Seraphita

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Seraphita


"Thus your invisible moral universe and your visible physical universe
are one and the same matter. We will not separate properties from
substances, nor objects from effects. All that exists, all that
presses upon us and overwhelms us from above or from below, before us
or in us, all that which our eyes and our minds perceive, all these
named and unnamed things compose--in order to fit the problem of
Creation to the measure of your logic--a block of finite Matter; but
were it infinite, God would still not be its master. Now, reasoning
with your views, dear pastor, no matter in what way God the infinite
is concerned with this block of finite Matter, He cannot exist and
retain the attributes with which man invests Him. Seek Him in facts,
and He is not; spiritually and materially, you have made God
impossible. Listen to the Word of human Reason forced to its ultimate
conclusions.

"In bringing God face to face with the Great Whole, we see that only
two states are possible between them,--either God and Matter are
contemporaneous, or God existed alone before Matter. Were Reason--the
light that has guided the human race from the dawn of its existence
--accumulated in one brain, even that mighty brain could not invent a
third mode of being without suppressing both Matter and God. Let human
philosophies pile mountain upon mountain of words and of ideas, let
religions accumulate images and beliefs, revelations and mysteries,
you must face at last this terrible dilemma and choose between the two
propositions which compose it; you have no option, and one as much as
the other leads human reason to Doubt.

"The problem thus established, what signifies Spirit or Matter? Why
trouble about the march of the worlds in one direction or in another,
since the Being who guides them is shown to be an absurdity? Why
continue to ask whether man is approaching heaven or receding from it,
whether creation is rising towards Spirit or descending towards
Matter, if the questioned universe gives no reply? What signifies
theogonies and their armies, theologies and their dogmas, since
whichever side of the problem is man's choice, his God exists not? Let
us for a moment take up the first proposition, and suppose God
contemporaneous with Matter. Is subjection to the action or the
co-existence of an alien substance consistent with being God at all?
In such a system, would not God become a secondary agent compelled to
organize Matter? If so, who compelled Him? Between His material gross
companion and Himself, who was the arbiter? Who paid the wages of the
six days' labor imputed to the great Designer? Has any determining
force been found which was neither God nor Matter? God being regarded
as the manufacturer of the machinery of the worlds, is it not as
ridiculous to call Him God as to call the slave who turns the
grindstone a Roman citizen? Besides, another difficulty, as insoluble
to this supreme human reason as it is to God, presents itself.

"If we carry the problem higher, shall we not be like the Hindus, who
put the world upon a tortoise, the tortoise on an elephant, and do not
know on what the feet of their elephant may rest? This supreme will,
issuing from the contest between God and Matter, this God, this more
than God, can He have existed throughout eternity without willing what
He afterwards willed,--admitting that Eternity can be divided into two
eras. No matter where God is, what becomes of His intuitive
intelligence if He did not know His ultimate thought? Which, then, is
the true Eternity,--the created Eternity or the uncreated? But if God
throughout all time did will the world such as it is, this new
necessity, which harmonizes with the idea of sovereign intelligence,
implies the co-eternity of Matter. Whether Matter be co-eternal by a
divine will necessarily accordant with itself from the beginning, or
whether Matter be co-eternal of its own being, the power of God, which
must be absolute, perishes if His will is circumscribed; for in that
case God would find within Him a determining force which would control
Him. Can He be God if He can no more separate Himself from His
creation in a past eternity than in the coming eternity?

"This face of the problem is insoluble in its cause. Let us now
inquire into its effects. If a God compelled to have created the world
from all eternity seems inexplicable, He is quite as unintelligible in
perpetual cohesion with His work. God, constrained to live eternally
united to His creation is held down to His first position as workman.
Can you conceive of a God who shall be neither independent of nor
dependent on His work? Could He destroy that work without challenging
Himself? Ask yourself, and decide! Whether He destroys it some day, or
whether He never destroys it, either way is fatal to the attributes
without which God cannot exist. Is the world an experiment? is it a
perishable form to which destruction must come? If it is, is not God
inconsistent and impotent? inconsistent, because He ought to have seen
the result before the attempt,--moreover why should He delay to
destroy that which He is to destroy?--impotent, for how else could He
have created an imperfect man?

"If an imperfect creation contradicts the faculties which man
attributes to God we are forced back upon the question, Is creation
perfect? The idea is in harmony with that of a God supremely
intelligent who could make no mistakes; but then, what means the
degradation of His work, and its regeneration? Moreover, a perfect
world is, necessarily, indestructible; its forms would not perish, it
could neither advance nor recede, it would revolve in the everlasting
circumference from which it would never issue. In that case God would
be dependent on His work; it would be co-eternal with Him; and so we
fall back into one of the propositions most antagonistic to God. If
the world is imperfect, it can progress; if perfect, it is stationary.
On the other hand, if it be impossible to admit of a progressive God
ignorant through a past eternity of the results of His creative work,
can there be a stationary God? would not that imply the triumph of
Matter? would it not be the greatest of all negations? Under the first
hypothesis God perishes through weakness; under the second through the
Force of his inertia.

"Therefore, to all sincere minds the supposition that Matter, in the
conception and execution of the worlds, is contemporaneous with God,
is to deny God. Forced to choose, in order to govern the nations,
between the two alternatives of the problem, whole generations have
preferred this solution of it. Hence the doctrine of the two
principles of Magianism, brought from Asia and adopted in Europe under
the form of Satan warring with the Eternal Father. But this religious
formula and the innumerable aspects of divinity that have sprung from
it are surely crimes against the Majesty Divine. What other term can
we apply to the belief which sets up as a rival to God a
personification of Evil, striving eternally against the Omnipotent
Mind without the possibility of ultimate triumph? Your statics declare
that two Forces thus pitted against each other are reciprocally
rendered null.

"Do you turn back, therefore, to the other side of the problem, and
say that God pre-existed, original, alone?

"I will not go over the preceding arguments (which here return in full
force) as to the severance of Eternity into two parts; nor the
questions raised by the progression or the immobility of the worlds;
let us look only at the difficulties inherent to this second theory.
If God pre-existed alone, the world must have emanated from Him;
Matter was therefore drawn from His essence; consequently Matter in
itself is non-existent; all forms are veils to cover the Divine
Spirit. If this be so, the World is Eternal, and also it must be God.
Is not this proposition even more fatal than the former to the
attributes conferred on God by human reason? How can the actual
condition of Matter be explained if we suppose it to issue from the
bosom of God and to be ever united with Him? Is it possible to believe
that the All-Powerful, supremely good in His essence and in His
faculties, has engendered things dissimilar to Himself. Must He not in
all things and through all things be like unto Himself? Can there be
in God certain evil parts of which at some future day he may rid
Himself?--a conjecture less offensive and absurd than terrible, for
the reason that it drags back into Him the two principles which the
preceding theory proved to be inadmissible. God must be ONE; He cannot
be divided without renouncing the most important condition of His
existence. It is therefore impossible to admit of a fraction of God
which yet is not God. This hypothesis seemed so criminal to the Roman
Church that she has made the omnipresence of God in the least
particles of the Eucharist an article of faith.

"But how then can we imagine an omnipotent mind which does not
triumph? How associate it unless in triumph with Nature? But Nature is
not triumphant; she seeks, combines, remodels, dies, and is born
again; she is even more convulsed when creating than when all was
fusion; Nature suffers, groans, is ignorant, degenerates, does evil;
deceives herself, annihilates herself, disappears, and begins again.
If God is associated with Nature, how can we explain the inoperative
indifference of the divine principle? Wherefore death? How came it
that Evil, king of the earth, was born of a God supremely good in His
essence and in His faculties, who can produce nothing that is not made
in His own image?

"But if, from this relentless conclusion which leads at once to
absurdity, we pass to details, what end are we to assign to the world?
If all is God, all is reciprocally cause and effect; all is _One_ as God
is _One_, and we can perceive neither points of likeness nor points of
difference. Can the real end be a rotation of Matter which subtilizes
and disappears? In whatever sense it were done, would not this
mechanical trick of Matter issuing from God and returning to God seem
a sort of child's play? Why should God make himself gross with Matter?
Under which form is he most God? Which has the ascendant, Matter or
Spirit, when neither can in any way do wrong? Who can comprehend the
Deity engaged in this perpetual business, by which he divides Himself
into two Natures, one of which knows nothing, while the other knows
all? Can you conceive of God amusing Himself in the form of man,
laughing at His own efforts, dying Friday, to be born again Sunday,
and continuing this play from age to age, knowing the end from all
eternity, and telling nothing to Himself, the Creature, of what He the
Creator, does? The God of the preceding hypothesis, a God so nugatory
by the very power of His inertia, seems the more possible of the two
if we are compelled to choose between the impossibilities with which
this God, so dull a jester, fusillades Himself when two sections of
humanity argue face to face, weapons in hand.

"However absurd this outcome of the second problem may seem, it was
adopted by half the human race in the sunny lands where smiling
mythologies were created. Those amorous nations were consistent; with
them all was God, even Fear and its dastardy, even crime and its
bacchanals. If we accept pantheism,--the religion of many a great
human genius,--who shall say where the greater reason lies? Is it with
the savage, free in the desert, clothed in his nudity, listening to
the sun, talking to the sea, sublime and always true in his deeds
whatever they may be; or shall we find it in civilized man, who
derives his chief enjoyments through lies; who wrings Nature and all
her resources to put a musket on his shoulder; who employs his
intellect to hasten the hour of his death and to create diseases out
of pleasures? When the rake of pestilence and the ploughshare of war
and the demon of desolation have passed over a corner of the globe and
obliterated all things, who will be found to have the greater
reason,--the Nubian savage or the patrician of Thebes? Your doubts
descend the scale, they go from heights to depths, they embrace all,
the end as well as the means.

"But if the physical world seems inexplicable, the moral world
presents still stronger arguments against God. Where, then, is
progress? If all things are indeed moving toward perfection why do we
die young? why do not nations perpetuate themselves? The world having
issued from God and being contained in God can it be stationary? Do we
live once, or do we live always? If we live once, hurried onward by
the march of the Great-Whole, a knowledge of which has not been given
to us, let us act as we please. If we are eternal, let things take
their course. Is the created being guilty if he exists at the instant
of the transitions? If he sins at the moment of a great transformation
will he be punished for it after being its victim? What becomes of the
Divine goodness if we are not transferred to the regions of the blest
--should any such exist? What becomes of God's prescience if He is
ignorant of the results of the trials to which He subjects us? What is
this alternative offered to man by all religions,--either to boil in
some eternal cauldron or to walk in white robes, a palm in his hand
and a halo round his head? Can it be that this pagan invention is the
final word of God? Where is the generous soul who does not feel that
the calculating virtue which seeks the eternity of pleasure offered by
all religions to whoever fulfils at stray moments certain fanciful and
often unnatural conditions, is unworthy of man and of God? Is it not a
mockery to give to man impetuous senses and forbid him to satisfy
them? Besides, what mean these ascetic objections if Good and Evil are
equally abolished? Does Evil exist? If substance in all its forms is
God, then Evil is God. The faculty of reasoning as well as the faculty
of feeling having been given to man to use, nothing can be more
excusable in him than to seek to know the meaning of human suffering
and the prospects of the future.

"If these rigid and rigorous arguments lead to such conclusions
confusion must reign. The world would have no fixedness; nothing would
advance, nothing would pause, all would change, nothing would be
destroyed, all would reappear after self-renovation; for if your mind
does not clearly demonstrate to you an end, it is equally impossible
to demonstrate the destruction of the smallest particle of Matter;
Matter can transform but not annihilate itself.

"Though blind force may provide arguments for the atheist, intelligent
force is inexplicable; for if it emanates from God, why should it meet
with obstacles? ought not its triumph to be immediate? Where is God?
If the living cannot perceive Him, can the dead find Him? Crumble, ye
idolatries and ye religions! Fall, feeble keystones of all social
arches, powerless to retard the decay, the death, the oblivion that
have overtaken all nations however firmly founded! Fall, morality and
justice! our crimes are purely relative; they are divine effects whose
causes we are not allowed to know. All is God. Either we are God or
God is not!--Child of a century whose every year has laid upon your
brow, old man, the ice of its unbelief, here, here is the summing up
of your lifetime of thought, of your science and your reflections!
Dear Monsieur Becker, you have laid your head upon the pillow of
Doubt, because it is the easiest of solutions; acting in this respect
with the majority of mankind, who say in their hearts: 'Let us think
no more of these problems, since God has not vouchsafed to grant us
the algebraic demonstrations that could solve them, while He has given
us so many other ways to get from earth to heaven.'

"Tell me, dear pastor, are not these your secret thoughts? Have I
evaded the point of any? nay, rather, have I not clearly stated all?
First, in the dogma of two principles,--an antagonism in which God
perishes for the reason that being All-Powerful He chose to combat.
Secondly, in the absurd pantheism where, all being God, God exists no
longer. These two sources, from which have flowed all the religions
for whose triumph Earth has toiled and prayed, are equally pernicious.
Behold in them the double-bladed axe with which you decapitate the
white old man whom you enthrone among your painted clouds! And now, to
me the axe, I wield it!"

Monsieur Becker and Wilfrid gazed at the young girl with something
like terror.

"To believe," continued Seraphita, in her Woman's voice, for the Man
had finished speaking, "to believe is a gift. To believe is to feel.
To believe in God we must feel God. This feeling is a possession
slowly acquired by the human being, just as other astonishing powers
which you admire in great men, warriors, artists, scholars, those who
know and those who act, are acquired. Thought, that budget of the
relations which you perceive among created things, is an intellectual
language which can be learned, is it not? Belief, the budget of
celestial truths, is also a language as superior to thought as thought
is to instinct. This language also can be learned. The Believer
answers with a single cry, a single gesture; Faith puts within his
hand a flaming sword with which he pierces and illumines all. The Seer
attains to heaven and descends not. But there are beings who believe
and see, who know and will, who love and pray and wait. Submissive,
yet aspiring to the kingdom of light, they have neither the aloofness
of the Believer nor the silence of the Seer; they listen and reply. To
them the doubt of the twilight ages is not a murderous weapon, but a
divining rod; they accept the contest under every form; they train
their tongues to every language; they are never angered, though they
groan; the acrimony of the aggressor is not in them, but rather the
softness and tenuity of light, which penetrates and warms and
illumines. To their eyes Doubt is neither an impiety, nor a blasphemy,
nor a crime, but a transition through which men return upon their
steps in the Darkness, or advance into the Light. This being so, dear
pastor, let us reason together.

"You do not believe in God? Why? God, to your thinking, is
incomprehensible, inexplicable. Agreed. I will not reply that to
comprehend God in His entirety would be to be God; nor will I tell you
that you deny what seems to you inexplicable so as to give me the
right to affirm that which to me is believable. There is, for you, one
evident fact, which lies within yourself. In you, Matter has ended in
intelligence; can you therefore think that human intelligence will end
in darkness, doubt, and nothingness? God may seem to you
incomprehensible and inexplicable, but you must admit Him to be, in
all things purely physical, a splendid and consistent workman. Why
should His craft stop short at man, His most finished creation?

"If that question is not convincing, at least it compels meditation.
Happily, although you deny God, you are obliged, in order to establish
your doubts, to admit those double-bladed facts, which kill your
arguments as much as your arguments kill God. We have also admitted
that Matter and Spirit are two creations which do not comprehend each
other; that the spiritual world is formed of infinite relations to
which the finite material world has given rise; that if no one on
earth is able to identify himself by the power of his spirit with the
great-whole of terrestrial creations, still less is he able to rise to
the knowledge of the relations which the spirit perceives between
these creations.

"We might end the argument here in one word, by denying you the
faculty of comprehending God, just as you deny to the pebbles of the
fiord the faculties of counting and of seeing each other. How do you
know that the stones themselves do not deny the existence of man,
though man makes use of them to build his houses? There is one fact
that appals you,--the Infinite; if you feel it within, why will you
not admit its consequences? Can the finite have a perfect knowledge of
the infinite? If you cannot perceive those relations which, according
to your own admission, are infinite, how can you grasp a sense of the
far-off end to which they are converging? Order, the revelation of
which is one of your needs, being infinite, can your limited reason
apprehend it? Do not ask why man does not comprehend that which he is
able to perceive, for he is equally able to perceive that which he
does not comprehend. If I prove to you that your mind ignores that
which lies within its compass, will you grant that it is impossible
for it to conceive whatever is beyond it? This being so, am I not
justified in saying to you: 'One of the two propositions under which
God is annihilated before the tribunal of our reason must be true, the
other is false. Inasmuch as creation exists, you feel the necessity of
an end, and that end should be good, should it not? Now, if Matter
terminates in man by intelligence, why are you not satisfied to
believe that the end of human intelligence is the Light of the higher
spheres, where alone an intuition of that God who seems so insoluble a
problem is obtained? The species which are beneath you have no
conception of the universe, and you have; why should there not be
other species above you more intelligent than your own? Man ought to
be better informed than he is about himself before he spends his
strength in measuring God. Before attacking the stars that light us,
and the higher certainties, ought he not to understand the certainties
which are actually about him?'

"But no! to the negations of doubt I ought rather to reply by
negations. Therefore I ask you whether there is anything here below so
evident that I can put faith in it? I will show you in a moment that
you believe firmly in things which act, and yet are not beings; in
things which engender thought, and yet are not spirits; in living
abstractions which the understanding cannot grasp in any shape, which
are in fact nowhere, but which you perceive everywhere; which have,
and can have, on name, but which, nevertheless, you have named; and
which, like the God of flesh upon whom you figure to yourself, remain
inexplicable, incomprehensible, and absurd. I shall also ask you why,
after admitting the existence of these incomprehensible things, you
reserve your doubts for God?

"You believe, for instance, in Number,--a base on which you have built
the edifice of sciences which you call 'exact.' Without Number, what
would become of mathematics? Well, what mysterious being endowed with
the faculty of living forever could utter, and what language would be
compact to word the Number which contains the infinite numbers whose
existence is revealed to you by thought? Ask it of the loftiest human
genius; he might ponder it for a thousand years and what would be his
answer? You know neither where Number begins, nor where it pauses, nor
where it ends. Here you call it Time, there you call it Space. Nothing
exists except by Number. Without it, all would be one and the same
substance; for Number alone differentiates and qualifies substance.
Number is to your Spirit what it is to Matter, an incomprehensible
agent. Will you make a Deity of it? Is it a being? Is it a breath
emanating from God to organize the material universe where nothing
obtains form except by the Divinity which is an effect of Number? The
least as well as the greatest of creations are distinguishable from
each other by quantities, qualities, dimensions, forces,--all
attributes created by Number. The infinitude of Numbers is a fact
proved to your soul, but of which no material proof can be given. The
mathematician himself tells you that the infinite of numbers exists,
but cannot be proved.

"God, dear pastor, is a Number endowed with motion,--felt, but not
seen, the Believer will tell you. Like the Unit, He begins Number,
with which He has nothing in common. The existence of Number depends
on the Unit, which without being a number engenders Number. God, dear
pastor is a glorious Unit who has nothing in common with His creations
but who, nevertheless, engenders them. Will you not therefore agree
with me that you are just as ignorant of where Number begins and ends
as you are of where created Eternity begins and ends?

"Why, then, if you believe in Number, do you deny God? Is not Creation
interposed between the Infinite of unorganized substances and the
Infinite of the divine spheres, just as the Unit stands between the
Cipher of the fractions you have lately named Decimals, and the
Infinite of Numbers which you call Wholes? Man alone on earth
comprehends Number, that first step of the peristyle which leads to
God, and yet his reason stumbles on it! What! you can neither measure
nor grasp the first abstraction which God delivers to you, and yet you
try to subject His ends to your own tape-line! Suppose that I plunge
you into the abyss of Motion, the force that organizes Number. If I
tell you that the Universe is naught else than Number and Motion, you
would see at once that we speak two different languages. I understand
them both; you understand neither.