[BNP/E3, 26 – 90-92]
I do not comprehend how predestination can be conciliated with free-will. I know that God as conceived in the philosophy of the churches cannot but be held as knowing all things. The future is known then to him as the present. But, with God, to know is not as with us. With us, to know is to see what we saw not before, we receive instruction. But with God — with the God of the Churches — to know is identical with to do, else there is no unity in his nature. If God knows our sins it is because he makes them. Cf. Aristotle’s hypothesis of God’s ignorance of world. These contradictions are very common in the philosophy of the churches. The Christian God is an infant’s riddle — it has an answer but no sense.
[90v]
{…} the people, stupid and useful, deserving of pity and of love.
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Immortality is a higher thing than death. It does not represent an advance to relinquish this dogma of the churches. To understand its reason, to know why it exists, to comprehend it — this would be the true advance. After dogmatic affirmation should come not this negation, but comprehension. And these or perhaps abstract, or conciliate negation or affirmation with a reason. A wilful accep[ta]tion of mortality, without conditions and without longing, is a stigma of retrocess[ion].
Those who let drop this idea, however they cover themselves with the cloak of science, have beneath it but the skeleton of the vertebrate.
[91r]
Christianity here is false; it attempts to reconstruct part of the material world, leaving out and forgetting the other.
Buddhism is more profound. It is a better consolation for the soul. I read of the 4 sublime truths, not shaken by fear, but thrilled for[1] their sublimeness. That wiping out of the world entire, that nirvanâh, world of consolation and of not-pain, there is no soul but yearns for it. A sleep of death without dreams, a ceasing of personality — we can desire nothing better, nor wish for anything more deep. Yet I do not like. I, Friar Maurice, the madman.
Personality is the place of evil; the heart the sanctuary of pain. We do not desire men’s good but their evil, when we wish them to be immortal.
[92r]
It is often said, with words that fill the mouth, that Christianity is a sad thing, that its ethics is sad, and that it gives us a sad view of life. We all know what this means. It means that Christianity does not sanction vice, that it does not allow our passions their full scope, that it makes us weary of living by condemning our pleasures. Oh, we understand well those words and know what sentiment has inspired them!
In Christianity, true, there are things to be condemned. The theory of free-will, the horrible doctrine of hell — all these things are bad, primitive, immoral. It is not that Christianity saddens this life, but that saddens the world beyond.
[92v]
It gives us a bad finiteness here upon earth and shows to us, beyond this, the dreadful possibility of an eternity of pain. The shudder of Pascal cannot be repressed. Not the most dogmatic pessimism ever shook us with such affright.
Book
Friar
Maurice.
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[1] for /by\
