Part 13
And in Paul of Tarsus, in his epistle to the Romans and his first epistle to the Corinthians, he found those three classes of men: the carnal or _sarcinal_, σάρϰινοι, the natural or psychical, Ψυϰικοί, and the spiritual or pneumatical, πνευματικοί. He had often read that 14th verse of the 7th chapter of the epistle to the Romans: “For we know that the law is spiritual [_pneumatical_]; but I am carnal [_sarcinal_], sold under sin”; and that 44th verse of the 11th chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians which says that there is a natural or _psychical_ body and a spiritual or _pneumatical_ body; and he was aware that for the Apostle the _psyche_, Ψυϰή, was something inferior, something that was more or less equivalent to what was later to be called the vital force, the sensitive soul, common to men and animals; the _pneuma_, on the other hand, being the higher part of the soul, the spirit, the ήγεμονικόν of the Stoics, something that survives the body. But he preferred to give it another interpretation, and he always regarded the _psyche_ as the intellectual power that is bound to the necessities of our actual earthly life, the slave of a logic that is educated and trained by the struggle for life, ordinary, common, current knowledge, necessary in order to enable us to live, the knowledge from which science is evolved. He could not help thinking of psychical men as intellectuals, men of common sense and logic, men whose ideas are dominated by the associations which the external and visible world suggests to them, reasonable men who are trained to some profession and practice it, who, if they are doctors, learn how to cure diseases, if engineers to construct roads, if chemists to prepare drugs and analyse compounds, if architects to build houses. These psychical men are the average men, those who take the middle course, those of whom it is said that they have a sound and clear judgment and standard, those who do not believe in any fallacy that is not consecrated by tradition and habit, those who never swallow any new absurdity, because their minds are already so stuffed with timeworn absurdities.
Between these and the carnal or _sarcinal_ men he always established a difference. For him the carnal men were the brutish, the absolutely uncultured, those who scarcely think of anything but eating, drinking and sleeping, those who are wholly and completely immerged in animal life. The psychical man, no; the psychical man is interested in questions of science and culture; the psychical Spaniard preaches national regeneration, is enthusiastic about the telephone, the gramophone and the cinematograph, reads Flammarion, Haeckel, Ribot, buys popular works on philosophy, and if he is in the neighbourhood of a railway stands in ecstatic contemplation of the majestic progress of the locomotive. If the psychical man is an orthodox Catholic, he admires the genius of St. Thomas Aquinas, although he has never read him, he knows that modern geology squares with the Mosaic account of the Creation, and that it is legitimate to admit a part of Darwinism, and that the Church possesses a remedy for all the social ills that afflict our age. The psychical man is an intellectual, his intellect may be small or great, but fundamentally he is an intellectual.
And lastly come the spiritual men, the dreamers, those whom the intellectuals contemptuously call mystics, those who tolerate the tyranny neither of science nor of logic, those who believe that there is another world within our world and mysterious dormant forces in the depths of our spirit, those who speak the language of the heart and many who prefer not to speak at all. Most of the great poets have been spiritual men, not intellectuals. Of one of them, of the sweet singer Wordsworth, it has been said that he was a genius without talent, that is to say a great spirit without sufficient intelligence.
How many times had he not read and re-read the end of the second and the beginning of the third chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians! “For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth [not with didactical arguments, which is the term employed in the text], but which the Holy Spirit teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man [_psychical_, or as our man translated it, intellectual] receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual [_pneumatical_] judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal [_sarcinal_], even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat; for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able. For ye are yet carnal....”
He turned again to the epistles of Paul of Tarsus and re-read the verses that he had so often read before. “The things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.” And he said to himself: Useless to seek to know the things of God by the method of didactical argument, of theology, of logic; a theology is a contradiction in terms, for the _theos_ is at war with the _logia_; arguments do not help us to reach God. And he remembered Kant and his shattering of the supposed logical proofs of the existence of God, and how in his own spirit all that scaffolding of a metalogical belief, spiritual and not intellectual, psychical and not pneumatical, had collapsed. The ontological proof, the cosmological proof, the metaphysical proof, the ethical proof, all had come tumbling down in his mind at the same time, and with them the so-called God of reason. All that theological rationalism had come to earth in his spirit with a crash, though the noise of it was heard only by himself, destroying not a few delicate flowers in its fall and covering the ground with rubbish. Upheavals of the heart, earthquakes of the spirit, had cleared the ground of the debris, and in a new way, a way the intellectuals do not know, there sprung up within him a faith which came from the Spirit of God. For the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.
“Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.”--Mystic! This word, spat out with contempt, like an insult or a reproach, seemed to be spoken into his ear, and so near, so clear, so distinct it was, that he involuntarily turned his head. And there at his side, not in the body, visible and tangible, but present in the spirit, was the prototype of the intellectual, with all his most exclusively intellectual attributes--there was the psychical man, the natural man _par excellence_. There he was repeating his physiological creed parrot-wise, while in his heart he rebelled against his poetic and creative impotence, against his unconfessed unspirituality.--He shrugged his shoulders, smiled and turned again to look at the slowly darkening sky. The sunset clouds now appeared like mountains of ashes, the remains of the solar conflagration. He turned on the electric switch and the wire thread glowed in the bulb--there was light, light of man’s making, light of applied science.
“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness into him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” Foolishness ... madness ... he repeated to himself, while his eyes wandered over those familiar objects which the electric light had called forth out of the dark shadows. Madness ... and what is madness? There are alienists, phreno-pathologists, psychiatrists, and who knows by how many other names they are called?... But what is sanity? For perhaps one ought to begin with that.
Health is that condition in which a man is free from every kind of disease; but what is disease? Health, others say, is “that condition in which the organism exercises all its faculties normally.”[5] Normally ... normally ... and what is the normal? He stretched out his hand for a book which he was just then reading, a book stored with a mass of data relating to the mysterious life of the spirit, the work of that noble mind that had been the soul of the Society for Psychical Research, and he read:
“The word _normal_ in common speech is used almost indifferently to imply either of two things, which may be very different from each other--conformity to a standard and position as an average between extremes. Often, indeed, the average constitutes the standard--as when a gas is of average density; or is practically equivalent to the standard--as when a sovereign is of normal weight. But when we come to living organisms a new factor is introduced. Life is change; each living organism changes; each generation differs from its predecessor. To assign a fixed norm to a changing species is to shoot point-blank at a flying bird. The actual average at any given moment is no ideal standard; rather, the furthest evolutionary stage now reached is tending, given stability in the environment, to become the average of the future.”[6]
He shut the book and said to himself again: Normal ... madness ... sanity ... disease ... health.... The madness of to-day will be the sanity of to-morrow, just as the sanity of to-day will appear madness to-morrow. Intellectuals call that madness which they are unable to understand, for it can only be discerned spiritually. And an intellectual, what is he, in the last instance, but a normal man, a man of the _via media_, equally far removed from the carnal and from the spiritual man? The intellectual is the man of the _via media_, at an equal distance from the enormous mass of carnality and from the very limited quantity of conscious spirituality--for the other kind of spirituality, the unconscious and potential, is dormant in all men and is perhaps more alive in the carnal men themselves than in the intellectuals. For it is easier for the flesh than for the intellect to receive the spirit; between intellect and spirit the logic of the schools interposes. The intellectual is the man of average sense, which he calls common sense, and which is as far from the universal, cosmic or instinctive sense in which carnal men live, as it is from that private sense which fortifies the spirit of spiritual men.
“But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.” By what right do those whose own spirit is buried beneath their intellect judge the things of the spirit?
“For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.” At this word Christ our man’s thinking was arrested. He had arrived at what is called the religious problem and it presented itself to him in the form under which he had been contemplating it now for some time. In this problem--_the_ problem, the religious problem--he saw the principal touchstone that distinguishes the intellectuals from the spiritual men.
In so far as the religious question is concerned, the intellectuals presented themselves to him, in effect, as divided into two large groups, usually called believers and unbelievers. Taking these terms in the concrete and in relation to his own country, they resolved themselves into intellectual Catholics and intellectual non-Catholics, who in practice were always anti-Catholics. These two factions contended one against another; but as a contest is only possible on a common basis, they contended on the same ground. No contest is possible between a fish which never emerges from the depths of the sea and a bird which never descends from the altitudes of the air. These two factions contended facing one another--that is to say, one looking in one direction and the other in another--but both standing on the same ground, both on the same plane of intellectuality. And woe to him who should address them either from above or from below, from another plane than theirs, from the plane of spirituality or from the plane of carnality. They will both unite in calling him either a madman or a brute.
These two factions contend together. For the one, religion is needful as the necessary basis of morality, social order being impossible without the fear of hell, of death and of the devil; religion is assured by external proofs, prophecies, miracles--or, rather, accounts of miracles--and before all and above all, by a tradition of centuries resting upon an authority. For the other, proofs of the truth of religion are wanting; social order can be established without hell or the fear of death and of the devil, and the tradition has neither been constant nor does it possess any convincing logical value. Both approach the question from the same side: the one sees in religion a social institution devoted to the interests of order, the other a social institution devoted to the interests of despotism; the one seeks for external logical proofs and the other rejects these proofs. Advocates, and merely advocates, both of them! For both of them it is a question of a social institution, something based upon external authorities and evidences or inevidences, upon something logical or illogical. It is what they call the conflict between reason and faith, although this faith is not faith but only belief. It was not possible for him, for our man, to feel it in that way, and the arguments of the one side interested him as little as those of the other. Disputes of intellectuals!...
He was now called to supper and he went away to attend to the wants of the body, giving it first food and then sleep.
THE MATERIALISM OF THE MASSES
In the course of my frequent peregrinations, when I go up and down the country preaching my lay sermons in the towns and cities of Spain, I have a way of taking my audiences as raw material for experiment. I carry out tests upon them, observing how they respond and react to my words. And I have observed that whenever they hear me say something which they think, however erroneously, implies a kind of negation of the immortality of the soul and of the existence of another life transcending this world, they break out into applause. And this applause saddens me and sometimes prompts me to attack.
If these outbursts of applause meant simply: “Hear, hear! Bravo! This man’s honest. He puts love of truth, however painful the truth may be, before love of consolation”--if the applause meant that, I would accept it, though with a certain sadness. But no, this applause means something different. It means: “Hear, hear! Excellent! We don’t want another life! This life is enough for us!” And this wounds me, for it is an explosion of the most debasing materialism.
Not believing that God exists or that the soul is immortal, or believing that God does not exist and that the soul is not immortal--and believing that the soul is not immortal is not the same as not believing that it is immortal--this is a belief that I can respect; but not wishing that God should exist or that the soul should be immortal is a thing profoundly repellent to me.
And it is precisely because I have this thorn in my heart of hearts, because I cannot resign myself to one day returning to unconsciousness, because I have a thirst for eternity, that this applause bruises my heart. That a man should not believe in another life, that I understand, for I myself find no proof of it; but that he should resign himself to this, and above all that he should not desire anything more than this life, that is a thing I do indeed not understand.
And then these gross calumniations of Christ and of Christianity, these stupidities that go contrary to nature and that have stunted the human spirit, and all this alluvion of vulgarity that so many unfortunate people swallow whole....
In one of those series of popular publications which flatter and seduce the coarsest instincts of the unlettered multitudes, there is a book--translated from the Italian, I believe--entitled “Jesus Christ Has Never Existed.” It is one of the most deplorable, shallow, and worthless books imaginable, inspired not by a love of truth but by the most blatant sectarianism. I was talking about it one day to a man who had read it and who had been delighted with it, and I said: “It is not the thesis that shocks me. The thesis that Jesus had no historical existence, that He is a myth, has many times been put forward, and with apparently very plausible arguments, at any rate with erudition--recently by Karthoff--but it is a thesis that has been demolished by the most judicious investigators, no matter what their personal creed may have been.” He replied: “Then I’m sorry, for He ought not to have existed.” And naturally I did not know what to say to that.
This lack of ideality, this aridity and poverty of inward life, which is implied by not longing for another and transcendental life, all this practical materialism, is dismaying to the mind of whosoever meditates a little upon the worth of human life. For my own part, I have very little hope of peoples who fall into this materialistic attitude.
Understand me clearly: I am not assuring you, nor can I assure you, that there is another life; I myself am not convinced that there is; but I cannot conceive that a man, a true man, should not merely resign himself to the enjoyment of this life only, but that he should renounce and even spurn another life. And as for this idea that we shall continue to live in our works, in our children, in the memory of other generations, and that everything renews and transforms itself, and that we shall help to build up a more perfect society--all this appears to me to be the most miserable subterfuge for escaping the depths of despair.
This is the reason why the radicalism of certain sections of the masses dismays me and why I cannot hope that anything fruitful will come of it. The radicalism of the masses in Spain, and perhaps in other so-called Latin, or, more strictly speaking, Catholic, countries, is lacking in the spirit and substance of religion. The weak point in our socialism is its confused notion of the supreme end of the individual life.
Let us better the economic condition of man--good! Let us put an end to the division between rich and poor--exactly! Let us realize a state in which a moderate amount of work will be sufficient to satisfy all our wants--very good! And then? We have now created a society such as Bebel or Kropotkin dreamed of, and what is to happen to each one of us in this society? What is to be the end of this society? What shall we live for?
“Get rich!” said Guizon, the Calvinist, to the Catholic bourgeoisie of France; “get rich!” Very good. And then, when we have got rich?...
A country in which the people think only of getting rich is a country ... well, I would rather not inquire what kind of a country it is. Suffice it to say that I at any rate should die in it of cold, of shame, of disgust.
And if a country which is solely preoccupied with getting rich is abhorrent to me, still more abhorrent is the country in which the dominant preoccupation is that of enjoyment, of diversion. In other words, of self-stupefaction.
A collective patriotic enthusiasm, an imperialistic instinct, a passionate desire to influence other peoples and to impress your own stamp upon them--this, after all, is something. But this enthusiasm, this instinct, this desire, lives and burns in those peoples which preserve the inward spring of religion, an underlying inextinguishable thirst for eternity.
The people that is satisfied with this life lives, strictly speaking, on the defensive, and the people that lives on the defensive ends by being absorbed and dominated by those in whom the aggressive and dominating instinct is uppermost. The so-called struggle for life is efficacious only when the struggle is for predominance, not for preservation. The essence of being, as Spinoza showed, consists not so much in the effort to persist in mere being as in the effort to become more, to become everything. It is the appetite for infinity and eternity.
I do not know what is to be hoped from peoples that have been materialized by a long indoctrination of implicit Catholic faith, whose beliefs are a matter of routine, in whom the inner spring appears to be exhausted--that inward disquietude which distinguishes the essentially Protestant spirit. I do not know what is to be hoped from peoples in whom centuries of a religion more social than individual, characterized rather by ritual and ceremony and externality and authority than by inward struggle, have resulted in generating a kind of free-thinking that issues in indifference and in resignation to the life of this world.
From the superstition of a ridiculous and childish heaven and hell they have fallen into the superstition of a gross and unspiritual earth.
THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE
_Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto_, said the Latin playwright. And I would rather say: _Nullum hominem a me alienum puto_: I am a man; no other man do I deem a stranger. For to me the adjective _humanus_ is no less suspect than its abstract substantive _humanitas_, humanity. Neither the “human” nor “humanity,” neither the simple adjective nor the substantivized adjective, but the concrete substantive--man. The man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies--above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.
For there is something else that is also called man, and he is the subject of many more or less scientific speculations. He is the legendary featherless biped, the ξῷον πολιτικόυ of Aristotle, the social contractor of Rousseau, the _homo economicus_ of the Manchester school, the _homo sapiens_ of Linnæus, or, if you like, the vertical mammal. A man neither of here nor there, neither of this age nor of another, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in brief, merely an idea. That is to say, a no-man.
Our man is the other man, the man of flesh and bone--I and you, my reader, and the other man over there, all of us who weigh upon the earth.
And this concrete man, this man of flesh and bone, is at once the subject and the supreme object of all philosophy, whether certain self-styled philosophers like it or not.
In most of the histories of philosophy that I know, philosophic systems are presented to us as if they grew out of one another and their authors, the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts. The inward biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a secondary place. And it is this, nevertheless, this inward biography, that explains most things to us.
It behoves us to say, before all, that philosophy lies closer to poetry than to science. All philosophic systems that have been constructed as a supreme concord of the final results of the individual sciences have in every age possessed much less consistency and less life than those which have expressed the integral desire of the spirit of their authors.