§4
Certainly these three coercive factors, and many others, too, bear strangely upon all our attempts to think. The beauty and the happiness of religion, perhaps, lie in the fact that it has little to do with thinking. As far as any man knows, up to now, the universe is insoluble; and the mind, ardent particle, rather resents insolubility. It resents the solemn circling of the Dipper, seen from the front porch every clear night. Filling itself with slow darkness, gently tilting and draining again, it too cruelly reminds us of the orderly immensities of space. And religion may very well be considered a form of art and of anesthetic to soften the onset of that insolvency. It is reason’s petition in bankruptcy, “to drown the memory of that insolence.” If it makes us happy, we need inquire no further; for happiness is what all pursue. Perhaps, indeed, we are but memoranda in the note-book of the cosmic Author, jottings of some story that flashed into His mind one day, but which He did not trouble to write. So we are hunting, hunting endlessly for the rest of the plot. Or we are surf-bathers in an ocean where one step carries us beyond our depth. Accept any figure of speech that appeals to you. No work of art or literature yet, so far as I know, has given an adequate presentment of the glory and agony and mirth and excitement of being alive. Suppose some visitor from another planet dropped in for an evening and could communicate his inquisition. We wanted to give him just one book that would offer a picture, trustworthy, frank, recognizable, of the life we have known—man’s long campaign with nature, with other men, with woman, with himself. Some suggest “Candide,” but I find that great book too pitiless. Some, Browne’s “Religio Medici,” but is it not too witty? We might, in a hasty ransack of the shelves, linger momently upon Boswell or Walt Whitman or Shakespere’s Sonnets or “Moby Dick”; or upon the Book of Common Prayer or a photograph of Gozzoli’s “Viaggio dei Re Magi.” But not even these would duly serve. It would have to be an anthology, I fear; perhaps Robert Bridges’s “Spirit of Man,” though it should really have a stouter infusion of the seventeenth century, when God-intoxicated and Eros-maddened poets like John Donne and Andrew Marvell uttered their ecstatic and magnanimous despair.
And that brings us to another cusp in this only too risible indent upon the infinite. Religion is an attempt, a noble attempt, to suggest in human terms more-than-human realities. The seat of Peter has always lain beyond the Alps. The church, like the poet, is an ambassador from abroad; from the strangest of countries, that lying within our own bosoms. And what is the virtue of an ambassador? Surely, tact. The one thing that makes ambassadors useless or dangerous is too great a zest to blurt out truths that many of us know, but have agreed not to emphasize. He thinks in the language of his homeland; he must speak—though always, we trust, with winningly foreign accent—the tongue to which he is accredited. The ambassador knows, better than any other, that truth is condiment, not diet. It is rough manners to shove truth at people when they are not expecting it. There is always charming significance in popular phrases. “The dreadful truth” is such a one. Truth is always dreaded, not so much because it is gruesome or tragic, but because it is so often absurd.
The church, then, comes before us as envoy from the world of spirit to the world of flesh; and here is the anomaly, that only too probably these worlds have small interest in common. So is our envoy but demi-potentiary. In medieval time the problem was simple; flesh and spirit were assumed to be deadly enemies one of the other. But nowadays we lean toward a casuistry far more perplexed; that body is soul’s noblest ally, that whatever makes flesh satiate and merry is so much gain for soul. Blithe, ruddy doctrine! Yet, sadly enough, it is even possible that truth is neither Trojan nor avoirdupois. Flesh and spirit sometimes look terribly incommensurable. Saint Paul did not fully plumb the real tragedy of the situation. The most bitter wisdom of the human voice is the very opposite of Paul’s cry. Transpose it so: Video deteriora proboque, meliora sequor.
Body and soul, tied together back to back, see different realms of sky. And the innermost capsule of mind, that very I of very I, though wretchedly at the mercy of pains and lusts, is yet also oddly detached. Sitting in the dentist’s chair, the innermost self says: “Here we are. This is terrible. Now he is going to hurt me. Is it the essential me he is going to hurt, or is it just the make-believe me?” But when the pang comes, then truly for an instant all me’s whatsoever coalesce into one indignant craven whole. Yet even in that horrid shudder I think we are obscurely aware that it is not our essence that surrenders. That volatile quiddity has retreated in disgust, loath to attend the deplorable scene. He is as cheerfully regardless of body as is the tenant of a house he has merely rented, and for rather less than value. He is, perhaps, not unlike the fire on the hearth, the brightness and warm centre of the home, yet caring nought for your cherished odds and ends. What’s Hecuba to him? Given a chance, that same domestic ember would devour the whole building; and is no different, in essence, from the roaring streamers that once ran wild in Baltimore and San Francisco.
I knew a lovely and thoughtful woman who, with a few other adepts, used to do graceful figure-skating on the far side of a college skating-pond. There, in a quiet little cove of clear ice, apart from the crowd and the rhythmic, hollow undersong of the whole vibrating lake, this little group swung and twirled. I can see her small slender figure, her bright cheek, the lovely float and spread of her skirt as she curved and poised in that steely waltzing. College students and wild hockey berserks and miscellaneous small fry scuttled and careered about; now and then a rubber puck would skim across the ice, and like a pack of hounds the barbarian rout would sweep upon that tranquil shore of the pond. For a moment the pensive skaters would be blotted out by swirling movement—clattering sticks, ringing skates, noisy shouts. Then the rabble would whirl away. The fancy skaters would be seen again; and that lonely figure, swinging, leaning in airy curves, aware of it all with thoughtful eyes a little sparked with annoyance, aloof from the turmoil, yet not unkindly so.
Not otherwise, perhaps, our hidden capsule of identity is a solitary skater. The wild rush of emotions, desires, passions, timidities, comes tearing across the pond; lonely Diana is hidden, even shouldered off her lagoon of clear crystal. But then they go racketing away. The pirouette begins again, and the soul is happy with her own concerns.
What language, then, is our ambassador to utter, dealing with two worlds appallingly incongruous? Is it strange if, like the rest of us, he falls back upon prudential and cheery approximations? That witty writer Stella Benson mentions in one of her novels (“The Poor Man”) a character who “knew too well the difficulties and dangers of being alive to despise those who sought for safety in tremulous platitudes.”