THE DIVINE PARADOX
Powerless Greek Philosophers and the
cowardly sect of the Satan Worshippers,—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 silly 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 overturning’s, 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 over-turner, 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.
Buddha discovered something that Christ always knew, "Men are unhappy, all men—even those
who seem happy." And Siddharta, to put an end to pain counseled the
suppression of life itself. Jesus had another hope, more inspiring 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, like the animals below them,
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 dearly. The pessimists are right. Those who
denounce our boasting, those who scorn our lack of strength, those who despise
our humiliation, 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 pessimism 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 tomorrow 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 or rigorous atheism, not
the maimed hypocritical atheism of the cowardly sects of today; or active
faith in Christ who saves and resurrects us by His love.
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