IIPOVERTY AND RICHES
The Christian doctrine, which has all the beauties, has all the audacities too. It has endeavored to make the sublime and daring notion prevail among the mass of men that salvation is reserved for the poor. What a magnificent thing! And if this religion of poverty has degenerated in the course of the centuries, with what consolation has it not bathed those thrice-happy souls whom an unbroken faith guides through misery and humiliation!
But there has never been a religion which has been able to found itself upon renunciation without compensation. Is he poor, this man who consents to go unclad, roofless, unfed, up to the day when there will be showered upon him all the riches of the kingdom of God? Has he no thought of a supreme gift, of a magnificent possession, the man to whom his master, in person, has given the command: “Lay up your treasures in heaven, where they will not be lost”?
He does not exist, the hopeless being who does nothunger for some treasure, even if it is an imaginary one, even an unreal one, even one that is lost in a bewildering future.
In what an abyss of poverty should we groan if our kingdom were not of this world and were nowhere outside the world, either?
And now a generation of men has come that no longer believes in the supernatural felicities of the future life and seems no longer to have anything to hope from a world consumed by hatred and given over inevitably, for long years, to confusion, destitution, egotistical passions.
In truth, the programmes of the social factions have no consolation for us, there is nothing in them that speaks of love and the true blessings; all these monuments of eloquence bring us back to hatred and anguish.
The most generous of them only give us glimpses of new struggles, new sheddings of blood, when our age is drunk with crime and fatigue. To whichever side the individual turns he finds himself crushed, scoffed at, sacrificed to insatiable, hostile gods.
A few years ago Maeterlinck wrote: “Up to the present men have left one religion to enter another; but when we abandon ours, it is not to go anywhere. That is a new phenomenon, with unknown consequences, in the midst of which we live.”
Having quoted these words, I hasten to add thatthe war is no particular consequence of this moral state of the world. The question of religion is not involved at all. The priests are quite ready to abuse these easy oppositions in order to obtain arguments in favor of their cause. But they know well enough, alas! that if the teaching of Christ stigmatizes wars, the religions have only contributed to multiply and aggravate them. They know very well that, in the conflict that now divides the earth, the religions have shown themselves enslaved to the states. No one has wished to take up the wallet and staff of the dead Tolstoy.
Humanity seems poorer and more truly disinherited than ever. Its kingdom is in itself and in everything that surrounds it; but it has sold it for a morsel of bread. And how can one reproach it for this? It is very hungry and its heart is not open to beauty.
We shall seek together the materials of our happiness. Together we shall pile up all those marvelous little things that must constitute our patrimony, our wealth.
We shall have great misfortunes and we shall often be bitterly deceived. It is because the war has succeeded in depriving the simplest and the most sacred things of the light of eternity. That is not the least consequence of the catastrophe. We must make apainful effort to recover that light and clear it of its blemishes. Silence, solitude, the sky, the vestiture of the earth, all the riches of the poor have been sullied as if forever. The works of art have been mutilated. They have taken refuge under the earth where they seem to veil their faces.
We ought to seek and gather together the debris so that we can take up and love in secret every day the fragments of our liberties.
We ought to think unceasingly of that “mean landscape” of which Charles Vildrac has spoken in one of his most beautiful poems. It is an unfruitful landscape, despoiled, denatured by the sad labor of men, and apparently worn out;—
But even so you found, if you sought there,One happy spot where the grass grew rich,Even so you heard, if you listened,The whisper of leavesAnd the birds pursuing one another.And if you had enough love,You could even ask of the windPerfumes and music ...
But even so you found, if you sought there,One happy spot where the grass grew rich,Even so you heard, if you listened,The whisper of leavesAnd the birds pursuing one another.And if you had enough love,You could even ask of the windPerfumes and music ...
But even so you found, if you sought there,One happy spot where the grass grew rich,Even so you heard, if you listened,The whisper of leavesAnd the birds pursuing one another.
And if you had enough love,You could even ask of the windPerfumes and music ...
We shall have enough love! That shall be the principle and source of our wealth.
And so we shall not have a whole life of poverty. When love, that is to say, grace, abandons us, we shall perhaps know hours of poverty. That will help us all the better to understand our hours of opulence, and all the better cherish them.
If you wish, we can divide our task, enumerate the coffers in which we are to pile our treasures.
First of all, let us stop over a word. We have said: to possess is to know. The definition may seem to you arbitrary. On the chance of this I open my little pocket dictionary, which is the whole library I have as a soldier, and read: “To possess: to have for oneself, in one’s power, to know to the bottom.” Let us accept that. We shall see, page by page, if it is possible for us to satisfy these naïve, direct definitions.
What is most certain to attract our glance, when we look about us, is the world of men, our fellow-creatures. Their figures are certainly the most affecting spectacle that can be offered us. Their acts undoubtedly constitute, owing to a natural inclination and an indestructible solidarity, the chief object of our curiosity. Good! We shall possess them first of all. We shall possess this inexhaustible fund of other people.
We shall feel no shame then in contemplating, with a noble desire, whatever strikes our senses, the animals, that is to say, the plants, the material universe of stones and waters, the sky and even the populous stars. These, too, ought to be well worth possessing!
Already our wealth seems immense. Our ambition is still greater: we must possess our dreams. But have not illustrious men made more beautiful dreams than ours? Yes, and these men are called Shakespeare, Dante, Rembrandt, Goethe, Hugo, Rodin; there are a hundred of them, even more; their works form the royal crown of humanity. We shall possess that crown. It is for us it was forged, for us it was bejewelled with immortal joys.
It would be vain to extend our possession only into space. It overruns time: we possess the past, that is to say, our memories, and the future in our hopes.
And then we also possess, and in the strictest sense of all, our sorrows, our griefs, our despair, if that supreme and terrible treasure is reserved for us.
Finally, there will be times when we possess nothing but an idea, but this may perhaps be the idea of the absolute or the infinite. If it is given us to possess God, then, no doubt, nothing else will be necessary to us.
Every time that we possess the world purely we shall find that we have touched an almost unhoped for happiness, for it is always being offered to us and we do not think of it: we shall possess ourselves.
We shall share all our riches with our companions: that shall be our apostolate. And we shall manage in some way to resist the seductions or the commands of a society that is going to ruin, a society that iseven more unhappy and abused than corrupt. If, in consequence, we are permitted to glimpse, even if only for the space of a minute, a little more happiness about us, a little more happiness than there is at present, we shall at last be so happy as to accept death with joy.
The greatest of all joys is to give happiness, and those who do not know it have everything to learn about life. The annals of humanity abound with illustrious deeds aptly proving that generosity enriches first of all those who practise it.
Not to mention any celebrated instance, I shall tell you one simple little tale. It is of the truth I live on, my daily bread.
Just now, not far from me, there is a young English soldier from the neighborhood of York who is so severely wounded in the lower part of the stomach that the natural functions of the body have been completely upset and he has been reduced to a state of terrible suffering.
And yet, when I went to see him this morning, this boy gave me an extraordinary smile, his very first, a smile full of delicacy and hope, a smile of resurrection.
Presently I learned the cause of this great joy. The dying man pulled from under his pillow acigarette he had hidden there, which he had secretly saved for me and now gave me.
There are many who preach an unpretentious life and the sweetness of possessing a little garden. The most magnificent of gardens is insignificant compared with this world in which nothing is refused us. Accepting the little garden we should have the air of those dispossessed kings who lose an empire to be ironically dowered with a small island.
If we find it pleasant to employ our muscles in digging the earth, there are a thousand spots where we can easily practise this wholesome and fruitful exercise. But we shall never really possess a single clod of earth because a legal deed has declared that it belongs exclusively to us. The world itself! Our love demands the whole world; the rocks, the clouds, the great trees along the highway, the darting flight of birds, receding into the evening, the rustling verdure high above that wall that vainly strives to shut in the private property of someone else, the shining glory of those flowers we glimpse through the iron railings of a park, and even that very wall and railing themselves.
According to the stretch of our wings, the scope of our desires, we shall possess whatever our hands touch with ardor and respect, whatever delights our eyesfrom the summits of mountains, whatever our thoughts bring back from their travels through legendary lands.
To possess the world is purely a question of the intensity of our understanding of it. One does not possess things on their surfaces but in their depths; but the spirit alone can penetrate into the depths, and for the spirit there is no barrier.
Many men to whom the law allows the gross, official possession of a statue, a gem, a beautiful horse or a province wear themselves out fulfilling a rôle to which no human being has received a call. Every moment they perceive with bitterness that men who have no legal title whatever to these material goods draw from them a delight that is superior to the enjoyment they themselves get from them as absolute owners. They often find, in this way, that a friend appreciates their beautiful pictures better than they do, that a groom is a better judge of their own stables, that a passer-by draws out of “their landscape” a purer joy than theirs and more original ideas. They take their revenge by obstinately confusing the usage of a thing with its possession.
Jesus said that the rich man renounced the kingdom of God. He renounces many other things as well. For if he shuts himself up within his proud walls, he abandons the marvelous universe for a small fragment of it; and if he is actually curious aboutthe universe, if he appreciates its significance, how can he consent without guilt to hide a portion of it away from the contemplation of others?
In order to express the gross and exclusive possession of things society has invented various words and phrases that betray the weak efforts of men to appropriate for themselves, in spite of everything, in spite of the laws of love, the riches that remain the prerogative of all. They speak, for example, of “disposing of a piece of property,” which means having it subject to our pleasure, being able to do as we choose with it. The sacrilegious vanity of this view of the world gives the possessor, as his supreme right, the power to destroy his own treasure. He could not, indeed, have a greater right than that. But what sort of desperate possession is it, I ask, that considers the destruction of the object possessed as the supreme manifestation of power?
The world has long known and still knows slavery. Lords and masters claimed the extravagant right of disposing of other human beings. They all insisted, as a mark of authority, on their right of dealing death to their slaves. But truly, what was the power of these despots compared with the deep, sensitive, voluntary bond that united Plato to Socrates, or John to Christ?
Epictetus suffered at the hands of Epaphroditus. For all that, Epaphroditus was not able to preventhis slave from reigning, through his thought, over the centuries. Epaphroditus’ right of possession seems to us ridiculous and shameful. Who can fairly envy him when so many centuries have passed judgement on him?
Every philosophy has given magnificent expression to these immortal truths. What can we add to the words of Epictetus, of Marcus Aurelius, of Christ in regard to the vanity of those riches which alone society admits to be of value?
But the poets have said to us, “Do not abandon the world, for it abounds in pure and truly divine joys that will be lost if you do not harvest them!”
The road that ought to be sweet for us to follow crosses now that of the Christians, now that of the Stoics. We may stop now at the Garden of Olives, now at the threshold of that small house without a door, without furnishings, where the master of Arrien used to live.
Our road will lead us even more often through wild, solitary places, or to the pillow of some man who sleeps in the earth, or to the smiling dwelling of some humble friend, or again into the melodious shadow where the souls of Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach forever dwell.
We shall not struggle with the mass of deluded manto possess the known, so long as the unknown remains without a master. We shall give up crude material possession in order to dream all the better of spiritual possession.
No, we cannot any longer renounce our kingdom when it calls to us, when for us it sings, hosanna!
And those of us who already have their place in the kingdom of heaven must not hesitate to demand their share of this world also; for the world has been given to all men so that each man, with the help of all the rest, may possess the whole of it.