Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 7

Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 7

We have seen[76] that reason, if one of the principles which govern it be destroyed, cannot lay hold of truth, not even absolute truths of the intellectual and moral order; it refers all universal, necessary, absolute truths, to the being that alone can explain them, because in him alone are necessary and absolute existence, immutability, and infinity. G.o.d is the substance of uncreated truths, as he is the cause of created existences. Necessary truths find in G.o.d their natural subject. If G.o.d has not arbitrarily made them,--which is not in accordance with their essence and his,--he const.i.tutes them, inasmuch as they are himself. His intelligence possesses them as the manifestations of itself. As long as our intelligence has not referred them to the divine intelligence, they are to it an effect without cause, a phenomenon without substance. It refers them, then, to their cause and their substance. And in that it obeys an imperative need, a fixed principle of reason.

Mysticism breaks in some sort the ladder that elevates us to infinite substance: it regards this substance alone, independently[77] of the truth that manifests it, and it imagines itself to possess also the pure absolute, pure unity, being in itself. The advantage which mysticism here seeks, is to give to thought an object wherein there is no mixture, no division, no multiplicity, wherein every sensible and human element has entirely disappeared. But in order to obtain this advantage, it must pay the cost of it. It is a very simple means of freeing theodicea from every shade of anthropomorphism; it is reducing G.o.d to an abstraction, to the abstraction of being in itself. Being in itself, it is true, is free from all division, but upon the condition that it have no attribute, no quality, and even that it be deprived of knowledge and intelligence; for intelligence, if elevated as it might be, always supposes the distinction between the intelligent subject and the intelligible object. A G.o.d from whom absolute unity excludes intelligence, is the G.o.d of the mystic philosophy.

How could the school of Alexandria, how could Plotinus, its founder,[78] in the midst of the lights of the Greek and Latin civilization, have arrived at such a strange notion of the Divinity? By the abuse of Platonism, by the corruption of the best and severest method, that of Socrates and Plato.

The Platonic method, the dialectic process, as its author calls it, searches in particular, variable, contingent things, for what they also have general, durable, one, that is to say, their Idea, and is thus elevated to Ideas, as to the only true objects of intelligence, in order to be elevated still from these Ideas, which are arranged in an admirable hierarchy, to the first of all, beyond which intelligence has nothing more to conceive, nothing more to seek. By rejecting in finite things their limit, their individuality, we attain genera, Ideas, and, by them, their sovereign principle. But this principle is not the last of genera, nor the last of abstractions; it is a real and substantial principle.[79] The G.o.d of Plato is not called merely unity, he is called the Good; he is not the lifeless substance of the Eleatics;[80] he is endowed with _life and movement_;[81] strong expressions that show how much the G.o.d of the Platonic metaphysics differs from that of mysticism.

This G.o.d is the _father of the world_.[82] He is also the father of truth, that light of spirits.[83] He dwells in the midst of Ideas _which make him a true G.o.d inasmuch as he is with them_.[84] He possesses _august and holy intelligence_.[85] He has made the world without any external necessity, and for the sole reason that he is good.[86] In fine, he is beauty without mixture, unalterable, immortal, that makes him who has caught a glimpse of it disdain all earthly beauties.[87] The beautiful, the absolute good, is too dazzling to be looked on directly by the eye of mortal; it must at first be contemplated in the images that reveal it to us, in truth, in beauty, in justice, as they are met here below, and among men, as the eye of one who has been a chained captive from infancy, must be gradually habituated to the light of the sun.[88] Our reason, enlightened by true science, can perceive this light of spirits; reason rightly led can go to G.o.d, and there is no need, in order to reach him, of a particular and mysterious faculty.

Plotinus erred by pushing to excess the Platonic dialectics, and by extending them beyond the boundary where they should stop. In Plato they terminate at ideas, at the idea of the good, and produce an intelligent and good G.o.d; Plotinus applies them without limit, and they lead him into an abyss of mysticism. If all truth is in the general, and if all individuality is imperfection, it follows, that as long as we are able to generalize, as long as it is possible for us to overlook any difference, to exclude any determination, we shall not be at the limit of dialectics. Its last object, then, will be a principle without any determination. It will not spare in G.o.d being itself. In fact, if we say that G.o.d is a being, by the side of and above being, we place unity, of which being partakes, and which it cannot disengage, in order to consider it alone. Being is not here simple, since it is at once being and unity; unity alone is simple, for one cannot go beyond that. And still when we say unity, we determine it. True absolute unity must, then, be something absolutely indeterminate, which is not, which, properly speaking, cannot be named, the _unnamable_, as Plotinus says.

This principle, which exists not, for a still stronger reason, cannot think, for all thought is still a determination, a manner of being. So being and thought are excluded from absolute unity. If Alexandrianism admits them, it is only as a forfeiture, a degradation of unity.

Considered in thought, and in being, the supreme principle is inferior to itself; only in the pure simplicity of its indefinable essence is it the last object of science, and the last term of perfection.

In order to enter into communication with such a G.o.d, the ordinary faculties are not sufficient, and the theodicea of the school of Alexandria imposes upon it a quite peculiar psychology.

In the truth of things, reason conceives absolute unity as an attribute of absolute being, but not as something in itself, or, if it considers it apart, it knows that it considers only an abstraction. Does one wish to make absolute unity something else than an attribute of an absolute being, or an abstraction, a conception of human intelligence? Reason could accept nothing more on any condition. Will this barren unity be the object of love? But love, much more than reason, aspires after a real object. One does not love substance in general, but a substance that possesses such or such a character. In human friendships, suppress all the qualities of a person, or modify them, and you modify or suppress the love. This does not prove that you do not love this person; it only proves that the person is not for you without his qualities.

So neither reason nor love can attain the absolute unity of mysticism.

In order to correspond to such an object, there must be in us something a.n.a.logous to it, there must be a mode of knowing that implies the abolition of consciousness. In fact, consciousness is the sign of the _me_, that is to say, of that which is most determinate: the being who says, _me_, distinguishes himself essentially from every other; that is for us the type itself of individuality. Consciousness should degrade the ideal of dialectic knowledge, or every division, every determination must be wanting, in order to respond to the absolute unity of its object. This mode of pure and direct communication with G.o.d, which is not reason, which is not love, which excludes consciousness, is ecstasy ([Greek: ekstasis]). This word, which Plotinus first applied to this singular state of the soul, expresses this separation from ourselves which mysticism exacts, and of which it believes man capable. Man, in order to communicate with absolute being, must go out of himself. It is necessary that thought should reject all determinate thought, and, in falling back within its own depths, should arrive at such an oblivion of itself, that consciousness should vanish or seem to vanish. But that is only an image of ecstasy; what it is in itself, no one knows; as it escapes all consciousness, it escapes memory, escapes reflection, and consequently all expression, all human speech.

This philosophical mysticism rests upon a radically false notion of absolute being. By dint of wishing to free G.o.d from all the conditions of finite existence, one comes to deprive him of all the conditions of existence itself; one has such a fear that the infinite may have something in common with the finite, that he does not dare to recognize that being is common to both, save difference of degree, as if all that is not were not nothingness itself! Absolute being possesses absolute unity without any doubt, as it possesses absolute intelligence; but, once more, absolute unity without a real subject of inherence is dest.i.tute of all reality. Real and determinate are synonyms. What const.i.tutes a being is its special nature, its essence. A being is itself only on the condition of not being another; it cannot but have characteristic traits. All that is, is such or such. Difference is an element as essential to being as unity itself. If, then, reality is in determination, it follows that G.o.d is the most determinate of beings.

Aristotle is much more Platonic than Plotinus, when he says that G.o.d is the thought of thought,[89] that he is not a simple power, but a power effectively acting, meaning thereby that G.o.d to be perfect, ought to have nothing in himself that is not completed. To finite nature it belongs to be, in a certain sense, indeterminate, since being finite, it has always in itself powers that are not realized; this indetermination diminishes as these powers are realized. So true divine unity is not abstract unity, it is the precise unity of perfect being in which every thing is accomplished. At the summit of existence, still more than at its low degree, every thing is determinate, every thing is developed, every thing is distinct, every thing is one. The richness of determinations is a certain sign of the plenitude of being. Reflection distinguishes these determinations from each other, but it is not necessary that it should in these distinctions see the limits. In us, for example, does the diversity of our faculties and their richest development divide the _me_ and alter the ident.i.ty and the unity of the person? Does each one of us believe himself less than himself, because he possesses sensibility, reason, and will? No, surely. It is the same with G.o.d. Not having employed a sufficient psychology, Alexandrian mysticism imagined that diversity of attributes is incompatible with simplicity of essence, and through fear of corrupting simple and pure essence, it made of it an abstraction. By a senseless scruple, it feared that G.o.d would not be sufficiently perfect, if it left him all his perfections; it regards them as imperfections, being as a degradation, creation as a fall; and, in order to explain man and the universe, it is forced to put in G.o.d what it calls failings, not having seen that these pretended failings are the very signs of his infinite perfection.

The theory of ecstasy is at once the necessary condition and the condemnation of the theory of absolute unity. Without absolute unity as the direct object of knowledge, of what use is ecstasy in the subject of knowledge? Ecstasy, far from elevating man to G.o.d, abases him below man; for it effaces in him thought, by taking away its condition, which is consciousness. To suppress consciousness, is to render all knowledge impossible; it is not to comprehend the perfection of this mode of knowing, wherein the limitation of subject and object gives at once the simplest, most immediate, and most determinate knowledge.[90]

The Alexandrian mysticism is the most learned and the profoundest of all known mysticisms. In the heights of abstraction where it loses itself, it seems very far from popular superst.i.tions; and yet the school of Alexandria unites ecstatic contemplation and theurgy. These are two things, in appearance, incompatible, but they pertain to the same principle, to the pretension of directly perceiving what inevitably escapes all our efforts. On the one hand, a refined mysticism aspires to G.o.d by ecstasy; on the other, a gross mysticism thinks to seize him by the senses. The processes, the faculties employed, differ, but the foundation is the same, and from this common foundation necessarily spring the most opposite extravagances. Apollonius of Tya.n.u.s is a popular Alexandrianist, and Jamblicus is Plotinus become a priest, mystagogue, and hierophant. A new worship shone forth by miracles; the ancient worship would have its own miracles, and philosophers boasted that they could make the divinity appear before other men. They had demons for themselves, and, in some sort, for their own orders; the G.o.ds were not only invoked, but evoked. Ecstasy for the initiates, theurgy for the crowd.

At all times and in all places, these two mysticisms have given each other the hand. In India and in China, the schools where the most subtile idealism is taught, are not far from paG.o.das of the most abject idolatry. One day the Bhagavad-Gita or Lao-tseu[91] is read, an indefinable G.o.d is taught, without essential and determinate attributes; the next day there is shown to the people such or such a form, such or such a manifestation of this G.o.d, who, not having a form that belongs to him, can receive all forms, and being only substance in itself, is necessarily the substance of every thing, of a stone and a drop of water, of a dog, a hero, and a sage. So, in the ancient world under Julien, for example, the same man was at once professor in the school of Athens and guardian of the temple of Minerva or Cybele, by turns obscuring the _Timaeus_ and the _Republic_ by subtile commentaries, and exhibiting to the eyes of the mult.i.tude sometimes the sacred vale,[92]

sometimes the shrine of the good G.o.ddess,[93] and in either function, as priest or philosopher, imposing on others and himself, under taking to ascend above the human mind and falling miserably below it, paying in some sort the penalty of an unintelligible metaphysics, in lending himself to the most shameless superst.i.tions.

When the Christian religion triumphed, it brought humanity under a discipline that puts a rein upon this deplorable mysticism. But how many times has it brought back, under the reign of spiritual religion, all the extravagances of the religions of nature! It was to appear especially at the _renaissance_ of the schools and of the genius of Paganism in the sixteenth century, when the human mind had broken with the philosophy of the Middle Age, without yet having arrived at modern philosophy.[94] The Paracelsuses and the Von Helmonts renewed the Apolloniuses and the Jamblicuses, abusing some chemical and medical knowledge, as the former had abused the Socratic and Platonic method, altered in its character, and turned from its true object. And so, in the midst of the eighteenth century, has not Swedenborg united in his own person an exalted mysticism and a sort of magic, opening thus the way to those senseless[95] persons who contest with me in the morning the solidest and best-established proofs of the existence of the soul and G.o.d, and propose to me in the evening to make me see otherwise than with my eyes, and to make me hear otherwise than with my ears, to make me use all my faculties otherwise than by their natural organs, promising me a superhuman science, on the condition of first losing consciousness, thought, liberty, memory, all that const.i.tutes me an intelligent and moral being. I should know all, then, but at the cost of knowing nothing that I should know. I should elevate myself to a marvellous world, which, awakened and in a natural state, I am not even able to suspect, of which no remembrance will remain to me:--a mysticism at once gross and chimerical, which perverts both psychology and physiology; an imbecile ecstasy, renewed without genius from the Alexandrine ecstasy; an extravagance which has not even the merit of a little novelty, and which history has seen reappearing at all epochs of ambition and impotence.

This is what we come to when we wish to go beyond the conditions imposed upon human nature. Charron first said, and after him Pascal repeated it, that whoever would become an angel becomes a beast. The remedy for all these follies is a severe theory of reason, of what it can and what it cannot do; of reason enveloped first in the exercise of the senses, than elevating itself to universal and necessary ideas, referring them to their principle, to a being infinite and at the same time real and substantial, whose existence it conceives, but whose nature it is always interdicted to penetrate and comprehend. Sentiment accompanies and vivifies the sublime intuitions of reason, but we must not confound these two orders of facts, much less smother reason in sentiment.

Between a finite being like man and G.o.d, absolute and infinite substance, there is the double intermediary of that magnificent universe open to our gaze, and of those marvellous truths which reason conceives, but has not made more than the eye makes the beauties it perceives. The only means that is given us of elevating ourselves to the Being of beings, without being dazzled and bewildered, is to approach him by the aid of a divine intermediary; that is to say, to consecrate ourselves to the study and the love of truth, and, as we shall soon see, to the contemplation and reproduction of the beautiful, especially to the practice of the good.

FOOTNOTES:

[71] See the preceding lectures.

[72] See the _Phaedrus_ and the _Banquet_, vol. vii. of our translation.

[73] We shall not be accused of perverting the holy Scriptures by these a.n.a.logies, for we give them only as a.n.a.logies, and St. Augustine and Bossuet are full of such.

[74] See part ii., _The Beautiful_, lecture 6, and part iii., lecture 13, on the _Morals of Sentiment_. See also our _Pascal_, preface of the last edition, p. 8, etc., vol. i. of the 4th Series.

[75] See the admirable work of Bossuet, _Instruction sur les etats d'Oraison_.

[76] Lecture 4.

[77] See especially in our writings the regular and detailed refutation of the double extravagance of considering substance apart from its determinations and its qualities, or of considering its qualities and its facilities apart from the being that possesses them. 1st Series, vol. iii., lecture 3, _On Condillac_, and vol. v., lectures 5 and 6, _On Kant_. We say, the same Series, vol. iv., p. 56: "There are philosophers beyond the Rhine, who, to appear very profound, are not contented with qualities and phenomena, and aspire to pure substance, to being in itself. The problem stated as follows, is quite insoluble: the knowledge of such a substance is impossible, for this very simple reason, that such a substance does not exist. Being in itself, _das Ding in sich_, which Kant seeks, escapes him, and this does not humiliate Kant and philosophy; for there is no being in itself. The human mind may form to itself an abstract and general idea of being, but this idea has no real object in nature. All being is determinate, if it is real; and to be determinate is to possess certain modes of being, transitory and accidental, or constant and essential. Knowledge of being in itself is then not merely interdicted to the human mind; it is contrary to the nature of things. At the other extreme of metaphysics is a powerless psychology, which, by fear of a hollow ontology, is condemned to voluntary ignorance. We are not able, say these philosophers, Mr. Dugald Stewart, for example, to attain being in itself; it is permitted us to know only phenomena and qualities: so that, in order not to wander in search of the substance of the soul, they do not dare affirm its spirituality, and devote themselves to the study of its different faculties. Equal error, equal chimera! There are no more qualities without being, than being without qualities. No being is without its determinations, and reciprocally its determinations are not without it.

To consider the determinations of being independently of the being which possesses them, is no longer to observe; it is to abstract, to make an abstraction quite as extravagant as that of being considered independently of its qualities."

[78] On the school of Alexandria, see 2d Series, vol. ii., _Sketch of a General History of Philosophy_, lecture 8, p. 211, and 3d Series, vol.

i., _pa.s.sim_.

[79] See the previous lecture.

[80] 3d Series, vol. i., _Ancient Philosophy_, article _Xenophanes_, and article _Zeno_.

[81] _The Sophist_, vol. xi. of our translation, p. 261.

[82] _Timaeus_, vol. xii., p. 117.

[83] _Republic_, book vii., p. 70 of vol. x.

[84] _Phaedrus_, vol. vi., p. 55.

[85] _The Sophist_, p. 261, 262. The following little-known and decisive pa.s.sage, which we have translated for the first time, must be cited:--"_Stranger._ But what, by Zeus! shall we be so easily persuaded that in reality, motion, life, soul, intelligence, do not belong to absolute being? that this being neither lives nor thinks, that this being remains immobile, immutable, without having part in august and holy intelligence?--_Theatetus._ That would be consenting, dear Eleatus, to a very strange a.s.sertion.--_Stranger._ Or, indeed, shall we accord to this being intelligence while we refuse him life?--_Theatetus._ That cannot be.--_Stranger._ Or, again, shall we say that there is in him intelligence and life, but that it is not in a soul that he possesses them?--_Theatetus._ And how could he possess them otherwise?--_Stranger._ In fine, that, endowed with intelligence, soul, and life, all animated as he is, he remains incomplete immobility.--_Theatetus._ All that seems to me unreasonable."

[86] _Timaeus_, p. 119: "Let us say that the cause which led the supreme ordainer to produce and compose this universe was, that he was good."

[87] _Bouquet_, discourse of Diotimus, vol. vi., and the 2d part of this vol., _The Beautiful_, lecture 7.

[88] _Republic._ _Ibid._

[89] Book xii. of the _Metaphysics_. _De la Metaphysique d'Aristotle_, 2d edition, p. 200, etc.

[90] On this fundamental point, see lecture 3, in this vol.--2d Series, vol. i., lecture 5, p. 97. "The peculiarity of intelligence is not the power of knowing, but knowing in fact. On what condition is there intelligence for us? It is not enough that there should be in us a principle of intelligence; this principle must be developed and exercised, and take itself as the object of its intelligence. The necessary condition of intelligence is consciousness--that is to say, difference. There can be consciousness only where there are several terms, one of which perceives the other, and at the same time perceives itself. That is knowing, and knowing self; that is intelligence.

Intelligence without consciousness is the abstract possibility of intelligence, it is not real intelligence. Transfer this from human intelligence to divine intelligence, that is to say, refer ideas, I mean ideas in the sense of Plato, of St. Augustine, of Bossuet, of Leibnitz, to the only intelligence to which they can belong, and you will have, if I may thus express myself, the life of the divine intelligence ..., etc."

[91] Vol. ii. of the 2d Series, _Sketch of a General History of Philosophy_, lectures 5 and 6, _On the Indian Philosophy_.

[92] See the _Euthyphron_, vol. i. of our translation.

[93] Lucien, Apuleius, Lucius of Patras.

[94] 2d Series, vol. ii., _Sketch of a General History of Philosophy_, lecture 10, _On the Philosophy of the Renaissance_.

[95] One was then ardently occupied with magnetism, and more than a magnetizer, half a materialist, half a visionary, pretended to convert us to a system of perfect clairvoyance of soul, obtained by means of artificial sleep. Alas! the same follies are now renewed. Conjunctions are the fashion. Spirits are interrogated, and they respond! Only let there be consciousness that one does not interrogate, and superst.i.tion alone counterpoises skepticism.

PART SECOND

THE BEAUTIFUL.