THE DIVINE PARADOX
Emasculated Gymnosophists and the cowardly sect of the Saturnists,—these are serious-minded men who can understand plain facts but cannot interpret those facts but merely repeat and spoil them—have always looked with unfriendly eyes on what is called the paradoxical. To save themselves the trouble of distinguishing between sacred paradoxes and those which are only a fatuous amusement, they make haste to pass judgment on all paradox as nothing else than the overturning of recognized old truths; hence, false and—they add, to clip the wings of vanity—as easy as possible to invent. One would suppose it seems to them more difficult to walk along the road already laid out, and to spell over line by line what was written before they were born by men who certainly had not their cowardly temperament.
But if these priests of the already-said would consider the few master ideas on which modern thought is living, or rather on which it is dying, they would discover that they are almost all overturnings, that is to say, paradoxes. When Rousseau says that men are born good but that society makes them bad, he turns inside out the accepted doctrine of original sin; when the disciples of progress affirm that from the worse comes the better; when the evolutionist affirms that the complex springs out of the simple; and the monist that all diversities are but manifestations of the One; and the Marxist that economic history is the basis of spiritual development; when the modern mathematical philosophers affirm that man is not as he has always been believed, the center of the universe, but a minute animal species on one of an infinite number of spheres scattered in the infinite; when the Protestants cry, “The Pope is of no account but only the Scriptures”; when the French Revolutionists say, “The Third Estate is nothing and should be everything”—what are all these people doing except overturning old and commonly held opinions?
But Jesus is the greatest overturner, the supreme maker of paradoxes, radical and without fear. This is His greatness, His eternal freshness and youth, the secret of the turning sooner or later of every great heart toward His Gospel.
He became incarnate to recreate men sunk in error and evil; He found error and evil in the world; how could He fail to overturn the maxims of the world? Read over again the words of the Sermon on the Mount. At every step it proclaims the desire of Jesus that what is low shall be recognized as lofty; that the last shall be first; that the overlooked shall be the preferred; that the scorned shall be reverenced, and finally, that the old truth shall be considered as error, and ordinary life as death and corruption. He has said to the past, benumbed in its death agony, to Nature, too easily followed, to universal and common opinion of mankind, the most decisive “NO” in the history of the world.
In this He is faithful to the spirit of His race which in its very downfall always found reasons for greater hope. The most enslaved people dreamed of dominating other peoples with the help of the Son of David. The most despised race felt that glory was promised them, the people most punished by God believed itself the most loved; the most sinful was certain that it alone was to be saved. This absurd reaction of the Hebrew conscience became in Christ a revision of values, became, because of His superhuman origin, a divine renovation of all the principles followed and respected by humanity.
Christ’s first discovery is like that of Buddha, “Men are unhappy, all men—even those who seem happy.” Siddharta to put an end to pain counseled the suppression of life itself. Jesus had another hope, more sublime in that it appears absurd. He taught that men are unhappy because they have not found true life. Let them become the opposite of what they are, let them do the contrary of what they do, and the festival of happiness on earth will begin.
Until now they have followed Nature, they have let themselves be guided by their instincts, they have accepted and that only superficially a provisional and insufficient law, they have worshiped lying gods, they have thought they could find happiness in wine, in flesh, in gold, in authority, in cruelty, in art, in learning; and the only result has been that their suffering has become more intense. The explanation is that they have lost the path, that they must turn straight around, renounce what seemed good, pick up what was thrown away, worship what was burned, and burn what was worshiped, conquer the animal instincts instead of satisfying them, struggle with their nature instead of justifying it, make a new law and live by it, faithfully, in the spirit. If until now they have not obtained what they looked for, the only possible cure is to turn their present life upside down, that is, to transform their souls.
Our permanent unhappiness is a proof that the experiment of the old world has failed, that Nature is hostile, that the past is wrong, that to live like animals according to the elementary instinct of animals, only slightly furbished up and varnished with humanity, results in wretchedness and despair.
Those who have laughed at or wept over the infinite wretchedness of man have seen clearly. The pessimists are right. Those who denounce our boasting, those who scorn our strengthlessness, those who despise our ignominy, how can they be refuted?
Whoever is not born to wriggle contentedly in the worm heap, eating his particle of earth, he who has not only a stomach and two hands, but a soul and a heart; he whose soul is of finer temper because it has been so beaten upon, is bound to feel a horror of mankind. For hard, arid natures this horror changes into repugnance and hate; for others richer and more generous it turns to pity and love.
When we read Leopardi and consider how he lost (perhaps because of the imperfect Christians surrounding him) his youthful love of Christ and, eating his heart out in reasoning despair, ended with the despairing lines, “Tiresome and bitter is life, never aught but that”; who of us will have the insight to reply, “Be quiet, unfortunate man! If you taste nothing but bitterness, it comes from the wormwood you are eating; if you find life tiresome the fault is yours; you yourself have used the infernal stone of barren reasoning to cauterize those feelings which would have made your life cheerful or at least endurable”?
No, Leopardi was not mistaken, for when you see men as they are and have no hope of saving them, or changing them, and you cannot live like them because you are too different from them, and cannot succeed in loving them because you believe them condemned to eternal unhappiness and wickedness, when you feel that the brutes will always be brutes and the cowards always cowards and the foul always more sunk in their foulness, what else can you do but counsel your heart to silence, and hope for death? There is but one question: are men unchangeable, not to be transformed, not capable of becoming better? Or, on the other hand, can man rise above himself and make himself holy? The answer is of terrible importance. All our destiny is in that question. Among superior men many have not been fully conscious of this dilemma. Many have believed and still believe that the form of life can be changed, but not the essence; and that to man everything will be given except to change the nature of his spirit; that man can become yet more master of the world, richer and more learned, but he cannot change his moral structure. His feelings, his primary instincts will always remain as they were in the wild occupants of the caves, in the constructors of the lake cities, in the first barbarians and in the peoples of the most ancient kingdoms.
Others feel an equal horror of man as he has been and as he is, but before they sink into the despair of moral nihilism they look at man as he could be. They have a firm faith in his perfectibility of soul and find happiness in the divine but terrible task of preparing the happiness of their brothers.
For men who are truly men there is no other choice: either the blackest anguish or the boldest faith; either death or salvation. The past is horrible, the present is repellent; let us give all our life, let us offer all our power of loving and understanding in order that to-morrow may be better, that the future may be happy. If up to now we have erred, and the irrefutable proof is the black past from which we have come, let us work for the birth of a new man and a new life. There are but two possibilities: either happiness will never be given to men or, and this Jesus believed firmly, if happiness could be our ordinary and eternal possession there is no other price for attaining it but to change our course, transform our souls, create new values, deny the old, answer the “No” of holiness to the false “Yes” of the world. If Christ was mistaken, nothing remains but absolute and universal negation, resolute faith in nothing. Either complete and rigorous atheism, not the maimed hypocritical atheism of the cowardly sects of to-day; or active faith in Christ who saves and resurrects us by His love.