VI. TRANSCENDENTAL HOPE
VI. TRANSCENDENTAL HOPE
THIS earthly life can not be the end of all life; it can not be the final word concerning our destinies, unless they are, even in the most favorable cases, to close with an enigmatic deficit, and with an unexplainable divergence between capacity and accomplishment, between task and performance: this must be evident to every one who carefully reflects upon it, to every one who is unwilling to dismiss such questions curtly, unwilling to accept of death as an all-conclusive, comfortless fate.
The life of every thinking man who does not believe in its continuance after death, ends, therefore, in deep sadness. The decline of all the powers, bodily and mental, fills the heart that knows no further hope with dejection, and with a terror, at times, that no circumstances of earthly fortune can save him from. Even the consideration that the works of a man survive him, or that “when the body shall fall to dust the great name shall still live on,” gives him no adequate comfort for the passing away of life itself. Some then forcibly rouse themselves and seek in feverish activity to use up the last moments of vanishing existence in making sure that others will have something to remember them by, or feel a momentary regret over their loss. In other aging men, on the other hand, once more there awakens with almost elementary force the long-slumbering desire for pleasure in every direction, seeking again to blow into flame the pitiful spark of the fire of life. The end in both cases, however, is a helpless breaking-down in the face of the constantly approaching Unknown, or the banishment of all thoughts on the subject as far as possible, or finally, in the bravest cases, a stoical surrender to an unavoidable fate—unless there is a hope that life will continue beyond. Only where such hope is present is Death the friendly-earnest messenger who heralds to the tired wanderer the end of his journey and the soon impending prospect, from a slowly and toilsomely mounted hilltop, into a broad new world; for all others he is the ugly skeleton as represented in the mediæval Dance of Death, or at least the inexorable, cruel Reaper of the very beautiful, but very melancholy poem of Clemens Brentano, “There is a reaper whose name is Death.”
Now, for the first, there comes to light the most remarkable of all the differences between men; now, at the end of life, the “simple fool” comes to a victorious vindication. For while to all others every autumnal falling leaf awakens the feeling of a hopeless passing away, he sees, even in the tree stripped bare, the buds already of a new and gracious spring, and he hears, in his last days, not only the unalterable judgment of death, “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return,” but at the same time likewise the word of life, “Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.”
II
The attitude of men toward the question of death, the most important of life’s questions, is that which best characterizes each one of them, and if one always knew their thoughts about it, one would be able to draw therefrom the most definite conclusions as to their whole conception of life.
The fear of death is also the best test-stone for every philosophy. A philosophy that does not overcome this fear, or at best leads to sad reflections upon the transitoriness of life, is in the first place of not very much practical value, and in any case does not completely fulfil its purpose. Nor is it even quite consonant with reason; for how could we picture a reasonable condition of man and society, if there were no death? For when the lives of prominent persons have been too prolonged, it has been a manifest misfortune to their fellow-men. Far from being an evil that makes a shrill discord in the universe, death is rather an advantage, the only conceivably possible arrangement under which a world such as ours, in which the good must contend with the evil, can exist.
This at least is certain, that even upon those whose “heart is fortified” against any event, the incompleteness and trouble of life often lies heavily, and that to them this earthly existence seems merely a transitory state from which there must some day be release. Even the happiest life knows such moods, and though one might be entirely satisfied with his own lot, he could not possibly be so for his nation and for the millions of men whose life seems only one long chain of deprivations and blunders that mock at all attempts to help. An old German poet, Heinrich von Laufenburg (1445), already gives expression to this mood in the following verses: