And in self-defence life searches for the weak point in reason and finds it in scepticism, which it seizes hold of, endeavouring to save itself by maintaining its hold. It needs the weakness of its adversary.
In an outburst of passion, Lamennais exclaims: “But what! All hope lost, shall we plunge blindly into the mute depths of a universal scepticism? Shall we doubt that we think, that we feel, that we are? Nature does not allow it; she forces us to believe even when our reason is not convinced. Absolute certainty and absolute doubt are both alike forbidden to us. We hover in a vague mean between these two extremes, as between being and nothingness; for complete scepticism would be the extinction of the intelligence and the total death of man. But it is not given to man to annihilate himself; there is in him something which invincibly resists destruction, I know not what vital faith, which the will itself cannot master. Whether he like it or not, he must believe, because he must act, because he must preserve himself. His reason, if he listened only to that, teaching him to doubt everything, itself included, would reduce him to a state of absolute inaction; he would perish before even he had been able to prove to himself that he existed.”[10]
It is not strictly true that reason leads us to absolute scepticism. No, reason does not lead me and cannot lead me to doubt that I exist. Whither reason does lead me is to vital scepticism, or more properly to vital negation—not merely to doubt but to deny that my consciousness survives my death. Vital scepticism comes from the clash between reason and desire. And from this clash, from this embrace between despair and scepticism is born holy, sweet, saving incertitude, our supreme consolation.
The absolute and complete certainty, on the one hand, that death is a complete, definite, irrevocable annihilation of personal consciousness, a certainty of the same order as the certainty that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or, on the other hand, the absolute and complete certainty that our personal consciousness is prolonged beyond death in these or those conditions, including withal the extraneous and adventitious addition of eternal rewards and punishments—both of these certainties would equally make life impossible for us. In the most secret chamber of the spirit of him who believes himself convinced that death puts an end to his personal consciousness, his memory, for ever, there lurks a shadow, all unknown to him perhaps, a vague shadow, a shadow of a shadow of uncertainty, and while he says within himself: “Well, let us live this passing life, for there is no other!” the silence of this secret chamber speaks to him and murmurs: “Who knows!...” He may not think he hears it, but he hears it. And likewise in some secret place of the soul of the believer who most firmly holds the faith in future life, there is a muffled voice, a voice of uncertainty, which whispers in the ear of his spirit: “Who knows!...” These voices are like the humming of a mosquito when the gale roars through the trees in the wood; we cannot distinguish this faint humming, nevertheless, merged in the clamour of the storm, it reaches the ear. Otherwise, without this uncertainty, how could we live?
“Is there?” “Is there not?”—these are the bases of our inner life. There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would only prove that just as there are monsters, so there are people who are affectively and feelingly stupid, however much intelligence they may have, and people who are intellectually stupid, however great their virtue may be. But in normal cases I cannot believe those who assure me that never, not even for a moment, not in the hours of greatest loneliness and tribulation, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed upon their consciousness. I do not understand the men who tell me that the prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that the thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them. For my part I do not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith and my reason—I wish rather that there should be war between them.
“Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief!” This may appear to be a contradiction, for if the man believes, if he trusts, how is it that he beseeches the Lord to help his lack of trust? Nevertheless it is this contradiction that gives all its deepest human value to this cry torn from the heart of the father of a demoniac. His faith is a faith that is based upon incertitude. Because he believes, that is to say, because he wishes to believe, because he has need that his son should be cured—he beseeches the Lord to help his unbelief, his doubt that such a cure could be effected. Of such a kind is human faith. Of such a kind was the heroic faith that Sancho Panza had in his master, the knight Don Quixote de la Mancha, as I think I have shown in my “Life of Don Quixote and Sancho”—a faith based upon incertitude, upon doubt. Sancho Panza was indeed a man, a whole and a real man, and he was not stupid, for only if he had been stupid would he have believed without a shadow of doubt in the follies of his master. Neither did his master believe in them without a shadow of doubt, for neither was Don Quixote, though mad, stupid. He was fundamentally a man of despair, as I think I have shown in my book. And because he was a man of an heroic despair, the hero of that inward and resigned despair, he is the eternal exemplar of every man whose soul is the battle-ground of reason and immortal desire. Our Lord Don Quixote is the prototype of the vitalist whose faith is based upon incertitude, and Sancho is the prototype of the rationalist who doubts his own reason.
CREATIVE FAITH
When as a boy I began to be disquieted by the eternal problems, I read in a book, the author of which I have no wish to recall, this sentence: “God is the great x placed over the barrier of human knowledge—as science advances, the barrier recedes.” And I wrote in the margin: “On this side of the barrier, everything is explained without Him; on the further side, nothing is explained, either with Him or without Him. God, therefore, is superfluous.” And so as far as concerns the God-Idea, the God whose existence is supposed to be logically proved, I continue to be of the same opinion. Laplace is said to have stated that he had not found the hypothesis of God necessary in the construction of his system of the origin of the Universe, and it very certainly is so. The idea of God does not in any way help us to understand any better the existence, the essence and the finality of the Universe.
The living God, the human God, is reached not by the way of reason but by the way of love and of suffering. Reason rather separates us from Him. It is not possible to know Him in order that afterwards we may love Him; we must begin by loving Him, longing for Him, hungering for Him, before knowing Him. The knowledge of God proceeds from the love of God, and it is a knowledge that has little or nothing of the rational in it. For God is indefinable. To seek to define Him is to claim to limit Him in our mind—that is to say, to kill Him. In so far as we attempt to define Him, we are confronted by Nothingness.
The idea of God which the would-be rational theodicy presents us with is merely an hypothesis, like the hypothesis of the ether, for example.