DEO VOLENTE. Essays. - Preface.

DEO VOLENTE.

Essays.

Preface.

Our little systems have their day;

They have their day and cease to be;

They are but broken lights of thee,

And thou O Lord art more than they. TENNYSON.

 

MANKIND seem to have but one motive: to relieve the pains of  their mortality. Some by vice rise and some by virtue fall, and many by vice fall and by virtue rise. Yet, what is vice and what is virtue if not what is thought to be pain inducing in the one and pain reducing in the other? If the murderer conceives his agonies may be reduced by murder, how many know their agonies to be increased by it? If the thief supposes his inconveniences to be lessened by theft, his victims equally suppose theirs to be increased, and others feel their anxieties to be heightened; if several traitors find their propensities satisfied by their national treacheries, several millions of their former fellow-countrymen are left unsatisfied, indeed dissatisfied, in fact nauseated; hence the illegality of those acts; hence the great pragmatism of morality.

   All secondary action moreover, even within the boundaries of morality, is impelled by the continuous impulse to reduce the sharp pangs of mortal existence. Money may acquire all the material luxuries the earth can afford, therefore men work, and give, that they might receive. If their wealth satisfies them adequately, which has never yet been observed, their struggles might end; should their wealth not so satisfy, their struggles proceed. Romance is besought, foregone, and besought; marriages are solemnised, revoked, and solemnised; religions are joined, abandoned, and joined; in fine, optimism is nourished and depleted by turns, while pessimism takes all which optimism will not reserve. Then some in their impudence must attempt to rationalise these tangles of action, though with yet the same motive, that they might be eased, comforted, and surfeited, by their rationalisms, nay, even rewarded and revered for aiding others besides. That is when selfishness plays selflessness, and fattens upon its deceptions.

   However, habit is a kind of second nature, and who may say where honesty ends and dishonesty begins? Is not to constantly play selflessness to be selflessness itself? Imitation is only imitation by limitation, and trueness is only trueness in fullness. Could Christ resist a superficially, though consistently, penitent Herod? Would Herod in his consistency escape the superficiality of his penitence? If one is to masquerade as something is it not preferable to masquerade as a beauty than to masquerade as a beast?

   Thus it may be that the poor hazarding rationalist errs little in his poor hazarding, and perhaps might succeed somewhat in his redoubled motive, not only to lessen the pain of his own mortality but that of others too. Commit him then to his wandering bark, and let the logbook of his voyages across the rough waters of Thought be heeded; for if he succeeds he is a light unto the gentiles, and if he fails he makes a seamark by his shipwreck. Wish him success therefore in his endeavours, and wish yourselves success thereby; a tolling bell may peal as well.

   For thinkers may construct palaces of thought as masons may construct palaces of stone, but what worth is a palace if left uninhabited, unseen, uninspected, and unimproved when declined? If a light is under a bushel is it a light? Or why should it be necessary to wander and ponder over ideas, to attempt to prove this, and disprove that, if not in all earnestness to be of service and comfort to others? If I, lone survivor of a fatal plague, were left to my own devices would I bother to be a pessimist? Who would there be to approve my censures and admire my perspicuity? Not I, for it was once rightly observed that men however publicly boastful are privately self-loathing. I, though plunged irrevocably into mortal misery by such a calamity, would be no pessimist; my grief would be too great. Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep, and what would criticisms avail so situated a man? We all live for one another, especially the misanthropic. Thus may be inferred the beneficence of purest optimism, and the dishonesty of truly optimistic pessimism, for who is a pessimist who rises of mornings?

   The method of these essays is philosophical and their theme religious. Let then their theme serve as their preface's sorely needed example of its case. Religion to the Western mind is like a wooden chair to the Western back, found indifferently in comfort and gladly in exhaustion; and it is a comfortable age. Therefore is it presently both fashionable and, I am assured, reasonable to snub religion; to scoff its tenets, dismiss its precepts, and despise its influence. Is this because religion, or church, to make the distinction, is the spring of all social evil, or perhaps a magnifier of animalistic violence, or simply a foolishly permitted excuse for conceited self-assertion? Or is it, indeed, because we would fain blame the part to the sum? That we should like to please ourselves with the notion that the canker is local and not general? Why blame humanity? What profit when we may blame religion?

   Is it not contradictory to divert one’s judgement from the affectation of pessimism by accusing the instinct of optimism? Does redoubled drinking cure the wounds of alcohol or deepen their effects? If mankind has an obligation to argue anything it is surely their obligation to argue the beneficial; otherwise their history would be one of self-affliction. Benefit in all its manifesta­tions is as the gentle rains or soft rays from heaven; it neither drowns nor scorches, neither wrinkles nor blisters, neither swallows nor incinerates, but rather sustains its nourishing influence over an imperfect mortality. Immortality, for its perfection, is ever the lamplight of its perishable opposite, thus every alteration made to its imitation is both an alteration from affliction to beneficence and from falsehood to truth. Regard, therefore, the necessary association between the two; that if perfection is both truthful and beneficent then every truthfully beneficial improvement is beneficially truthful, and that actual beneficence is as actual truth.

   There are indeed manifold mimics of beneficence and truthfulness, which ape an understanding and posture a conviction, but they are only mimics; as quickly discovered by the shrewd as adored by the credulous. It is amongst such mimics that the great proponent minds of cynicism have warned against supposed beneficence and rather commended factual truth. That, however, such minds should be as capable of discerning factual truth as they were evidently incapable of recognising actual beneficence is as apparently unlikely as it is actually impossible. No useful function is served in overcautiously shutting one's eyes to illusions. Not only are illusions preferable to blindness, they are the makeweights of epiphany, and to shroud the mind in a darkling scepticism is scarcely conducive to enlightenment. For such philosophies as the great cynics held essentially imply that what is most existentially truthful is most socially injurious, and what is most abundantly false is most widely beneficent. It is the philosophy of the three witches, 'fair is foul and foul is fair'. Should mankind generally elect, however, to think, speak, and write, as they act, namely with persistent optimism, then might a sounder uniformity of appearance be accomplished. Let us not merely make honey but buzz as we make it; let us not simply build nests but chirp as we build them; let us not only be what we are but acknowledge what we are.

   And I humbly submit that we are religious, for I humbly suggest that where irreligion is heralded pessimism (and where religion is invariably heralded optimism then irreligion is inevitably heralded pessimism) and where optimism is unquestionably the law of nature, as all optimism is activity of a kind, then nature is of its own accord religious, and religious too in its own religion, which religion all others strive to imitate. Indeed religion is but the academic sphere which man has designated to the study of ultimate truth. Science inspects; religion surveys. They are two means of observation, the one particulate the other comprehensive. Soured minds might object to the opiates of the masses, and might dream of a world where none were maddened by the pagan incantations of falsely specious syllogisms, but they never could confute the irrepressible facts of mortal existence: that we are, and so must have been, and so must ever be. All other theory is extraneous to these central facts. We must reconcile our doctrines to these facts, if we are not to suffer the acid corrosions of hopelessness. Atheism, as the doctrine of implicative disbelief, suggests that there is but temporary life which sprang from, and will return to, death. But this fallacy of thought is neither convincing nor logical, Occam’s razor shaves it as instantaneously as all false complexity; ‘nothing comes of nothing’. If death is the fact we should have no occasion for the observation, but as we have some occasion for observation I must conclude that life is the fact. I am not therefore an atheist, for I am an optimist, as my heart still beats.

   Yet it is a very ridiculous thing to be religious, so it is said. How can anyone believe such things in this day and age? How, for that matter, can anyone believe in anything in this day and age? Suppose a man denies the truth and existence of a lemon. He has not seen one, he has not tasted one, he has not heard of one. What can possibly be said  to convince him of the thing’s existence? That it has yellow skin? That though it is a fruit it has a sour taste? That it seems vertically shaped on the outside but, when it is cut, seems horizontally shaped on the inside? Suppose this incredulous man were an analytic philosopher (for all analytic philosophers are incredulous men but not all incredulous men are analytic philosophers) and that, in order to please the pride of his profession, these descriptions were presented to him instead of the lemon itself. Would he be satisfied? Rather would he say, ‘The latter description is a contradiction in terms, the preceding description is against the rule of common experience, and the first description a terminological improbability.’ That the descriptions are true is, of course, quite beside the point.

   All have seen a lemon however, and so it is a bad example; but I say all have seen the Deity, and heard Him, felt Him, smelled Him, touched him, conceived Him, although only to the most minute extent. It is with man and God as it would be with a protein born on the edge of a lemon wedge: we are of God, as the protein is of the lemon, but we are so much less than He that we cannot immediately know it. Nevertheless, our instincts are all in His direction, and when people rail against Him and speak such things to the effect of showing how ‘God is a tyrant, religion is a war, and the religious its bloody soldiers’, the effect is to feel rather more kindly towards St. Francis of Assisi and rather less kindly towards political zealots. When ridicule is more ridiculous than the ridiculed the truth is plainly observable.

   What, however, is this period which we call the life of man? Whence and wherefore arose its personality and what will be its fate when its bodily motions cease? It is plainly not the lot of man to know his own fate, no more than it is for birds, fish, or crickets, to know theirs, but it is for man to trust in his own reflective intellect which grants him the power of supposing what he never can know, but which he never can doubt if he is not to turn into an incarnation of doubt itself, namely, that there is a purpose to existence and that that purpose, too great for mortals to bear, must be ultimately fulfilled by one greater than himself who, projecting all the emanative light of which mortal individuality is but a flicker, and bearing all the weights of existence, will redeem the ills of the earth with the palliative powers of the supreme perspective. He is not God as we have thought Him, He is not God as yet we think Him, He is not God as any will newly think Him, for He is as He knows and not as we speculate. Nevertheless, we feel we know Him by the name of God and in the name of God attribute we all which we can dimly espy of goodness, all which we can conjecture of truth, and all which we can feel of glory.