Part 12

=Religious and Scientific Intuition.=--The pupil said: "The everlasting strife between Faith and Knowledge would have been stifled at the outset if some sharp wit had discovered in time that the problem is wrongly stated, for the two ideas form no real antithesis. What I know, that I believe; consequently faith presupposes knowledge, consequently knowledge is subsumed under faith. But the word 'belief' has received other significations. In religion it means reception or absorption. Science recognises the fact of intuition or rapid inference, _i.e._ the faculty of reaching certainty without sufficient reason and without a complete chain of proof. That is scientific belief, and is in complete analogy with religious belief. When a man arrives at the knowledge of God and of His laws by way of intuition, when he then tests this knowledge by observing his experiences and finds it confirmed, then the final outcome of his investigation is Belief. Belief is complete objective certainty, but on a higher plane, so that all scientific chatter that Knowledge is higher than Belief is mere nonsense. By 'knowledge' in this case one understands for the most part information about stones, plants, and animals, and historical facts such as the year in which a certain book was published, when Goethe was in Strasburg, whether Rebecca Ost's real name was Popoffsky or Johanna Hagelstrom, or whether an Apostle-mug is genuine or imitation. The antithesis 'Faith _or_ Knowledge' is the stupidest dispute about words which ever took place, and a disgrace to humanity."

=The Freed Thinker.=--The teacher said: "In order to think rightly and in accordance with law, I must free my reason from fetters of rustic intelligence, from interests, passions, conventional considerations. One must go into deep solitude, and not be afraid of remaining alone, deserted by all. Above all, one must not belong to any party which regulates, inspects, and degrades. In order to be able to dare to give up the weak and hampering support of men, one must be able thoroughly to rely upon God. In order to do that one must keep one's conscience as clean as possible, must hate evil, strive after righteousness and goodness, bear everything except humiliation, exercise mercifulness, and take trials as such and not as persecutions.

"The electric clock has contact and connection with a correctly-timed chronometer. And so my reason cannot think logically till I have opened connection with the Logos, and no longer discharge contrary currents of sterile denial and doubt. Only in life with God is there freedom of thought, freedom from impure impulses, selfish and ambitious interests, freedom from the wish to stand well with the crowd. That is the _freed_ thinker in contrast to the 'free-thinker,' who has left the rails and lost connection with the overhead wire; he will come to grief at the next street-corner, and is of no more use as a vehicle of traffic."

=Primus inter pares.=--The pupil continued: "Religions seemed to be determined by regions like nationalities. Swedenborg hints at something of the sort, saying that people have the religion which they ought to have. Those who have no religion are tramps and vagabonds, pariahs and gipsies, scoundrels and swindlers. They think they are at home everywhere, but are so only on the high-roads, in the market-places, behind the circus-stable, in the alehouse. When Lessing asserts in _Nathan der Weise_ that all religions are equally good, he shows that he has not understood Christianity, which is the beginning and end of the world's history. The Muhammedans are certainly religious, more religious than the Christians, and among the adherents of Islam are many sects, but no atheistic ones. All observe the hours of prayer, fasts, and daily washings. Muhammed was no Christ-hater. But they are alien to our climate. Still we have something to learn from them; they are not ashamed to show their religion, while we shuffle with it. They are not only religious on Sundays but every day and all day.

"But, if we heard that a Christian had gone over to Islam we should regard it as a fall from the higher to the lower, while the conversion of a Muhammedan to Christianity would be hailed as an ascent. Saladin was certainly noble and Nathan wise, but the nobleness of the former had somewhat of a pose about it, and the wisdom of the latter was of the same homely kind as Voltaire's. On the other hand, Godfrey de Bouillon accepted the crown of thorns instead of the king's crown, and St. Louis gave his life for the wisdom which surpasses all understanding."

=Heathen Imaginations.=--The teacher said: "Religions are represented by regions, defined territories, circles, of which each considers himself the centre. The modern heathen sit in their little bag, which is big enough to be seen, and when they only see heathen they imagine that Christianity is decaying or altogether done with. And yet it is flourishing as it never did before; everything serves the Gospel with or against its will. The heathen find new weapons in heaps of ruins and in temple-libraries; they close churches and thereby bring Christianity into life and into the domestic circle. When they make life bitter for the Christians, the latter turn from the sour and seek the fresh. The missionaries who were only lately regarded with a contemptuous smile are now discovered by great explorers in deserts and wildernesses, where they have established oases of humanity and mercy. There the plundered wanderer can rest his weary head, secure of having found one trustworthy man. He who wishes to know the effect of Christianity on an idolater should read Kanso Utschimura's _Memoirs of a Japanese; or, How I Became a Christian_. Those who preach 'cheerful paganism' can see in this work how a polytheist is tom and tortured by doubt, and tossed to-and-fro between the contradictory commands of eighty million gods."

=Thought Bound by Law.=--The teacher said: "When a young man comes and says he is a free-thinker, say to him: 'You lie. You think with your stomach, your throat, your sexuality, with your passions and your interests, your hate and your sympathies. But in your youthful immaturity you do not really think at all, but merely drivel. What is instilled into you, you give out, and dub your wishes by the name of thoughts.' Moreover 'free-thought' is a contradiction in terms, for thought obeys laws, just as sound, light, and chemical combinations do. Thought is bound, bound by laws. If you say 'There is no God,' you speak without thinking. 'Non-existence' and 'God' are two incommensurate ideas which cannot be brought into juxtaposition. If they are, there results an absurdity which is the secretion or excretion of an illogical and confused mind.

"If on the other hand you say 'There is no God _for me_,' there is something probable in that. But you should be ashamed to speak of it. It only means that you are a godless dog, a perverse ape, a conscienceless deceiver and thief whom men must avoid and detectives must watch. Fortunately godlessness is an hallucination imposed on haughty blockheads as a punishment. When the 'free-thinker' discovers some day how stupid he is, then he is freed, and that is a mercy for him."

=Credo quia (et-si) absurdum.=--The teacher said: "If I call myself a Christian it is because I recognise Christ as a power, a source of strength, from whom I obtain strength by prayer in order to support tolerably the burdens of life. But at the same time I confess that I cannot understand nor explain the doctrine of Atonement through sacrificial death. That is not, however, the fault of the doctrine but a defect in me. I have also no right to deny a matter of fact because I do not understand it. Here is an illustration. If I multiply 2 by 2 I obtain an increase--4. But if I multiply ½ by ½ I obtain as a result a decrease by half, _i.e._ ¼. Here is an incomprehensible contradiction. Multiplication cannot produce a decrease. Yet it is mathematically true that 2 multiplied by 2 is doubled, _i.e._ 4, but ½ multiplied by ½ is halved, _i.e._ ¼. My intelligence would fain deny it, but I must believe it, and in doing so I do well, otherwise the whole science of mathematics would be unusable, which would be a great loss. _Credo quia absurdum._ That means, I must believe a fact just because it is incomprehensible and absurd (for me, but not for others). If I could understand it, the emergency short-cut of 'faith' would not be necessary. That is the sacrifice, not of my reason, but of my rustic understanding and of my pride."

=The Fear of Heaven.=--The pupil said: "The astronomy or uranology of the astronomers has ceased to make any progress since it has become godless. They have given up observing the sky. They sit there and calculate, with the express purpose of calculating God's existence away. Seven years ago I met a teacher of astronomy. He did not know that the equator of the sky passes through the belt of Orion, and could not point out the ecliptic. He boasted of not knowing the constellations, saying it was no science to know them. Our nearest neighbour the moon has been ignored for a long time. And yet in 1866 it was noticed that changes had taken place there, and that the crater of Linnæus was on the point of disappearing. On the other hand, they are trying to signal to Mars. If man, who lately in his folly thinks he has solved the riddle of the universe without God, only knew how the 'gods' are to us, and if he understood the signals which they send to us daily and hourly, he would go out like Peter and weep that he had denied his Lord or behaved as though he knew Him not."

=The Goat-god Pan and the Fear of the Pan-pipe.=--The teacher said: "Like all lower classes the apelings regard themselves as supermen, who march at the head of all movements and can regulate developments. Their god is the shaggy Pan, who had been a goat and became a half-man, and later the Evil One, Satan, or God's opponent. But they must be ashamed of their god, for they call themselves atheists. Their religion is that of the Satanists. When they hear of any good action they snort. They delight in persecuting and tormenting anyone in whom there is any good visible, and call him a hypocrite. Their children learn to lie as soon as they learn to talk. The greatest poet of the apelings has written a lament over the 'Decay of lying' and an heroic poem in six cantos in praise of unnatural vice. They are all perverse, mostly in secret, but they betray themselves in their writers, who write in the name of woman, and from the woman's point of view, against man. For by confusion of sex they have lost all distinction of sex; they have ceased to think and to feel as men. They run like dogs with their noses on the track of the white man, in order to bite him, that he may become like one of them.

"There are white men who have been seduced by the females of the apelings. The children are bastards, and their lives are a perpetual conflict against the Satanic inheritance they have received from their mothers. Some fight in vain; others find the Helper. There is only One--Jesus Christ, the Exorciser of demons. You know that I was such a bastard and fought the battle, which is not yet concluded.

"The apelings preach toleration. By that they mean that whatever they do must be overlooked, and that they should be left at liberty to propagate their doctrines, while they more or less secretly persecute the Christians. As soon as they begin to scent Christian blood they shudder. Then they begin to excommunicate the 'heretic.' His name is no more mentioned, and if it appears in print it is cut out. If he formerly belonged to the body of the apelings he is now called an apostate, and must die as a traitor.

"When an apeling dies he obtains an apotheosis in the absence of a pantheon. At the burial the wreaths are counted, and the inscriptions attached to them examined; if anyone's name is missing he is excommunicated. The ceremonial is just like that of a witches' sabbath when the 'faithful' gave their testimony. But it may happen, when they invoke Pan, that he answers with the reed-pipe. Then if he shows himself in the wood or in the bedchamber, they are seized with a panic fear; they weep like children who are afraid of the dark, or fly to sanatoriums to be cured of their neurasthenia, their sleeplessness, and their heart-complaints."

=Their Gospel=.--The teacher continued: "But the apelings have also constructed a dogmatic theology which is a parody of the Christian faith. They have a doctrine of reconciliation which proclaims reconciliation with life, but it is really a compromise with all the dirt of life which one generally wipes off on the mat at the house-door. They teach men to be tolerant towards turpitude and wickedness; they describe men as good fellows, as careless creatures who are thoroughly good at bottom--'there is no malice in them.' The really good men, who cannot do anything wicked, seemed to the apelings puritanical. 'Why should we torment ourselves in the only life we have?' they ask, feeling quite sure that they will be annihilated at death, like maggots.

"According to this distorted gospel, it is wrong to describe in a literary work how the malicious, the liar, the deceiver, the pander get their deserts. We should, they say, pardon the conscienceless and obstinate. Christianity, on the other hand, teaches that we should pardon the repentant who improve. In the apelings' gospel all the teaching of Christ is sophisticated. In their view all Magdalenes are interesting innocent victims of social circumstances, while Christ only received the Magdalene who had abandoned vice."

=The Disposition of the Apes.=--The teacher continued: "This is the whole kernel of Darwinism, this madness which infected the mind of a generation which was overstrained with the pursuit of power and luxury. But this Beelzebub could only be driven out by another. That was Nietzsche. He was a demon let loose, who killed the ape, restored the man, and altered the old popular estimates. He was understood because he spoke the language of the apelings. That was the only way to compel them to listen, for they would never have heard a Christian prophet. But after he had his say his tongue was spiked and his tale was over.

"Joseph Peladan was a Christian prophet of the school of the Therapeutæ and Essenes. The apelings feared him, and could not name his name, for it stuck in their throats. Only the Christian upper class understood him. His Christianity was luminous and esoteric, perhaps too luminous. But after a pilgrimage to Christ's grave he discovered the deceit, turned his back on the 'reconciliation with life,' and forswore the worship of beauty which was merely the dressing up of the apes with white sheets and ivy leaves. He ceased to be interested in the bestial and the nude, saw through the 'joy of life' and Nora,[1] unmasked the humbug of tolerance, and took the cross in real earnest, as it is, on himself. Peladan was a living protest against apishness. He represented the undercurrent, not the surface-stream. Still the undercurrent is always ready to mount and overflow and cleanse the banks, which at the ebb-tide have served as a place for dumping down rubbish."

[Footnote 1: The heroine of Ibsen's _Doll's House_.]

=The Secret of the Cross.=--The teacher said: "The conflict between paganism and Christianity is now being fought out in the world. But just as surely as Christianity preceded paganism in time, so surely does the future belong to Christianity, although for the moment the apelings have the upper hand. Their edict of toleration allows them in the name of freedom to forbid the preaching of Christianity. They close the churches, declare Judas innocent, give mad women the vote, write heathenish schoolbooks for children, place forgers and pettifoggers in power, for their kingdom is of this world. But it is with Christianity as with the walnut-tree, whose fruit is knocked down with poles, and which is roughly treated in order that it may bear fruit and thrive. The night grows darker towards the dawn. Spinach-seed is trodden down that it may grow better; the ground must be harrowed, broken, and rolled in order to be able to yield a crop; gold must be refined in fire, and flax be steeped in water. The cross points upwards, downwards, sideways, to the four quarters of heaven at once; it is a completion of the compass. Suffering bums up the rubbish of the soul. I have seen a man who had suffered all the griefs endured by humanity; yet the more he suffered the more beautiful he became. That is the secret of the cross and of suffering. 'Because ye are not of the world, therefore the world hateth you. In the world ye have tribulation, but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.'"

=Examination and Summer Holidays.=--The teacher said: "When, on reaching maturity, one awakes to new consciousness and discovers that everything one has is borrowed, one begins to cut oneself down to the root, in order to let strike a new stem which is one's own. When we enter old age this stem withers down to the root (the process Swedenborg calls 'desolation'); the branches formerly cut down bloom again and put forth new foliage which is like, and yet not like the former. But when old and new flourish together, the whole result is confusing; but the root remains the same and reveals the nature of the plant. The dissonances of life increase with the years, and the material of life becomes so immense that it is impossible to survey it properly. Therefore one lives more in remembrance than in the present, and along the whole line of one's experience. Sometimes I live in my childhood, sometimes in my mature age.

"But it is strange that one does not feel old age to be the beginning of an end but the introduction to something new, _i.e._ when one has recovered the belief or assurance that there is a life on the other side. One feels as though one were preparing for an examination by doing preliminary exercises and one becomes literally young again. There is a little touch of examination fever with it, but also great hopes mingled with dreams of the future. These remind us of Christmas joys, summer holidays, family gatherings with reconciliations and wishes fulfilled. But there is also a scent of broken-off birch-leaves and the seashore; there is a sound of Sunday bells and organs, the attraction of new clothes, white linen, and a bath in green sea-water. There is a feeling like that of evening prayer and a good conscience, wife, home, and child after a journey, the hearth-fire after a snow-storm, the first ball and the one we loved to dance with most, the opening of the savings-box, and first and last the examination and the summer holidays."

=Veering and Tacking.=--The teacher continued: "The Theosophists speak of the seven planes of the Kama-Loka, the condition after death. I will admit that, in certain circumstances, I have lived simultaneously on several planes. This was difficult for me, and still more difficult for my enemies to understand. I should like to have explained these contradictions in existence by a cleavage of the personality or a multiplication of the ego. I have also sought the solution of the riddle in the self-adaptation to one's surroundings, to which St. Paul refers in the First Epistle to the Corinthians: 'To the Jews I became a Jew.... To those who are under the law, I became as under the law.... To those who are without law, I became as one without law. To the weak I became as weak.' ... Kierkegaard speaks of Sympaschomenos who rejoices with the joyful, mourns with the sad, is coarse with the coarse, refined with the refined.

"Swedenborg makes another suggestion, 'When a man is to be born again, his desires and falsities cannot be stripped off at once, for that would be equivalent to destroying the whole man, because as yet he only lives in them. Therefore for a long while evil spirits are left with him, to stir up his desires that they may be dissolved in many ways.'

"Formerly I believed, when I was young with the youthful, old and wise with the old, mad with the mad, that I was doing them a service. As a poet, I lived for the moment in their life and their moods, which I then depicted and forgot myself. Often by these relapses into stages I had left behind, I seemed to have worked myself higher, as the ship tacks in order to get a more favourable wind."

=Attraction and Repulsion.=--The teacher continued: "There is both an attraction and a repulsion between similar souls. Like loves like, but not always; often the unlike seeks the unlike. A good man lamented to me that it was his lot always to be in bad society, and never to meet good men who could elevate him. Since he was strong he was at any rate not drawn down, but he did not observe that he exercised a good influence on his bad surroundings. He had, it is true, occasion to see and to hear evil; but, on the other hand, he was able to react against it through the disgust with which it inspired him. Without instituting a comparison we may say that Christ did not attract people of high position and good character, but poor devils and weak characters, the sick, the possessed, the wicked, thieves, publicans, and harlots. His disciples did not understand his doctrine, but interpreted it all in a material way. He answered their reproaches by saying, 'Only the sick need a physician.' I will suppress my former objection, for I bow myself experimentally before 'the folly of the cross,' since experience has taught me that wisdom can only be received by a humble mind, and that obedience is more than sacrifice. In recent times my constant prayer has been that I might come into good society which might elevate me, and avoid evil companionship which, to say the least, involves an injurious connection with the lower plane. It is in truth my fault that those who seek me seek my old ego, and, when they do not find it, believe that I am not to be found."

=The Double.=--The pupil said: "When a man begins to love a woman he throws himself into a trance, and becomes a poet and artist. Out of her plastic, unindividualised material he fashions an ideal form into which he puts all that is best in himself. Thus he creates an homunculus which he adopts as his double, and with that she lets him do as he likes.

"But this astral image may be also the doll which she the huntress sets up as a decoy, while she with a loaded gun lies behind the bush and watches for her prey. The love of a man for his homunculus often survives every illusion; he may have conceived a deadly hatred against herself, while his love for his double continues. But this masquerade gives rise to the deepest dissonances and troubles. He becomes squint-eyed by contemplating two images which do not coincide. He wishes to embrace his cloud, but takes hold of a body; he wishes to hear _his_ poem, but it is someone else's; he wants to see his work of art, but it is only a model. He is happy during his trance, although the world cannot understand him. When he awakes from his somnambulism, his hatred to the woman increases in proportion as she fails to correspond to his image of her. And if he murders his double, then love is done with, and only boundless hate remains."