Tragic Sense Of Life Part 21

He who bases or thinks that he bases his conduct--his inward or his outward conduct, his feeling or his action--upon a dogma or theoretical principle which he deems incontrovertible, runs the risk of becoming a fanatic, and moreover, the moment that this dogma is weakened or shattered, the morality based upon it gives way. If, the earth that he thought firm begins to rock, he himself trembles at the earthquake, for we do not all come up to the standard of the ideal Stoic who remains undaunted among the ruins of a world shattered into atoms. Happily the stuff that is underneath a man's ideas will save him. For if a man should tell you that he does not defraud or cuckold his best friend only because he is afraid of h.e.l.l, you may depend upon it that neither would he do so even if he were to cease to believe in h.e.l.l, but that he would invent some other excuse instead. And this is all to the honour of the human race.

But he who believes that he is sailing, perhaps without a set course, on an unstable and sinkable raft, must not be dismayed if the raft gives way beneath his feet and threatens to sink. Such a one thinks that he acts, not because he deems his principle of action to be true, but in order to make it true, in order to prove its truth, in order to create his own spiritual world.

My conduct must be the best proof, the moral proof, of my supreme desire; and if I do not end by convincing myself, within the bounds of the ultimate and irremediable uncertainty, of the truth of what I hope for, it is because my conduct is not sufficiently pure. Virtue, therefore, is not based upon dogma, but dogma upon virtue, and it is not faith that creates martyrs but martyrs who create faith. There is no security or repose--so far as security and repose are obtainable in this life, so essentially insecure and unreposeful--save in conduct that is pa.s.sionately good.

Conduct, practice, is the proof of doctrine, theory. "If any man will do His will--the will of Him that sent me," said Jesus, "he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of G.o.d or whether I speak of myself" (John vii. 17); and there is a well-known saying of Pascal: "Begin by taking holy water and you will end by becoming a believer." And pursuing a similar train of thought, Johann Jakob Moser, the pietist, was of the opinion that no atheist or naturalist had the right to regard the Christian religion as void of truth so long as he had not put it to the proof by keeping its precepts and commandments (Ritschl, _Geschichte des Pietismus_, book vii., 43).

What is our heart's truth, anti-rational though it be? The immortality of the human soul, the truth of the persistence of our consciousness without any termination whatsoever, the truth of the human finality of the Universe. And what is its moral proof? We may formulate it thus: Act so that in your own judgement and in the judgement of others you may merit eternity, act so that you may become irreplaceable, act so that you may not merit death. Or perhaps thus: Act as if you were to die to-morrow, but to die in order to survive and be eternalized. The end of morality is to give personal, human finality to the Universe; to discover the finality that belongs to it--if indeed it has any finality--and to discover it by acting.

More than a century ago, in 1804, in Letter XC of that series that const.i.tutes the immense monody of his _Obermann_, Senancour wrote the words which I have put at the head of this chapter--and of all the spiritual descendants of the patriarchal Rousseau, Senancour was the most profound and the most intense; of all the men of heart and feeling that France has produced, not excluding Pascal, he was the most tragic.

"Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if it is nothingness that awaits us, do not let us so act that it shall be a just fate." Change this sentence from its negative to the positive form--"And if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it shall be an unjust fate"--and you get the firmest basis of action for the man who cannot or will not be a dogmatist.

That which is irreligious and demoniacal, that which incapacitates us for action and leaves us without any ideal defence against our evil tendencies, is the pessimism that Goethe puts into the mouth of Mephistopheles when he makes him say, "All that has achieved existence deserves to be destroyed" (_denn alles was ensteht ist wert doss es zugrunde geht_). This is the pessimism which we men call evil, and not that other pessimism that consists in lamenting what it fears to be true and struggling against this fear--namely, that everything is doomed to annihilation in the end. Mephistopheles a.s.serts that everything that exists deserves to be destroyed, annihilated, but not that everything will be destroyed or annihilated; and we a.s.sert that everything that exists deserves to be exalted and eternalized, even though no such fate is in store for it. The moral att.i.tude is the reverse of this.

Yes, everything deserves to be eternalized, absolutely everything, even evil itself, for that which we call evil would lose its evilness in being eternalized, because it would lose its temporal nature. For the essence of evil consists in its temporal nature, in its not applying itself to any ultimate and permanent end.

And it might not be superfluous here to say something about that distinction, more overlaid with confusion than any other, between what we are accustomed to call optimism and pessimism, a confusion not less than that which exists with regard to the distinction between individualism and socialism. Indeed, it is scarcely possible to form a clear idea as to what pessimism really is.

I have just this very day read in the _Nation_ (July 6, 1912) an article, ent.i.tled "A Dramatic Inferno," that deals with an English translation of the works of Strindberg, and it opens with the following judicious observations: "If there were in the world a sincere and total pessimism, it would of necessity be silent. The despair which finds a voice is a social mood, it is the cry of misery which brother utters to brother when both are stumbling through a valley of shadows which is peopled with--comrades. In its anguish it bears witness to something that is good in life, for it presupposes sympathy ... The real gloom, the sincere despair, is dumb and blind; it writes no books, and feels no impulse to burden an intolerable universe with a monument more lasting than bra.s.s." Doubtless there is something of sophistry in this criticism, for the man who is really in pain weeps and even cries aloud, even if he is alone and there is n.o.body to hear him, simply as a means of alleviating his pain, although this perhaps may be a result of social habits. But does not the lion, alone in the desert, roar if he has an aching tooth? But apart from this, it cannot be denied that there is a substance of truth underlying these remarks. The pessimism that protests and defends itself cannot be truly said to be pessimism. And, in truth, still less is it pessimism to hold that nothing ought to perish although all things may be doomed to annihilation, while on the other hand it is pessimism to affirm that all things ought to be annihilated even though nothing may perish.

Pessimism, moreover, may possess different values. There is a eudemonistic or economic pessimism, that which denies happiness; there is an ethical pessimism, that which denies the triumph of moral good; and there is a religious pessimism, that which despairs of the human finality of the Universe, of the eternal salvation of the individual soul.

All men deserve to be saved, but, as I have said in the previous chapter, he above all deserves immortality who desires it pa.s.sionately and even in the face of reason. An English writer, H.G. Wells, who has taken upon himself the role of the prophet (a thing not uncommon in his country), tells us in _Antic.i.p.ations_ that "active and capable men of all forms of religious profession tend in practice to disregard the question of immortality altogether." And this is because the religious professions of these active and capable men to whom Wells refers are usually simply a lie, and their lives are a lie, too, if they seek to base them upon religion. But it may be that at bottom there is not so much truth in what Wells a.s.serts as he and others imagine. These active and capable men live in the midst of a society imbued with Christian principles, surrounded by inst.i.tutions and social feelings that are the product of Christianity, and faith in the immortality of the soul exists deep down in their own souls like a subterranean river, neither seen nor heard, but watering the roots of their deeds and their motives.

It must be admitted that there exists in truth no more solid foundation for morality than the foundation of the Catholic ethic. The end of man is eternal happiness, which consists in the vision and enjoyment of G.o.d _in saecula saeculorum_. Where it errs, however, is in the choice of the means conducive to this end; for to make the attainment of eternal happiness dependent upon believing or not believing in the Procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son and not from the Father alone, or in the Divinity of Jesus, or in the theory of the Hypostatic Union, or even in the existence of G.o.d, is, as a moment's reflection will show, nothing less than monstrous. A human G.o.d--and that is the only kind of G.o.d we are able to conceive--would never reject him who was unable to believe in Him with his head, and it is not in his head but in his heart that the wicked man says that there is no G.o.d, which is equivalent to saying that he wishes that there may not be a G.o.d. If any belief could be bound up with the attainment of eternal happiness it would be the belief in this happiness itself and in the possibility of it.

And what shall we say of that other proposition of the king of pedants, to the effect that we have not come into the world to be happy but to fulfil our duty (_Wir sind nicht auf der Welt, um glucklich zu sein, sondern um unsere Schuldigkeit zu tun_)? If we are in the world _for_ something (_um etwas_), whence can this _for_ be derived but from the very essence of our own will, which asks for happiness and not duty as the ultimate end? And if it is sought to attribute some other value to this _for_, an objective value, as some Sadducean pedant would say, then it must be recognized that the objective reality, that which would remain even though humanity should disappear, is as indifferent to our duty as to our happiness, is as little concerned with our morality as with our felicity. I am not aware that Jupiter, Ura.n.u.s, or Sirius would allow their course to be affected by the fact that we are or are not fulfilling our duty any more than by the fact that we are or are not happy.

Such considerations must appear to these pedants to be characterized by a ridiculous vulgarity and a dilettante superficiality. (The intellectual world is divided into two cla.s.ses--dilettanti on the one hand, and pedants on the other.) What choice, then, have we? The modern man is he who resigns himself to the truth and is content to be ignorant of the synthesis of culture--witness what Windelband says on this head in his study of the fate of Holderlin (_Praeludien_, i.). Yes, these men of culture are resigned, but there remain a few poor savages like ourselves for whom resignation is impossible. We do not resign ourselves to the idea of having one day to disappear, and the criticism of the great Pedant does not console us.

The quintessence of common sense was expressed by Galileo Galilei when he said: "Some perhaps will say that the bitterest pain is the loss of life, but I say that there are others more bitter; for whosoever is deprived of life is deprived at the same time of the power to lament, not only this, but any other loss whatsoever." Whether Galileo was conscious or not of the humour of this sentence I do not know, but it is a tragic humour.

But, to turn back, I repeat that if the attainment of eternal happiness could be bound up with any particular belief, it would be with the belief in the possibility of its realization. And yet, strictly speaking, not even with this. The reasonable man says in his head, "There is no other life after this," but only the wicked says it in his heart. But since the wicked man is possibly only a man who has been driven to despair, will a human G.o.d condemn him because of his despair?

His despair alone is misfortune enough.

But in any event let us adopt the Calderonian formula in _La Vida es Sueno_:

_Que estoy sonando y que quiero obrar hacer bien, pues no se pierde el hacer bien aun en suenos_[54]

But are good deeds really not lost? Did Calderon know? And he added:

_Acudamos a lo eterno que es la fama vividora donde ni duermen las dichas no las grandezas reposan_[55]

Is it really so? Did Calderon know?

Calderon had faith, robust Catholic faith; but for him who lacks faith, for him who cannot believe in what Don Pedro Calderon de la Barca believed, there always remains the att.i.tude of _Obermann_.

If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it; let us fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory; let us fight against it quixotically.

And not only do we fight against destiny in longing for what is irrational, but in acting in such a way that we make ourselves irreplaceable, in impressing our seal and mark upon others, in acting upon our neighbours in order to dominate them, in giving ourselves to them in order that we may eternalize ourselves so far as we can.

Our greatest endeavour must be to make ourselves irreplaceable; to make the theoretical fact--if this expression does not involve a contradiction in terms--the fact that each one of us is unique and irreplaceable, that no one else can fill the gap that will be left when we die, a practical truth.

For in fact each man is unique and irreplaceable; there cannot be any other I; each one of us--our soul, that is, not our life--is worth the whole Universe. I say the spirit and not the life, for the ridiculously exaggerated value which those attach to human life who, not really believing in the spirit--that is to say, in their personal immortality--tirade against war and the death penalty, for example, is a value which they attach to it precisely because they do not really believe in the spirit of which life is the servant. For life is of use only in so far as it serves its lord and master, spirit, and if the master perishes with the servant, neither the one nor the other is of any great value.

And to act in such a way as to make our annihilation an injustice, in such a way as to make our brothers, our sons, and our brothers' sons, and their sons' sons, feel that we ought not to have died, is something that is within the reach of all.

The essence of the doctrine of the Christian redemption is in the fact that he who suffered agony and death was the unique man--that is, Man, the Son of Man, or the Son of G.o.d; that he, because he was sinless, did not deserve to have died; and that this propitiatory divine victim died in order that he might rise again and that he might raise us up from the dead, in order that he might deliver us from death by applying his merits to us and showing us the way of life. And the Christ who gave himself for his brothers in humanity with an absolute self-abnegation is the pattern for our action to shape itself on.

All of us, each one of us, can and ought to determine to give as much of himself as he possibly can--nay, to give more than he can, to exceed himself, to go beyond himself, to make himself irreplaceable, to give himself to others in order that he may receive himself back again from them. And each one in his own civil calling or office. The word office, _officium_, means obligation, debt, but in the concrete, and that is what it always ought to mean in practice. We ought not so much to try to seek that particular calling which we think most fitting and suitable for ourselves, as to make a calling of that employment in which chance, Providence, or our own will has placed us.

Perhaps Luther rendered no greater service to Christian civilization than that of establis.h.i.+ng the religious value of the civil occupation, of shattering the monastic and medieval idea of the religious calling, an idea involved in the mist of human pa.s.sions and imaginations and the cause of terrible life tragedies. If we could but enter into the cloister and examine the religious vocation of those whom the self-interest of their parents had forced as children into a novice's cell and who had suddenly awakened to the life of the world--if indeed they ever do awake!--or of those whom their own self-delusions had led into it! Luther saw this life of the cloister at close quarters and suffered it himself, and therefore he was able to understand and feel the religious value of the civil calling, to which no man is bound by perpetual vows.

All that the Apostle said in the fourth chapter of his Epistle to the Ephesians with regard to the respective functions of Christians in the Church must be transferred and applied to the civil or non-ecclesiastical life, for to-day among ourselves the Christian--whether he know it or not, and whether he like it or not--is the citizen, and just as the Apostle exclaimed, "I am a Roman citizen!"

each one of us, even the atheist, might exclaim "I am a Christian!" And this demands the _civilizing_, in the sense of dis-ecclesiasticizing, of Christianity, which was Luther's task, although he himself eventually became the founder of a Church.

There is a common English phrase, "the right man in the right place." To which we might rejoin, "Cobbler, to thy last!" Who knows what is the post that suits him best and for which he is most fitted? Does a man himself know it better than others or do they know it better than he?

Who can measure capacities and apt.i.tudes? The religious att.i.tude, undoubtedly, is to endeavour to make the occupation in which we find ourselves our vocation, and only in the last resort to change it for another.

This question of the proper vocation is possibly the gravest and most deep-seated of social problems, that which is at the root of all the others. That which is known _par excellence_ as the social question is perhaps not so much a problem of the distribution of wealth, of the products of labour, as a problem of the distribution of avocations, of the modes of production. It is not apt.i.tude--a thing impossible to ascertain without first putting it to the test and not always clearly indicated in a man, for with regard to the majority of callings a man is not born but made--it is not special apt.i.tude, but rather social, political, and customary reasons that determine a man's occupation. At certain times and in certain countries it is caste and heredity; at other times and in other places, the guild or corporation; in later times machinery--in almost all cases necessity; liberty scarcely ever.

And the tragedy of it culminates in those occupations, pandering to evil, in which the soul is sacrificed for the sake of the livelihood, in which the workman works with the consciousness, not of the uselessness merely, but of the social perversity, of his work, manufacturing the poison that will kill him, the weapon, perchance, with which his children will be murdered. This, and not the question of wages, is the gravest problem.

I shall never forget a scene of which I was a witness that took place on the banks of the river that flows through Bilbao, my native town. A workman was hammering at something in a s.h.i.+pwright's yard, working without putting his heart into his work, as if he lacked energy or worked merely for the sake of getting a wage, when suddenly a woman's voice was heard crying, "Help! help!" A child had fallen into the river.

Instantly the man was transformed. With an admirable energy, prompt.i.tude, and sang-froid he threw off his clothes and plunged into the water to rescue the drowning infant.

Possibly the reason why there is less bitterness in the agrarian socialist movement than in that of the towns is that the field labourer, although his wages and his standard of living are no better than those of the miner or artisan, has a clearer consciousness of the social value of his work. Sowing corn is a different thing from extracting diamonds from the earth.

And it may be that the greatest social progress consists in a certain indifferentiation of labour, in the facility for exchanging one kind of work for another, and that other not perhaps a more lucrative, but a n.o.bler one--for there are degrees of n.o.bility in labour. But unhappily it is only too seldom that a man who keeps to one occupation without changing is concerned with making a religious vocation of it, or that the man who changes his occupation for another does so from any religious motive.

And do you not know cases in which a man, justifying his action on the ground that the professional organism to which he belongs and in which he works is badly organized and does not function as it ought, will evade the strict performance of his duty on the pretext that he is thereby fulfilling a higher duty? Is not this insistence upon the literal carrying out of orders called disciplinarianism, and do not people speak disparagingly of bureaucracy and the Pharisaism of public officials? And cases occur not unlike that of an intelligent and studious military officer who should discover the deficiencies of his country's military organization and denounce them to his superiors and perhaps to the public--thereby fulfilling his duty--and who, when on active service, should refuse to carry out an operation which he was ordered to undertake, believing that there was but scant probability of success or rather certainty of failure, so long as these deficiencies remained unremedied. He would deserve to be shot. And as for this question of Pharisaism ...

And there is always a way of obeying an order while yet retaining the command, a way of carrying out what one believes to be an absurd operation while correcting its absurdity, even though it involve one's own death. When in my bureaucratic capacity I have come across some legislative ordinance that has fallen into desuetude because of its manifest absurdity, I have always endeavoured to apply it. There is nothing worse than a loaded pistol which n.o.body uses left lying in some corner of the house; a child finds it, begins to play with it, and kills its own father. Laws that have fallen into desuetude are the most terrible of all laws, when the cause of the desuetude is the badness of the law.

And these are not groundless suppositions, and least of all in our country. For there are many who, while they go about looking out for I know not what ideal--that is to say, fict.i.tious duties and responsibilities--neglect the duty of putting their whole soul into the immediate and concrete business which furnishes them with a living; and the rest, the immense majority, perform their task perfunctorily, merely for the sake of nominally complying with their duty--_para c.u.mplir_, a terribly immoral phrase--in order to get themselves out of a difficulty, to get the job done, to qualify for their wages without earning them, whether these wages be pecuniary or otherwise.

Here you have a shoemaker who lives by making shoes, and makes them with just enough care and attention to keep his clientele together without losing custom. Another shoemaker lives on a somewhat higher spiritual plane, for he has a proper love for his work, and out of pride or a sense of honour strives for the reputation of being the best shoemaker in the town or in the kingdom, even though this reputation brings him no increase of custom or profit, but only renown and prestige. But there is a still higher degree of moral perfection in this business of shoemaking, and that is for the shoemaker to aspire to become for his fellow-townsmen the one and only shoemaker, indispensable and irreplaceable, the shoemaker who looks after their footgear so well that they will feel a definite loss when he dies--when he is "dead to them,"

not merely "dead"[56]--and they will feel that he ought not to have died. And this will result from the fact that in working for them he was anxious to spare them any discomfort and to make sure that it should not be any preoccupation with their feet that should prevent them from being at leisure to contemplate the higher truths; he shod them for the love of them and for the love of G.o.d in them--he shod them religiously.

I have chosen this example deliberately, although it may perhaps appear to you somewhat pedestrian. For the fact is that in this business of shoemaking, the religious, as opposed to the ethical, sense is at a very low ebb.

Working men group themselves in a.s.sociations, they form co-operative societies and unions for defence, they fight very justly and n.o.bly for the betterment of their cla.s.s; but it is not clear that these a.s.sociations have any great influence on their moral att.i.tude towards their work. They have succeeded in compelling employers to employ only such workmen, and no others, as the respective unions shall designate in each particular case; but in the selection of those designated they pay little heed to their technical fitness. Often the employer finds it almost impossible to dismiss an inefficient workman on account of his inefficiency, for his fellow-workers take his part. Their work, moreover, is often perfunctory, performed merely as a pretext for receiving a wage, and instances even occur when they deliberately mishandle it in order to injure their employer.

In attempting to justify this state of things, it may be said that the employers are a hundred times more blameworthy than the workmen, for they are not concerned to give a better wage to the man who does better work, or to foster the general education and technical proficiency of the workman, or to ensure the intrinsic goodness of the article produced. The improvement of the product--which, apart from reasons of industrial and mercantile compet.i.tion, ought to be in itself and for the good of the consumers, for charity's sake, the chief end of the business--is not so regarded either by employers or employed, and this is because neither the one nor the other have any religious sense of their social function. Neither of them seek to make themselves irreplaceable. The evil is aggravated when the business takes the unhappy form of the impersonal limited company, for where there is no longer any personal signature there is no longer any of that pride which seeks to give the signature prestige, a pride which in its way is a subst.i.tute for the craving for eternalization. With the disappearance of the concrete individuality, the basis of all religion, the religious sense of the business calling disappears also.

And what has been said of employers and workmen applies still more to members of the liberal professions and public functionaries. There is scarcely a single servant of the State who feels the religious bearing of his official and public duties. Nothing could be more unsatisfactory, nothing more confused, than the feeling among our people with regard to their duties towards the State, and this sense of duty is still further obliterated by the att.i.tude of the Catholic Church, whose action so far as the State is concerned is in strict truth anarchical. It is no uncommon thing to find among its ministers upholders of the moral lawfulness of smuggling and contraband as if in disobeying the legally const.i.tuted authority the smuggler and contrabandist did not sin against the Fourth Commandment of the law of G.o.d, which in commanding us to honour our father and mother commands us to obey all lawful authority in so far as the ordinances of such authority are not contrary (and the levying of these contributions is certainly not contrary) to the law of G.o.d.

There are many who, since it is written "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," regard work as a punishment, and therefore they attribute merely an economico-political, or at best an esthetic, value to the work of everyday life. For those who take this view--and it is the view princ.i.p.ally held by the Jesuits--the business of life is twofold: there is the inferior and transitory business of winning a livelihood, of winning bread for ourselves and our children in an honourable, manner--and the elasticity of this honour is well known; and there is the grand business of our salvation, of winning eternal glory.

This inferior or worldly business is to be undertaken not only so as to permit us, without deceiving or seriously injuring our neighbours, to live decently in accordance with our social position, but also so as to afford us the greatest possible amount of time for attending to the other main business of our life. And there are others who, rising somewhat above this conception of the work of our civil occupation, a conception which is economical rather than ethical, attain to an esthetic conception and sense of it, and this involves endeavouring to acquire distinction and renown in our occupation, the converting of it into an art for art's sake, for beauty's sake. But it is necessary to rise still higher than this, to attain to an ethical sense of our civil calling, to a sense which derives from our religious sense, from our hunger of eternalization. To work at our ordinary civil occupation, with eyes fixed on G.o.d, for the love of G.o.d, which is equivalent to saying for the love of our eternalization, is to make of this work a work of religion.