Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel

by Henri Frédéric Amiel

All theories of the nullity of the individual, all pantheistic and materialist conceptions, are now but so much forcing of an open door, so much slaying of the slain. As soon as we cease to glorify this imperceptible point of conscience, and to uphold the value of it, the individual becomes naturally a mere atom in the human mass, which is but an atom in the planetary mass, which is a mere nothing in the universe. The individual is then but a nothing of the third power, with a capacity for measuring its nothingness! Thought leads to resignation. Self-doubt leads to passivity, and passivity to servitude. From this a voluntary submission is the only escape, that is to say, a state of dependence religiously accepted, a vindication of ourselves as free beings, bowed before duty only. Duty thus becomes our principle of action, our source of energy, the guarantee of our partial independence of the world, the condition of our dignity, the sign of our nobility. The world can neither make me will nor make me will my duty; here I am my own and only master, and treat with it as sovereign with sovereign. It holds my body in its clutches; but my soul escapes and braves it. My thought and my love, my faith and my hope, are beyond its reach. My true being, the essence of my nature, myself, remain inviolate and inaccessible to the world’s attacks. In this respect we are greater than the universe, which has mass and not will; we become once more independent even in relation to the human mass, which also can destroy nothing more than our happiness, just as the mass of the universe can destroy nothing more than our body. Submission, then, is not defeat; on the contrary, it is strength.

April 28, 1866.—I have just read the procès-verbal of the Conference of Pastors held on the 15th and 16th of April at Paris. The question of the supernatural has split the church of France in two. The liberals insist upon individual right; the orthodox upon the notion of a church. And it is true indeed that a church is an affirmation, that it subsists by the positive element in it, by definite belief; the pure critical element dissolves it. Protestantism is a combination of two factors—the authority of the Scriptures and free inquiry; as soon as one of these factors is threatened or disappears, Protestantism disappears; a new form of Christianity succeeds it, as, for example, the church of the Brothers of the Holy Ghost, or that of Christian Theism. As far as I am concerned, I see nothing objectionable in such a result, but I think the friends of the Protestant church are logical in their refusal to abandon the apostle’s creed, and the individualists are illogical in imagining that they can keep Protestantism and do away with authority.

It is a question of method which separates the two camps. I am fundamentally separated from both. As I understand it, Christianity is above all religions, and religion is not a method, it is a life, a higher and supernatural life, mystical in its root and practical in its fruits, a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a love which radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which overflows. Religion, in short, is a state of the soul. These quarrels as to method have their value, but it is a secondary value; they will never console a heart or edify a conscience. This is why I feel so little interest in these ecclesiastical struggles. Whether the one party or the other gain the majority and the victory, what is essential is in no way profited, for dogma, criticism, the church, are not religion; and it is religion, the sense of a divine life, which matters. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” The most holy is the most Christian; this will always be the criterion which is least deceptive. “By this ye shall know my disciples, if they have love one to another.”

As is the worth of the individual, so is the worth of his religion. Popular instinct and philosophic reason are at one on this point. Be good and pious, patient and heroic, faithful and devoted, humble and charitable; the catechism which has taught you these things is beyond the reach of blame. By religion we live in God; but all these quarrels lead to nothing but life with men or with cassocks. There is therefore no equivalence between the two points of view.

Perfection as an end—a noble example for sustenance on the way—the divine proved by its own excellence, is not this the whole of Christianity? God manifest in all men, is not this its true goal and consummation?

September 20, 1866.—My old friends are, I am afraid, disappointed in me; they think that I do nothing, that I have deceived their expectations and their hopes. I, too, am disappointed. All that would restore my self-respect and give me a right to be proud of myself, seems to me unattainable and impossible, and I fall back upon trivialities, gay talk, distractions. I am always equally lacking in hope, in faith, in resolution. The only difference is that my weakness takes sometimes the form of despairing melancholy and sometimes that of a cheerful quietism. And yet I read, I talk, I teach, I write, but to no effect; it is as though I were walking in my sleep. The Buddhist tendency in me blunts the faculty of free self-government and weakens the power of action; self-distrust kills all desire, and reduces me again and again to a fundamental skepticism. I care for nothing but the serious and the real, and I can take neither myself nor my circumstances seriously. I hold my own personality, my own aptitudes, my own aspirations, too cheap. I am forever making light of myself in the name of all that is beautiful and admirable. In a word, I bear within me a perpetual self-detractor, and this is what takes all spring out of my life. I have been passing the evening with Charles Heim, who, in his sincerity, has never paid me any literary compliment. As I love and respect him, he is forgiven. Self-love has nothing to do with it—and yet it would be sweet to be praised by so upright a friend! It is depressing to feel one’s self silently disapproved of; I will try to satisfy him, and to think of a book which may please both him and Scherer.

October 6, 1866.—I have just picked up on the stairs a little yellowish cat, ugly and pitiable. Now, curled up in a chair at my side, he seems perfectly happy, and as if he wanted nothing more. Far from being wild, nothing will induce him to leave me, and he has followed me from room to room all day. I have nothing at all that is eatable in the house, but what I have I give him—that is to say, a look and a caress—and that seems to be enough for him, at least for the moment. Small animals, small children, young lives—they are all the same as far as the need of protection and of gentleness is concerned.... People have sometimes said to me that weak and feeble creatures are happy with me. Perhaps such a fact has to do with some special gift or beneficent force which flows from one when one is in the sympathetic state. I have often a direct perception of such a force; but I am no ways proud of it, nor do I look upon it as anything belonging to me, but simply as a natural gift. It seems to me sometimes as though I could woo the birds to build in my beard as they do in the headgear of some cathedral saint! After all, this is the natural state and the true relation of man toward all inferior creatures. If man was what he ought to be he would be adored by the animals, of whom he is too often the capricious and sanguinary tyrant. The legend of Saint Francis of Assisi is not so legendary as we think; and it is not so certain that it was the wild beasts who attacked man first.... But to exaggerate nothing, let us leave on one side the beasts of prey, the carnivora, and those that live by rapine and slaughter. How many other species are there, by thousands and tens of thousands, who ask peace from us and with whom we persist in waging a brutal war? Our race is by far the most destructive, the most hurtful, and the most formidable, of all the species of the planet. It has even invented for its own use the right of the strongest—a divine right which quiets its conscience in the face of the conquered and the oppressed; we have outlawed all that lives except ourselves. Revolting and manifest abuse; notorious and contemptible breach of the law of justice! The bad faith and hypocrisy of it are renewed on a small scale by all successful usurpers. We are always making God our accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity. So that what, in the beginning, was the relation of man to the animal becomes that of people to people and man to man.

If so, we have before us an expiation too seldom noticed but altogether just. All crime must be expiated, and slavery is the repetition among men of the sufferings brutally imposed by man upon other living beings; it is the theory bearing its fruits. The right of man over the animal seems to me to cease with the need of defense and of subsistence. So that all unnecessary murder and torture are cowardice and even crime. The animal renders a service of utility; man in return owes it a need of protection and of kindness. In a word, the animal has claims on man, and the man has duties to the animal. Buddhism, no doubt, exaggerates this truth, but the Westerns leave it out of count altogether. A day will come, however, when our standard will be higher, our humanity more exacting, than it is to-day. Homo homini lupus, said Hobbes: the time will come when man will be humane even for the wolf—homo lupo homo.

December 30, 1866.—Skepticism pure and simple as the only safeguard of intellectual independence—such is the point of view of almost all our young men of talent. Absolute freedom from credulity seems to them the glory of man. My impression has always been that this excessive detachment of the individual from all received prejudices and opinions in reality does the work of tyranny. This evening, in listening to the conversation of some of our most cultivated men, I thought of the Renaissance, of the Ptolemies, of the reign of Louis XV., of all those times in which the exultant anarchy of the intellect has had despotic government for its correlative, and, on the other hand, of England, of Holland, of the United States, countries in which political liberty is bought at the price of necessary prejudices and à priori opinions.

That society may hold together at all, we must have a principle of cohesion—that is to say, a common belief, principles recognized and undisputed, a series of practical axioms and institutions which are not at the mercy of every caprice of public opinion. By treating everything as if it were an open question, we endanger everything.