The Bride of Dreams

by Frederik van Eeden

Suggestion is a very convenient word with a meaning easily adaptable to all sorts of explanations; but if there were no bounds and no end to this explaining by suggestion, we might as well rub out from our suggested slate of life, with a suggested sponge, the whole beautiful world of clear and eternal realities. No, the Christ of Lucia and my mother was no suggested fancy, but a living reality.

But what was he?

Of the Bible the two women knew very little. My mother, despite her Northern origin, had had an Italian Catholic education as well as Lucia. In this, for valid reasons, the Bible is forbidden. They did not speak much of the life of Jesus as an historical person, nor of his adventures, nor of his teachings. It was his suffering, his martyrdom, and his death that to them seemed to be above all deserving of meditation.

And if I had not known it - if the Nazarene of whom the New Testament narrates had borne another name, it might perhaps never have occurred to me to identify him with the Deity worshipped by my mother.

But now that I must needs assume that all information regarding the being, personally wholly unknown to me, that so occupied the lives of these two women and of millions of human beings besides, was to be found in these ancient writings, the English translation of which, contrary to my mother's wishes, I faithfully kept - now I began to read with renewed and even closer attention.

But I found nothing to give me light. I found a very beautiful and touching narrative full of dramatic power, written by the hand of a master, but to its detriment four times retold with embellishments and obvious falsifications. And the hero of this narrative was a very human mortal, more delicate, more sensitive and nearer akin to us than Hiob: just as bold in the flight of his thought, just as fanatic and even immoderate in his declarations, and certainly less strong, less resolute, his character less unmoved by the lot threatening him than the mighty hero of the older drama. I was deeply stirred by the reading of this wonderful creation, by the thoroughly human truth of his struggle, his disappointments, waverings and weaknesses, his courage and self-denial, his alternately proud and discouraged bearing, his very explainable self-deception, caused by the influence of his childish followers and worshippers, his fatal and truly tragic ending, not desired but foreboded, and manfully not evaded, - immutable necessary result of human weakness in human heroic strength.

But what did all this have to do with the wonderful reality in which my mother and millions with her found all their joy and their security, with which, through which, for which, in which they lived as fish live in the water?

I found nothing but a little outward resemblance, the name, the death he suffered. But for the rest it seemed to me that they might as well have named any other hero of tragedy - Prometheus for example - as the mighty and loving being that, even now, directed all their steps and shed light upon their path.

And through many careful and attentive conversations with the fair Lucia, in the presence of my mother, who was for her the living fountain from which she gratefully drew when her wisdom threatened to forsake her, I became convinced that had Lucia been taught that the divine reality she felt in herself was named Spinoza, because Spinoza was a God, incarnate in human form, who had lived in Rynsburg as a man, had proclaimed many words of living wisdom and therefore suffered scorn and contempt and finally, after a life of simplicity and chastity, had died in loneliness and poverty for our salvation - the pious maiden would just as readily have accepted it and would have found exactly as much strength, happiness and contentment in it.

Do not lose patience, my reader, because I tell you such commonplace things. Of course as an independently thinking and observing person, you know all this just as well as I. But for the herd it is all new, absolutely new. And it will still be so when you read this and I am dead and for many, many years after. Do not forget that we too belong to the herd, you and I, and that an accurate comprehension of our relations does not exclude a loving understanding and a wise affection. There is joy in my pride only because it rests on an immutable estimation of worth. I know that the herd thinks and feels slavishly and I do not, and that it is therefore necessarily subject to me; but my joy would rot and wither in my pride, did I not know the comforting and refreshing humility, the humility that by patient deeds of love unites me to the herd, and gives me full measure of comfort in this faithful, sincere and patient record for the good of all, so that I have found peace, tranquillity of mind and a foretaste of bliss in the utmost spiritual loneliness, in this dead life.