"Vanity, Vanity," saith the Preacher. "Sow in the morning thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thy hand, for thou knowest not which shall succeed, or whether both alike are good."
Where Are We?—If men only knew where they are!
The description which the ancients gave of Tartarus exactly fits our condition in this life. The ambitious man rolls his stone up the hill like Sisyphus, and when he has got it to the top it rolls down again. A certain architect spent twenty-five years of his life in working and intriguing in order to build a temple for the state. The temple was built and consecrated, a torch-light procession was held in honour of the architect, and he was crowned with a laurel-wreath. The next day the newspapers informed us that the temple must be pulled down because it was a failure. The architect died half a year afterwards in an asylum; the temple was demolished and the architect's name forgotten and obliterated. Tantalus, the rich miser, stands in the midst of a spring of water, but cannot drink; branches laden with fruit hang over his head, but when he stretches out his hand to pluck a fruit a gust of wind comes and tears the branch away. The rich man has worked and swindled till old age begins. Then at last, when the grouse come flying towards him, he has no teeth left; his wine-cellar is full, but the doctor has forbidden him wine. That is Tantalus!
Ixion revolves on his wheel, at one moment up, at another down. The ancients assigned as the reason of his punishment that he had boasted of the favour of a woman who had never been his.
The Danaides, the coquettes, are perpetually drawing water, but their vessel is like a sieve; everything enters it, but nothing remains.
All day long and every day one hears the expression "That is hell!"—such is the universal view. When things look a little brighter, the table is covered, the bed made, and we feel well again. We cheat ourselves often with alcohol, and continue our somnambulism. Then we are awoken by a noise, start up, rush about, weep, and then go to sleep again. At last sleep is banished once for all, and we wake never to sleep any more. Once we are well awake no opiates are of avail.
Then we discover the whole cheat. We see where we are, and what our past, which seemed so real, was. The comparatively wise man then turns away from the phantoms and shadows of reality in order to seek the other, the true, the actual Real. Then the state is seen to be a prison; the defenders of the fatherland are body-snatchers; society is a madhouse, whose warders are the officials and police; family life is concubinage; capitalists are usurers; the fine arts are superfluities; literature is printed nonsense; industry feeds unnecessary luxury; railways are instruments of torture; the electric light ruins the eyes; all the blessings of civilisation are either curses or superfluous.
When we have seen this, we turn our backs on all and seek the only thing that holds, that gives a real answer, that fulfils what it promises. But this super-real fools call a phantom.
Hegel's Christianity.—There are two Voltaires: one, the mocker at all definite religion, who is revered by the godless; the other, the fanatical champion of God who is ridiculed by the atheists because he believed in God as naïvely as a child. Voltaire recovered his reason before he died, as lunatics are wont to do; when he died he was definitely religious and took the sacrament. There are also two Hegels. But they are more complicated than Voltaire, who was as simple as a feuilletonist. Hegel discovered with his logic that what exists has a right to exist; he defends the status quo, society, state, religion with all their corollaries, because they have proceeded from God; everything is right since it exists. "It belongs," he says, "to the essence of religion that it should realise itself in several historical religious forms. Of these, however, Christianity is the only one which suitably expresses the essence of religion. In her doctrine of the Trinity the Christian Church contains the nucleus of all philosophical speculation. For this signifies nothing less than that the Eternal God, enthroned in His majesty over the sphere of the finite, condescends and reconciles Himself to the finite, becomes man, suffers, dies, and returns to Himself as the Holy Spirit." That is well put; but every schoolchild knew it already from Luther's "little catechism." For what object then is this extraordinary accumulation of several thousand pages of incomprehensible philosophy? To what purpose? Hegel died of cholera in 1831, after traversing many devious ways, as a simple, believing Christian, without any philosophy, repeating the penitential psalms.