III. The Hunger for Immortality

THOUGH GNOSTICS OR intellectuals may say that what follows is rhetoric and not philosophy, let us nevertheless consider the immortal longing for immortality. The divine Plato himself, discoursing on the immortality of the soul in his Phaedo, said that it was right to make legends on the theme:

First let us recall once again, and it will not be the last time, the saying of Spinoza about every being striving to persevere in itself, that to strive constitutes its very essence and implies indefinite time, and that the soul, in sum, tends to persevere, sometimes with a clear and distinct idea and sometimes confusedly, in its being indefinitely, and that it is aware of its perseverance (Ethics, Part III, Propositions VI-X).

In effect it is impossible for us to conceive of ourselves as non-existent. There is no way whatsoever to make consciousness become aware of absolute unconsciousness, aware of its own annihilation. Try, reader, to imagine, when you are wide awake, the state of your soul in deep sleep. Try to flood your consciousness with the image of non-consciousness, and you will see the difficulty. We can not conceive of ourselves as not existing.

The visible Universe, the one created by the instinct of self-preservation, strikes me as too narrow. It is like an over-small cage against whose bars my soul beats its wings. I need more air to breathe: more, more, always more! I want to be myself and, without ceasing to be myself, to be others as well, to encompass the totality of all things visible and invisible, to extend myself to the limitless in space and prolong myself to the endless in time. Not to be everything and not be it forever is the same as not being at all. At least let me be altogether myself and be so forever. And to be altogether myself is to be all others. All or nothing!

All or nothing at all! What other meaning is there in the Shakespearean “To be or not to be,” or that passage in Coriolanus where it is said of Marcius: “He wants nothing of a god but eternity.” Eternity! Eternity! That is the longing. The thirst for eternity is what is called, among men, love, and whoever loves another desires to become eternal in this other. Whatever is not eternal is also not real.

The terrible vision of life flowing away like waves of water has wrung soul-wrenching cries from the poets of all ages, from Pindar and his “dream of a shadow,” to Calderón and his “life is a dream” and Shakespeare and his “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” This last sentence is even more tragic than the Castilian’s, for where Calderón merely declares that our life is a dream—our life, but not necessarily we, who are the dreamers of it—the Englishman makes us a dream as well, a dream that dreams.

Love and the vanity of the passing world are the two fundamental and heartfelt notes of true poetry. And they are two notes which can not sound one without the other. The sense of the vanity of the passing world leads us into love, the only feeling which triumphs over the vain and the transitory and which fulfills and eternalizes life—at least apparently, if not in all reality. Love, especially when it struggles against destiny, overwhelms us with a sense of the vanity of this world of appearances and allows us a glimpse of another world where destiny is overcome and liberty is law.

Everything passes! That is the refrain of all who have drunk, lips to the spout, at the fountain of life, of all who have savored the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

To be, to be forever, to be without end! Thirst to be, thirst to be more! Hunger for God! Thirst for eternal and eternalizing love! To be forever! To be God!

“Ye shall be as gods!” the serpent said to the first pair of lovers, as we know from Genesis (3:5). “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable,” wrote the Apostle (1 Cor., 15:19). And all religion has sprung historically from the cult of the dead, that is to say, from the cult of immortality.

The tragic Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam wrote that there is nothing the free man thinks of less than he does of death. But that sort of free man is no more than a dead man; he is free only from life’s wellspring, lacking in love, a slave to his freedom. The thought that I must die and the enigma of what will come afterwards constitutes the very heartbeat of my consciousness. Whenever I contemplate the green serenity of the fields or look into the clear eyes from which a fellow soul is looking, my consciousness dilates, I feel the diastole of my soul and am bathed in the flood of life that flows around me, and I believe in my own future. But at once the voice of the mystery whispers to me: “You will cease to be!” The wing of the Angel of Death brushes against me, and the systole of my soul inundates the depths of my spirit with the blood of divinity.

Like Pascal, I do not understand anyone who asserts he doesn’t give a fig for these considerations. Such indifference “in a matter that concerns themselves, their eternity, their all, exasperates me more than it moves me to compassion; it appalls and terrifies me.” And the man who feels in this way is for me, as for Pascal, whose words I have quoted, “a monster.”

A thousand times and in a thousand tones of voice it has been said that ancestor worship is generally the starting point of primitive religions, and strictly speaking it may surely be said that what most distinguishes man from other animals is that in one way or another he keeps his dead, refusing to hand them over to the indifference of teeming mother earth. Man is an animal that preserves his dead. And against what does he preserve them? From what does futile man protect them? Unhappy consciousness flees its own annihilation; like an animal spirit whose umbilical cord to the physical world is cut, it finds itself confronted with this alien world and realizes it is a thing apart, and must long then for another life not of this world. For the earth would become a vast cemetery before the dead themselves could die again.

In the days when the living could count on no more than mud huts or straw shelters (which the weather has long ago wiped out), the dead had tumuli raised for them, and stone was employed in sepulchers before it was used for houses. The strong walled houses of the dead are the ones to have outlived the centuries, not the houses of the living: not the inns of passage, but the dwellings of permanence.

This cult, not of death but of immortality, originates and keeps religions. Amidst the delirium of destruction, Robespierre induced the Convention to declare the existence of the Supreme Being and of “the consolatory principle of the immortality of the soul,” for the Incorruptible was terrified at the thought that he himself would one day turn to dust.

Is it a disease? Perhaps. But whoever pays no heed to disease is heedless of his health, and man is an animal who is essentially and in substance diseased. Is it a disease? Perhaps it is, as is life, to which it is in thrall, and the only health possible is death. And this disease is the wellspring of all solid health. It is from the depths of this anguish, out of the abyss of the sense of our mortality, that we emerge into the light of another heaven, as Dante emerged from the deep of Hell to behold the stars once again:

e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

Though at first blush meditation on our mortality is anguishing, in the end it fortifies us. Withdraw, reader, into yourself, and begin to imagine a slow dissolution of yourself: the light growing dim, things becoming dumb and soundless, silence enveloping you; the objects you handle crumbling between your fingers, the ground slipping from under your feet, your very memory vanishing as if in a swoon, everything melting away into nothingness and you yourself disappearing, not even the consciousness of nothingness remaining by way of grotesque handhold.

I have heard a story told about a poor harvest worker who died in hospital: when the priest went to anoint his hands in extreme unction, the worker refused to open his right hand, in which he was clutching a few grubby coins, unmindful of the fact that neither his hand nor he himself would soon be his at all. In the same way we close up and clench, not just our hands, but our hearts, seeking to clutch the world.

A friend of mine once confessed to me that foreseeing a violent death within a short time—though he was then in vigorous health—he planned to concentrate all his forces, for the short period he calculated was left to him, on writing a book. Vanity of vanities!

If it is true that on the death of the body that maintains me alive, the body I call mine in order to distinguish it from me myself, which is I, if it is true that my consciousness returns to the absolute unconsciousness whence it sprang, and if a like fate befalls all my brothers in humanity, then our elaborate human lineage is no more than a doomed procession of phantoms trooping from nothingness to nothingness and humanitarianism is the most inhuman notion of all.

The remedy is not to be found in the quatrain that runs

Every time that I consider

that I am going to die,

I spread my cape upon the ground

And sleep till life is by.

No, not that! The remedy is to consider it face to face, fixing our gaze on the gaze of the Sphinx, for that is the way to break the spell of its evil eye.

If we are all to die altogether—what is the point of everything! Wherefore? It is the Wherefore, the Wherefore of the Sphinx, that corrodes the marrow of our soul and that is the begetter of the anguish which stirs our love of hope.

Among the poetic lamentations of the unhappy Cowper there are some lines written under the weight of delirium, where he exclaims, as he feels himself the mark of divine vengeance,

Hell might afford my miseries a shelter.

This is a Puritan sentiment, the preoccupation with sin and predestination. Only read the more terrible words of Sénancour, which express Catholic despair, not Protestant, when he makes his Obermann say: “Man is perishable. . . . That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if annihilation must be our portion, let us not make it a just one.” For my part I must confess, painful as the confession may be, that even in the days of my youth’s simple faith, I never was made to tremble by descriptions of hellfire, no matter how terrible, for I felt, always, that the idea of nothingness was much more terrifying than Hell. Whoever suffers lives, and whoever lives in suffering still loves and hopes, even though over the portal of his abode is written “Abandon all Hope!” And it is better to live in pain than peacefully cease to be at all. The truth is that I could not believe in this atrocious Hell, an eternity of punishment, nor could I imagine a more authentic Hell than that of nothingness and the prospect of it. And I still believe that if we all believed in our salvation from nothingness, we would all be the better for it.

What is this relish for living, la joie de vivre, they talk about nowadays? The hunger for God, the thirst for immortality, for survival, will always stifle in us this pitiful pleasure-taking in the life that is fleeting and does not abide. It is the frenzied love of life, the love that would have life be unending, which most often leads us to long for death. “If I am to be altogether annihilated,” we say to ourselves, “the world is finished for me, it is over. And why not let it come to an end as soon as possible, so that no new consciousness will have to come into being and suffer the tormenting deceit of a transient and apparential existence? If the illusion of life is destroyed and life for life’s sake or for the sake of others who must also die does not satisfy our soul, then what is the point in living? Death is our best release.” And so we sing dirges to death, the never-ending respite, simply from fear of it, and call it a liberation.

Leopardi, poet of sorrow and annihilation, having lost the ultimate illusion, that of thinking himself immortal,

Perí l’inganno estremo

ch’eterno io mi credei,

spoke to his heart of “the infinite vanity of everything,” l'infinita vanità del tutto, and saw the close kinship between love and death, and how when “a languid and weary loving affection is born in the depths of the heart, along with it is felt a desire to die.” The larger number of those who take their own life are moved by love, by the supreme longing for life, for more life. Led on by the urge to prolong and perpetuate life, they are driven to death once they fully realize the vanity of their longing.

The problem is tragic and eternal, and the more we try to escape it, the more it is thrust upon us. The serene Plato—was he really so serene?—allowed a profound cry to escape from his own soul, twenty-four centuries ago, in his dialogue on the immortality of the soul, where he speaks of the uncertainty of our dream of being immortal, and of the risk that it may be vain: “Beautiful risk!” Beautiful the chance that our souls may never die. And this verdict is the origin of Pascal’s famous argument of the wager.

Faced with this risk, I am presented with arguments calculated to eliminate it, arguments to prove the absurdity of a belief in the immortality of the soul. But these ratiocinations do not move me, for they are reasons and no more than reasons, and one does not feed the heart with reasons. I do not want to die. No! I do not want to die, and I do not want to want to die. I want to live always, forever and ever. And I want to live, this poor I which I am, the I which I feel myself to be here and now, and for that reason I am tormented by the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own soul.

I am the center of my Universe, the center of the Universe, and in my extreme anguish I cry, along with Michelet: “My I! They are stealing my I!” For “What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Matt. 16:26.) Egoism, you say? There is nothing more universal than the individual, for what becomes of one becomes of all. Every man is worth more than all Humanity. Nor is there any point in sacrificing each to all, save in so far as all sacrifice themselves to each. What we call egoism is the principle of psychic gravity, the necessary postulate. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” we were told, on the presupposition that each man loves himself, so that it was not necessary to say: “Love thyself.” And yet, we do not know how to love ourselves.

Put aside the perseverance of your own self, and then ponder their platitudes. For example: “Sacrifice yourself for your children!” And you sacrifice yourself for them because they are yours, part and prolongation of yourself, and they in turn will sacrifice themselves for their children, and these children for theirs, and so it will go on without end, a sterile sacrifice profiting no one. I came into the world to create my self. And what is to become of all our selves? Or: “Live for Truth, Good, Beauty!” We shall see the farfetched insincerity and supreme vanity of this hypocritical posture.

“That art thou!” they tell me with the Upanishads. And I answer: “Yes, I am that, when that is I and all is mine and the totality of things is mine. As mine, I love the all, and I love my neighbor because he lives in me and is part of my consciousness, and because he is like me and is mine.”

Oh, to prolong this dulcet moment and fall asleep for all eternity! Here and now, in this mildly diffused light, in this backwater of quietude, when the tempest in the heart is stilled and no echoes of the world reach me! Insatiable desire sleeps and does not even dream; use and wont, blessed use and wont, rule in my eternity; my disillusion has gone with my memory, and my fears have died with my hopes!

They seek to deceive us with the deceit of deceits, telling us that nothing is lost: everything is transformed, they say, everything moves and changes, and not even the smallest dab of matter is annihilated nor is the least impulse of energy altogether dissipated. And there are people who attempt to console us with this theory! A poor consolation indeed! Neither my matter nor my energy causes me any disquiet, for neither of them is mine as long as I myself am not altogether mine, that is, as long as I am not eternal. No, I do not long to be submerged in the great ALL, in infinite and eternal Matter or Energy, or in God. I long to possess God, not be possessed by Him, to become myself God without ceasing to be the I who now speaks to you. Monist tricks are of no use to us. We want the substance, not the shadow, of eternity!

Is this materialism? Doubtless: but either our soul is also some species of matter, or it is nothing. I dread the thought of having to tear myself away from my flesh. I dread still more the idea of having to tear myself away from everything perceptible and material, from everything of substance. If this perhaps merits the name of materialism, and if I cleave to God with all my senses and all my strength, I do so in order that He may carry me in His arms beyond death, and so that when my eyes are closing forever, He may look into them with His glory. Self-delusion? Do not speak to me of delusion, but let me live!

They also call this pride—“stinking pride,” Leopardi called it—and they ask us who are we, vile earthworms, to pretend to immortality. “By virtue of what? What for? By what right?” Such are the questions; and I reply: “By virtue of what do we live? What for? And what are we for? By what right? And by what right do we exist at all?” It is just as gratuitous to exist at all as it is to go on existing forever. Let us not speak of the right nor of the wherefore of our longing, which is an end in itself: otherwise we will lose our reason in a vortex of absurdities. I do not claim any right or merit whatever; it is a matter of necessity only: I need my longing in order to live.

“And who are you?” you may well ask me. And along with Obermann I answer: “For the Universe I am nothing. For myself I am everything.” Is that pride? Is it pride to want to be immortal? Unhappy mankind! It is a tragic destiny, obviously, to have to base the affirmation of immortality upon the shifting and fragile foundation of a mere desire for immortality. But it would be only will-less and supine to deny our longing for immortality because it appears to have been proved that we can not be immortal—without verifying that proof. I dream, you say? Let me dream. If this dream is my life, do not awaken me from it. I believe in the immortal origin of this longing for immortality, which is the very substance of my soul. But do I really believe . . . ? And you ask: “Why do you want to be immortal?” Why? I do not really understand the question, for it is like asking the reason of the reason, the beginning of the beginning, the end of the end.

All these are points which can not be argued.

The Acts of the Apostles contains an account of how wherever Paul went he stirred up the jealous Jews, who persecuted him. They stoned him in Iconium and Lystra, cities of Lycaonia, despite the wonders he worked; his fellow-Jews scourged him at Philippi in Macedonia, and persecuted him in Thessalonica and Berca. But then he arrived in Athens, the noble city of intellectuals, over which the sublime spirit of Plato kept vigil, the spirit of the man who held that the “risk” of being immortal was a beautiful thing. And there Paul disputed with Epicureans and Stoics: “And some said, What will this babbler say? other some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods. . . . And they took him, and brought him unto the Areopagus, saying, May we know what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest, is? For thou bringest certain strange things to our ears: we would know therefore what these things mean.” (Acts 17:18-20.) And then follows that marvelous description of the Athenians of the decadence, those dainty connoisseurs of the curious, “For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing” (21). An incisive characterization, this, which depicts for us in one stroke the stage of development reached by those Greeks who had learned from the Odyssey that the gods weave and accomplish the destruction of mortals in order that their posterity may have something to narrate!

And now we have Paul before the refined Athenians, before the graeculi, cultured and tolerant men who admit any doctrine, who study everything and never stone or scourge or imprison any man for professing whatever beliefs he professes. Here he stands, in a place where liberty of conscience is respected and every opinion is heard and listened to. And Paul raises his voice there, in the middle of the Areopagus, and speaks as it was fitting to speak to the cultured citizens of Athens, and all of them listen, anxious to hear the latest novelty. But when he comes to speak to them of the resurrection of the dead, their stock of patience and tolerance comes suddenly to an end, and some of them begin to make mock of him, and others tell him “We will hear about that some other time,” intending not to listen to him any more at all. And something similar happened to him at Caesarea, before the Roman praetor Felix, another tolerant and cultured man, who relieved the hardships of his imprisonment and who wanted to hear him, and did listen to him speak of “righteousness,” and “temperance”; but when Paul came to speak of the “judgement to come,” Felix told him in a fright “Go thy way for this time; when I have a convenient season, I will call for thee.” (Acts 24: 22-25.)

And then when Paul was received in audience by King Agrippa, he spoke of the resurrection of the dead and caused Festus, the governor, to exclaim “Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad.” (Acts 26:24.)

Whatever the truth of Paul’s discourse in the Areopagus—and even if there were none—it is clear that in this admirable narrative we can see just how far Attic tolerance goes and where the patience of the intellectuals ends. Calm and smiling, they all listen to you, and smiling, from time to time urge you on by saying “That’s curious!” or “An ingenious thought!” or “Very suggestive!” or “How lovely!” or “Too bad that all that beauty isn’t true!” or “That gives one pause!” But then as soon as you mention resurrection and life after death, their patience comes to an end and they cut you off with “Enough of that! We’ll discuss it another time.” But it is precisely about this matter that I propose to speak to you, my poor Athenians, my intolerant intellectuals, about this matter precisely that I would speak here.

For even if this belief were absurd, why should its exposition be found less tolerable than that of many more absurd beliefs? Why the evident hostility toward this belief? Is it from fear? Is it perhaps from regret at an inability to share the belief?

And sensible men, those who are not about to be put upon, keep dinning into our ears the refrain that it is useless to give way to madness and to butt one’s head against a stone wall, for what can not be can not be. “The manly attitude,” they say, “is to resign oneself to fate, and, since we are not immortal, not to want to be. Let us bow to reason and not torment ourselves with what is irremediable, and not make life dark and sad. Such an obsession,” they add, “is a sickness.” Sickness, madness, reason: the same old refrain! Very well then: No! I do not submit to reason and I rebel against it, and I aim to create, by force of faith, my immortalizing God, and I would deflect the course of the stars by the force of my will. For if we had “faith as a grain of mustard seed,” we could say to that mountain there “Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove”; and nothing would be impossible for us (Matt. 18:20).

There you have that “thief of energies,” as Christ was so obtusely called by the man who strove to wed nihilism with the struggle for existence, and who speaks to you of courage. His heart craved the eternal All, while his head showed him nothingness, and, despairing and mad to defend himself against himself, he cursed what he most loved. Because he could not be Christ, he blasphemed against Christ. Full of himself he wished to be unending and dreamed of the “eternal recurrence,” a sorry counterfeit of immortality, and, swollen with self-pity, he abominated all other pity. And then there are people who say that his is the philosophy of strong men! No: it is not. My own health and my strength impel me to perpetuate myself. The other is the doctrine of the weak who aspire to be strong, but not of those who really are strong. Only the weak resign themselves to final death and substitute some lesser passion for the longing to survive in personal immortality. Among the strong, the urge toward self-perpetuation overrides the doubtfulness of achieving it, and their overabundance of life overflows the boundaries of death.

Before this terrible mystery of mortality, face to face with the Sphinx, man adopts a variety of attitudes and seeks variously to console himself for having been born. And now it occurs to him to take it all as a great game, and he tells himself, along with Renan, that the Universe is a theatrical performance put on by God for his own benefit, and that we should cooperate with the great Stage Manager and contribute toward making the spectacle as brilliant and varied as possible. And they have made a religion of art as well as a cure for the metaphysical malady, inventing the gibberish about art for art’s sake.

And still it is not enough for them. If a man tells you that he writes, paints, sculpts, or sings for his own amusement, and at the same time makes his work public, then he lies: he lies if he puts his signature to his writing, painting, sculpture, or song. He is intent, at the very least, on leaving some shadow of his spirit behind, something to outlive him. If the Imitation of Christ is anonymous, it is because its author, seeking eternity of soul, did not seek an eternal name. A man of letters who tells you he scorns glory is a lying rogue. Speaking of Dante, the author of the thirty-three most vigorous verses on the vanity of worldly glory (Purgatorio, XI, 85-117), Boccaccio tells us that he enjoyed honors and pomp more than was perhaps consistent with his conspicuous virtue. The most ardent desire of his condemned souls is to be remembered here on Earth and to be spoken of, and it is this consolation which furnishes the principal light in their darkness. Dante himself expounded the concept of Monarchy, not merely for the use of others, but in order to win the palm of glory (De Monarchia, I, 1). What more? Even that holy man, of all men the most indifferent, apparently, to human vanity, the Humble One of Assisi, is reported, in the Legenda trium sociorum, to have said: “Adhuc adorabor per totum mundum!”—“You will see how I shall yet be adored by the whole world!” (2 Cel. I, i). And the theologians even say that God Himself created the world as a manifestation of His glory.

Whenever we are invaded by doubt, and our faith in the immortality of the soul becomes clouded over, the longing to perpetuate our name and fame, to grasp even the shadow of immortality, grows more ardent and painfully intense. Hence the tremendous struggle to distinguish oneself, to survive somehow in the memory of others and of posterity. And this struggle is a thousand times more terrifying than the struggle for life. And this struggle gives its tone, color, and character to our society, where the medieval faith in the immortal soul is fading. Every man seeks to affirm himself, even if only in appearance.

Once the demands of hunger are satisfied (and they are soon satisfied), then the vanity, the need—for it is a need—to make an impression and survive in others comes to the fore. Man tends to hand over his life for his purse, but he hands over his purse for his vanity. He is vain, for want of something better, even of his debilities or deficiencies, and is like a child who struts about with a bandaged finger in order to be noticed. And what is vanity but the longing to survive?

The vainglorious man is in the same situation as the miser, who takes the means for the ends, and, forgetting the latter, pursues the means as an end, and goes no farther. Seeming-to-be, en route to being, finally forms our end purpose. We need to have others believe we are superior to them in order to believe the same thing ourselves and to base upon this belief our faith in our own survival, or at least the survival of our fame. We are more gratified at being praised for the talent we show in defending a cause than in having the truth or goodness of the cause itself recognized. A furious mania for originality is rife in the modern intellectual world and characterizes individual endeavor. We would rather err ingeniously than hit the mark through vulgarity. Rousseau said in his Émile:

If the philosophers were in a position to declare the truth, which of them would care to do so? Every one of them knows that his own system rests on no surer foundations than the rest, but he maintains it because it is his own. There is not one of them who, if he chanced to discover the difference between truth and falsehood, would not prefer his own lie to the truth which another had discovered. Where is the philosopher who would not deceive the whole world for his own glory? If he can rise above the crowd, if he can excel his rivals, what more does he want? Among believers he is an atheist; among atheists he would be a believer.

What a deal of fundamental truth there is in these sad confessions by that man of painful sincerity!

Our desperate struggle to perpetuate our name extends backward into the past, just as it pushes forward into the conquest of the future. We battle with the dead, who put the living into the shade. We are envious of past genius, of those whose names, like landmarks in History, loom across the centuries. Fame’s heaven is not very extensive, and the greater the number of those who enter, the less the fame of each. The great names of the past rob us of a place: what space they occupy in the memory of nations is space usurped from those of us who aspire to be there too. And so we turn upon them, and hence the bitterness with which the seekers after fame in the field of letters judge those who have already achieved and enjoy such fame. If literature keeps on adding names, there will come a day for sifting, and each man fears he will be left on the meshes of the sieve. In attacking his masters the irreverent youth is only defending himself; the iconoclast, or image-breaker, is a Stylite who erects himself into an image, an icon. “Comparisons are odious,” runs the familiar adage, and the truth is that we all want to be unique. Do not venture to tell Mr. X that he is one of the most talented of young Spaniards, for though he will affect to be gratified, he will only be annoyed by the supposed eulogy; if you say he is the most talented of Spaniards . . . Well, that’s better! . . . But still not good enough. To enjoy one of the world’s great reputations would be more to his liking. But he would only be really satisfied to be considered first among all men universally and eternally. The more alone a name stands, the closer it is to apparential immortality, the immortality of the name, for names take away one from the other.

What is the meaning of the irritation which seizes us when we have been robbed of a phrase or an idea or an image which we had thought of as our own; how do we feel, in short, when we are plagiarized? Is it right, though, to speak of robbery? Once made public, are any of these things ours? We are concerned only if they are ours; we are fonder of false coin bearing our stamp than we are of pure gold pieces from which our effigy and device have been effaced. Very often it comes about that a writer most influences the public when his name is no longer spoken, when his spirit has become diffused and disseminated among those who have read him, his authorship having been cited only when his ideas and sayings needed the surety of a name because they went against the current. His thought now belongs to everyone and so he lives in them. But he himself lives sad and dejected in the belief that he has been defeated. He no longer hears the applause or the silent heartbeat of those who continue to read him. Ask any sincere artist his preference: whether he would rather have his work perish and his memory survive, or have his memory perish and his work survive, and just see what he tells you, if he really is sincere. When a man does not work merely to live and get on, he lives to survive beyond life. To work for work’s sake is not work at all but play. And play? We shall speak later about play.

The passion to be remembered if possible when oblivion overtakes all others is tremendous. From it flows envy, the cause, according to the biblical narrative, of the crime which began human history: the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. It was not a struggle for bread: it was a struggle to survive in God, in the divine memory. Envy is a thousand times more terrible than physical hunger, for envy is a spiritual hunger. If the so-called problem of life, the basic problem of food, were ever solved, the earth would be turned into a hell, as the struggle for survival would become even more intense.

For the sake of a name, man is prepared to sacrifice not only his life—that goes without saying—but his happiness. “Death to me! Long live my fame!” exclaims Rodrigo Arias in Las Mocedades del Cid, as he falls mortally wounded by Don Diego Ordóñez de Lara. One owes oneself to one’s name. “Courage, Girolamo! thou wilt long be remembered; death is bitter, but glory is eternal!” exclaimed to himself Girolamo Olgiati, disciple of Cola Montano, and assassin—together with his two fellow conspirators Lampugnani and Visconti—of Galeazzo Sforza, tyrant of Milan. There are men who even covet the gallows as a means to fame, though it be an infamous fame: avidus malae famae, as Tacitus said.

And what, basically, is this Erostratism but the longing for immortality, if not for substantial and concrete immortality, at least immortality of name and influence?

And there are degrees in this striving for fame. The man who despises the applause of today’s multitude is seeking to live on among generations of evernew minorities. “Posterity is a superposing of minorities,” said Gounod. Man wishes to prolong himself in time more than in space. The idols of the multitude are soon overthrown by the same multitude; the statue lies broken at the foot of the pedestal, disregarded by everyone; while those who win the hearts of the select few go on benefitting from a fervent veneration, in a small and secluded shrine perhaps, but one which protects them from the inroads of oblivion. The artist sacrifices the extent of his fame to its duration: he would rather last forever in his little corner than shine for an instant throughout the entire Universe, rather be an eternal atom conscious of himself than momentarily be the consciousness of the entire Universe. He sacrifices infinity in favor of eternity.

And once again they batter our ears with the cry of “Pride!” “Stinking pride!” But is it pride to want to leave an ineradicable name? Is that pride? That would be like calling the thirst for riches a mere thirst for pleasures: it is not so much a longing for pleasure as terror of poverty that drives us poor men to seek money, just as it was not a desire for glory but terror of Hell which drove men in the Middle Ages into the cloister and its acedia. No, it is not pride, but terror of extinction. We aim at being everything because we feel it is the only way to escape being nothing. We wish to preserve our memory, the memory of us, at the very least. How long will it last? At the most, as long as the human race. And what if we saved the memory of us in God?

All these speculative confessions amount to so much wretchedness, I know; but from the depths of wretchedness springs new life, and it is only by draining the dregs of spiritual sorrow that the honey at the bottom of life’s cup is tasted. Anguish leads us to consolation.

That thirst for eternal life is quenched by many, especially by simple people, at the fountain of religious faith. But it is not given to everyone to drink there. The institution whose principal objective is to protect this faith in the immortality of the soul is Catholicism. But Catholicism has sought to rationalize this faith by converting religion into theology, proffering a philosophy—and a philosophy of the thirteenth century—as basis for a vital belief. Let us examine the consequences.