever find peace without it. And this kind of blindness from birth is scarcely possible among men, except by a strange aberration. And the merely and exclusively rational man is an aberration and nothing but an aberration.
I do not know why so many people were scandalized, or pretended to be scandalized, when Brunetière proclaimed once again the bankruptcy of science. For science, in so far as it is a substitute for religion, and reason, in so far as it is a substitute for faith, have always foundered. Science will be able to satisfy in an increasing measure, and in fact does satisfy, our increasing logical and intellectual needs, our desire to know and understand the truth; but science does not satisfy the needs of our heart and our will, our hunger for immortality—far from satisfying it, it contradicts it. Rational life and truth stand in opposition to one another. And can it be that there is any other truth than rational truth?
It must remain established, therefore, that reason, human reason, within its limits not only does not proverationally that the soul is immortal and that the human consciousness is through all the ages indestructible, but that it proves rather—within its limits, I repeat—that the individual consciousness cannot persist after the death of the physical organism upon which it depends. And these limits, within which I say that human reason proves this, are the limits of rationality, of what we know by demonstration. Beyond these limits is the irrational, which is all the same whether it be called the super-rational or the infra-rational or the contra-rational. Beyond these limits is the absurd of Tertullian, the impossible of thecertum est, quia impossible est. And this absurd can only base itself upon the most absolute incertitude.
The vital longing for human immortality, therefore, finds no rational confirmation, nor does reason give us any incentive or consolation for living or give to life itself any real finality. But here, in the depths of the abyss, the despair of the heart and the will and the scepticism of reason meet face to face and embrace fraternally. And it will be from this embrace, a tragic, that is to say a profoundly loving, embrace, that the fountain of life will flow, a life earnest and terrible. Scepticism, uncertainty—the ultimate position at which reason arrives by practising its analysis upon itself, upon its own validity—is the foundation upon which the despair of the vital sense must build its hope.
Disillusioned, we have had to abandon the position of those who seek to convert rational and logical truth into consolation, pretending to prove the rationality, or at any rate the non-irrationality, of consolation; andwe have had to abandon likewise the position of those who seek to convert consolation and motives for living into rational truth. Neither of these positions satisfies us. The one is at variance with our reason, the other with our feeling. Peace between these two powers is impossible and we must live by their war. We must make of this war, of war itself, the condition of our spiritual life.
Faith in immortality is irrational. And nevertheless, faith, life and reason have mutual need of one another. This vital longing is not properly a problem, cannot be formulated in propositions capable of rational discussion; but it announces itself in us as hunger announces itself. Neither can the wolf that throws itself upon its prey to devour it or upon the she-wolf to fecundate her, enunciate its impulse rationally and as a logical problem. Reason and faith are two enemies neither of which can maintain itself without the other. The irrational demands to be rationalized and reason alone can operate on the irrational. They are compelled to seek mutual support and association. But association in conflict, for conflict is a mode of association.
There is no possible permanent position of agreement and harmony between reason and life, between philosophy and religion. And the tragic history of human thought is simply the history of a struggle between reason and life—reason bent on rationalizing life and making it resign itself to the inevitable, to mortality; life bent on vitalizing reason and forcing it to serve as a support for its vital desires. And this is thehistory of philosophy, inseparable from the history of religion.
Our sense 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 and the alternation of periods in which life imposes itself, giving birth to spiritual forms, with periods in which reason imposes itself, giving birth to materialistic forms, although both of these classes of forms of belief may disguise themselves under other names. Neither reason nor life ever acknowledges itself vanquished.
No doubt it will be said that life ought to submit to reason and to this we shall reply that nothing ought to be done that cannot be done, and life cannot submit to reason. “Ought, therefore can,” some Kantian will retort. To which we shall demur: “Cannot, therefore ought not.” And life cannot submit to reason, because the end of life is living and not understanding.
There is always someone who will tell us of the religious duty of resigning ourselves to mortality. This is indeed the very summit of aberration and insincerity. And over against sincerity will be set the opposing ideal of veracity. Be it so, and yet it is quite possible to reconcile the two. Veracity, respect for what I believe to be rational, for what we call truth in the logical sense, moves me to affirm that the immortality of the individual soul is a logical contradiction, is something not only irrational but contra-rational; but sincerity leads me to affirm also that I do not resign myself to this former affirmation and that I protest against itsvalidity. What I feel is a truth, as much a truth at any rate as what I see, touch, hear, and what is demonstrated to me—I believe that it is even more of a truth—and sincerity obliges me not to hide my feelings.
And in self-defence life searches for the weak point in reason and finds it in scepticism, which it seizes hold of, endeavouring to save itself by maintaining its hold. It needs the weakness of its adversary.
In an outburst of passion, Lamennais exclaims: “But what! All hope lost, shall we plunge blindly into the mute depths of a universal scepticism? Shall we doubt that we think, that we feel, that we are? Nature does not allow it; she forces us to believe even when our reason is not convinced. Absolute certainty and absolute doubt are both alike forbidden to us. We hover in a vague mean between these two extremes, as between being and nothingness; for complete scepticism would be the extinction of the intelligence and the total death of man. But it is not given to man to annihilate himself; there is in him something which invincibly resists destruction, I know not what vital faith, which the will itself cannot master. Whether he like it or not, he must believe, because he must act, because he must preserve himself. His reason, if he listened only to that, teaching him to doubt everything, itself included, would reduce him to a state of absolute inaction; he would perish before even he had been able to prove to himself that he existed.”[10]
It is not strictly true that reason leads us to absolute scepticism. No, reason does not lead me and cannotlead me to doubt that I exist. Whither reason does lead me is to vital scepticism, or more properly to vital negation—not merely to doubt but to deny that my consciousness survives my death. Vital scepticism comes from the clash between reason and desire. And from this clash, from this embrace between despair and scepticism is born holy, sweet, saving incertitude, our supreme consolation.
The absolute and complete certainty, on the one hand, that death is a complete, definite, irrevocable annihilation of personal consciousness, a certainty of the same order as the certainty that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or, on the other hand, the absolute and complete certainty that our personal consciousness is prolonged beyond death in these or those conditions, including withal the extraneous and adventitious addition of eternal rewards and punishments—both of these certainties would equally make life impossible for us. In the most secret chamber of the spirit of him who believes himself convinced that death puts an end to his personal consciousness, his memory, for ever, there lurks a shadow, all unknown to him perhaps, a vague shadow, a shadow of a shadow of uncertainty, and while he says within himself: “Well, let us live this passing life, for there is no other!” the silence of this secret chamber speaks to him and murmurs: “Who knows!...” He may not think he hears it, but he hears it. And likewise in some secret place of the soul of the believer who most firmly holds the faith in future life, there is a muffled voice, a voice of uncertainty, which whispers in the ear of his spirit: “Who knows!...” These voices arelike the humming of a mosquito when the gale roars through the trees in the wood; we cannot distinguish this faint humming, nevertheless, merged in the clamour of the storm, it reaches the ear. Otherwise, without this uncertainty, how could we live?
“Is there?” “Is there not?”—these are the bases of our inner life. There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would only prove that just as there are monsters, so there are people who are affectively and feelingly stupid, however much intelligence they may have, and people who are intellectually stupid, however great their virtue may be. But in normal cases I cannot believe those who assure me that never, not even for a moment, not in the hours of greatest loneliness and tribulation, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed upon their consciousness. I do not understand the men who tell me that the prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that the thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them. For my part I do not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith and my reason—I wish rather that there should be war between them.
“Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief!” This may appear to be a contradiction, for if the man believes, if he trusts, how is it that he beseeches the Lord to help his lack of trust? Nevertheless it is this contradiction that gives all its deepest human value to thiscry torn from the heart of the father of a demoniac. His faith is a faith that is based upon incertitude. Because he believes, that is to say, because he wishes to believe, because he has need that his son should be cured—he beseeches the Lord to help his unbelief, his doubt that such a cure could be effected. Of such a kind is human faith. Of such a kind was the heroic faith that Sancho Panza had in his master, the knight Don Quixote de la Mancha, as I think I have shown in my “Life of Don Quixote and Sancho”—a faith based upon incertitude, upon doubt. Sancho Panza was indeed a man, a whole and a real man, and he was not stupid, for only if he had been stupid would he have believed without a shadow of doubt in the follies of his master. Neither did his master believe in them without a shadow of doubt, for neither was Don Quixote, though mad, stupid. He was fundamentally a man of despair, as I think I have shown in my book. And because he was a man of an heroic despair, the hero of that inward and resigned despair, he is the eternal exemplar of every man whose soul is the battle-ground of reason and immortal desire. Our Lord Don Quixote is the prototype of the vitalist whose faith is based upon incertitude, and Sancho is the prototype of the rationalist who doubts his own reason.
When as a boy I began to be disquieted by the eternal problems, I read in a book, the author of which I have no wish to recall, this sentence: “God is the great x placed over the 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 further side, nothing is explained, either with Him or without Him. God, therefore, is superfluous.” And so as far as concerns the God-Idea, the God whose existence is supposed to be logically proved, I continue to be of the same opinion. Laplace is said to have stated that he had not found the hypothesis of God necessary in the construction of his system of the origin of the Universe, and it very certainly is so. The idea of God does not in any way help us to understand any better the existence, the essence and the finality of the Universe.
The living God, the human God, is reached not by the way of reason but by the way of love and of suffering. Reason rather separates us from Him. It is not possible to know Him in order that afterwards we may love Him; we must begin by loving Him, longing for Him, hungering for Him, before knowing Him. The knowledge of God proceeds from the love of God,and it is a knowledge that has little or nothing of the rational in it. For God is indefinable. To seek to define Him is to claim to limit Him in our mind—that is to say, to kill Him. In so far as we attempt to define Him, we are confronted by Nothingness.
The idea of God which the would-be rational theodicy presents us with is merely an hypothesis, like the hypothesis of the ether, for example.
The ether is, in effect, merely a hypothetical entity, which is of value only in so far as it explains that which by means of it we seek to explain—light, or electricity, or universal gravitation—and only so far as these facts cannot be explained in any other way. Similarly the idea of God is also an hypothesis which is of value only in so far as we explain by means of it that which we seek to explain—the essence and existence of the Universe—and only so long as these cannot be explained better in some other way. And since in reality we explain the Universe neither better nor worse with this idea than without it, the idea of God, the supremepetitio principii, fails of its purpose.
But if the ether is nothing but an hypothesis intended to explain light, air on the other hand is a thing that is directly felt; and even though it did not enable us to explain sound, we should have a direct sensation of it, and, above all, of the lack of it in moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way, God Himself, not the idea of God, may become a directly felt reality; and although the idea of Him may not enable us to explain either the existence or the essence of the Universe, we have at times the directfeeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And this feeling—mark it well, for herein lies its tragicness and the whole tragic sense of life—is a feeling of hunger for God, of lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first instance, to wish that there may be a God, not to be able to live without Him.
So long as I pilgrimaged through the fields of reason in search of God, I could not find Him, for I was not taken in by the idea of God, neither could I take an idea for God; and it was then, as I wandered among the wastes of rationalism, that I told myself that we ought to seek no other consolation than the truth, meaning thereby reason, and yet for all that I was not comforted. But as I sank deeper and deeper into rational scepticism on the one hand and into heart’s despair on the other, the hunger for God awoke within me, and the suffocation of spirit made me feel the want of God, and with the want of Him, His reality. And I wished that there might be a God, that God might exist.
The problem of the existence of God, a problem that is rationally insoluble, is in its essence none other than the problem of consciousness, 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 existsforman. For man, or for a consciousness of the same order as the human consciousness, of the same nature, although sublimated, a consciousness that is cognizant of us, in whose depths our memory lives for ever.
Perhaps by a supreme and desperate effort of resignation we might succeed in making the sacrifice of our personality if we knew that in dying it would go to enrich a Supreme Personality, a Supreme Consciousness, if we knew that the Universal Soul was nourished by our souls and had need of them. Perhaps we might meet death with a desperate resignation or with a resigned desperation, delivering up our soul to the soul of humanity, bequeathing to it our work, the work that bears the stamp of our personality, if this humanity were in its turn to bequeath its soul to another soul after the ultimate extinction of consciousness upon this earth with its burden of longings. But if it be otherwise?
And if the soul of humanity is eternal, if the human collective consciousness is eternal, if there is a Consciousness of the Universe and if this Consciousness is eternal, why should not our own individual consciousness, yours, reader, and mine, not be eternal?
In the whole of the vast universe must there needs be such a thing as a consciousness that knows itself, loves itself and feels itself, an exception united to a organism that can only live between such and such degrees of heat, a transitory phenomenon? No, it is not mere curiosity to wish to know whether or not the stars are inhabited by living organisms, by consciousness akin to our own, and there is an element of profound longing in the dream of the transmigration of our souls through the stars that people the vast remotenesses ofthe heavens. The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe that everything is animated, that consciousness, in a greater or lesser degree, extends through all things. We wish not only to save ourselves but to save the world from nothingness. And therefore God. Such is His felt finality.
What would a universe be without any consciousness to reflect it and to know it? What would the objectified reason be, without will and without feeling? For us it would be the same as nothing—a thousand times more dreadful than nothing.
If such a supposed universe is reality, then our life lacks value and meaning.
It is not, therefore, rational necessity but vital anguish that leads us to believe in God. And to believe in God—I must repeat it again—is, before all and above all, to feel hunger for God, hunger for divinity, to feel the lack and absence of God, to wish that God may exist. And it is to wish to save the human finality of the Universe. For we might even succeed in resigning ourselves to being absorbed by God if our consciousness rests upon a Consciousness, if consciousness is the end of the Universe.
“The wicked man has said in his heart: There is no God.” And there is truth in this. For it is possible for a righteous man to say in his head: God does not exist. But only the wicked can say it in his heart. Not to believe that there is a God or to believe that there is not a God, is one thing; to resign oneself to there not being a God is another thing, though an inhuman and horrible thing; but not to wish that there is a God exceeds every other moral aberration. Although in fact those who deny God do so because of their despair at not finding Him.
And now once again there comes the rational question, the question of the Sphinx—the Sphinx, in effect, is reason—does God exist? This eternal and eternalizing Person who gives meaning—I do not add “human,” for there is no other meaning—to the universe, is He a substantial something external to our consciousness, external to our desire? Here you have something that is insoluble, and it is better that it should be insoluble. Let it suffice for reason that the impossibility of His existence cannot be proved.
To believe in God is to long for His existence, and, furthermore, it is to act as if He existed. It is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action.
To believe is to place confidence in someone, and it has reference to a person. I say that I know that there is an animal called the horse, and that it has such and such characteristics, because I have seen it; and I say that I believe in the existence of the giraffe or the ornithorhyncus, and that it has such and such qualities, because I believe those who assure me that they have seen it. And hence the element of uncertainty that attaches to faith, for a person may be deceived or he may deceive us.
But, on the other hand, this personal element in belief gives it an affective character, it connects it with love, and above all, in religious faith, it carries with it a reference to what is hoped for. Perhaps there is nobody who would sacrifice his life for the sake of maintaining that the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles, for such a truth does not require the sacrifice of our life; but on the other hand there are many who have lost their lives for the sake of maintaining their religious faith, and it is martyrs that make faith rather than faith that makes martyrs. For faith is not the mere adherence of the intellect to an abstract principle; it is not the recognition of a theoretical truth in which the will does nothing save move us to understand; faith is a matter of the will, it is a movement of the mind towards a practical truth, towards a person, towards something that makes us live and not merely understand life.
But although we said 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 some other psychic force distinct from intelligence, will and feeling. We should then have feeling, knowing, willing, and believing or creating. For neither feeling nor intelligence nor will creates; they operate upon a material already given, upon a material given by faith. Faith is the creating power of man. But since it has a more intimate relation with the will than with any other of his faculties, we present it under the form of volition.
Faith is, then, if not creative power, the fruit of the will, and its function is to create. Faith, in a certain sense, creates its object. And faith in God consists in creating God, and since it is God that gives us faith in Him, it is God who is continually creating Himself in us. Hence St. Augustine said: “I will seek Thee, Lord, by calling upon Thee, and I will call upon Thee by believing in Thee. My faith calls upon Thee, Lord,the faith which Thou hast given me, with which Thou hast inspired me through the Humanity of Thy Son, through the ministry of the Preacher” (“Confessions,” Book I, chap. I). The power of creating God in our own image and likeness, of personalizing the Universe, simply means that we carry God within us, as the substance of what we hope for, and that God is continually creating us in His image and likeness.
But after all this I shall be told that to show that faith creates its own object is to show that this object is an object for faith alone, that it has no objective reality external to faith itself—just as, on the other hand, to maintain that faith is necessary in order to restrain or to console people is to declare that the object of faith is illusory. What is certain is that for thinking believers to-day, faith is, before all and above all, wishing that God may exist.
Wishing that God may exist, and acting and feeling as if He did exist. And it is in this way, wishing for God’s existence and acting conformably with this desire, that we create God in ourselves, that is, that God creates Himself in us, manifests Himself to us, opens and reveals Himself to us. For God goes out to meet him who seeks Him with love and by love and withdraws Himself from him who seeks Him with the cold and loveless reason. God wills that the heart should have rest but not the head, while in the physical life the head sometimes rests and sleeps and the heart wakes and works unrestingly. And thus knowledge without love removes us from God; and love, even without knowledge, and perhaps better without it, leadsus to God, and through God to wisdom. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Faith is our longing for the eternal, for God; and hope is God’s longing, the longing of the eternal, of the divine in us, which advances to meet our faith and raises us up. Man aspires to God by faith and cries to Him: “I believe—give me, Lord, wherein to believe.” And God, the divinity in man, sends him hope in another life in order 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, and we hope only what we believe.
The narrow road, hewn out of the naked rock, goes winding along above the abyss. On one side rise high tors and crags, on the other side is heard the ceaseless murmur of waters in the dark depths of the ravine, deeper than eye can reach. At intervals the track widens so as to form a kind of refuge, just large enough to hold about a dozen people, a resting-place, screened by leafy branches, for those who travel along the road above the ravine. In the distance, crowning the summit of a jutting crag, a castle stands out against the sky. The clouds passing over it are torn by the pinnacles of its tall towers.
With the pilgrims goes Maquetas. He walks hurriedly, sweating, seeing nothing but the road in front of his eyes, except when from time to time he raises them towards the castle. As he walks he sings an old wailing song that his grandmother taught him when he was a child, and he sings it so that he shall not hear the ominous murmur of the torrent flowing unseen in the depths of the abyss.
As he approaches one of the resting-places, a maiden who is sitting inside on a bank of turf calls to him:
“Maquetas, come here and stop awhile. Come and rest by my side, with your back to the abyss, and let us talk a little. Nothing heartens us for this journeylike a few words spoken in love and companionship. Stay awhile here with me. Afterwards you will go on your way again refreshed and renewed.”
“I cannot, my girl,” Maquetas replied, slowing his pace but without halting, “I cannot. The castle is still a great way off and I must reach it before the sun sets behind its towers.”
“You will lose nothing by staying here awhile, young man, for afterwards you will take the road again with more mettle and with new strength. Are you not tired?”
“That I am, lass.”
“Then stay awhile and rest. Here you have this turf for your couch and my lap for your pillow. Come, stay!”
And she opened her arms, offering him her bosom.
Maquetas paused for a moment, and as he did so there came to his ears the voice of the invisible torrent flowing in the depths of the abyss. He quitted the road, stretched himself on the turf and laid his head on the girl’s lap. With her fresh rosy hands she wiped the sweat from his brow, while his eyes gazed up at the morning sky overhead, a sky that was as young as the eyes of the girl.
“What is it you are singing, lass?”
“’Tis not I singing—it is the water that flows down there, behind us.”
“And what is it that it sings?”
“It sings the song of eternal rest. But now rest yourself.”
“Eternal, did you say?”
“Yes, that is what the torrent sings. But now rest.”
“And afterwards....”
“Rest, Maquetas, and don’t say ‘afterwards.’”
The girl put her lips to his lips and kissed him. Maquetas felt the kiss melt and flow through all his body, and so sweet it was that it seemed as if all the sky poured itself down over him. His senses swooned. He dreamed that he was falling endlessly down into the bottomless abyss....
When he awoke and opened his eyes he saw above him the sky of evening.
“O lass, how late it is! Now I shall not have time to reach the castle. Let me go, let me go.”
“Go then, and God guide and companion you. And don’t forget me, Maquetas.”
“Give me one kiss more.”
“Take it, and may it strengthen you.”
With the kiss Maquetas felt that his strength was increased a hundredfold and he began to run along the road, the lilt of his song keeping time with his strides. And he ran and ran, leaving the other pilgrims behind him. One of them shouted to him as he passed:
“You’ll stop, Maquetas.”
Then he saw that the sun was beginning to set behind the towers of the castle and Maquetas felt a chill strike his heart. The fires of the sunset lasted but for a moment. He heard the grating of the chains of the drawbridge. And Maquetas said to himself:
“They are shutting the castle-gate.”
Night began to fall, an impenetrable night. Very soon Maquetas had to halt, for he could see nothing, absolutely nothing. Blackness enveloped everything.Maquetas stood still, silent, and in the impenetrability of the darkness he heard only the murmur of the waters of the torrent in the abyss. The cold grew denser.
Maquetas stooped down, felt the road with his numb hands, and began to creep along on all fours, warily, like a fox. He kept edging away from the abyss.
He went forward like this for a long, long time. And he said to himself:
“Ah, that lass deceived me! Why did I heed her?”
The cold became horrible. It penetrated everywhere, like a thousand-edged sword. Maquetas no longer felt the touch of the ground, he no longer felt his own hands; he was benumbed. He stopped still. Or rather he scarcely knew whether he was stopping or crawling.
Maquetas felt himself suspended in the midst of the darkness, black night all around him. He heard nothing but the ceaseless murmur of the waters of the abyss.
“I will call out,” Maquetas said to himself, and he made an effort to shout. But no sound was heard; his voice did not come forth out of his chest. It was as if it were frozen within him.
Then Maquetas thought:
“Can I be dead?”
And as this thought took hold of him, it seemed as if the darkness and the cold fused together and eternalized themselves round about him.
“Can this be death?” Maquetas went on thinking. “Shall I have to live henceforward like this, in pure thought, in memory? And the castle? And the abyss? What do the waters say? What a dream,what an appalling dream! And not to be able to sleep!... To die like this, dreaming, dying little by little, and not to be able to sleep!... And now what am I going to do? What shall I do to-morrow?
“To-morrow? What is to-morrow? What does to-morrow mean? What is this idea of to-morrow that seems to come to me out of the depth of the darkness, where the waters are singing? To-morrow? For me there is now no to-morrow. Everything is now, everything is blackness and cold. Even this song of the eternal waters seems like a song of ice—just one prolonged note.
“But can I really have died? How long the dawn is in coming! But I don’t even know how long it is since the sun set behind the towers of the castle....
“Once upon a time,” he went on thinking, “there was a man who was called Maquetas, a great wayfarer, and he walked for days and days journeying to a castle, where a good dinner awaited him and a warm fire and a good bed to rest in, and in the bed a good bedmate. And there in the castle he was going to live days without end, listening to stories that went on for ever, joying in his sweet companion, a life of perpetual youth. And those days would be all alike and all peaceful. And as they passed, oblivion would fall on them. And all those days would be thus one eternal day, one same day eternally renewed, a perpetual to-day overflowing with a whole infinity of yesterdays and with a whole infinity of to-morrows.
“And Maquetas believed that that was life, and set out on his journey. And he journeyed on, stopping at inns where he slept, and when the sun rose he went onhis way again. And once, as he was leaving an inn, he met an aged beggar who was sitting on the trunk of a tree by the door, and the beggar said to him: ‘Maquetas, what meaning have things?’ And that Maquetas answered him, shrugging his shoulders: ‘What does that matter to me?’ And the aged beggar asked him again: ‘Maquetas, what does this road mean?’ And that Maquetas, now somewhat irritated, answered him: ‘Why do you ask me what the road means? How should I know? Does anybody know? Does the road mean anything? Leave me in peace, and God be with you.’ And the aged beggar knitted his brows and smiled sadly, gazing on the ground.
“And then Maquetas came to a very rugged country and had to cross a wild mountain ridge by a precipitous footpath hewn out of the rock, high up over an abyss, in the depths of which sang the waters of an invisible torrent. And thence he discerned afar the castle that he had to reach before the sun set, and when he discerned it his heart leaped for joy in his breast, and he quickened his steps. But a lass, sweet as a vision, compelled him to stop and rest awhile on a bank of turf, and that Maquetas rested his head on her lap and stopped. And when he left her the lass gave him a kiss, the kiss of death, and as soon as the sun set behind the towers of the castle the cold and the darkness closed in all round him and the darkness and the cold grew denser and merged into one. And there fell a silence from which only that song of the eternal waters emerged. Yonder, in life, sounds, songs, murmurs, used to issue out of a vague murmurous background, out of a kind of mist of sound; but here thissong emerged out of the profound silence, the silence of darkness and cold, the silence of death.
“Of death? Yes, of death, for that Maquetas, that valiant wayfarer, died....
“How sweet the story is, and how sad! It is sweeter, far sweeter, sadder, far sadder, than that old song my grandmother taught me. Let me see, how does it go? I will repeat it over again.
“Once upon a time there was a man who was called Maquetas, a great wayfarer, and he walked for days and days journeying to a castle....”
And Maquetas repeated to himself again and again and again and again the story of that other Maquetas, and he continues repeating it and so he will go on repeating it as long as the waters of the invisible torrent go on singing, and the waters will sing for ever, ever, ever, without a yesterday and without a to-morrow, for ever, ever, ever....
It is freezing. A biting north wind cuts short the breath. From the steely blue a pale sun sheds a glittering light that cuts out the shadows and models the landscape into a kind of architectural relief.
For this crystal-clear light, bright as frost, without haze, appears not so much to illumine as to civilize Nature; it makes it civil, which means that it makes it more than human. To humanize is much, but to civilize is more. To civilize, to make civil—or, if you like, to citizenize—is to superhumanize. Humanity seems to us, so far as man is concerned, to be everything; but civility embraces more than humanity; it is more than all, for it is the future in never-ending process of realization—it is the ideal. The all is that which is and that which is permanent; but the more than all is that which, over and above all that has been and is, will be. The all is the past that is condensed in the present; the more than all is the eternity that embraces the past, the present and the future. The all is the universe and the more than all is thought. For thought exceeds all that has been thought and all that is thinkable and goes beyond them.
The city also is Nature. Its streets and its squares and its erect pillared towers also are landscape. And its lines are like the lines of the country. Baroque lines they are said to be. But not all.
The escarpments which slope down from the vast tableland of La Armuña to the banks of the Tormes are like the buttresses of a gigantic cathedral; they are architectonic. There are villages which seem as if they were sculptured out of the earth of the bleak upland plains, out of the rock itself. And if you look long enough at some dark poplar standing near the spire of a village church, you begin to wonder which is the tree and which the spire. And the skeleton trees, all swart naked bone, look like the pillars of a ruined temple the roof of which has fallen in.
In travelling through this barren rocky Iberian land, have you never sometimes fancied that you discerned in some distant craggy hill the outline of a Baroque cathedral?
And conversely, here in the city, one might imagine oneself to be in the midst of some vast geological formation. Men, like coral insects, have built up these masses of grey and golden coral, gleaming in the naked winter sun.
Every one of these fabrics of stone might be said to be an immense architectonic phrase, an aphorism in lines. In a phrase culminates and is condensed a whole system of ideas, of thoughts. In the title—La Vida es Sueño—of Calderón’s drama, the immortal fellow of “Don Quixote,” is condensed (as Farinelli rightly says in his workLa Vita é un Sogno, which I have just been reading) “the substance of all earthly philosophies.” It was by a phrase that each of the seven wise men of Greece won a lasting place in the memory of their race; for these seven wise men eternalized themselves in the thought of their people as being the authors of sevensingle sentences. And a phrase, a civil sentence, civil rather than human, is an edifice of thought in which economy of material and of brute force has achieved its supreme triumph. The Pyramids are phrases of stone which rise up from the sands of the desert; and like an immense phrase, like one of the periods of Demosthenes, or rather of Pericles, which Thucydides has bequeathed to us for ever, stands the Parthenon. And these towers are phrases too, civil phrases, phrases of civility now made one with Nature.
I know not how I am to translate to you in sounding words—words that are winged, yet captive, words that fly and soar, yet abide—that which this harmonious phrase of hewn stone, this tower of Monterrey, says to me, says to us all, in the fine cutting light of these benumbing winter mornings, when the frost sleeps idly on its lofty pinnacles; but I know that it is a phrase when I see it clear-cut against the blue of heaven. And if men pass away and yet abide, these stones will abide to tell Nature that once there was Humanity, once there was thought; they will abide to tell of plan, and of order, and of proportion, to the Universe.
And why should not the planets which journey through space in obedience to the laws which they themselves communicated to Kepler, understand geometry and mathematics? Is not the whole vast structure of the Universe a great city, the city of God, its supreme Architect and Inhabiter?
All this is a dream. True! But this dream of stone, in the clarified frosty light, tells us that dream is what abides, the lasting, the permanent, the substantial, and that on the surface of the dream, likewaves on the surface of the sea, roll our sorrows and our joys, our hates and our loves, our memories and our hopes. The waves are of the sea; but the waves pass and the sea abides; the sorrows and the joys, the hates and the loves, the memories and the hopes, are of the dream, the dream of life; but they—sorrows, joys, hates, loves, memories, hopes—pass away and the dream abides. And it abides thus, converted into stone, stone of the earth, but civilized, civil or spiritual stone, a phrase minted for ever,monumentum ære perennius, more enduring than bronze.
This dream of stone enters into the soul and sinks into it, into the innermost depths of it, into the soul’s soul, into what is innermost in the soul itself, and it bears our soul along with it into the underlying substance of all souls, fugitive waves submerged in the sea of souls. Is it a sea? Is it liquid? Is it not rather a rocky floor, a plain, a stony stratum of many mansions for civil human thought to dwell in? And is not each one of our souls a stone which life hews—hews with hammer-strokes of sorrow and joy, of hate and love, of memory and hope—so that it may fit into the great civil, human cathedral, in the temple of our civil and human God?
It was but yesterday, but a moment ago, that is to say it was five and twenty years ago—the third of a full lifetime—that I first saw you, tower of Monterrey, and you carry me beyond, far beyond, those twenty-five years, back to when, before ever I was born, I beheld you—where?—and in beholding you, you carry me from the midst of these twenty-five years, beyond, far beyond, to when, after I am dead and dead indeed,I shall go on beholding you—this vision of you which in the clarified frosty light is imprinted on my soul will abide with me, at rest and buried deep in the sea of souls. Dream abides. It is the only thing that abides; vision abides.
Spirit, when it suffers or rejoices, when it hates or loves, when it remembers or hopes, becomes earth, becomes water, becomes fire or becomes air; and stone, when it thinks and thinks civilly, becomes abiding spirit, congealed, crystallized, substantivated. This tower is a diamond of spirit.
And what does it say? It says nothing that is not itself; it says itself, it proclaims itself immortal, it affirms itself. No matter if an earthquake or a bombardment—which is another earthquake—or any other accident that the hate of Nature or of man may bring about, throws you to the ground and scatters your stones in confusion, tower of Monterrey, for the vision of you will remain. It will remain fused in the souls which behold you.
And to the soul that beholds you, tower of Monterrey, you say that he says the utmost that can be said who says himself, who expresses his person, who strips his spirit naked in the icy-clear light of the civil world, standing statue-like before the world of men. The greatest thing that men can see is another man, and if they but once saw him utterly and completely, they would carry him with them for ever.
And this tower and other towers fill our soul with the tormenting longing to say the unsayable, to leave in words that are borne on wings of sound and pass away and are lost, something that does not pass away and isnever lost. To say what one sees and to say it so that it is seen in being heard; to see what is heard: that is the whole secret of Art. Art makes the blind to see—and many are blind whose eyes reflect the images of what they see upon the mind—and it makes them see with the word; Art makes the deaf to hear—and many are deaf whose ears vibrate with the sounds they hear round about them—and it makes them hear with the vision. A poem gives sight to the blind; a picture gives hearing to the deaf. Art fuses the senses, descending to that which unites them in a common root and ascending to that which also unites them in a common crown.
Tower of Monterrey, not the tower which I see with my eyes when I go forth from my house on these benumbing mornings of clarified light to read the divine Plato with my pupils—O noble word degraded to so ignoble use!—my tower of Monterrey, the tower that I carry in the crystal of my mind, as if it were a vision which by some enchantment had remained frozen for ever upon the frozen surface of a lake, this tower of mine tells me that he who says himself remains for ever too. It matters not, my soul, what you say if you say yourself. For what art thou but a phrase in the thought of God?
The thought of God is History: human history, civil history, the history of this civil humanity in which God became man and dwelt among men, and proclaimed that His kingdom, the kingdom of God, that is, the kingdom of Man, the kingdom of God-Man, is not of this world of sorrows and joys, of hates and loves, of memories and hopes. For the kingdom ofGod, the kingdom of Man, is of thought, which is above sorrow and joy, above hate and love, above memory and hope, although it is made of these, as the towers that abide in History are made of stones. The thought of God is History; History is what God thinks, what He goes on thinking. And he who lives in History, more or less audible and visible, whatever the fashion of his life, however far beneath the surface, lives in the thought of God, and, abiding in God’s thought, he abides in God. And everyone who, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly, helps to make History, lives in History; everyone, however obscurely and hesitatingly he lives, who has civil consciousness. Absolute death is unconsciousness.
And this my tower of Monterrey speaks to me of our Renaissance, of the Spanish renaissance, of the eternal essence of Spain, and tells me to say my Spanish self and to affirm that if life is dream, dream is the only thing that abides, and that the rest, all that is not dream, is nothing but a process of digestion that passes away, as sorrow and joy, hate and love, memory and hope, pass away. Yes, life without dream is nothing but digestion and respiration, breath that vanishes. Breath, air,pneuma,anima,spiritus, such are the names that have been given to the life that animates the body but is not dream; and the breath passes away, but the dream abides.
“Life is dream!” affirmed the man, the Spaniard, who believed in the eternal and the substantial, and those who do not believe in it say in the foolishness of their hearts: “Life is breath!” And the tower of Monterrey, my tower of Monterrey, my tower of theSpanish renaissance, of renaissant Spanishness, tells me that life is not breath that passes away and is lost, but dream that abides and triumphs.
When I go forth in the morning and the tower says to me: “Here am I!” I, beholding it, say to it: “Here am I!”
The foregoing essays are derived from the following works.
“The Spirit of Castile”—En Torno al Casticismo, 1895,Ensayos, Vol. I.
“Spanish Individualism”—El Individualismo Español(A propósito del librode Martin A. S. Hume, “The Spanish People: Their Origin, Growth and Influence,” London, 1901), 1902,Ensayos, Vol. IV.
“Some Arbitrary Reflections upon Europeanization”—Sobre la Europeizacion(Arbitrariedades), 1906,Ensayos, Vol. VII.
“The Spanish Christ”—Mi Religión y Otros Ensayos(El Cristo Español), 1910.
“The Sepulchre of Don Quixote”—Introduction to 2nd edition ofLa Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, 1913. (Originally published inLa España Moderna, February, 1906.)
“The Helmet of Mambrino”—La Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, Part I, Chap. XLV.
“Don Quixote’s Niece”—La Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, Part II, Chap. LXXIV.
“The Religion of Quixotism”—Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida(Don Quijote en la Tragi-Comedia Europea Contemporánea), 1912.
“Large and Small Towns”—Por Tierras de Portugal y de España(Grandes y Pequeñas Ciudades), 1908.
“To My Readers”—Soliloquios y Conversaciones(A Mis Lectores), 1911.
“Soliloquies”—Soliloquios y Conversaciones(SoliloquiosandDesahogo Lirico), 1911.
“My Religion”—Mi Religión y Otros Ensayos, 1910.
“Solitude”—Soledad, 1905,Ensayos, Vol. VI.
“Intellectuality and Spirituality”—Intellectualidad y Espiritualidad, 1904,Ensayos, Vol. IV.
“The Materialism of the Masses”—Mi Religión y Otros Ensayos, (Materialismo Popular, 1909).
“The Man of Flesh and Bone,” “The Problem of Immortality,” “Creative Faith”—Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida, 1912.
“The Song of the Eternal Waters”—Mi Religión y Otros Ensayos(El Canto de las Aguas Eternas, 1909).
“The Tower of Monterrey”—Andanzas y Visiones Españolas(La Torre de Monterrey, 1916).