“Every effort by man to build up virtue capable of triumphing over brute force, effort that found its highest representative in the Christ, is opposed to that totality of natural laws in which I can recognize no providential intervention. The “Eli Eli Lama Sabachtani” of the Christ, that desperate, despairing cry, could be uttered by all of us without ceasing, as soon as we try to find a God anywhere else than in the moral domain. The mesalliance that the Catholics try to establish between a god, master of nature and a god-providence (or simply a god realized humanly in the Christ) appears to me cause for misunderstanding between you and me. Those two worlds, the physical and the moral, remain in constant antagonism. I can not believe in two gods.
“I can recognize none of the attributes likely to make God worthy of adoration (but only of fear) in the physical world on which our bodies depend and whose laws are immutable. Nevertheless, our most praiseworthy effort is to master it by science and the knowledge of those laws, and then to apply that knowledge to a more and more efficacious exercise of increasingly generous virtues. I am willing to call God the fascicles of those virtues invented by man and that love which radiates from the Gospels; but then that is only to raise him up with all my human strength against that Zeus, against that pitiless and mechanical totality of the laws that govern our universe. Otherwise, if my mind assimilates God into those laws, it is only to come up unfailingly against fearful contradictions, against the unthinkable.”
“The constant drama of humanity is the one played between Prometheus and Zeus, between mind and matter, between love and brute force, between Christ and the indifference of Heaven; drama of which a new act is unfolding at present; drama in which we neither can nor should remain non-participating witnesses, and which, for victory against Zeus, requires from us “the strength of lions and the wisdom of serpents.”
“Do not make me regret having said so much to you, I beg you. The confidence in your letter invited me to do so. With my very deepest regards, Mademoiselle, believe me.…”
Yes, I know that the drop of water carried along by its weight, can ascend to the sky in vapor only to fall again in rain. But the wear and tear of rock, the gravel that the stream carries to the river and the river to the sea, the granite that disintegrates, I know that all that will not again go up the fatal incline; and the highest mountains dissolve into the valley, the plain where their ruins accumulate and become equal. Everything falls from a height less and less lofty with a fall more and more shallow. This inevitable leveling is accomplished hour by hour and minute by minute under our very eyes. In like manner the whole material world equalizes and tempers its energies. I was still young when that idea began to haunt me, an idea which I now find expressed scientifically and which is not, therefore, absurd.
I should like to offer as a counterbalance to it, that other idea which has itself escaped science: that this leveling of matter has a corresponding progressive variation in the mind.
“No one comes to the Father (to God), except through me.” To begin with God himself. It is through Christ that God is made.
… so that at last
It all amounts to this — the sovereign proof
That we devote ourselves to God, is seen
In living just as though no God there were.
(BROWNING.Paracelsus!)
The mind advances only over the dead bodies of ideas. To-day it is no longer possible to think what yesterday one considered certain: that the earth is flat; that the sun turns about it; that nature abhors a vacuum; and, more recently, that the atom is indecomposable etc.; the same thing on the mystical plane, although with many more laggards. A number of minds, and some of the best, still believe in Providence. It seems to them that all would be lost if the rock on which the believer has firmly placed his foot, and that he has believed firm, should totter. To move the foundation to a neighboring rock, firm until, in its turn, it totters, is, strictly speaking, progress.
I can not believe in the immortality of the soul without, at the same time, believing in metempsychosis. In order not to be obliged to come to an end … it is necessary never to have begun. I do not even understand how believers can be unembarrassed where my thought stumbles, and prolonging life beyond death, do not immediately feel the need to prolong it equally before birth.
32 AUTUMN LEAVES
Neuchâtel, November 1947.
I SHALL be able to say “amen” to anything whatever that happens to me, even if it means to exist no longer, to disappear after having existed. But now I exist and do not understand any too well what that means. I should like to see the matter clearly.
For pity’s sake, leave me alone. I need a little silence around me to obtain peace within myself.
How troublesome you are!.. I need to meditate.
“Free-thinking” … X. explains to me that true liberty of thought must be sought on the side of the believer, not on mine.
“For,” he reasoned, “your mind is held on leash by logic.”
I agreed that a remarkable freedom of thought was necessary to believe in the miracles and all that follows; and that I saw very well that his own mind did not revolt against admitting what to me (and to him) appeared contrary to reason. That is even the property of Faith. Where you can not verify or prove, you must believe.
“And if you refuse to believe,” he concluded, “stop telling me and claiming that you love liberty.”
In my heart, I knew very well that I was not a “free-thinker.”
Faith can remove mountains; yes, mountains of absurdities1. To Faith, I do not oppose doubt, but the affirmation: what could not be, is not.
Therefore I shall refuse to consider the finality in nature. According to the best advice, I shall everywhere replace systematically the why by the how. For instance, I know (or at least I have been told) that the substance which the silkworm discharges in forming his cocoon, would poison him if he kept it in him. He expurgates it. It is for his salvation that he empties himself. Which does not prevent the cocoon, which he is obliged to form under penalty of death, and which he would not know how and would be unable to form differently, from protecting the metamorphosis of the caterpillar; and that the latter can only become a butterfly when empty of this silky poison.… But at the same time, I am forced to wonder at the degree to which the how here joins the why, unites with it so closely, cleaves to it so tightly that I can not distinguish one from the other.
It is the same thing for the mollusk and the shell. The same thing everywhere incessantly; in nature, the solution is not separate from the problem. Or better expressed: there is no problem; there are only solutions. Man’s mind invents the problem afterwards. He sees problems everywhere. It’s a scream.1
Ah! if my mind would only drop its dead ideas as a tree its faded leaves! And without too many regrets, if it is possible! Those from which the sap has receded. But in heaven’s name! What beautiful colors!
Those ideas which you think at first you can not do without. From that the great danger of establishing one’s moral comfort on false ideas. Let us examine, let us verify first. Formerly the sun turned around the earth; the latter, a fixed point, remained the center of the world, God’s center of attention … And then, not at all! It is the earth that revolves. But then everything is tottering! Everything is lost!.. Nevertheless nothing is changed but the belief. Man must learn to get along without it. He frees himself first from one, then from the other. To get along without Providence: man is weaned.