We are not there yet. That state of complete atheism requires considerable virtue to attain; and even more to maintain. The “believer” will see in it doubtless only an invitation to license. If it were so: long live God! Long live the sacred lie that would preserve mankind from bankruptcy, from disaster. But can not man learn to require from himself by virtue what he thinks required by God? Nevertheless he will have to come to that; some at least, at first; without it, the game would be lost. It will only be won, this strange game we are playing here upon earth (without wanting to, without knowing it, and often against our inclination) if it is to virtue that the idea of God gives place as it recedes; if it is man’s virtue, his dignity, that replaces and supplants God. God exists only by virtue of man. Et eritis sicut dei (That is how I wish to understand that old word of the Tempter — who, like God, exists only in our minds — and see in that offer, that we have been told is fallacious, a possibility of salvation).
God is virtue. But what do I mean by that? It must be defined; I do not succeed very well. I shall only succeed later. But I shall already have done a great deal if I remove God from the altar and put man in his place. Temporarily I think that virtue is the highest an individual can obtain from himself.
God will come later. I persuade myself and repeat constantly: it depends on us. It is through us that God is realized.
What rubbish all this literature is! And even if I should consider only the most successful writings, what business have I, when life is there, with those reflections, those duplicates of life! The only thing that matters to me is what can lead me to modify my way of seeing and acting. To live, all my courage is not too much; to live in this frightful world.… And I know and feel that it is frightful; but I know also that it would be possible for it not to be so, and that it is what we make it. If you denounce the present horror of it, to bring a protest by indignation or disgust, bravo! But if not, away with demoralizers!
There could very well have been nothing; nor anybody. Nobody to notice that there was nothing, and to find that natural.
But what a strange thing that there is something, anything at all.
Something and not a void. Century upon century was necessary to produce this something, to free this something or other from chaos. Still more centuries to obtain the least life. And again still more for this life to reach consciousness. I have ceased to understand, and from its very beginning, this advance, this history. But more incomprehensible than all the rest: unselfishness. Let people go into ecstasies, wrongly without doubt, before the maternal or conjugal abnegation, or altruistical, of the animals; it can be explained, reduced; properly speaking there is nothing disinterested in it; everything follows its inclination and pleasure. I grant it; but it is to wonder all the more when I find these sublime sentiments in man, and capable of gratuitousness. I bend the knee before the slightest act of abnegation, of self-sacrifice for another, for an abstract duty, for an idea. If that is to be the end, the whole world is not too much, all the immense misery of mankind.
They do not admit serenity acquired outside of what they teach. I speak here of the Catholics; every doctrine that departs from their church must end in despair.
As for that serenity on which you plume yourself, you expose it by speaking of it; by exposing it, you compromise it. It is on your countenance and in your acts that one should read it; not in the sentences that you write not knowing why nor for whom.…
Get along without God.… I mean: get along without the idea of God, the belief in an attentive Providence, tutelary and rewarding … all who wish it, do not succeed.
Yet the bat with sunken eyes is able to avoid the wires strung up in the room where he is flying about without colliding with them. And he doubtless feels afar off, in the nocturnal air, the passing of some insect which will furnish his nourishment. He does not fly haphazardly, and his bearing which appears capricious to us, is motivated. Space is full of vibrations, rays, that our senses can not perceive, but which are intercepted by the antennae of insects. What connection between our sensations and their cause? Without a sensitive receiver, nature remains mute, colorless and odorless. It is within us that number becomes harmony.
The wonder is that man has been able to fabricate instruments capable of supplying the insufficiency of his senses, of picking up imperceptible waves and unheard vibrations. We were already satisfied with our senses; the rest is superfluous. But whether we wish it or not, the rest is there. Man has daringly widened his reception and unlimited his power. Too bad he does not show himself more equal to it! He bears himself ill. Lack of habit, perhaps (let us hope so); all of that is so new! He is trespassing and he is overwhelmed.
When I learned that little knots of ribbon were called rosettes (how old could I have been? Five or six …) I got a quantity of both of them from my mother’s workbox, then, having locked myself in my room, away from looks that would have disturbed the miracle, I arranged a flower-bed, a whole garden, on the floor. Were they not flowers? The word meant that. It was only necessary to believe. And I tried for a good quarter of an hour. Nothing happened.
On a childish plane, that was the defeat of nominalism. And perhaps, after all, I lacked imagination. But I especially remember saying to myself: “What an idiot I am. What does all this foolishness mean? There is nothing there but pieces of ribbon, nothing at all …” and I went and put them back in my mother’s basket.
These are such hard times, that we can not imagine (or rather: are not willing to admit) that there could have been just as tragic ones at any other moment in history. Better informed, we should arrive, perhaps, at convincing ourselves that the exceptional was, very much to the contrary, the long period of tolerance in which we were living before the breaking out of horrors (which feel themselves decidedly at home—on earth) — so natural did that freedom of mind, so deplorably compromised today, appear to us. Here comes back a time when those will be considered traitors who do not think “properly.”
Some, it is true, still resist; and it is they alone who count. It is of little importance that they are few in number: it is in them that the idea of God takes refuge.
But the temptation which, for the young, is the most difficult to resist, is that of “enlisting,” as is said. Everything tempts one to it, the most skillful sophisms, motives the most noble in appearance and the most urgent. Much would have been accomplished if youth were persuaded that, at heart, it is through laisser-aller and laziness that they enlist;
… if youth were persuaded that it is a question — not of being this or that but — of being.
One flatters oneself, or at least one has the tendency to flatter oneself. Complacency toward oneself is a trap into which I have such great fear of falling that I have often been able to doubt the sincerity (the genuineness) of movements, that were, nevertheless, natural to me, as soon as they took the direction that I would have liked them to take. (My sentence is frightfully complicated; impossible to express that simply.) Those movements, those “states of mind,” I still had to recognize and admit as natural, when I found them exactly the same, in my daughter while still a child; in particular, a certain fundamental optimism, that, in myself, I could be afraid was obtained.
As someone asked Catherine, a little stupidly, it seems to me: “Where would you rather be? At Saint-Clair (where she was then) or in Paris?”—at first she seemed very much astonished; she could scarcely comprehend that such a question deserved asking; then ended by answering ingenuously — “why, at Saint-Clair, since I am there.” (She must have been hardly more than five years old at that time.) And I suddenly recognized in her the very depths of my own nature and the secret of my happiness: an “Amen” indicated by the great difficulty, if not the impossibility (in that child as in myself) of producing and nourishing regrets.