Part 66 (1/2)
”We need not reproduce the former arguments, which are equally strong in relation to the division of eternity into two periods--uncreated and created. We will also set aside the question of the motion or the immobility of worlds, and restrict ourselves to the inherent difficulties of this second thesis.
”If G.o.d pre-existed alone, the universe proceeded from Him; matter is the emanation of His essence. Then matter is not. Every form is but a veil hiding the Divine Spirit. Then, the world is eternal; then, the world is G.o.d! But is not this formula even more fatal than the former one to the attributes a.s.signed to G.o.d by human reason? Does matter, as emanating from G.o.d, and always one with Him, account for the existing conditions of matter? How are we to believe that the Almighty, supremely good in His nature and His acts, could beget things so unlike Himself that He is not in all things and everywhere the same? Were there in Him certain evil const.i.tuents which He rejected from Him?--A conjecture more terrible than offensive or ridiculous, inasmuch as it includes the two theorems which, in our former argument, we proved to be inadmissible. G.o.d must be One, and cannot divide Himself without infringing the most important of His attributes. Is it possible to conceive of a portion of G.o.d which is not G.o.d?
”This hypothesis seemed so impious to the Roman Church, that she made G.o.d's Omnipresence, even in the smallest fragments of the Eucharist, an article of Faith.
”How, then, are we to conceive of an Omnipotent Intelligence which yet cannot conquer? How unite it with Nature, unless by direct conquest? But Nature seeks and combines, reproduces, dies, and is born again; it is even more agitated in the creative effort than when all is in a state of fusion; it suffers and groans; it is ignorant, degenerate, does evil, makes mistakes, destroys itself, disappears, and begins again. How are we to justify the almost universal eclipse of the Divine element? Why is Death?
Why was the spirit of evil, the monarch of this earth, sent forth from a supremely good G.o.d--good alike in His essence and His faculties, who could have produced nothing that was not like Himself?
”And if, setting aside this relentless issue which leads us at once to the absurd, we go into details, what purpose can we ascribe to the world? If all is G.o.d, all is at once effect and cause; or, more accurately, cause and effect do not exist. Like G.o.d, all is one; and you can discern no starting-point and no end. Can the real end be, possibly, a rotation of matter growing more and more rare? But whatever the end may be, is not the mechanism of such matter proceeding from G.o.d and returning to G.o.d, a mere child's plaything? Why should He embody Himself so grossly? Under what form is G.o.d most completely G.o.d? Which wins the day, spirit or matter, when neither of those modes of being can be wrong? Who can possibly discern G.o.d in this perennial toil by which He divides Himself into two natures--one omniscient, the other knowing nothing? Can you conceive of G.o.d as playing at being man, laughing His own labors to scorn, dying on Friday to rise again on Sunday, and carrying on the farce from age to age while knowing the end from all eternity; and never telling Himself, the Creature, what He is doing as Creator?
”The G.o.d of the former hypothesis, null as He is by sheer inertia, seems more possible--if we had to choose between impossibilities--than that stupid mocking G.o.d who destroys Himself when two portions of humanity meet weapon in hand. Comical as this ultimate expression of the second aspect of the problem may be, it was that chosen by half the human race among nations that had created certain gay mythologies. These amorous nations were consistent; to them everything was a G.o.d, even fear and its cowardice, even crime and its baccha.n.a.ls. If we accept Pantheism, the faith of some great human geniuses, who can tell where reason lies? Is it with the savage running free in the desert, clothed in his nakedness, lordly and always right in his actions whatever they may be, listening to the sun and talking to the sea? Is it with the civilized man, whose greatest pleasures are due to falsehoods, who hews and hammers Nature to make the gun he carries on his shoulder, who has applied his intelligence to hasten the hour of his death, and create maladies that taint his pleasures? When the scourge of pestilence, or the ploughshare of war, or the genius of the desert had pa.s.sed over a spot of earth, annihilating everything, which came off best--the Nubian savage or the patrician of Thebes?
”Your scepticism permeates from above downwards. Your doubts include everything, the end as well as the means. If the physical world seems inexplicable, the moral world proves even more against G.o.d. Where, then, is progress? If everything goes on improving, why do we die as children? Why do not nations, at any rate, perpetuate themselves? Is the world that proceeded from G.o.d, that is contained in G.o.d, stationary? Do we live but once? Or do we live for ever? If we live but once, coerced by the advance of the Great All, of which we have no knowledge given us, let us do what we will! If we are eternal, let everything pa.s.s! Can the creature be guilty because it exists when changes are going on? If it sins at the moment of some great transformation, shall it be punished for it after having been the victim? What becomes of divine goodness if it refuses to place us at once in the realms of happiness--if such there be? What becomes of G.o.d's foreknowledge if He does not know the results of the trials to which He subjects us? What is this alternative proposed to man by all His creeds, between stewing in an eternal caldron and wandering in a white robe with a palm in his hand and a halo to crown him? Can this pagan invention be the supreme promise of G.o.d?
”And what magnanimous spirit but sees how unworthy of man and G.o.d alike is virtue out of self-interest, the eternity of joys offered by every creed to those who, during a few brief hours of existence, fulfil certain monstrous and often unnatural conditions? Is it not preposterous to endow man with vehement senses and then forbid his gratifying them?
”Besides, to what end these trivial objections when good and evil alike are negatived? Does evil exist? If matter in all its manifestations is evil, evil is G.o.d.
”The faculty of reason, as well as the faculty of feeling, being bestowed on man for his use, nothing can be more pardonable than to seek a meaning in human suffering and to inquire into the future; if this rigid and rigorous logic leads us to such conclusions, what confusion is here! The world has then no stability; nothing moves on, and nothing stands still; everything changes, but nothing is destroyed; everything renews itself and reappears; for, if your mind cannot unanswerably prove an end, it is equally impossible to prove the annihilation of the smallest atom of matter: it may be transformed, but not destroyed. Though blind force may prove the atheist's position, intelligent force is inscrutable; for, if it proceeds from G.o.d, ought it to encounter any obstacles; ought it not to conquer them immediately?
”Where is G.o.d? If the living are not aware of Him, will the dead find Him?
”Crumble into dust, O idolatries and creeds! Fall, O too feeble keystones of the social arches, for ye have never r.e.t.a.r.ded the destruction, the death, the oblivion, that have come upon all the nations of the past, however securely they were founded. Fall, O morality and justice! Our crimes are but relative, they are divine results of which the causes are unknown to us! Everything is G.o.d. Either we are G.o.d, or G.o.d is not! Child of an age of which each year has left on your brow the cold touch of its scepticism--Old Man! this is the sum total of your science and your long meditations!
”Dear Pastor Becker, you have rested your head on the pillow of doubt, finding it the easiest solution, acting indeed like the majority of the human race. They say to themselves, 'We will think no more of this question if G.o.d will not vouchsafe us an algebraic demonstration for its solution, while He has given us so many that lead us safely up from the earth to the stars----'
”Now, are not these your secret thoughts? Have I missed them? Have I not, on the contrary, precisely stated them?--Either the dogma of the two elementary principles, an antagonism in which G.o.d is destroyed by the very fact that He--who is Almighty--plays at a struggle; or the ridiculous Pantheism in which all things being G.o.d, G.o.d is no more--these two founts, whence flow the creeds to whose triumph the earth is devoted, are equally pernicious.
”There, between us, lies the two-edged axe with which you behead the white-haired Ancient of Days whom you enthrone on painted clouds!
”Now, give me the axe!”
The pastor and Wilfrid looked at the girl in a sort of dismay.
”Belief,” said Seraphita in her gentle voice--for the man had been speaking hitherto--”belief is a gift! Belief is feeling. To believe in G.o.d, you must feel G.o.d. This sense is a faculty slowly acquired by the human being, as those wonderful powers are acquired which you admire in great men--in warriors, artists, men of science--those who act, those who produce, those who know. Thought, a bundle of the relations which you discern between different things, is an intellectual language that may be learned, is it not? Belief, a bundle of heavenly truths, is in the same way a language, but as far above thought as thought is above instinct. This language too can be learned.
”The believer answers in a single cry, a single sign; faith places in his hand a flaming sword which cuts and throws light on everything. The seer does not come down again from heaven; he contemplates it and is silent.
There is a being who both believes and sees, who has knowledge and power, who loves, prays, and waits. That being is resigned, and aspires to the realm of light; he has neither the believer's lofty scorn, nor the Seer's dumbness; he both listens and replies. To him the doubt of the dark ages is not a lethal weapon, but a guiding clue; he accepts the battle in whatever guise; he can accommodate his tongue to every language; he is never wroth, he pities; he neither condemns nor kills, he redeems and comforts; he has not the harshness of an aggressor, but rather the mild fluidity of light which penetrates and warms and lights up every place. In his eyes scepticism is not impiety, is not blasphemy, is not a crime; it is a stage of transition whence a man must go forward towards the light, or back into the darkness.
”So now, dear Pastor, let us reason together. You do not believe in G.o.d.
Why?--G.o.d, as you express it, is incomprehensible and inexplicable. I grant it. I will not retort that to comprehend G.o.d altogether is to be G.o.d. I will not tell you that you deny what you think inexplicable simply to give myself a right of affirming what seems to me believable. To you there is an evident fact dwelling within you. In you matter is conterminous with intelligence; and yet you think that human intelligence will end in darkness, in doubt, in nothingness? Even if G.o.d seems to you incomprehensible and inexplicable, confess at least that in all physical phenomena you recognize in Him a consistent and exquisite Craftsman.
”Then why should His logic end at man, as His most finished work? Though the question may not be convincing, it deserves some consideration at any rate. Though you deny G.o.d, to give a basis to your doubts, you happily can appreciate certain double-edged truths which demolish your arguments as effectually as your arguments demolish G.o.d.
”We both admit that matter and spirit are two separate creations, neither of which contains the other; that the spiritual world consists of infinite relations to which the finite material world gives rise; and that whereas no one on earth has ever been able to identify himself by a sheer effort of mind with the sum-total of earthly creations, all the more certainly can he not rise to an apprehension of the relations which the spirit discerns between these creations. So I might end the matter with one blow by denying you the faculty of understanding G.o.d, just as you deny the pebbles by the fiord the faculty of counting or of seeing themselves. How do you know that they may not deny the existence of man, though man uses them to build his house with?
”There is one fact which overthrows you--Infinitude. If you feel it within you, how is it that you do not recognize the consequences? Can the finite fully apprehend the infinite? If you cannot comprehend the relations which, by your own admission, are infinite, how can you comprehend the remote finality in which they are summed up? Order, of which the manifestation is one of your needs, being infinite, can your finite reason comprehend it?
”Nor need you inquire why man cannot comprehend all he can conceive of, for he likewise can conceive of much that he cannot comprehend. If I were to prove to you that your mind is ignorant of everything that lies within its grasp, would you grant me that it is impossible for it to conceive of what lies beyond it? Should I not be justified, then, in saying, 'One of the alternatives which bring G.o.d to nought at the bar of your judgment must be true and the other false; Creation exists, you feel the need for an end; must not that end be a n.o.ble one? Now, if in man matter is conterminous with intelligence, why can you not be satisfied to grant that human intelligence ends where the light begins of those superior spheres for which is reserved the intuition of the G.o.d who, to you, is merely an insoluble problem?
”The species lower than man have no comprehension of the universe; you have. Why should there not be, above man again, species more intelligent than he? Before using his powers to take measure of G.o.d, would not man do well to know more about himself? Before defying the stars that give him light, before attacking transcendent truths, ought he not rather to verify the truths that immediately concern him?