To Dr. Faustus in his study, Mephistopheles told the history of the Creation, saying:
"The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow wearisome; for,
after all, did he not deserve their praise? Had he not given them endless joy? Would it
not be more amusing to obtain undeserved praise, to be worshipped by beings whom he
tortured? He smiled inwardly, and resolved that the great drama should be performed.
"For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At length it
began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the planets cooled, boiling seas
and burning mountains heaved and tossed, from -black masses of cloud hot sheets of rain
deluged the barely solid crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the
ocean, and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest trees, huge ferns
springing from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing
away. And from the monsters, as the play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power of
thought, the knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship. And Man saw
that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is struggling to snatch, at any
cost, a few brief moments of life before Death'ss, inexorable decree. And Man said: 'There
is a hidden purpose, could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must
reverence something, and in the visible world there is nothing worthy of reverence. And
Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God intended harmony to come out of
chaos by human efforts. And when he followed the instincts which God had transmitted to
him from his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive him.
But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until he invented a divine Plan by
which God's wrath was to have been appeased. And seeing the present was bad, he made it
yet worse, that thereby the future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the
strength that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible. And God smiled; and
when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another sun
through the sky, which crashed into Man's sun; and all returned again to nebula.
" 'Yes,' he murmured, 'it was a good play; I will have it performed again.
Such in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which
Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward
must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they
were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his
beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no
heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the
grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the
noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the
solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement trust inevitably be buried
beneath the débris of a universe in ruins-all these things, if not quite beyond dispute,
are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only
within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair,
can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.
How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve
his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in
the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth
at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good
and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of
Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years,
to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the
world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority
to the resistless forces that control his outward life.
The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence before the powers of
Nature; but having in himself nothing that he respects more than Power, he is willing to
prostrate himself before his gods, without inquiring whether they are worthy of his
worship. Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of
degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods:
surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is most precious has been freely given,
then- lust for blood must be appeased, and more will riot be required. The religion of
Moloch - as such creeds may be generically called - is in essence the cringing submission
of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves
no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be
freely worshipped, and receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of
pain.
But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world begins to be
felt; and worship, if it is not to cease, must be given to gods of another kind than those
created by the savage. Some, though they feel the demands of the ideal, will still
consciously reject them, still urging that naked Power is worthy of worship. Such is the
attitude inculcated in God's answer to job out of the whirlwind: the divine power and
knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness there is no hint. Such also is the
attitude of those who, in our own day base their morality upon the struggle for survival,
maintaining that the survivors are necessarily the fittest. But others, not content with
an answer so repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the position which we have become
accustomed to regard as specially religious, maintaining that, in some hidden manner, the
world of fact is really harmonious with the world of ideals. Thus Man creates God,
all-powerful and all good, the mystic unity of what is and what should be.
But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our judgment to it,
there is an element of slavishness from which our thoughts must be purged. For in all
things it is well to exalt the dignity of Man, by freeing hint as far as possible front
the tyranny of non-human Power. When we have realised that Power is largely bad, that man,
with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a world which has no such
knowledge, the choice is again presented to us: Shall we worship Force, or shall we
worship Goodness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognised as the
creation of our own conscience~
The answer to this question is very momentous, and affects profoundly our whole
morality. The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche and the creed of Militarism
have accustomed us, is the result of failure to maintain our own ideals against a hostile
universe: it is itself a prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of our best to Moloch.
If strength indeed is to be respected, let us respect rather the strength of those who
refuse that false "recognition of facts" which fails to recognise that facts are
often bad. Let us admit that, in the world we know, there are many things that would be
better otherwise, and that the ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realised in
the realm of matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal of
perfection which life does not permit us to attain, though none of these things meet with
the approval of the unconscious universe. If Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us
reject it from our hearts. In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship
only the God created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which
inspires the insight of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually
to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free front
our fellow-men, free front the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free
even, while we live, front the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith
which enables its to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let us descend, in
action, into the world of fact, with that vision always before us.
When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a spirit of fiery
revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary to the assertion of freedom. To defy
with Promethean constancy a hostile universe, to keep its evil always in view, always
actively hated, to refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, appears to be the
duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But indignation is still a bondage,
for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world; and in the fierceness of
desire from which rebellion springs there is a kind of self'-assertion which it is
necessary for the wise to overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not
of our desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the submission of
our desires, but not of our thoughts , From the submission of our desires springs the
virtue of resignation; from the freedom of our thoughts springs the whole world of art and
philosophy, and the vision of beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant
world. But the vision of beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, to thoughts
not weighted by the load of eager wishes; and thus Freedom comes only, to those who no
longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject
to the mutations of time.
Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of evil, yet
Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding that of the Promethean
philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted that, of the things we desire, some, though
they prove impossible, are yet real goods; others, however, as ardently longed for, do
riot form part of a fully purified ideal. The belief that what must be renounced is bad,
though sometimes false, is far less often false than untamed passion supposes; and the
creed of religion, by providing a reason for proving that it is never false, has been the
means of purifying our hopes by the discovery of many austere truths.
But there is in resignation a further good element: even real goods, when they are
unattainable, ought not to be fretfully desired. To every man comes, sooner or later, the
great renunciation. For the young, there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired
with the whole force of a passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible.
Yet, by death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn, each one of
its, that the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we
crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them.. It is the part of courage, when misfortune
comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain
regret This degree of submission to Power is not only just and right: it is the very gate
of wisdom.
But passive renunciation is riot the whole of wisdom; for not by renunciation alone can
we build a temple for the worship of our own ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the temple
appear in the realm of imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom
of lyrics, where beauty shines and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote front
the fear of change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world of fact. In
the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will shape itself' lit our hearts,
giving at once a touchstone to judge the world about us, and an inspiration by which to
fashion to our needs whatever is not incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.
Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a cavern of darkness
to be traversed before that temple can be entered. The gate of the cavern is despair, and
its floor is paved with the gravestones of abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the
eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so, can the soul be freed
front the empire of Fate. But out of the cavern the Gate of Renunciation leads again to
the daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy. a new tenderness,
shine forth to gladden the pilgrim's heart.
Where, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both ic. resign
ourselves to Lie outward rule of Fate and to recognise that the non-human world is
unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the
unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image
of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world -
in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man,
even in the very omnipotence of Death - the insight of creative idealism can find the
reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its
subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Nature. The more evil the material with
which it deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is its achievement in
inducing the reluctant rock to yield tip its hidden treasures, the prouder its victory in
compelling the opposing forces co swell the pageant of his triumph. Of all the arts,
Tragedy is the proudest, the most triumphant for it builds its shining citadel in the very
centre of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; from its
impregnable watchtowers, his camps and arsenals, his columns and forts, are all revealed;
within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair,
and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city
new spectacles of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts, thrice happy the dwellers on that
all-seeing eminence. Honour to those brave warriors who, through countless ages of
warfare, have. preserved for us the priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled
by the sacrilegious invaders the home of the unsubdued.
But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more or less
obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life. In the spectacle of Death, in
the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is
a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness of existence, in which, as by
some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In
these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling and
striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial things that, to a superficial
view, make up the common life of day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined
by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we
toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill blast breaks in upon our
refuge; all the loneliness of humanity and hostile force is concentrated upon the
individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against
the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in
this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company
of heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that
awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, renunciation, wisdom, and charity are
born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost shrine of the soul
the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be - Death and change, the
irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of man before the blind hurry of the
universe from vanity to vanity - to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.
This is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of its motionless
and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity of late autumn, when the leaves, though
one breath would make them fall, still glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past does
not change or strive; like Duncan, after life's fitful fever it sleeps well; what was
eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away, the things that were
beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the night. Its beauty, to a soul not
worthy of it, is unendurable; but to a soul which has conquered Fate it is the key of
religion.
The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with the forces
of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are
greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things
which they devour. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their
passionless splendour, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no longer
bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we absorb it, and make it a part of
ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of
temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things-this is emancipation, and this
is the free man's worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for
Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire
of Time.
United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the
free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the
light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible
foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where
none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized
by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help
them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their
path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a
never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in hours of
despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits but let us think
only of their need-of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make
the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same
darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when
their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours
to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but
whenever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with
encouragement, with sympathy, wiih brave words in which high courage glowed.
Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls
pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter
rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, tomorrow
himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow
falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of
the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by
the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his
outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his
knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world
that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.
Source:
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970): "A Free Man's Worship" from Mysticism and
Logic (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1917)
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