The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1

Roman. But how? I can understand that by illuminating my judgment in general He might succeed in making me more prudent.

Christian. 'Judgment,' 'prudent'—these words show how wide by a whole hemisphere you are of the truth. It is your will that He applies His correction to.

Roman. 'Will!' why I've none but peaceable and lawful designs, I assure you. Oh! I begin to see. You think me a partner with those pirates that we just spoke to.

Christian. Not at all, my friend. I speak not of designs or intentions. What I mean is, the source of all desires—what I would call your wills, your whole moral nature.

Roman (bridling). Ahem! I hope Roman nature is quite as little in need of improvement as any other. There are the Cretans; they held up their heads. Accordingly they had their fire institutions, and that true institution against bribery and luxury, and all such stuff. They fancied themselves impregnable. Why, bless you! even Marcus Tullius, that was a prosing kind of man and rather peevish about such things, could not keep in the truth. 'Why, Cato, my boy,' says he, 'you talk.' And to hear you, bribery and luxury would not leave one a stick to fight for. Why, now, these same Cretans—lord! we took the conceit out of them in twenty-five minutes. No more time, I assure you, did it cost three of our cohorts to settle the whole lot of them.

Christian. My friend, you are more and more in the dark. What I mean is not present in your senses, but a disease.

Roman. Oh, a disease! that's another thing. But where?

Christian. Why, it affects the brain and the heart.

Roman. Well, now, one at a time. Take the brain—we have a disease, and we treat it with white hellebore. There may be a better way. But answer me this. If you are generally affected, what right have you to bring, as you are supposing, a diseased brain to a sound one? We Romans are all sound—sound as a bell.

Then Christian goes on to the history of the fall. But the whole would be self-baffled and construed away from want of sin as the antithesis of holiness.

Why St. Paul and the Athenians did not come to an Understanding.—So, again, if you think that St. Paul had a chance with the Athenians. If he had, it would tax his divine benevolence to see that he forbore to pursue it. This attempt shows that he was under a misconception. He fancied a possibility of preaching a pure religion. What followed? He was, he must have been defeated. That is, practically, else why did he not persist? But his confutation was the factual confutation of experience. It was no go. That he found too surely. But why? I am sure that he never found out. Enough that he felt—that under a strong instinct he misgave—a deep, deep gulf between him and them, so that neither could he make a way to their sense, nor they, except conjecturally, to his. For, just review the case. What was the ευαγγελιον, the good tidings, which he announced to man? What burthen of hope? What revelation of a mystery of hope arising out of a deeper mystery of despair? He announced a deliverer. Deliverer! from what? Answer that—from what? Why, from evil, you say. Evil! of what kind? Why, you retort, did not the Pagans admit that man was lying under evil? Not at all; nothing of the kind. But you are sure you have heard of such things? Very likely. And now you are forced back upon your arguments you remember specially that evil as to its origin was a favourite speculation of theirs. Evil, in its most comprehensive designation, whence is it? How came it? Now, mark, even to that extent, viz., the extent indicated by this problem, the ancients had no conception of evil corresponding to, no, nor dimly approaching to, a correspondence with ours. They had no ineffable standard of purity; how, then, any function of impurity? They had no ineffable doctrine of pain or suffering answering to a far more realized state of perception, and, therefore, unimaginably more exquisite; how, then, could they raise a question on the nature or fountains of such pains? They executed no synthesis, and could execute none upon the calamities of life; they never said in ordinary talk that this was a world of sorrow, either apostrophizing a newborn child, or a world of disappointment, bemoaning a mature victim; neither as in the anguish of meditative reflection, nor in the prudence of extenuating apology. The grand sanctus which arises from human sensibility, Perish empires and the crowns of kings, etc., first arose in connection with Christianity.30 Life was a good life; man was a prosperous being. Hope for men was his natural air; despondency the element of his own self-created folly. Neither could it be otherwise. For, besides that, it would be too immeasurable a draught of woe to say in one breath that this only was the crux or affirmation of man's fate, and yet that this also was wretched per se; not accidentally made wretched by imprudence, but essentially and irrevocably so by necessity of its nature. Besides all this, which has a lurking dependency upon man's calculations of what is safe, he sees that this mode of thinking would leave him nothing; yet even that extreme consequence would not check some honest or sincere or desperate minds from uttering their convictions that life really was this desperate game—much to lose and nothing in the best case to win. So far there would have been a dangerous gravitation at all times to the sad conclusion of Paganism. But, meanwhile, this dangerous gravitation was too dangerous, and Providence has deeply counteracted it by principles laid down in human nature. I affirm that where the ideas of man, where the possible infinities are not developed, then also the exorbitant on the other field is strongly pulled up. No ideals of evil can take place except under ideals of happiness that passeth all understanding. No synthesis can ever be executed, that is, no annumeration of A, B, C into a common total, viewed as elements tending to a common unity, unless previously this unity has been preconceived, because the elements are not elements, viz., original constituents of a representative whole (a series tending to a summation), unless that which is constituted—that whole—is previously given in idea. Since A and B and C could not be viewed as tending to a unity, having no existence except through them, unless previously that unity had existed for the regulation and eduction of its component elements. And this unity in the case of misery never could have been given unless far higher functions than any which could endure Paganism, or which Paganism could endure. Until the sad element of a diseased will is introduced, until the affecting notion is developed of a fountain in man himself welling up the misery for ever, no idea of misery could arise. Suffering is limited and transitory. What pain is permanent in man? Even the deepest laceration of the human heart, that which is inflicted by the loss of those who were the pulses of our hearts, is soothed (if never wholly healed) by time. One agency of time would avail for this effect were there no other. The features of the individual whom we mourn grow dimmer and dimmer as time advances; and, pari passu, the features of places and collateral objects and associated persons from whom reverberated these afflicting reminiscences of the lost object.

I return: Deliverer from what? From suffering or misery. But that was not acknowledged, nor could have been, we could see no misery as a hypothesis except in these two modes: First, as a radication in man by means of something else, some third thing. Secondly, as a synthesis—as a gathering under a principle which must act prior to the gathering in order to provoke it. (The synthesis must be rendered possible and challenged by the à priori unity which otherwise constitutes that unity.) As a metaphysical possibility evil was recognised through its unfathomable nature. But this was because such a nature already presupposed a God's nature, realizing his own ends, stepped in with effect. For the highest form—the normal or transcendent form—of virtue to a Pagan, was in the character of citizen. Indeed, the one sole or affirmative form of virtue lay in this sole function, viz., of public, of patriotic virtue. Since here only it was possible to introduce an additional good to the world. All other virtue, as of justice between individual and individual, did but redress a previous error, sometimes of the man himself, sometimes of social arrangement, sometimes of accident. It was a plus which balanced and compensated a pre-existing minus—an action in regressu, which came back with prevailing power upon an action in progressu. But to be a patriot was to fulfil a call of the supererogatory heart—a great nisus of sympathy with the one sole infinite, the sole practical infinite that man pre-Christian ever could generate for his contemplation. Now, therefore, it followed that the idea of virtue here only found its realization. Virtue, in fact, was not derivatively or consequentially connected with patriotism, it was immanent; not transitively associated by any links whatever, but immanently intertwisted, indwelling in the idea. Therefore it happened that a man, however heartsick of this tumid, bladdery delusion, although to him it was a balloon, by science punctured, lacerated, collapsing, trailed through ditch and mud under the rough handling and the fearful realities of life, yet he durst not avow his private feelings. That would have been even worse than with us: it would have been to proclaim virtue and vice mere bubbles and chimeras. He who really thinks so even we reasonably suspect of practical indifference unless when we believe him to speak as a misanthrope.

The question suppose to commence as to the divine mission of Christ. And the feeble understanding is sure to think this will be proved best by proving the subject of this doubt to have been a miracle-working power. And of all miracles, to have mastered (not merely escaped or evaded) death will be in his opinion the greatest. So that if Christ could be proved to have absolutely conquered death, i.e., to have submitted to death, but only to recoil from his power and overthrow it, to have died and subsequently to have risen again, will, à fortiori, prove Him to have been sent of God.

Not so. All and every basis of credibility must be laid in the moral nature, where the thing to be believed is important, i.e., moral. And I therefore open with this remark absolutely zermalmende to the common intellect: That from a holy faith you may infer a power of resurrection, but not from a power of resurrection fifty times repeated can we infer a holy faith. What in the last result is the thing to be proved? Why, a holy revelation, not of knowledge, but of things practical; of agenda, not scienda. It is essential that this holy should also be new, original, revelatum. Because, else, the divinest things which are connata and have been common to all men, point to no certain author. They belong to the dark foundations of our being, and cannot challenge a trust, faith, or expectation as suspended upon any particular individual man whatever.

Here, then, arises the πρωτοντοκινον. Thick darkness sits on every man's mind as to Christ's revelation. He fancies that it amounts to this: 'Do what is good. Do your duty. Be good.' And with this vague notion of the doctrine, natural is it that he should think it as old as the hills. The first step to a saner view is, to understand—if a man has sense enough to reach so high—that the subtlest discoveries ever made by man, all put together, do not make one wave of that Atlantic as to novelty and originality which lies in the moral scheme of Christianity. I do not mean in the total scheme of Christianity, redemption, etc. No, but in the ethics.

All ethics that ever Greece refined or Rome illustrated, was, and could be, only the same universal system of social ethics—ethics proper and exclusive to man and man inter se, with no glimpse of any upward relationship.

Now Christianity looks upward for the first time. This in the first place. Secondly, out of that upward look Christianity looks secondarily down again, and reacts even upon the social ethics in the most tremendous way.

For my Book on the Relations of Christianity to Man.—S. T. C. cites Jeremy Taylor, etc., for horrible passages on the gloomy state of the chances for virtuous Pagans. S. T. C. in a more liberal generation is shocked; and of course in his readers as in himself secretly, he professes more liberal ideas. Aye, but how is he entitled to these ideas? For, on further consideration, it is not Cicero only, or Epictetus only, that would suffer under this law of Christianity viewed in its reagency, but also Abraham, David, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hezekiah. Because, how could they benefit by a Redeemer not yet revealed—nay, by a Redeemer not even existing? For it is not the second person in the Trinity—not He separately and abstractedly—that is the Redeemer, but that second person incarnated. St. Paul apparently wished to smuggle this tremendous question into a fraudulent solution, by mixing up Abraham (with others pre-Christian and Christian) into the long array of those whose Faith had saved them. But faith in whom? General faith in God is not the thing, it is faith in Jesus Christ; and we are solemnly told in many shapes that no other name was given on earth through which men could be delivered. Indeed, if not, how is the Messiah of such exclusive and paramount importance to man? The Messiah was as yet (viz., in Abraham's time) a prophecy—a dim, prophetic outline of one who should be revealed. But if Abraham and many others could do without Him, if this was a dispensable idea, how was it in any case, first or last, indispensable? Besides, recur to the theory of Christianity. Most undeniably it was this, that neither of the two elements interested in man could save him; not God; He might have power, but His purity revolted. Power (or doubtfully so), but no will. Not man—for he, having the will, had no power. God was too holy; manhood too unholy. Man's gifts, applicable, but insufficient. God's sufficient, but inapplicable. Then came the compromise. How if man could be engrafted upon God? Thus only, and by such a synthesis, could the ineffable qualities of God be so co-ordinated with those of man.

Suppose even that a verbal inspiration could have been secured—secured, observe, against gradual changes in language and against the reactionary corruption of concurrent versions, which it would be impossible to guarantee as also enjoying such an inspiration (since, in that case, what barrier would divide mine or anybody's wilfully false translations from that pretending to authority? I repeat what? None is conceivable, since what could you have beyond the assurance of the translator, even which could only guarantee his intentions)—here is a cause of misinterpretation amounting to ruin, viz., after being read for centuries as if practically meant for our guidance, such and such a chapter (e.g., Jael and Sisera), long proscribed by the noble as a record of abominable perfidy, has at length been justified on the ground that it was never meant for anything else. Thus we might get rid of David, etc., were it not that for his flexible obedience to the clerus he has been pronounced the man after God's own heart.

Is it not dreadful that at the very vestibule of any attempt to execute the pretended law of God and its sentences to hell we are interrupted by one case in every three as exceptional? Of the deaths, one in three are of children under five. Add to these surely very many up to twelve or thirteen, and many up to eighteen or twenty, then you have a law which suspends itself for one case in every two.

Note in the argument drawn from perishableness of language. Not only (which I have noted) is any language, ergo the original, Chaldæan, Greek, etc., perishable even for those who use it, but also the vast openings to error which all languages open to translators form a separate source of error in translators, viz.:

1. The old one on my list that for them the guidance of inspiration has ceased, else, if not, you must set up an inspiration separately to translators, since, if you say—No, not at all, why, which then?

2. The uncertainty of a foreign language even in a day contemporary with the original writer, and therefore over and above what arises from lapse of time and gradual alterations.

On Human Progress.—Oftentimes it strikes us all that this is so insensible as to elude observation the very nicest. Five years add nothing, we fancy. Now invert your glass. In 1642 Englishmen are fighting for great abstract principles. In 1460-83 (i.e., 100 + 17 + 42 years before, or 159 years) they are fighting for persons, for rival candidates. In 1460 they could not have conceived more than an Esquimaux can entertain a question about the constitution of lyric poetry, or the differential principles of English and Greek tragedy, the barest approximation to questions that in 1642 are grounds of furious quarrel, of bloody quarrel, of extermination. Now then, looking forward, you would see from year to year little if any growth; but inverting your glass, looking back from the station of 1642 to 1460, you see a progress that if subdivided amongst all the 159 years would give to each x/0 as its quota, i.e. infinity. In fact, it is like the progression from nothing to something. It is—creation.

All the body of the Christian world would fly out in a rage if you should say that Christianity required of you many things that were easy, but one thing that was not. Yet this is undoubtedly true; it requires you to believe, and even in the case where you know what it is to believe, and so far are free from perplexity, you have it not in your own power to ensure (though you can influence greatly) your own power to believe. But also great doubt for many (and for all that are not somewhat metaphysical) attends the knowledge of what is believing.

As to my mother's fancy that Sir W. Jones had found in the East proofs of Christianity, having gone out an infidel.

To do her justice, never once after she had adopted a theory of Christianity did she inquire or feel anxious about its proof. But to review the folly of this idea.

1. That Christianity there where it reigned and was meant to reign should be insufficient in its proofs; but that in a far distant land, lurking in some hole or corner, there should be proofs of its truth, just precisely where these proofs were not wanted. And again, that these should be reserved for one scholar rambling into a solitary path, where in a moral sense nobody could follow him (for it is nobody—this or that oriental scholar). And we are sure that his proof was not of that order to shine by its own light, else it would have resounded through England.

2. That for many hundreds of years Christianity should have been received, generation after generation should have lived under its vital action, upon no sufficient argument, and suddenly such an argument should turn up as a reward to a man in a country not Christian for being more incredulous than his neighbours; how impossible!

That fraudulent argument which affects to view the hardships of an adventurous life and its perils as capable of one sole impression—that of repulsion—and secondly as the sole circumstances about such adventures, injures from the moment when it is perceived: not

1. The writer only; no matter for him, worthless liar, how much he sinks in the opinion of his readers: but

2. The Apostles. Now see the injury of falsehood. Suddenly it snaps, and with a great reaction causes a jar to the whole system, which in ordinary minds it is never likely to recover. The reason it is not oftener perceived is that people read such books in a somnolent, inactive state of mind, one-tenth coming to a subject on which they have already made up their minds, and open to no fresh impressions, the other nine-tenths caring not one straw about the matter, as reading it in an age of irreflectiveness and purely through an act of obedience to their superiors, else not only does this hypocritical attempt to varnish give way all at once, and suddenly (with an occasion ever after of doubt, and causing a reflection to any self-sufficient man, suddenly coming to perceive that he has been cheated, and with some justification for jealousy thenceforwards to the maker up of a case), but also it robs the Apostles of the human grace they really possessed. For if we suppose them armed against all temptations, snares, seductions, by a supernatural system of endowments, this is but the case of an angel—nay, not of an angel, for it is probable that when an angel incarnated himself, or one of the Pagan deities, who was obliged first to incarnate himself before he could act amongst men, or so much as be seen by men, he was bound by all the defects of man, i.e., he could choose only an ideal, so far ideal as to elude the worst effects from vice, intemperance, etc. The angel who wrestled with Jacob probably did his best; he was a stout fellow, but so was the patriarch. The very condition of incarnation, and this because the mere external form already includes limitations (as of a fish, not to fly; of a man, not to fly, etc.) probably includes as a necessity, not as a choice, the adoption of all evils connected with the nature assumed. Even the Son of God, once incarnated, was not exempted from any evil of flesh; He grew, passed through the peculiar infirmities of every stage up to mature life; would have grown old, infirm, weak, had He lived longer; was liable to death, the worst of all human evils, and was not, we may be sure, exempted from any one fleshly desire with regard to sex, or enemies, or companions, but because that divine principle, which also is in man, yes, in every man the foulest and basest—this light which the darkness comprehended not, and which in some is early extinguished, but in all fights fitfully with the winds and storms of this human atmosphere, in Him was raised to a lustre unspeakable by His pure and holy will.

If the Apostles were more celestially armed in any other sense than as we are all armed from above by calling forth our better natures, if in any other sense than as sorrow arms us by purifying our natures, as sorrowful reflection, as meditation and earnest endeavours to resist our angry instincts (which, on the contrary, how often do men obey under the vile pretence of being put by conscience on a painful duty), then, I say, what were the Apostles to us? Why should we admire them? How can we make them models of imitation? It is like that case of Anarcharsis the Scythian.

It does certainly incense a Christian to think that stupid Mahommedans should impute to us such childish idolatries as that of God having a son and heir—just as though we were barbarous enough to believe that God was liable to old age—that the time was coming, however distant, when somebody would say to him, 'Come, Sir,' or 'Come, my Lord, really you are not what you were. It's time you gave yourself some ease (ευφημι, time, indeed, that you resigned the powers to which you are unequal), and let a younger man take the reins.' None but a filthy barbarian could carry forward his thoughts so little as not to see that this son in due time would find himself in the same predicament.

Now mark how Christian lands would enforce this doctrine of unity by horrid coercions. They hang, drown, burn, crucify those who deny it. So that, be assured you are planting your corner-stone on the most windy of delusions. You yourselves do not ascribe any merit to Mahommed separate from that of revealing the unity of God. Consequently, if that is a shaken craze arising from mere inability on his part, a little, a very little information would have cut up by the very roots the whole peculiarity of Islam. For if a wise man could have assembled these conceited Arabians and told them: Great thieves, you fancy yourselves to have shot far ahead of the Christians as to the point of unity, and if you had I would grant that you had made a prodigious advance. But you are deceiving quarrellers. It is all a word—mere smoke, that blinds you. The Christian seems to affirm three Gods, and even to aggravate this wickedness by calling one of them 'a Son,' thus seeming to accept that monstrous notion that God is liable to old age and decrepitude, so as to provide wisely against His own dotage. But all this is an error: these three apparent Gods are but one, and in the most absolute sense one.