At
our last meeting, we considered the healthy-minded temperament, the temperament
which has a constitutional incapacity for prolonged suffering, and in which the
tendency to see things optimistically is like a water of crystallization in which
the individual's character is set. We saw how this temperament may become the
basis for a peculiar type of religion, a religion in which good, even the good
of this world's life, is regarded as the essential thing for a rational being
to attend to. This religion directs him to settle his scores with the more evil
aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make
much of them by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on occasion,
by denying outright that they exist. Evil is a disease; and worry over disease
is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.
Even repentance and remorse, affections which come in the character of ministers
of good, may be but sickly and relaxing impulses, The best repentance is to up
and act for righteousness, and forget that you ever had relations with sin.
Spinoza's philosophy has this sort of healthy-mindedness woven into the heart
of it, and this has been one secret of its fascination. He whom Reason leads,
according to Spinoza, is led altogether by the influence over his mind of good.
Knowledge of evil is an 'inadequate' knowledge, fit only for slavish minds. So
Spinoza categorically condemns repentance. When men make mistakes, he says,- -
"One might perhaps expect gnawings of conscience and repentance to help to
bring them on the right path, and might thereupon conclude (as every one does
conclude) that these affections are good things. Yet when we look at the matter
closely, we shall find that not only are they not good, but on the contrary deleterious
and evil passions. For it is manifest that we can always get along better by reason
and love of truth than by worry of conscience and remorse. Harmful are these and
evil, inasmuch as they form a particular kind of sadness; and the disadvantages
of sadness," he continues, "I have already proved, and shown that we should strive
to keep it from our life. Just so we should endeavor, since uneasiness of conscience
and remorse are of this kind of complexion, to flee and shun these states of mind."
* -
* Tract on God, Man, and Happiness, Book ii. ch. x. -
Within the Christian
body, for which repentance of sins has from the beginning been the critical religious
act, healthy-mindedness has always come forward with its milder interpretation.
Repentance according to such healthy-minded Christians means getting away from
the sin, not groaning and writhing over its commission. The Catholic practice
of confession and absolution is in one of its aspects little more than a systematic
method of keeping healthy-mindedness on top. By it a man's accounts with evil
are periodically squared and audited, so that he may start the clean page with
no old debts inscribed. Any Catholic will tell us how clean and fresh and free
he feels after the purging operation. Martin Luther by no means belonged to the
healthy-minded type in the radical sense in which we have discussed it, and be
repudiated priestly absolution for sin. Yet in this matter of repentance he had
some very healthy-minded ideas, due in the main to the largeness of his conception
of God. -
"When I was a monk," he says, "I thought that I was utterly cast
away, if at any time I felt the lust of the flesh: that is to say, if I felt any
evil motion, fleshly lust, wrath, hatred, or envy against any brother. I assayed
many ways to help to quiet my conscience, but it would not be; for the concupiscence
and lust of my flesh did always return, so that I could not rest, but was continually
vexed with these thoughts: This or that sin thou hast committed: thou art infected
with envy, with impatiency, and such other sins: therefore thou art entered into
this holy order in vain, and all thy good works are unprofitable. But if then
I had rightly understood these sentences of Paul: 'The flesh lusteth contrary
to the Spirit, and the Spirit contrary to the flesh; and these two are one against
another, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would do,' I should not have
so miserably tormented myself, but should have thought and said to myself, as
now commonly I do, 'Martin, thou shalt not utterly be without sin, for thou hast
flesh; thou shalt therefore feel the battle thereof.' I remember that Staupitz
was wont to say, 'I have vowed unto God above a thousand times that I would become
a better man: but I never performed that which I vowed. Hereafter I will make
no such vow: for I have now learned by experience that I am not able to perform
it. Unless, therefore, God be favorable and merciful unto me for Christ's sake,
I shall not be able, with all my vows and all my good deeds, to stand before him.'
This (of Staupitz's) was not only a true, but also a godly and a holy desperation;
and this must they all confess, both with mouth and heart, who will be saved.
For the godly trust not to their own righteousness. They look unto Christ their
reconciler, who gave his life for their sins. Moreover, they know that the remnant
of sin which is in their flesh is not laid to their charge, but freely pardoned.
Notwithstanding, in the mean while they fight in spirit against the flesh, lest
they should fulfill the lusts thereof; and although they feel the flesh to rage
and rebel, and themselves also do fan sometimes into sin through infirmity, yet
are they not discouraged, nor think therefore that their state and kind of life,
and the works which are done according to their calling, displease God; but they
raise up themselves by faith." * -
* Commentary on Galatians, Philadelphia,
1891, pp. 510-514 (abridged). -
One of the heresies for which the Jesuits
got that spiritual genius, Molinos, the founder of Quietism, so abominably condemned
was his healthy-minded opinion of repentance:- -
"When thou fallest into a
fault, in what matter soever it be, do not trouble nor afflict thyself for it.
For they are effects of our frail Nature, stained by Original Sin. The common
enemy will make thee believe, as soon as thou fallest into any fault, that thou
walkest in error, and therefore art out of God and his favor, and herewith would
he make thee distrust of the divine Grace, telling thee of thy misery, and making
a giant of it; and putting it into thy head that every day thy soul grows worse
instead of better, whilst it so often repeats these failings. O blessed Soul,
open thine eyes; and shut the gate against these diabolical suggestions, knowing
thy misery, and trusting in the mercy divine. Would not he be a mere fool who,
running at tournament with others, and falling in the best of the career, should
lie weeping on the ground and afflicting himself with discourses upon his fall?
Man (they would tell him), lose no time, get up and take the course again, for
he that rises again quickly and continues his race is as if he had never fallen.
If thou seest thyself fallen once and a thousand times, thou oughtest to make
use of the remedy which I have given thee, that is, a loving confidence in the
divine mercy. These are the weapons with which thou must fight and conquer cowardice
and vain thoughts. This is the means thou oughtest to use- not to lose time, not
to disturb thyself, and reap no good." * -
* MOLINOS: Spiritual Guide, Book
II., chaps. xvii., xviii. (abridged). -
Now in contrast with such healthy-minded
views as these, if we treat them as a way of deliberately minimizing evil, stands
a radically opposite view, a way of maximizing evil, if you please so to call
it, based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very
essence, and that the world's meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most
to heart. We have now to address ourselves to this more morbid way of looking
at the situation. But as I closed our last hour with a general philosophical reflection
on the healthy-minded way of taking life, I should like at this point to make
another philosophical reflection upon it before turning to that heavier task.
You will excuse the brief delay.
If we admit that evil is
an essential part of our being and the key to the interpretation of our life,
we load ourselves down with a difficulty that has always proved burdensome in
philosophies of religion. Theism, whenever it has erected itself into a systematic
philosophy of the universe, has shown a reluctance to let God be anything less
than All-in-All. In other words, philosophic theism has always shown a tendency
to become pantheistic and monistic, and to consider the world as one unit of absolute
fact; and this has been at variance with popular or practical theism, which latter
has ever been more or less frankly pluralistic, not to say polytheistic, and shown
itself perfectly well satisfied with a universe composed of many original principles,
provided we be only allowed to believe that the divine principle remains supreme,
and that the others are subordinate. In this latter case God is not necessarily
responsible for the existence of evil; he would only be responsible if it were
not finally overcome. But on the monistic or pantheistic view, evil, like everything
else, must have its foundation in God; and the difficulty is to see how this can
possibly be the case if God be absolutely good. This difficulty faces us in every
form of philosophy in which the world appears as one flawless unit of fact. Such
a unit is an Individual, and in it the worst parts must be as essential as the
best, must be as necessary to make the individual what he is; since if any part
whatever in an individual were to vanish or alter, it would no longer be that
individual at all. The philosophy of absolute idealism, so vigorously represented
both in Scotland and America to-day, has to struggle with this difficulty quite
as much as scholastic theism struggled in its time; and although it would be premature
to say that there is no speculative issue whatever from the puzzle, it is perfectly
fair to say that there is no clear or easy-issue, and that the only obvious escape
from paradox here is to cut loose from the monistic assumption altogether, and
to allow the world to have existed from its origin in pluralistic form, as an
aggregate or collection of higher and lower things and principles, rather than
an absolutely unitary fact. For then evil would not need to be essential; it might
be, and may always have been, an independent portion that had no rational or absolute
right to live with the rest, and which we might conceivably hope to see got rid
of at last.
Now the gospel of healthy-mindedness, as we have described it,
casts its vote distinctly for this pluralistic view. Whereas the monistic philosopher
finds himself more or less bound to say, as Hegel said, that everything actual
is rational, and that evil, as an element dialectically required, must be pinned
in and kept and consecrated and have a function awarded to it in the final system
of truth, healthy-mindedness refuses to say anything of the sort. * Evil, it says,
is emphatically irrational, and not to be pinned in, or preserved, or consecrated
in any final system of truth. It is a pure abomination to the Lord, an alien unreality,
a waste element, to be sloughed off and negated, and the very memory of it, if
possible, wiped out and forgotten. The ideal, so far from being co-extensive with
the whole actual, is a mere extract from the actual, marked by its deliverance
from all contact with this diseased, inferior, and excrementitious stuff. -
* I say this in spite of the monistic utterances of many mind-cure writers; for
these utterances are really inconsistent with their attitude towards disease,
and can easily be shown not to be logically involved in the experiences of union
with a higher Presence with which they connect themselves. The higher Presence,
namely, need not be the absolute whole of things, it is quite sufficient for the
life of religious experience to regard it as a part, if only it be the most ideal
part. -
Here we have the interesting notion fairly and squarely presented
to us, of there being elements of the universe which may make no rational whole
in conjunction with the other elements, and which, from the point of view of any
system which those other elements make up, can only be considered so much irrelevance
and accident- so much 'dirt,' as it were, and matter out of place. I ask you now
not to forget this notion; for although most philosophers seem either to forget
it or to disdain it too much ever to mention it, I believe that we shall have
to admit it ourselves in the end as containing an element of truth. The mind-cure
gospel thus once more appears to us as having dignity and importance. We have
seen it to be a genuine religion, and no mere silly appeal to imagination to cure
disease; we have seen its method of experimental verification to be not unlike
the method of all science; and now here we find mind-cure as the champion of a
perfectly definite conception of the metaphysical structure of the world. I hope
that, in view of all this, you will not regret my having pressed it upon your
attention at such length. -
Let us now say good-by for a
while to all this way of thinking, and turn towards those persons who cannot so
swiftly throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil, but are congenitally
fated to suffer from its presence. Just as we saw that in healthy-mindedness there
are shallower and profounder levels, happiness like that of the mere animal, and
more regenerate of happiness, so also are there different levels of the morbid
mind, and the one is much more formidable than the other. There are people for
whom evil means only a mal-adjustment with things, a wrong correspondence of one's
life with the environment. Such evil as this is curable, in principle at least,
upon the natural plane, for merely by modifying either the self or the things,
or both at once, the two terms may be made to fit, and all go merry as a marriage
bell again. But there are others for whom evil is no mere relation of the subject
to particular outer things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness
or vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any
superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural
remedy. On the whole, the Latin races have leaned more towards the former way
of looking upon evil, as made up of ills and sins in the plural, removable in
detail; while the Germanic races have tended rather to think of Sin in the singular,
and with a capital S, as of something ineradicably ingrained in our natural subjectivity,
and never to be removed by any superficial piecemeal operations. * These comparisons
of races are always open to exception, but undoubtedly the northern tone in religion
has inclined to the more intimately pessimistic persuasion, and this way of feeling,
being the more extreme, we shall find by far the more instructive for our study.
-
* Cf., J. MILSAND: Luther et le Serf-Arbitre, 1884, passim. -
Recent
psychology has found great use for the word 'threshold' as a symbolic designation
for the point at which one state of mind passes into another. Thus we speak of
the threshold of a man's consciousness in general, to indicate the amount of noise,
pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all.
One with a high threshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with
a low threshold would be immediately waked. Similarly, when one is sensitive to
small differences in any order of sensation we say he has a low 'difference-threshold'-
his mind easily steps over it into the consciousness of the differences in question.
And just so we might speak of a 'pain-threshold,' a 'fear-threshold,' a 'misery-threshold,'
and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying
too high in others to be often reached by their consciousness. The sanguine and
healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of their misery-line, the depressed
and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension. There are men who
seem to have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to their
credit; whilst others seem to have been born close to the pain-threshold, which
the slightest irritants fatally send them over.
Does it not
appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of the pain-threshold might
need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other?
This question, of the relativity of different types of religion to different types
of need, arises naturally at this point, and will become a serious problem ere
we have done. But before we confront it in general terms, we must address ourselves
to the unpleasant task of hearing what the sick souls, as we may call them in
contrast to the healthy-minded, have to say of the secrets of their prison-house,
their own peculiar form of consciousness. Let us then resolutely turn our backs
on the once-born and their sky-blue optimistic gospel; let us not simply cry out,
in spite of all appearances, "Hurrah for the Universe!- God's in his Heaven, all's
right with the world." Let us see rather whether pity, pain, and fear, and the
sentiment of human helplessness may not open a profounder view and put into our
hands a more complicated key to the meaning of the situation. -
To
begin with, how can things so insecure as the successful experiences of this
world afford a stable anchorage? A chain is no stronger than its weakest link,
and life is after all a chain. In the healthiest and most prosperous existence,
how many links of illness, danger, and disaster are always interposed? Unsuspectedly
from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something
bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of
melancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring
a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness.
The buzz of life ceases at their touch as a piano-string stops sounding when the
damper falls upon it.
Of course the music can commence again;- and again and
again,- at intervals. But with this the healthy-minded consciousness is left with
an irremediable sense of precariousness. It is a bell with a crack; it draws its
breath on sufferance and by an accident.
Even if we suppose a man so packed
with healthy-mindedness as never to have experienced in his own person any of
these sobering intervals, still, if he is a reflecting being, he must generalize
and class his own lot with that of others; and, doing so, he must see that his
escape is just a lucky chance and no essential difference. He might just as well
have been born to an entirely different fortune. And then indeed the hollow security!
What kind of a frame of things is it of which the best you can say is, "Thank
God, it has let me off clear this time!" Is not its blessedness a fragile fiction?
Is not your joy in it a very vulgar glee, not much unlike the snicker of any rogue
at his success? If indeed it were an success, even on such terms as that! But
take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out
of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line
of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or
else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which
he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.
When such a conquering optimist
as Goethe can express himself in this wise, how must it be with less successful
men? -
"I will say nothing," writes Goethe in 1824, "against the course of
my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can
affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine
well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again
forever." -
What single-handed man was ever on the whole as successful as
Luther? yet when he had grown old, he looked back on his life as if it were an
absolute failure. -
"I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come
forthwith and carry me hence. Let him come, above all, with his last Judgment:
I will stretch out my neck, the thunder will burst forth, and I shall be at rest."-
And having a necklace of white agates in his hand at the time he added: "O God,
grant that it may come without delay. I would readily eat up this necklace to-day,
for the Judgment to come to-morrow."- The Electress Dowager, one day when Luther
was dining with her, said to him: "Doctor, I wish you may live forty years to
come." "Madam," replied he, "rather than live forty years more, I would give up
my chance of Paradise." -
Failure, then, failure! so the
world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our
lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation.
And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere
apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound
of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering
known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these
results.
And they are pivotal human experiences. A process so ubiquitous and
everlasting is evidently an integral part of life. "There is indeed one element
in human destiny," Robert Louis Stevenson writes, "that not blindness itself can
controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed;
failure is the fate allotted." * And our nature being thus rooted in failure,
is it any wonder that theologians should have held it to be essential, and thought
that only through the personal experience of humiliation which it engenders the
deeper sense of life's significance is reached? *(2) -
* He adds with characteristic
healthy-mindedness: "Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits."
*(2) The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the
damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of this world. To our
own consciousness there is usually a residuum of worth left over after our sins
and errors have been told off- our capacity of acknowledging and regretting them
is the germ of a better self in posse at least. But the world deals with us in
actu and not in posse: and of this bidden germ, not to be guessed at from without,
it never takes account. Then we turn to the All-knower, who knows our bad, but
knows this good in us also, and who is just. We cast ourselves with our repentance
on his mercy: only by an All-knower can we finally be judged. So the need of a
God very definitely emerges from this sort of experience of life. -
But this
is only the first stage of the world-sickness. Make the human being's sensitiveness
a little greater, carry him a little farther over the misery-threshold, and the
good quality of the successful moments themselves when they occur is spoiled and
vitiated. All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love
is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish. Can things whose end is always
dust and disappointment be the real goods which our souls require? Back of everything
is the great spectre of universal death, the all-encompassing blackness:- -
"What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the Sun? I looked
on all the works that my hands had wrought, and behold, all was vanity and vexation
of spirit. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; as the one
dieth, so dieth the other; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again....
The dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory
of them is forgotten. Also their love and their hatred and their envy is now perished;
neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the
Sun.... Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold
the Sun: but if a man live many years and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember
the days of darkness; for they shall be many." -
In short, life and its negation
are beaten up inextricably together. But if the life be good, the negation of
it must be bad. Yet the two are equally essential facts of existence; and all
natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the
sepulchre surrounds it.
To a mind attentive to this state
of things and rightly subject to the joy-destroying chill which such a contemplation
engenders, the only relief that healthy-mindedness can give is by saying: 'Stuff
and nonsense, get out into the open air!' or 'Cheer up, old fellow, you'll be
all right erelong, if you will only drop your morbidness!' But in all seriousness,
can such bald animal talk as that be treated as a rational answer? To ascribe
religious value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment with one's brief chance at
natural good is but the very consecration of forgetfulness and superficiality.
Our troubles lie indeed too deep for that cure. The fact that we can die, that
we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment
live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity. We need a life not correlated
with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not perish,
a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature.
It all depends on how
sensitive the soul may become to discords. "The trouble with me is that I believe
too much in common happiness and goodness," said a friend of mine whose consciousness
was of this sort, "and nothing can console me for their transiency. I am appalled
and disconcerted at its being possible." And so with most of us: a little cooling
down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a
little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm
at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into
melancholy metaphysicians. The pride of life and glory of the world will shrivel.
It is after all but the standing quarrel of hot youth and hoary eld. Old age has
the last word: the purely naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically
it may begin, is sure to end in sadness.
This sadness lies at the heart of
every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let
sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the
moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there
to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical
life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present
fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its
significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known
to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and
gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh
and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the
doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all
these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and
they turn to a mere flatness.
The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed
from the background of possibilities it goes with. Let our common experiences
be enveloped in an eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance;
let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith and hope
be the atmosphere which man breathes in;- and his days pass by with zest; they
stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values. Place round them on the
contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanent meaning which
for pure naturalism and the popular science evolutionism of our time are all that
is visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious
trembling.
For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind
is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded
by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the
ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will
disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature's portion.
The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the
ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must
take in the meaning of the total situation.
The early Greeks
are continually held up to us in literary works as models of the healthy-minded
joyousness which the religion of nature may engender. There was indeed much joyousness
among the Greeks- Homer's flow of enthusiasm for most things that the sun shines
upon is steady. But even in Homer the reflective passages are cheerless, * and
the moment the Greeks grew systematically pensive and thought of ultimates, they
became unmitigated pessimists. *(2) The jealousy of the gods, the nemesis that
follows too much happiness, the all-encompassing death, fate's dark opacity, the
ultimate and unintelligible cruelty, were the fixed background of their imagination.
The beautiful joyousness of their polytheism is only a poetic modern fiction.
They knew no joys comparable in quality of preciousness to those which we shall
erelong see that Brahmans, Buddhists, Christians, Mohammedans, twice-born people
whose religion is non-naturalistic, get from their several creeds of mysticism
and renunciation. -
* E.g., Iliad, XVII. 446: "Nothing then is more wretched
anywhere than man of all that breathes and creeps upon this earth."
*(2) E.g.,
Theognis, 425-428: "Best of all for all things upon earth is it not to be born
nor to behold the splendors of the Sun; next best to traverse as soon as possible
the gates of Hades." See also the almost identical passage in Oedipus in Colonus,
1225.- The Anthology is full of pessimistic utterances: "Naked came I upon the
earth, naked I go below the ground- why then do I vainly toil when I see the end
naked before me?"- "How did I come to be? Whence am I? Wherefore did I come? To
pass away. How can I learn aught when naught I know? Being naught I came to life:
once more shall I be what I was. Nothing and nothingness is the whole race of
mortals."- "For death we are all cherished and fattened like a herd of hogs that
is wantonly butchered."
The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental
and modern variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that the pathetic
mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility. Their spirit
was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily
dwelt on in their classic literature. They would have despised a life set wholly
in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds of lachrymosity.
The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as this world goes, may be laid
on its pain and failure, was reserved for races more complex, and (so to speak)
more feminine than the Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period. But
all the same was the outlook of those Hellenes blackly pessimistic. -
Stoic
insensibility and Epicurean resignation were the farthest advance which the Greek
mind made in that direction. The Epicurean said: "Seek not to be happy, but rather
to escape unhappiness; strong happiness is always linked with pain; therefore
hug the safe shore, and do not tempt the deeper raptures. Avoid disappointment
by expecting little, and by aiming low; and above all do not fret." The Stoic
said: "The only genuine good that life can yield a man is the free possession
of his own soul; all other goods are lies." Each of these philosophies is in its
degree a philosophy of despair in nature's boons. Trustful self-abandonment to
the joys that freely offer has entirely departed from both Epicurean and Stoic;
and what each proposes is a way of rescue from the resultant dust-and-ashes state
of mind. The Epicurean still awaits results from economy of indulgence and damping
of desire. The Stoic hopes for no results, and gives up natural good altogether.
There is dignity in both these forms of resignation. They represent distinct stages
in the sobering process which man's primitive intoxication with sense-happiness
is sure to undergo. In the one the hot blood has grown cool, in the other it has
become quite cold; and although I have spoken of them in the past tense, as if
they were merely historic, yet Stoicism and Epicureanism will probably be to all
time typical attitudes, marking a certain definite stage accomplished in the evolution
of the world-sick soul. * They mark the conclusion of what we call the once-born
period, and represent the highest flights of what twice-born religion would call
the purely natural man- Epicureanism, which can only by great courtesy be called
a religion, showing his refinement, and Stoicism exhibiting his moral will. They
leave the world in the shape of an unreconciled contradiction, and seek no higher
unity. Compared with the complex ecstasies which the supernaturally regenerated
Christian may enjoy, or the oriental pantheist indulge in, their receipts for
equanimity are expedients which seem almost crude in their simplicity. -
*
For instance, on the very day on which I write this page, the post brings me some
aphorisms from a worldly-wise old friend in Heidelberg which may serve as a good
contemporaneous expression of Epicureanism: "By the word 'happiness' every human
being understands something different. It is a phantom pursued only by weaker
minds. The wise man is satisfied with the more modest but much more definite term
contentment. What education should chiefly aim at is to save us from a discontented
life. Health is one favoring condition, but by no means an indispensable one,
of contentment. Woman's heart and love are a shrewd device of Nature, a trap which
she sets for the average man, to force him into working. But the wise man will
always prefer work chosen by himself." -
Please observe, however, that I am
not yet pretending finally to judge any of these attitudes. I am only describing
their variety.
The securest way to the rapturous sorts of
happiness of which the twice-born make report has as an historic matter of fact
been through a more radical pessimism than anything that we have yet considered.
We have seen how the lustre and enchantment may be rubbed off from the goods of
nature. But there is a pitch of unhappiness so great that the goods of nature
may be entirely forgotten, and all sentiment of their existence vanish from the
mental field. For this extremity of pessimism to be reached, something more is
needed than observation of life and reflection upon death. The individual must
in his own person become the prey of a pathological melancholy. As the healthy-minded
enthusiast succeeds in ignoring evil's very existence, so the subject of melancholy
is forced in spite of himself to ignore that of all good whatever: for him it
may no longer have the least reality. Such sensitiveness and susceptibility to
mental pain is a rare occurrence where the nervous constitution is entirely normal;
one seldom finds it in a healthy subject even where he is the victim of the most
atrocious cruelties of outward fortune. So we note here the neurotic constitution,
of which I said so much in my first lecture, making its active entrance on our
scene, and destined to play a part in much that follows. Since these experiences
of melancholy are in the first instance absolutely private and individual, I can
now help myself out with personal documents. Painful indeed they will be to listen
to, and there is almost an indecency in handling them in public. Yet they lie
right in the middle of our path; and if we are to touch the psychology of religion
at all seriously, we must be willing to forget conventionalities, and dive below
the smooth and lying official conversational surface.
One can
distinguish many kinds of pathological depression. Sometimes it is mere passive
joylessness and dreariness, discouragement, dejection, lack of taste and zest
and spring. Professor Ribot has proposed the name anhedonia to designate this
condition. -
"The state of anhedonia, if I may coin a new word to pair off
with analgesia," he writes, "has been very little studied, but it exists. A young
girl was smitten with a liver disease which for some time altered her constitution.
She felt no longer any affection for her father and mother. She would have played
with her doll, but it was impossible to find the least pleasure in the act. The
same things which formerly convulsed her with laughter entirely failed to interest
her now. Esquirol observed the case of a very intelligent magistrate who was also
a prey to hepatic disease. Every emotion appeared dead within him. He manifested
neither perversion nor violence, but complete absence of emotional reaction. If
he went to the theatre, which he did out of habit, he could find no pleasure there.
The thought of his house, of his home, of his wife, and of his absent children
moved him as little, he said, as a theorem of Euclid." * -
* RIBOT: Psychologie
des sentiments, p. 54. -
Prolonged seasickness will in most persons produce
a temporary condition of anhedonia. Every good, terrestrial or celestial, is imagined
only to be turned from with disgust. A temporary condition of this sort, connected
with the religious evolution of a singularly lofty character, both intellectual
and moral, is well described by the Catholic philosopher, Father Gratry, in his
autobiographical recollections. In consequence of mental isolation and excessive
study at the Polytechnic school, young Gratry fell into a state of nervous exhaustion
with symptoms which he thus describes:- -
"I had such a universal terror that
I woke at night with a start, thinking that the Pantheon was tumbling on the Polytechnic
school, or that the school was in flames, or that the Seine was pouring into the
Catacombs, and that Paris was being swallowed up. And when these impressions were
past, all day long without respite I suffered an incurable and intolerable desolation,
verging on despair. I thought myself, in fact, rejected by God, lost, damned!
I felt something like the suffering of hell. Before that I had never even thought
of hell. My mind had never turned in that direction. Neither discourses nor reflections
had impressed me in that way. I took no account of hell. Now, and all at once,
I suffered in a measure what is suffered there.
"But what was perhaps still
more dreadful is that every idea of heaven was taken away from me: I could no
longer conceive of anything of the sort. Heaven did not seem to me worth going
to. It was like a vacuum; a mythological elysium, an abode of shadows less real
than the earth. I could conceive no joy, no pleasure in inhabiting it. Happiness,
joy, light, affection, love- all these words were now devoid of sense. Without
doubt I could still have talked of all these things, but I had become incapable
of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything
from them, or of believing them to exist. There was my great and inconsolable
grief! I neither perceived nor conceived any longer the existence of happiness
or perfection. An abstract heaven over a naked rock. Such was my present abode
for eternity." * -
* A. GRATRY: Sonvenirs de ma jeunesse, 1880, pp. 119-121,
abridged. Some persons are affected with anhedonia permanently, or at any rate
with a loss of the usual appetite for life. The annals of suicide supply such
examples as the following:
An uneducated domestic servant, aged nineteen,
poisons herself, and leaves two letters expressing her motive for the act. To
her parents she writes:
"Life is sweet perhaps to some, but I prefer what
is sweeter than life, and that is death. So good-by forever, my dear parents.
It is nobody's fault, but a strong desire of my own which I have longed to fulfill
for three or four years. I have always had a hope that some day I might have all
opportunity of fulfilling it, and now it has come.... It is a wonder I have put
this off so long, but I thought perhaps I should cheer up a bit and put all thought
out of my head." To her brother she writes: "Good-by forever, my own dearest brother.
By the time you get this I shall be gone forever. I know, dear love, there is
no forgiveness for what I am going to do.... I am tired of living, so am willing
to die.... Life may be sweet to some, but death to me is sweeter." S.A.K. STRAHAN:
Suicide and Insanity, 2d edition, London, 1894, p. 131.
So much
for melancholy in the sense of incapacity for joyous feeling. A much worse form
of it is positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown
to healthy life. Such anguish may partake of various characters, having sometimes
more the quality of loathing; sometimes that of irritation and exasperation; or
again of self-mistrust and self-despair; or of suspicion, anxiety, trepidation,
fear. The patient may rebel or submit; may accuse himself, or accuse outside powers;
and he may or he may not be tormented by the theoretical mystery of why he should
so have to suffer. Most case are mixed cases, and we should not treat our classifications
with too much respect. Moreover, it is only a relatively small proportion of cases
that connect themselves with the religious sphere of experience at all. Exasperated
cases, for instance, as a rule do not. I quote now literally from the first case
of melancholy on which I lay my hand. It is a letter from a patient in a French
asylum.
"I suffer too much in this hospital, both physically and morally.
Besides the burnings and the sleeplessness (for I no longer sleep since I am shut
up here, and the little rest I get is broken by bad dreams, and I am waked with
a jump by nightmares, dreadful visions, lightning, thunder, and the rest), fear,
atrocious fear, presses me down, holds me without respite, never lets me go. Where
is the justice in it all! What have I done to deserve this excess of severity?
Under what form will this fear crush me? What would I not owe to any one who would
rid me of my life! Eat, drink, lie awake all night, suffer without interruption-
such is the fine legacy I have received from my mother! What I fail to understand
is this abuse of power. There are limits to everything, there is a middle way.
But God knows neither middle way nor limits. I say God, but why? All I have known
so far has been the devil. After all, I am afraid of God as much as of the devil,
so I drift along, thinking of nothing but suicide, but with neither courage nor
means here to execute the act. As you read this, it will easily prove to you my
insanity. The style and the ideas are incoherent enough- I can see that myself.
But I cannot keep myself from being either crazy or an idiot; and, as things are,
from whom should I ask pity? I am defenseless against the invisible enemy who
is tightening his coils around me. I should be no better armed against him even
if I saw him, or had seen him. Oh, if he would but kill me, devil take him! Death,
death, once for all! But I stop. I have raved to you long enough. I say raved,
for I can write no otherwise, having neither brain nor thoughts left. O God! what
a misfortune to be born! Born like a mushroom, doubtless between an evening and
a morning; and how true and right I was when in our philosophy-year in college
I chewed the cud of bitterness with the pessimists. Yes, indeed, there is more
pain in life than gladness- it is one long agony until the grave. Think how gay
it makes me to remember that this horrible misery of mine, coupled with this unspeakable
fear, may last fifty, one hundred, who knows how many more years!" *
* ROUBINOVITCH
ET TOULOUSE: La Melancolie, 1897, p. 170, abridged.
This letter shows two
things. First, you see how the entire consciousness of the poor man is so choked
with the feeling of evil that the sense of there being any good in the world is
lost for him altogether. His attention excludes it, cannot admit it: the sun has
left his heaven. And secondly you see how the querulous temper of his misery keeps
his mind from taking a religious direction. Querulousness of mind tends in fact
rather towards irreligion; and it has played, so far as I know, no part whatever
in the construction of religious systems.
Religious melancholy must be cast
in a more melting mood. Tolstoy has left us, in his book called My Confession,
a wonderful account of the attack of melancholy which led him to his own religious
conclusions. The latter in some respects are peculiar; but the melancholy presents
two characters which make it a typical document for our present purpose. First
it is a well-marked case of anhedonia, of passive loss of appetite for all life's
values; and second, it shows how the altered and estranged aspect which the world
assumed in consequence of this stimulated Tolstoy's intellect to a gnawing, carking
questioning and effort for philosophic relief. I mean to quote Tolstoy at some
length; but before doing so, I will make a general remark on each of these two
points.
First on our spiritual judgments and the sense of value in general.
It is notorious that facts are compatible with opposite
emotional comments, since the same fact will inspire entirely different feelings
in different persons, and at different times in the same person; and there is
no rationally deducible connection between any outer fact and the sentiments it
may happen to provoke. These have their source in another sphere of existence
altogether, in the animal and spiritual region of the subject's being. Conceive
yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your world
now inspires you, and try to imagine it as it exists, purely by itself, without
your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost
impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No
one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the
whole collection of its things and series of its events would be without significance,
character, expression, or perspective. Whatever of value, interest, or meaning
our respective worlds may appear endued with are thus pure gifts of the spectator's
mind. The passion of love is the most familiar and extreme example of this fact.
If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force
it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise
transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets
the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life.
So with fear, with indignation, jealousy, ambition, worship. If they are there,
life changes. And whether they shall be there or not depends almost always upon
non-logical, often on organic conditions. And as the excited interest which these
passions put into the world is our gift to the world, just so are the passions
themselves gifts,- gifts to us, from sources sometimes low and sometimes high;
but almost always non-logical and beyond our control. How can the moribund old
man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things
with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?
Gifts, either of the flesh or of the spirit; and the spirit bloweth where it listeth;
and the world's materials lend their surface passively to all the gifts alike,
as the stage-setting receives indifferently whatever alternating colored lights
may be shed upon it from the optical apparatus in the gallery.
Meanwhile
the practically real world for each one of us, the effective world of the
individual, is the compound world, the physical facts and emotional values in
indistinguishable combination. Withdraw or pervert either factor of this complex
resultant, and the kind of experience we call pathological ensues.
In Tolstoy's
case the sense that life had any meaning whatever was for a time wholly withdrawn.
The result was a transformation in the whole expression of reality. When we come
to study the phenomenon of conversion or religious regeneration, we shall see
that a not infrequent consequence of the change operated in the subject is a transfiguration
of the face of nature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth.
In melancholiacs there is usually a similar change, only it is in the reverse
direction. The world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its color is
gone, its breath is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with.
"It is as if I lived in another century," says one asylum patient.- "I see everything
through a cloud," says another, "things are not as they were, and I am changed."-
"I see," says a third, "I touch, but the things do not come near me, a thick veil
alters the hue and look of everything."- "Persons move like shadows, and sounds
seem to come from a distant world."- "There is no longer any past for me; people
appear so strange; it is as if I could not see any reality, as if I were in a
theatre; as if people were actors, and everything were scenery; I can no longer
find myself; I walk, but why? Everything floats before my eyes, but leaves no
impression."- "I weep false tears, I have unreal hands: the things I see are not
real things."- Such are expressions that naturally rise to the lips of melancholy
subjects describing their changed state. *
* I cull these examples from the
work of G. DUMAS: La Tristesse et la Joie, 1900.
Now there are some subjects
whom all this leaves a prey to the profoundest astonishment. The strangeness is
wrong. The unreality cannot be. A mystery is concealed, and a metaphysical solution
must exist. If the natural world is so double-faced and unhomelike, what world
what thing is real? An urgent wondering and questioning is set up, a poring theoretic
activity, and in the desperate effort to get into right relations with the matter,
the sufferer is often led to what becomes for him a satisfying religious solution.
At about the age of fifty, Tolstoy relates that he began
to have moments of perplexity, of what he calls arrest, as if he knew not 'how
to live,' or what to do. It is obvious that these were moments in which the excitement
and interest which our functions naturally bring had ceased. Life had been enchanting,
it was now flat sober, more than sober, dead. Things were meaningless whose meaning
had always been self-evident. The questions 'Why?' and 'What next?' began to beset
him more and more frequently. At first it seemed as if such questions must be
answerable, and as if he could easily find the answers if he would take the time;
but as they ever became more urgent, he perceived that it was like those first
discomforts of a sick man, to which he pays but little attention till they run
into one continuous suffering, and then he realizes that what he took for a passing
disorder means the most momentous thing in the world for him, means his death.
These questions 'Why?' 'Wherefore?' 'What for?' found no response.
"I
felt," says Tolstoy, "that something had broken within me on which my life had
always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life
had stopped. An invincible force impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one
way or another. It cannot be said exactly that I wished to kill myself, for the
force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful, more general than
any mere desire. It was a force like my old aspiration to live, only it impelled
me in the opposite direction. It was an aspiration of my whole being to get out
of life.
"Behold me then, a man happy and in good health, hiding the rope
in order not to hang myself to the rafters of the room where every night I went
to sleep alone; behold me no longer going shooting, lest I should yield to the
too easy temptation of putting an end to myself with my gun.
"I did not know
what I wanted. I was afraid of life; I was driven to leave it; and in spite of
that I still hoped something from it.
"All this took place at a time when
so far as all my outer circumstances went, I ought to have been completely happy.
I had a good wife who loved me and whom I loved; good children and a large property
which was increasing with no pains taken on my part. I was more respected by my
kinsfolk and acquaintance than I had ever been; I was loaded with praise by strangers;
and without exaggeration I could believe my name already famous. Moreover I was
neither insane nor ill. On the contrary, I possessed a physical and mental strength
which I have rarely met in persons of my age. I could mow as well as the peasants,
I could work with my brain eight hours uninterruptedly and feel no bad effects.
"And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my life. And
I was surprised that I had not understood this from the very beginning. My state
of mind was as if some wicked and stupid jest was being played upon me by some
one. One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when
one grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What is
truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in it; it is cruel
and stupid, purely and simply.
"The oriental fable of the traveler surprised
in the desert by a wild beast is very old.
"Seeking to save himself from the
fierce animal, the traveler jumps into a well with no water in it; but at the
bottom of this well he sees a dragon waiting with open mouth to devour him. And
the unhappy man, not daring to go out lest he should be the prey of the beast,
not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be devoured by the dragon, clings
to the branches of a wild bush which grows out of one of the cracks of the well.
His hands weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way to certain fate; but
still he clings, and sees two mice, one white, the other black, evenly moving
round the bush to which he hangs, and gnawing off its roots.
"The traveler
sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish; but while thus hanging he
looks about him and finds on the leaves of the bush some drops of honey. These
he reaches with his tongue and licks them off with rapture.
"Thus I hang upon
the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable dragon of death is waiting ready
to tear me, and I cannot comprehend why I am thus made a martyr. I try to suck
the honey which formerly consoled me; but the honey pleases me no longer, and
day and night the white mouse and the black mouse gnaw the branch to which I cling.
I can see but one thing: the inevitable dragon and the mice- I cannot turn my
gaze away from them.
"This is no fable, but the literal incontestable truth
which every one may understand. What will be the outcome of what I do to-day?
Of what I shall do to-morrow? What will be the outcome of all my life? Why should
I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable
death which awaits me does not undo and destroy?
"These questions are the
simplest in the world. From the stupid child to the wisest old man, they are in
the soul of every human being. Without an answer to them, it is impossible, as
I experienced, for life to go on.
"'But perhaps,' I often said to myself,
'there may be something I have failed to notice or to comprehend. It is not possible
that the condition of despair should be natural to mankind.' And I sought for
an explanation in all the branches of knowledge acquired by men. I questioned
painfully and protractedly and with no idle curiosity. I sought, not with indolence,
but laboriously and obstinately for days and nights together. I sought like a
man who is lost and seeks to save himself,- and I found nothing. I became convinced,
moreover, that all those who before me had sought for an answer in the sciences
have also found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized that
the very thing which was leading me to despair- the meaningless absurdity of life-
is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man."
To prove this point,
Tolstoy quotes the Buddha, Solomon, and Schopenhauer. And he finds only four ways
in which men of his own class and society are accustomed to meet the situation.
Either mere animal blindness, sucking the honey without seeing the dragon or the
mice,- "and from such a way," he says, "I can learn nothing, after what I now
know;" or reflective epicureanism, snatching what it can while the day lasts,-
which is only a more deliberate sort of stupefaction than the first; or manly
suicide; or seeing the mice and dragon and yet weakly and plaintively clinging
to the bush of life.
Suicide was naturally the consistent course dictated
by the logical intellect.
"Yet," says Tolstoy, "whilst my intellect was working,
something else in me was working too, and kept me from the deed- a consciousness
of life, as I may call it, which was like a force that obliged my mind to fix
itself in another direction and draw me out of my situation of despair.... During
the whole course of this year, when I almost unceasingly kept asking myself how
to end the business, whether by the rope or by the bullet, during all that time,
alongside of all those movements of my ideas and observations, my heart kept languishing
with another pining emotion. I can call this by no other name than that of a thirst
for God. This craving for God had nothing to do with the movement of my ideas,-
in fact, it was the direct contrary of that movement,- but it came from my heart.
It was like a feeling of dread that made me seem like an orphan and isolated in
the midst of all these things that were so foreign. And this feeling of dread
was mitigated by the hope of finding the assistance of some one." *
* My extracts
are from the French translation by 'ZONIA.' In abridging I have taken the liberty
of transposing one passage.
Of the process, intellectual as well as emotional,
which, starting from this idea of God, led to Tolstoy's recovery, I will say nothing
in this lecture, reserving it for a later hour. The only thing that need interest
us now is the phenomenon of his absolute disenchantment with ordinary life, and
the fact that the whole range of habitual values may, to a man as powerful and
full of faculty as he was, come to appear so ghastly a mockery.
When disillusionment
has gone as far as this, there is seldom a restitutio ad integrum. One has tasted
of the fruit of the tree, and the happiness of Eden never comes again. The happiness
that comes, when any does come,- and often enough it fails to return in an acute
form, though its form is sometimes very acute,- is not the simple ignorance of
ill, but something vastly more complex, including natural evil as one of its elements,
but finding natural evil no such stumbling-block and terror because it now sees
it swallowed up in supernatural good. The process is one of redemption, not of
mere reversion to natural health, and the sufferer, when saved, is saved by what
seems to him a second birth, a deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy
before.
We find a somewhat different type of religious melancholy
enshrined in literature in John Bunyan's autobiography. Tolstoy's preoccupations
were largely objective, for the purpose and meaning of life in general was what
so troubled him; but poor Bunyan's troubles were over the condition of his own
personal self. He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament, sensitive
of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears, and insistent ideas,
and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory. These were usually
texts of Scripture which, sometimes damnatory and sometimes favorable, would come
in a half-hallucinatory form as if they were voices, and fasten on his mind and
buffet it between them like a shuttlecock. Added to this were a fearful melancholy
self-contempt and despair.
"Nay, thought I, now I grow worse and worse; now
I am farther from conversion than ever I was before. If now I should have burned
at the stake, I could not believe that Christ had love for me; alas, I could neither
hear him, nor see him, nor feel him, nor savor any of his things. Sometimes I
would tell my condition to the people of God, which, when they heard, they would
pity me, and would tell of the Promises. But they had as good have told me that
I must reach the Sun with my finger as have bidden me receive or rely upon the
Promise [Yet] all this while as to the act of sinning, I never was more tender
than now; I durst not take a pin or stick, though but so big as a straw, for my
conscience now was sore, and would smart at every touch; I could not tell how
to speak my words, for fear I should misplace them. Oh, how gingerly did I then
go, in all I did or said! I found myself as on a miry bog that shook if I did
but stir; and was as there left both by God and Christ, and the spirit, and all
good things.
"But my original and inward pollution, that was my plague and
my affliction. By reason of that, I was more loathsome in my own eyes than was
a toad; and I thought I was so in God's eyes too. Sin and corruption, I said,
would as naturally bubble out of my heart as water would bubble out of a fountain.
I could have changed heart with anybody. I thought none but the Devil himself
could equal me for inward wickedness and pollution of mind. Sure, thought I, I
am forsaken of God; and thus I continued a long while, even for some years together.
"And now I was sorry that God had made me a man. The beasts, birds, fishes,
etc., I blessed their condition, for they had not a sinful nature; they were not
obnoxious to the wrath of God; they were not to go to bell-fire after death. I
could therefore have rejoiced, had my condition been as any of theirs. Now I blessed
the condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would I have been in the condition
of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul to perish under the everlasting
weight of Hell or Sin, as mine was like to do. Nay, and though I saw this, felt
this, and was broken to pieces with it, yet that which added to my sorrow was,
that I could not find with all my soul that I did desire deliverance. My heart
was at times exceedingly hard. If I would have given a thousand pounds for a tear,
I could not shed one; no, nor sometimes scarce desire to shed one.
"I was
both a burthen and a terror to myself; nor did I ever so know, as now, what it
was to be weary of my life, and yet afraid to die. How gladly would I have been
anything but myself! Anything but a man! and in any condition but my own." *
* Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners: I have printed a number of detached
passages continuously.
Poor patient Bunyan, like Tolstoy,
saw the light again, but we must also postpone that part of his story to another
hour. In a later lecture I will also give the end of the experience of Henry Alline,
a devoted evangelist who worked in Nova Scotia a hundred years ago, and who thus
vividly describes the high-water mark of the religious melancholy which formed
its beginning. The type was not unlike Bunyan's.
"Everything I saw seemed
to be a burden to me; the earth seemed accursed for my sake: all trees, plants,
rocks, bills, and vales seemed to be dressed in mourning and groaning, under the
weight of the curse, and everything around me seemed to be conspiring my ruin.
My sins seemed to be laid open; so that I thought that every one I saw knew them,
and sometimes I was almost ready to acknowledge many things, which I thought they
knew: yea sometimes it seemed to me as if every one was pointing me out as the
most guilty wretch upon earth. I had now so great a sense of the vanity and emptiness
of all things here below, that I knew the whole world could not possibly make
me happy, no, nor the whole system of creation. When I waked in the morning, the
first thought would be, Oh, my wretched soul, what shall I do, where shall I go?
And when I laid down, would say, I shall be perhaps in hell before morning. I
would many times look on the beasts with envy, wishing with all my heart I was
in their place, that I might have no soul to lose; and when I have seen birds
flying over my head, have often thought within myself, Oh, that I could fly away
from my danger and distress! Oh, how happy should I be, if I were in their place!"
*
* The Life and Journal of the Rev. Mr. Henry Alline, Boston, 1806, pp. 25,
26. I owe my acquaintance with this book to my colleague, Dr. Benjamin Rand.
Envy of the placid beasts seems to be a very widespread affection in this type
of sadness.
The worst kind of melancholy is that which takes
the form of panic fear. Here is an excellent example, for permission to print
which I have to thank the sufferer. The original is in French, and though the
subject was evidently in a bad nervous condition at the time of which he writes,
his case has otherwise the merit of extreme simplicity. I translate freely.
"Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits
about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to
procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without
any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own
existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient
whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely
idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against
the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt,
which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat
there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing
but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered
into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially.
Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should
strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a
perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if
something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass
of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke
morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with
a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never
felt since. * It was like a revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed
away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others
ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the
dark alone.
* Compare Bunyan: "There was I struck into a very great trembling,
insomuch that at some times I could, for days together, feel my very body, as
well as my mind, to shake and totter under the sense of the dreadful judgment
of God, that should fall on those that have sinned that most fearful and unpardonable
sin. I felt also such clogging and beat at my stomach, by reason of this my terror,
that I was, especially at some times, as if my breast-bone would have split asunder....
Thus did I wind, and twine, and shrink, under the burden that was upon me; which
burden also did so oppress me that I could neither stand, nor go, nor lie, either
at rest or quiet."
"In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering
how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that
pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life. My mother in particular, a very
cheerful person, seemed to me a perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger,
which you may well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revelations of
my own state of mind. I have always thought that this experience of melancholia
of mine had a religious bearing."
On asking this correspondent to explain
more fully what he meant by these last words, the answer he wrote was this:
"I mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful that if I had not clung to
scripture-texts like 'The eternal God is my refuge,' etc., 'Come unto me, all
ye that labor and are heavy-laden,' etc., 'I am the resurrection and the life,'
etc., I think I should have grown really insane." *
* For another case of
fear equally sudden, see HENRY JAMES: Society the Redeemed Form of Man, Boston,
1879, pp. 43 ff.
There is no need of more examples. The cases we have looked
at are enough. One of them gives us the vanity of mortal things; another the sense
of sin; and the remaining one describes the fear of the universe; and in one or
other of these three ways it always is that man's original optimism and self-satisfaction
get leveled with the dust.
In none of these cases was there
any intellectual insanity or delusion about matters of fact; but were we disposed
to open the chapter of really insane melancholia, with its hallucinations and
delusions, it would be a worse story still- desperation absolute and complete,
the whole universe coagulating about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming
horror, surrounding him without opening or end. Not the conception or intellectual
perception of evil, but the grisly blood-freezing heart-palsying sensation of
it close upon one, and no other conception or sensation able to live for a moment
in its presence. How irrelevantly remote seem all our usual refined optimisms
and intellectual and moral consolations in presence of a need of help like this!
Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! help! No prophet can claim
to bring a final message unless he says things that will have a sound of reality
in the ears of victims such as these. But the deliverance must come in as strong
a form as the complaint, if it is to take effect; and that seems a reason why
the coarser religions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and miracles and supernatural
operations, may possibly never be displaced. Some constitutions need them too
much.
Arrived at this point, we can see how great an antagonism
may naturally arise between the healthy-minded way of viewing life and the way
that takes all this experience of evil as something essential. To this latter
way, the morbid-minded way, as we might call it, healthy-mindedness pure and simple
seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the healthy-minded way, on the other hand,
the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased. With their grubbing in rat-holes
instead of living in the light; with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation
with every unwholesome kind of misery, there is something almost obscene about
these children of wrath and cravers of a second birth. If religious intolerance
and hanging and burning could again become the order of the day, there is little
doubt that, however it may have been in the past, the healthy-minded would at
present show themselves the less indulgent party of the two.
In our own attitude,
not yet abandoned, of impartial onlookers, what are we to say of this quarrel?
It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the
wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method
of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good
is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work
far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere
of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious
solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even
though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness
is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses
positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after
all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our
eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
The normal process
of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled
with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.
Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes
out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till
you arrive there yourself! To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic
times is hard for our imagination- they seem too much like mere museum specimens.
Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that did not daily through
long years of the foretime hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some
fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to their victims, if on
a smaller spatial scale, fill the world about us to-day. Here on our very hearths
and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the
hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at
this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills
every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other
wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac
feels is the literally right reaction on the situation. *
* Example: "It was
about eleven o'clock at night... but I strolled on still with the people.... Suddenly
upon the left side of our road, a crackling was heard among the bushes; all of
us were alarmed, and in an instant a tiger, rushing out of the jungle, pounced
upon the one of the party that was foremost, and carried him off in the twinkling
of an eye. The rush of the animal, and the crush of the poor victim's bones in
his mouth, and his last cry of distress, 'Ho hai!' involuntarily reechoed by all
of us, was over in three seconds; and then I know not what happened till I returned
to my senses, when I found myself and companions lying down on the ground as if
prepared to be devoured by our enemy, the sovereign of the forest. I find my pen
incapable of describing the terror of that dreadful moment. Our limbs stiffened,
our power of speech ceased, and our hearts beat violently, and only a whisper
of the same 'Ho hai!' was heard from us. In this state we crept on all fours for
some distance back, and then ran for life with the speed of an Arab horse for
about half an hour, and fortunately happened to come to a small village.... After
this every one of us was attacked with fever, attended with shivering, in which
deplorable state we remained till morning."- Autobiography of Lutfullah, a Mohammedan
Gentleman, Leipzig, 1857, p. 112.
It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation
with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial
to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme
as to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect of such evil,
dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical resource. This question
must confront us on a later day. But provisionally, and as a mere matter of program
and method, since the evil facts are as genuine parts of nature as the good ones,
the philosophic presumption should be that they have some rational significance,
and that systematic healthy-mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow,
pain, and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally less complete
than systems that try at least to include these elements in their scope.
The
completest religions would therefore seem to be those in which the pessimistic
elements are best developed. Buddhism, of course, and Christianity are the best
known to us of these. They are essentially religions of deliverance: the man must
die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life. In my next lecture,
I will try to discuss some of the psychological conditions of this second birth.
Fortunately from now onward we shall have to deal with more cheerful subjects
than those which we have recently been dwelling on.