VI. TRANSCENDENTAL HOPE
T
THIS earthly life can not be the end of all life; it can not be the final word concerning our destinies, unless they are, even in the most favorable cases, to close with an enigmatic deficit, and with an unexplainable divergence between capacity and accomplishment, between task and performance: this must be evident to every one who carefully reflects upon it, to every one who is unwilling to dismiss such questions curtly, unwilling to accept of death as an all-conclusive, comfortless fate.
The life of every thinking man who does not believe in its continuance after death, ends, therefore, in deep sadness. The decline of all the powers, bodily and mental, fills the heart that knows no further hope with dejection, and with a terror, at times, that no circumstances of earthly fortune can save him from. Even the consideration that the works of a man survive him, or that “when the body shall fall to dust the great name shall still live on,” gives him no adequate comfort for the passing away of life itself. Some then forcibly rouse themselves and seekin feverish activity to use up the last moments of vanishing existence in making sure that others will have something to remember them by, or feel a momentary regret over their loss. In other aging men, on the other hand, once more there awakens with almost elementary force the long-slumbering desire for pleasure in every direction, seeking again to blow into flame the pitiful spark of the fire of life. The end in both cases, however, is a helpless breaking-down in the face of the constantly approaching Unknown, or the banishment of all thoughts on the subject as far as possible, or finally, in the bravest cases, a stoical surrender to an unavoidable fate—unless there is ahopethat life will continue beyond. Only where such hope is present is Death the friendly-earnest messenger who heralds to the tired wanderer the end of his journey and the soon impending prospect, from a slowly and toilsomely mounted hilltop, into a broad new world; for all others he is the ugly skeleton as represented in the mediæval Dance of Death, or at least the inexorable, cruel Reaper of the very beautiful, but very melancholy poem of Clemens Brentano, “There is a reaper whose name is Death.”
Now, for the first, there comes to lightthe most remarkable of all the differences between men; now, at the end of life, the “simple fool” comes to a victorious vindication. For while to all others every autumnal falling leaf awakens the feeling of a hopeless passing away,hesees, even in the tree stripped bare, the buds already of a new and gracious spring, and he hears, in his last days, not only the unalterable judgment of death, “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return,” but at the same time likewise the word of life, “Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.”
The attitude of men toward the question of death, the most important of life’s questions, is that which best characterizes each one of them, and if one always knew their thoughts about it, one would be able to draw therefrom the most definite conclusions as to their whole conception of life.
The fear of death is also the best test-stone for every philosophy. A philosophy that does not overcome this fear, or at best leads to sad reflections upon the transitoriness of life, is in the first placeof not very much practical value, and in any case does not completely fulfil its purpose. Nor is it even quite consonant with reason; for how could we picture a reasonable condition of man and society, if there were no death? For when the lives of prominent persons have been too prolonged, it has been a manifest misfortune to their fellow-men. Far from being an evil that makes a shrill discord in the universe, death is rather an advantage, the only conceivably possible arrangement under which a world such as ours, in which the good must contend with the evil, can exist.
This at least is certain, that even upon those whose “heart is fortified” against any event, the incompleteness and trouble of life often lies heavily, and that to them this earthly existence seems merely a transitory state from which there must some day be release. Even the happiest life knows such moods, and though one might be entirely satisfied with his own lot, he could not possibly be so for his nation and for the millions of men whose life seems only one long chain of deprivations and blunders that mock at all attempts to help. An old German poet, Heinrich von Laufenburg (1445), already gives expression to this mood in the following verses:
“I would I were at home on high,And all my worldly toil laid by;At home above is life deathless,And all is joy without distress;A thousand year make there one day,And pain and strife are gone for aye.Then up! my heart and hardihood,Seek ye the good above all good;Ye may not stay for long below,To-day, to-morrow, ye must go.Farewell, O world! may God thee bless;I fare to Heaven’s happiness.”
“I would I were at home on high,And all my worldly toil laid by;At home above is life deathless,And all is joy without distress;A thousand year make there one day,And pain and strife are gone for aye.Then up! my heart and hardihood,Seek ye the good above all good;Ye may not stay for long below,To-day, to-morrow, ye must go.Farewell, O world! may God thee bless;I fare to Heaven’s happiness.”
“I would I were at home on high,
And all my worldly toil laid by;
At home above is life deathless,
And all is joy without distress;
A thousand year make there one day,
And pain and strife are gone for aye.
Then up! my heart and hardihood,
Seek ye the good above all good;
Ye may not stay for long below,
To-day, to-morrow, ye must go.
Farewell, O world! may God thee bless;
I fare to Heaven’s happiness.”
But neither is this yet the right conception of death. One can also die “full of days,” and age is not necessarily a tedious, ever-increasing, hopelessly incurable disease, but it can also be a continuous advancing, an evolving of oneself toward a nobler and a purer life than is possible on this earth. Death is then but the wholly natural and by no means violent and illogical transition into an analogous kind of existence that only needs to be continued; the fruit is ripe, and falls, not to be destroyed, but for a useful harvest.
Moreover, if there is no awakening after death, then those who believe in an awakening will suffer naught from such a delusion, but, without ever being conscious of it,will share the common human fate of extinction; while, if there is an awakening after death, such an awakening can not be a pleasant thing for those who did not believe in it. This, indeed, is where faith has the advantage, to speak quite practically; for if it should be mistaken, it will fare no worse, in this life or later, than the opposite view; but if it shall find itself on the right path, it will fare better.
Still, our hope in a further life is only a hope and not a demonstrable certainty. Yet perhaps it is a well-grounded assurance, resting first of all on the fact that capacities and powers are placed in men for whose complete development human life is too short, and which would therefore be pointless if they did not attain to a further evolution. This is particularly manifest in the case of all men who die young.
Again, we have the very definite testimony of Christ, whose whole conception of life would otherwise rest upon a huge error. The resurrection of the personality is one of the most indubitable and the most definite promises of Christianity, and without it Christianity would have a very dubious amount of truth and a very doubtfulvalue for life; no “resurrection of the body,” of course, in the literal sense of the Christian confession of faith, as many conceive it, but in the sense in which Christ, and Paul too on occasion, announced it and in which alone it can satisfy us also. For though we do not wish to lose our individuality, nor rise again, as Job rightly says, as “a stranger to ourselves” (in which case there is no continuation ofourlife and the whole question no longer has any meaning), yet we shall surely not desire to live on with all “the weaknesses of the flesh”; and under any circumstances there is need of a thorough transformation, laying deep hold upon the whole nature of man, a transformation for which the Catholic church, indeed, assumes a special preparatory stage.
The details of this transformed continued life we do not know at all; nor do we know, in particular, how far those who are in that life have any consciousness of their former condition (as, indeed, logically belongs to a continued life, else it is none), nor how far they are in a position to maintain a connection with their kinsmen here. Moreover, we could not apprehend it with our present organs of perception, even if it were to be disclosed to us. Likewise alldescriptions of “eternal glory” (with which the fantasy of men has taken so much pleasure in busying itself), as well as the notion of an “everlasting rest” (which, with our present ideas of rest, we could not endure), are nothing further than fantasy, expressed in impossible, or at any rate in quite imperfect pictures. It is surely possible, we may hope, for the nature of the life to come to be, far beyond all human understanding, greater than all these pictures represent; but it will quite surely be intelligible only for those whose spiritual nature is suited for it and sufficiently purified from everything that tends to decay. That is, in other words, if there is a continued life for all, and if they who have lived for nullities and have not developed their capabilities toward the attainment of things eternal, do not sink into nothingness, then every one surely continues to live in the element to which he truly belongs.
Whether there is then an endless duration of this new state under all circumstances, or whether there are still many separate steps of life, as in our life, and a final purification for all men (the so-called “restoration of all things”)—these are questions that no one will ever be ableto answer satisfactorily. Whether there is an eternal punishment of the wicked does not seem to be so very important—less important, at least, than the unending advance of the good; and whether the wicked believe this, or do not believe, it has no very real influence upon their conduct. The punishment of the resolutely wicked (which many do not see brought about, and so become easily dubious of the existence of divine justice in the world) is particularly this, that they are unable to become better even if in their better moments they wish to do so. They are obliged to remain slaves to their lower nature, and to lose their life without any results worth while and without the hope of an immortality which they could only fear. If that still seems to you to be no satisfactory compensation for the sorrows and deprivations of the good upon earth, then add this fact to the account, that evil men do not experience the love and fidelity of men, the best of all outward things the world has to offer, and without which all their other possessions might well appear worthless, even to him who has them in the greatest fulness. He who loves no one, and whom no one loves, is a poor, lonely man, though he may, in the commonbelief, be sitting in the lap of fortune. And things are so arranged that these unhappy men can not understand or value the love which perhaps is still tendered them, but must infallibly lose it again through their own folly. To the things of highest value in human existence, the nearness of God, an inward trust in the good ending of a brave life, and that love and fidelity which can not exist without reciprocal esteem,—to these the evil man never attains. The other things let him enjoy in uneasiness and in the continual fear of the envy and hate of thousands (if that can be called “enjoyment”), and do not begrudge him a happiness that, for much the greater part, exists only in the mistaken idea that others have of it. “Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda e passa,”—speak not of them, but look, and pass them by.
As far as concerns our present life and nature, what is necessary (and therefore conceivable) as a reason for our faith, is only this: that without faith (that is, a trust in the transcendental, in what we can not grasp with the senses), we can not carry out the purpose of life in its entirety, nor can we lift ourselves to that plane which,withthis faith, lies in our power of attainment and therefore becomes our task; that,further, for the attainment of this plane we need a power of love which is stronger than that which rests on human affections, and which is also very likely the element that creates life and sustains it and that possesses the power to overcome death; and that finally neither this faith nor this love would endure in the face of the enormous obstacles which oppose them on every hand in our earthly existence, if it were not for the glad hope that “there remaineth a rest to the people of God.”
The most positive fact we really know as to an existence after death is the resurrection of Christ. This is evidence not only historically vouched for (better, indeed, than most so-called “historical facts” of equal antiquity), but also a necessary postulate from a philosophical and ethical point of view, unless the whole history of the world for two thousand years past is to rest upon a delusion, or even, one may say, upon an intentional falsehood. The resurrection is, and will remain, therefore, the foundation both of all true Christianity and of all transcendental hope.
Judging by this resurrection of Jesus, the future life would seem to be somewhatsimilar to our present existence, and death accordingly an event of much less importance and, one might properly say, much more a matter of indifference than we usually assume it to be. At any rate, the future life will be an evolution; neither an everlasting rest in the literal sense, nor everlasting enjoyment. The latter would not be noble enough, and the former appears to us as beautiful only in moments of weariness and not when we are endued with new vigor.
On the contrary, indestructible power of work and joy in work, joined with true depth and clearness of vision as to the ends of life one should pursue, enter, in the case of all divinely guided men, only toward the end of their life, when all seeking for pleasure has ceased; and this is a very safe indication, both as to the continuation of life itself (that it can not suddenly cease at this stage of development), and as to the nature of that continuation (that it can only be a heightening of the best of our present activities). This is often so clear to the reason that the assumption of a sudden extinction of this activity, just when it has become full of vitality, seems thoroughly unmeaning, and unworthy of the order of the universeunless it rests upon mere chance; and a cosmical order resting upon chance alone, yet existing for thousands of years, would be a simple impossibility.
Banish from your life, therefore, the melancholy fancy of a helpless sinking beneath the waters, for that is foolishness; but banish likewise too great a contempt of life. Life is no mere vale of sorrow that must be escaped from as soon as possible, but an important, perhaps the most important, part of our whole existence, in which we make our decision for advancing life, or for a gradual and real death. Even the many weak-hearted men of our day who only want to die quickly and “go to heaven” without a struggle, may well find themselves deceived, and that the struggle will yet meet them, but under less favorable conditions. Nor are we to envy the “innocent” children and young people who, in the view of the Greeks, have died early by a special favor of the gods; for they must none the less begin from the beginning. It is through conflict and many troubles of every sort that we must attain to the perfection which is our present task. This perfecting process alone opens the hard and unreceptive heart sufficiently to receive the noble seedof a higher conception of life, a seed that must be sown in the heart, and first spring up, then grow, then blossom, and at last bear fruit. This life-process may neither be hastened nor avoided, but it must be gone through. It is therefore reasonable that we should not be eager for death, even if we do not fear it, but we may justly rejoice only over what we have already happily gone through and now, for all eternity, no longer need to experience and endure.
When one once believes firmly in a continuation of existence that alone supplies our present life with an intelligible solution of all its questions and riddles, then a bit more or less enjoyment or pain during this short span of imperfect existence becomes more a matter of indifference, and much that was important before falls away from us as a form without meaning; while, if these thoughts are untrue, and if this is the only world, full as it is of injustices, sorrows, and passions, it is a simple impossibility to believe in a just and almighty God. Upon this single point, therefore, hangs our entire philosophy of life.
To me, the continuation of existence is a certainty, but its form inconceivable;only it will be similar to our present life in its purest moments, and will surely be no sudden leap into a quite different spiritual condition, but a continuation, in which each man can receive only that for which he has become ripe here. The difference will therefore, perhaps, be smaller than is commonly thought.
But the scientists are quite right in denying immortality to a soul that is simply a function of physical organs. Whatever in our nature can be comprehended by the methods of natural science can not possibly be immortal, but passes into annihilation, or rather into dissolution and change, just as surely as any other object in the physical world. But there is apparently something else in man besides bones, muscles, sinews, veins, and nerves, and this something else can be embodied again in some other form. And this seems to me relatively more conceivable than a sudden and complete annihilation of the spiritual life.
Death, in itself, is therefore nothing terrible, nor even something undesirable, and whoever still fears it is certainly not yet upon the right path of life. The only fearful thing is the backward glance, whenone is old, upon a life quite perverted and useless, or upon a great accumulation of guilt unforgiven.
Not we shall pass away, but the present world shall pass away: this is the one great thought which must lift us above all the terrors of uncertainty. The other bright point in this darkness which the understanding alone can not illumine, is the thought that the Lord of all existence, whom we have already learned to know here as a sure friend, must be quite the same for us there also as he was here, only still nearer joined to us and still clearer known.
His voice—and this all know who have once stood near the dark exit-gate of this life—his voice we shall be able to hear at last, when all else has already sunk away behind us. Then, only one step further, and
“I hope to see my pilot face to face,When I have crossed the bar.”
“I hope to see my pilot face to face,When I have crossed the bar.”
“I hope to see my pilot face to face,
When I have crossed the bar.”