Russell, Bertrand - A.Free.Man's.Worship
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A Free Man’s Worship
Bertrand Russell
To Dr. Faustus in
his study Mephistopheles told the history of the
Creation, saying:
did he not deserve their
praise? Had he not given them endless joy? Would
it not be more
amusing to obtain undeserved
praise, to be worshipped by beings whom he
tortured? He
smiled inwardly, and resolved
that the great drama should be performed.
take shape, the central mass threw off
planets, the planets cooled, boiling seas and
burning mountains heaved and tossed, from
black masses of cloud hot sheets of rain
deluged the barely solid crust. And now the
first germ of life grew in the depths of the
ocean, and developed rapidly in the
fructifying warmth into vast forest trees, huge
ferns
springing from the damp mould, sea
monsters breeding, fighting, devouring, and
passing
away. And from the monsters, as the
play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power
of thought, the knowledge of good and evil,
and the cruel thirst for worship. And Man
saw
that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world,
that all is struggling to snatch, at any
cost,
a few brief moments of life before Death's
inexorable decree. And Man said: 'There
is a
hidden purpose, could we but fathom it, and the
purpose is good; for we must
reverence
something, and in the visible world there is
nothing worthy of reverence.' And
Man stood
aside from the struggle, resolving that God
intended harmony to come out of
chaos by human
efforts. And when he followed the instincts which
God had transmitted
to him from his ancestry
of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God
to forgive him.
But he doubted whether he
could be justly forgiven, until he invented a
divine Plan by
which God's wrath was to have
been appeased. And seeing the present was bad, he
made
it yet worse, that thereby the future
might be better. And he gave God thanks for the
strength that enabled him to forgo even the
joys that were possible. And God smiled; and
when he saw that Man had become perfect in
renunciation and worship, he sent another
sun
through the sky, which crashed into Man's sun; and
all returned again to nebula.
Such, in
outline, but even more purposeless, more void of
meaning, is the world which
Science presents
for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere,
our ideals henceforward
must find a home. That
Man is the product of causes which had no
prevision of the end
they were achieving; that
his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his
loves and his
beliefs, are but the outcome of
accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no
heroism,
no intensity of thought and feeling,
can preserve an individual life beyond the grave;
that
all the labours of the ages, all the
devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday
brightness
of human genius, are destined to
extinction in the vast death of the solar system,
and that
the whole temple of Man's achievement
must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a
universe in ruins -- all these things, if not
quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain,
that no philosophy which rejects them can hope
to stand. Only within the scaffolding of
these
truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding
despair, can the soul's habitation
henceforth
be safely built.
How, in such an alien
and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as
Man preserve
his aspirations untarnished? A
strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but
blind, in
the revolutions of her secular
hurryings through the abysses of space, has
brought forth at
last a child, subject still
to her power, but gifted with sight, with
knowledge of good and
evil, with the capacity
of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother.
In spite of
Death, the mark and seal of the
parental control, Man is yet free, during his
brief years, to
examine, to criticise, to
know, and in imagination to create. To him alone,
in the world
with which he is acquainted, this
freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority
to the
resistless forces that control his
outward life.
The savage, like ourselves,
feels the oppression of his impotence before the
powers of
Nature; but having in himself
nothing that he respects more than Power, he is
willing to
prostrate himself before his gods,
without inquiring whether they are worthy of his
worship. Pathetic and very terrible is the
long history of cruelty and torture, of
degradation and human sacrifice, endured in
the hope of placating the jealous gods:
surely, the trembling believer thinks, when
what is most precious has been freely given,
their lust for blood must be appeased, and
more will not be required. The religion of
Moloch -- as such creeds may be generically
called -- is in essence the cringing
submission of the slave, who dare not, even in
his heart, allow the thought that his master
deserves no adulation. Since the independence
of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power
may
be freely worshipped, and receive an unlimited
respect, despite its wanton infliction
of
pain.
But gradually, as morality grows bolder,
the claim of the ideal world begins to be felt;
and worship, if it is not to cease, must be
given to gods of another kind than those created
by the savage. Some, though they feel the
demands of the ideal, will still consciously
reject them, still urging that naked Power is
worthy of worship. Such is the attitude
inculcated in God's answer to Job out of the
whirlwind: the divine power and knowledge
are
paraded, but of the divine goodness there is no
hint. Such also is the attitude of those
who,
in our own day, base their morality upon the
struggle for survival, maintaining that
the
survivors are necessarily the fittest. But others,
not content with an answer so
repugnant to the
moral sense, will adopt the position which we have
become accustomed
to regard as specially
religious, maintaining that, in some hidden
manner, the world of
fact is really harmonious
with the world of ideals. Thus Man creates God,
all-powerful
and all-good, the mystic unity of
what is and what should be.
But the world of
fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting
our judgment to it, there is
an element of
slavishness from which our thoughts must be
purged. For in all things it is
well to exalt
the dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as
possible from the tyranny of
non-human Power.
When we have realised that Power is largely bad,
that man, with his
knowledge of good and evil,
is but a helpless atom in a world which has no
such
knowledge, the choice is again presented
to us: Shall we worship Force, or shall we
worship Goodness? Shall our God exist and be
evil, or shall he be recognised as the
creation of our own conscience?
The
answer to this question is very momentous, and
affects profoundly our whole
morality. The
worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche
and the creed of
Militarism have accustomed
us, is the result of failure to maintain our own
ideals against
a hostile universe: it is
itself a prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice
of our best to
Moloch. If strength indeed is
to be respected, let us respect rather the
strength of those
who refuse that false
bad. Let us admit that, in the world we know,
there are many things that would be better
otherwise, and that the ideals to which we do
and must adhere are not realised in the
realm
of matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth,
for beauty, for the ideal of
perfection which
life does not permit us to attain, though none of
these things meet with
the approval of the
unconscious universe. If Power is bad, as it seems
to be, let us reject it
from our hearts. In
this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to
worship only the God
created by our own love
of the good, to respect only the heaven which
inspires the insight
of our best moments. In
action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to
the tyranny of
outside forces; but in thought,
in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow-
men, free
from the petty planet on which our
bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live,
from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then,
that energy of faith which enables us to live
constantly in the vision of the good; and let
us descend, in action, into the world of fact,
with that vision always before us.
When
first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully
visible, a spirit of fiery revolt, of
fierce
hatred of the gods, seems necessary to the
assertion of freedom. To defy with
Promethean
constancy a hostile universe, to keep its evil
always in view, always actively
hated, to
refuse no pain that the malice of Power can
invent, appears to be the duty of all
who will
not bow before the inevitable. But indignation is
still a bondage, for it compels
our thoughts
to be occupied with an evil world; and in the
fierceness of desire from which
rebellion
springs there is a kind of self-assertion which it
is necessary for the wise to
overcome.
Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but
not of our desires; the Stoic
freedom in which
wisdom consists is found in the submission of our
desires, but not of
our thoughts. From the
submission of our desires springs the virtue of
resignation; from
the freedom of our thoughts
springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and
the vision
of beauty by which, at last, we
half reconquer the reluctant world. But the vision
of
beauty is possible only to unfettered
contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by the
load
of eager wishes; and thus Freedom comes
only to those who no longer ask of life that it
shall yield them any of those personal goods
that are subject to the mutations of Time.
Although the necessity of renunciation is
evidence of the existence of evil, yet
Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a
wisdom exceeding that of the Promethean
philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted
that, of the things we desire, some, though
they prove impossible, are yet real goods;
others, however, as ardently longed for, do not
form part of a fully purified ideal. The
belief that what must be renounced is bad, though
sometimes false, is far less often false than
untamed passion supposes; and the creed of
religion, by providing a reason for proving
that it is never false, has been the means of
purifying our hopes by the discovery of many
austere truths.
But there is in
resignation a further good element: even real
goods, when they are
unattainable, ought not
to be fretfully desired. To every man comes,
sooner or later, the
great renunciation. For
the young, there is nothing unattainable; a good
thing desired with
the whole force of a
passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them
not credible. Yet, by
death, by illness, by
poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn,
each one of us, that
the world was not made
for us, and that, however beautiful may be the
things we crave,
Fate may nevertheless forbid
them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune
comes, to
bear without repining the ruin of
our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain
regrets.
This degree of submission to Power is
not only just and right: it is the very gate of
wisdom.
But passive renunciation is not
the whole of wisdom; for not by renunciation alone
can
we build a temple for the worship of our
own ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the
temple appear in the realm of imagination, in
music, in architecture, in the untroubled
kingdom of reason, and in the golden sunset
magic of lyrics, where beauty shines and
glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote
from the fear of change, remote from the
failures and disenchantments of the world of
fact. In the contemplation of these things the
vision of heaven will shape itself in our
hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the
world about us, and an inspiration by which to
fashion to our needs whatever is not
incapable
of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.
Except for those rare spirits that are born
without sin, there is a cavern of darkness to be
traversed before that temple can be entered.
The gate of the cavern is despair, and its
floor is paved with the gravestones of
abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the
eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be
slain, for only so can the soul be freed
from
the empire of Fate. But out of the cavern the Gate
of Renunciation leads again to the
daylight of
wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new
joy, a new tenderness, shine
forth to gladden
the pilgrim's heart.
When, without the
bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt
both to resign
ourselves to the outward rules
of Fate and to recognise that the non-human world
is
unworthy of our worship, it becomes
possible at last so to transform and refashion the
unconscious universe, so to transmute it in
the crucible of imagination, that a new image
of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay.
In all the multiform facts of the world -- in
the visual shapes of trees and mountains and
clouds, in the events of the life of man, even
in the very omnipotence of Death -- the
insight of creative idealism can find the
reflection
of a beauty which its own thoughts
first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle
mastery
over the thoughtless forces of Nature.
The more evil the material with which it deals,
the
more thwarting to untrained desire, the
greater is its achievement in inducing the
reluctant
rock to yield up its hidden
treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling
the opposing
forces to swell the pageant of
its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the
proudest, the
most triumphant; for it builds
its shining citadel in the very centre of the
enemy's country,
on the very summit of his
highest mountain; from its impregnable
watchtowers, his
camps and arsenals, his
columns and forts, are all revealed; within its
walls the free life
continues, while the
legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the
servile captains of
tyrant Fate, afford the
burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of
beauty. Happy
those sacred ramparts,
thrice happy the dwellers on that all-seeing
eminence. Honour to
those brave warriors who,
through countless ages of warfare, have preserved
for us the
priceless heritage of liberty, and
have kept undefiled by sacrilegious invaders the
home of
the unsubdued.
But the beauty of
Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in
more or less obvious
shapes, is present always
and everywhere in life. In the spectacle of Death,
in the
endurance of intolerable pain, and in
the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a
sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of
the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible
mystery of existence, in which, as by some
strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound
to the world by bonds of sorrow. In these
moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of
temporary desire, all struggling and striving
for petty ends, all care for the little trivial
things that, to a superficial view, make up
the common life of day by day; we see,
surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the
flickering light of human comradeship, the
dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for
a brief hour; from the great night without,
a
chill blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the
loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces
is
concentrated upon the individual soul, which must
struggle alone, with what of courage
it can
command, against the whole weight of a universe
that cares nothing for its hopes
and fears.
Victory, in this struggle with the powers of
darkness, is the true baptism into
the
glorious company of heroes, the true initiation
into the overmastering beauty of
human
existence. From that awful encounter of the soul
with the outer world,
enunciation, wisdom, and
charity are born; and with their birth a new life
begins. To take
into the inmost shrine of the
soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem
to be --
Death and change, the irrevocableness
of the past, and the powerlessness of Man before
the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to
vanity -- to feel these things and know them
is to conquer them.
This is the reason why
the Past has such magical power. The beauty of its
motionless and
silent pictures is like the
enchanted purity of late autumn, when the leaves,
though one
breath would make them fall, still
glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past
does not
change or strive; like Duncan, after
life's fitful fever it sleeps well; what was eager
and
grasping, what was petty and transitory,
has faded away, the things that were beautiful
and eternal shine out of it like stars in the
night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is
unendurable; but to a soul which has conquered
Fate it is the key of religion.
The life of
Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in
comparison with the forces of
Nature. The
slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and
Death, because they are
greater than anything
he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts
are of things which
they devour. But, great as
they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their
passionless
splendour, is greater still. And
such thought makes us free men; we no longer bow
before
the inevitable in Oriental subjection,
but we absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves.
To
abandon the struggle for private happiness,
to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to
burn with passion for eternal things -- this
is emancipation, and this is the free man's
worship. And this liberation is effected by a
contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is
subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be
purged by the purifying fire of Time.
United with his fellow-men by the
strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom,
the
free man finds that a new vision is with
him always, shedding over every daily task the
light of love. The life of Man is a long march
through the night, surrounded by invisible
foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards
a goal that few can hope to reach, and
where
none may tarry long. One by one, as they march,
our comrades vanish from our
sight, seized by
the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief
is the time in which we
can help them, in
which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it
ours to shed sunshine
on their path, to
lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to
give them the pure joy
of a never-tiring
affection, to strengthen failing courage, to
instil faith in hours of despair.
Let us not
weigh in grudging scales their merits and
demerits, but let us think only of
their need
-- of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the
blindnesses, that make the misery
of their
lives; let us remember that they are fellow-
sufferers in the same darkness, actors
in the
same tragedy as ourselves. And so, when their day
is over, when their good and
their evil have
become eternal by the immortality of the past, be
it ours to feel that, where
they suffered,
where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause;
but wherever a spark of
the divine fire
kindled in their hearts, we were ready with
encouragement, with sympathy,
with brave words
in which high courage glowed.
Brief and
powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race
the slow, sure doom falls
pitiless and dark.
Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction,
omnipotent matter rolls
on its relentless way;
for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-
morrow himself
to pass through the gate of
darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the
blow falls, the
lofty thoughts that ennoble
his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of
the slave of
Fate, to worship at the shrine
that his own hands have built; undismayed by the
empire of
chance, to preserve a mind free from
the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life;
proudly defiant of the irresistible forces
that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and
his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary
but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own
ideals have fashioned despite the trampling
march of unconscious power.