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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 he 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 fall 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."[67]
[67]
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."[68]
[68]
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 <129> 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 <130> 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.[69] 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.
[69]
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 sorts 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.[70] 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.
[70]
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 became 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 all 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? <135>
"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."[71] 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?[72]
[71]
He adds with characteristic healthy-mindedness:
"Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits."
[72]
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 hidden 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,[73] and the
moment the Greeks grew systematically pensive and thought of ultimates, they
became unmitigated pessimists.[74] 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 Ilrahmans, Buddhists, Christians, Mohammedans, twice-born people whose
religion is non-naturalistic, get from their several creeds of mysticism and
renunciation.
[73]
E.g., Iliad XVII. 446: "Nothing
then is more wretched anywhere than man of all that breathes and creeps upon
this earth."
[74]
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 l? 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.[75] 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.
[75]
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. <143> 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."[76]
[76]
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."[77]
[77]
A. Gratry: Souvenirs 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 an 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 cases
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 night mares 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!"[78]
[78]
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 <148> 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
nonlogical 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.[79]
[79]
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
<150> 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 see 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 this 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."[80]
[80]
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 hell-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."[81]
[81]
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, hills, 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!"[82]
[82]
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.[83] 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.
[83]
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 heat 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."[84]
[84]
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 <159> 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 <160> 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 the victims, if on a smaller spatial scale,
fill the world about us to-day. Here
on our very <161> 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.[85]
[85]
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 Lutullah 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.
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