Chapters 16
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1 01 - Chapter 01 9:28
I was christened and educated in the faith of the Orthodox Greek Church, I was taught it in my childhood, and I learned it in my youth. Nevertheless, at 18 years of age, when I quitted the university, I had discarded all belief in anything that I had been taught. To judge by what I can now remember, I could never have had a very serious belief. It must have been a kind of trust in this teaching, based on one in my teachers and elders, and, moreover, a trust not very firmly grounded. I remember once in my twelfth year, a boy, now long since dead, Vladimir M., a pupil in a gymnasium, spent a Sunday with us and brought us the news of the last discovery in the gymnasium, namely, that there was no god, and that all we were taught on the subject was a mere invention.
This was in 1838. I remember well how interested my elder brothers were in this news. I was admitted to their deliberations, And we all eagerly accepted the theory as something particularly attractive and possibly quite true. I remember also that when my elder brother Dmitri, then at the university, with the impulsiveness natural to his character, gave himself up to a passionate faith, began to attend the church services regularly, to fast and to lead a pure and moral life, We, all of us, and some older than ourselves, never ceased to hold him up to ridicule, and for some incomprehensible reason gave him the nickname of Noah. I remember that Moussin Pushkin, the then curator of the University of Kazan, having invited us to a ball, tried to persuade my brother, who had refused the invitation, by the jeering argument that even David danced before the Ark.
I sympathized then with these jokes of my elders, and drew from them this conclusion that I was bound to learn my catechism and go to church, but that it was not necessary to think of my religious duties more seriously. I also remember that I read Voltaire when I was very young, and that his tone of mockery amused without disgusting me. The gradual estrangement from all belief went on in me, as it does, and always has done, in those of the same social position and culture. This falling off, as it seems to me, for the most part, goes on as follows. People live as others live, and their lives are guided, not by the principles of the faith which is taught them, but by their very opposite. Belief has no influence on life, nor on the relations between men.
It is relegated to some other sphere, where life is not. If the two ever come into contact at all, Belief is only one of the outward phenomena and not one of the constituent parts of life. By a man's life, by his acts, it was then, as it is now, impossible to know whether he was a believer or not. If there be a difference between one who openly professes the doctrines of the Orthodox Church and one who denies them, the difference is to the advantage of the former. The open profession of the orthodox doctrines is mostly found among persons of dull intellects, of stern character, and who think much of their own importance. Intelligence, honesty, frankness, a good heart, and moral conduct are oftener met with among those who are disbelievers.
The schoolboy is taught his catechism and sent to church. From the grown man is required a certificate of his having taken the Holy Communion. A man, however, belonging to our class, neither goes to school nor is bound by the regulations affecting those in the public service, and may now live through long years. Still more was this the case formerly, without being once reminded of the fact that he lives among Christians, and calls himself a member of the Orthodox Church. Thus it happens that now, as formerly, the influence of early religious teaching Accepted merely on trust and upheld by authority, gradually faded away under the knowledge and practical experience of later life, which is opposed to all its principles, and that a man often believes for years that his early faith is still intact, while all the time not a particle of it remains in him.
A certain S., a clever and voracious man, once related to me how he came to cease to believe. Twenty-six years ago, being on a hunting party, before he lay down to rest according to a habit of his from childhood, he knelt down to pray. His elder brother, who was of the party, lay on some straw and watched him. When S. had finished and was preparing to lie down, his brother said to him, Ah, you still keep that up? Nothing more passed between them, but from that day S. ceased to pray and to go to church. For thirty years S. has not said a prayer, has not taken the communion, has not been in a church, not because he shared the convictions of his brother, or even knew them, not because he had come to any conclusions of his own, but because his brother's words were like the push of a finger against a wall, ready to tumble over with its own weight.
They proved to him that what he had taken for belief was an empty form. and that consequently every word he uttered, every sign of the cross he made, every time he bowed his head during his prayers, his act was an unmeaning one. When he once admitted to himself that such acts had no meaning in them, he could not but discontinue them. Thus it has been, and is, I believe, with the large majority of men. I speak of men of our class, of men who are true to themselves, and not of those who make of religion a means of obtaining some temporal advantage. These men are truly absolute unbelievers, for if faith be to them a means of obtaining any worldly end, it is most certainly no faith at all. Such men of our own class are in the following position.
The knowledge and experience of active life has shattered the artificially constructed building of belief within. And they have either observed that, and cleared away the superincumbent ruins, or they have remained unconscious of the destruction worked. The belief instilled from childhood in me, as in so many others, gradually disappeared. But with this difference, that as from fifteen years of age I had begun to read philosophical works, I was conscious of my own disbelief. From the age of sixteen, I ceased to pray, and ceased from conviction to attend the services of the church and to fast. I no longer accepted the faith of my childhood, but I had a vague belief in something, though I do not think I could exactly explain in what.
I believed in a god, or, rather, I did not deny the existence of god, but anything relating to the nature of that godhead I could not have described. I denied neither Christ nor his teaching, but in what that teaching consisted I could not have said. Now, when I think over that time, I see clearly that all the faith I had, the only belief which, apart from mere animal instinct, swayed my life, was a belief in a possibility of perfection, though what it was in itself, or what would be its results, I was unable to say. I endeavoured to reach perfection in intellectual attainments. My studies were extended in every direction of which my life afforded me a chance. I strove to strengthen my will, forming for myself rules which I forced myself to follow.
I did my best to develop my physical powers by every exercise calculated to give strength and agility, and by way of accustoming myself to patient endurance, I subjected myself to many voluntary hardships and trials of privation. All this I looked upon as necessary to obtain the perfection at which I aimed. At first, of course, moral perfection seemed to me the main end, but I soon found myself contemplating in its stead an ideal of general perfectibility. In other words, I wished to be better, not in my own eyes nor in those of God, But in the sight of other men. This feeling again soon ended in another, the desire to have more power than others, to secure for myself a greater share of fame, of social distinction and of wealth.
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2 02 - Chapter 02 9:49
At some future time, I may relate the story of my life, and dwell in detail on the pathetic and instructive incidents of my youth. Many others must have passed through the same as I did. I honestly desired to make myself a good and virtuous man. But I was young, I had passions, and I stood alone, altogether alone, in my search after virtue. Every time I tried to express the longings of my heart for a truly virtuous life, I was met with contempt and derisive laughter. But directly I gave way to the lowest of my passions, I was praised and encouraged. I found ambition, love of power, love of gain, lechery, pride, anger, vengeance, held in high esteem. I gave way to these passions, and becoming like unto my elders, I felt that the place which I filled in the world satisfied those around me.
My kind-hearted aunt, a really good woman, used to say to me that there was one thing above all others which she wished for me, an intrigue with a married woman. Another of her wishes for my happiness was that I should become an adjutant, and, if possible, to the emperor. The greatest happiness of all for me, she thought, would be that I should find a wealthy bride, who would bring me as her dowry an enormous number of slaves. I cannot now recall those years without a painful feeling of horror and loathing. I put men to death in war. I fought duels to slay others. I lost at cards, wasted my substance wrung from the sweat of peasants, punished the latter cruelly, rioted with loose women, and deceived men.
Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, and murder, all committed by me. Not one crime omitted, and yet I was not the less considered by my equals a comparatively moral man. Such was my life during ten years. During that time I began to write, out of vanity, love of gain, and pride. I followed as a writer the same path which I had chosen as a man. In order to obtain the fame and the money for which I wrote, I was obliged to hide what was good, and bow down before what was evil. How often, while writing, have I cudgelled my brains to conceal under the mask of indifference or pleasantry those yearnings for something better which formed the real problem of my life! I succeeded in my object and was praised.
At twenty-six years of age, on the close of the war, I came to St. Petersburg and made the acquaintance of the authors of the day. I met with a hearty reception and much flattery. Before I had time to look around, the prejudices and views of life common to the writers of the class with which I associated became my own, and completely put an end to all my former struggles after a better life. These views, under the influence of the dissipation into which I plunged, issued in a theory of life which justified it. The view of life taken by these my fellow writers was that life is a development. And the principal part in that development is played by ourselves, the thinkers, while among the thinkers the chief influence is again due to ourselves, the poets.
Our vocation is to teach mankind. In order to avoid answering the very natural question, What do I know, and what can I teach, the theory in question is made to contain the formula that such is not required to be known, but that the thinker and the poet teach unconsciously. I was myself considered a marvellous litterateur and poet, and I therefore very naturally adopted this theory. Meanwhile, thinker and poet though I was, I wrote and taught I knew not what. For doing this, I received large sums of money. I kept a splendid table, had an excellent lodging associated with loose women, and received my friends handsomely. Moreover, I had fame. It would seem, then, that what I taught must have been good.
The faith in poetry and the development of life was a true faith, and I was one of its high priests, a post of great importance and of profit. I long remained in this belief, and never once doubted its truth. In the second, however, and especially in the third year of this way of life, I began to doubt the infallibility of the doctrine, and to examine it more closely. The first doubtful fact which attracted my attention was that the apostles of this belief did not agree among themselves. Some proclaimed that they alone were good and useful teachers, and all others worthless, while those opposed to them said the same of themselves. They disputed, quarrelled, abused, deceived, and cheated one another.
Moreover, there were many among us who, quite indifferent to right or wrong, only cared for their own private interests. All this forced on me doubts as to the truth of our belief. Again, when I doubted this faith in the influence of literary men, I began to examine more closely into the character and conduct of its chief professors. And I convinced myself that these writers were men who led immoral lives, most of them worthless and insignificant individuals, and far beneath the moral level of those with whom I had associated during my former dissipated and military career. These men, however, had nonetheless an amount of self-confidence only to be expected in those who are conscious of being saints, or in those for whom holiness is an empty name.
I grew disgusted with mankind and with myself, and I understood that this belief which I had accepted was a delusion. The strangest thing in all this was that, though I soon saw the falseness of this belief and renounced it, I did not renounce the position I had gained by it. I still called myself a thinker, a poet, and a teacher. I was simple enough to imagine that I, the poet and thinker, was able to teach other men without knowing myself what it was that I attempted to teach. I had only gained a new vice by my companionship with these men. It had developed pride in me to a morbid extreme, and my self-confidence in teaching what I did not know amounted almost to insanity. When I now think over that time, and remember my own state of mind and that of these men, a state of mind common enough among thousands still, it seems to me pitiful, terrible, and ridiculous.
It excites the feelings which overcome us as we pass through a madhouse. We were all then convinced that it behooved us to speak, to write, and to print, as fast as we could, as much as we could, and that on this depended the welfare of the human race. Hundreds of us wrote, printed, and taught, and all the while confuted and abused each other. Quite unconscious that we ourselves knew nothing, that to the simplest of all problems in life, what is right and what is wrong, we had no answer, We all went on talking together without one to listen, at times abetting and praising one another, on condition that we were abetted and praised in turn, and again turning upon each other in wrath. In short, we reproduced the scenes in a madhouse.
Hundreds of exhausted laborers worked day and night, putting up the type and printing millions of pages to be spread by the post all over Russia. And still we continued to teach. Unable to teach enough, angrily complaining the while that we were not listened to. A strange state of things indeed, but now it is clear enough. The real motive that inspired all our reasoning was the desire for money and praise, to obtain which we knew of no other means than writing books and newspapers. In order, however, while thus uselessly employed, To hold fast to the conviction that we were really of importance to society, it was necessary to justify our occupation to ourselves by another theory. And the following was the one we adopted.
Whatever is, is right. Everything that is, is due to development, and the latter again to civilization. The measure of civilization is the figure to which the publication of books and newspapers reaches. We are paid and honoured for the books and newspapers which we write, and we are therefore the most useful and best of all citizens. This reasoning might have been conclusive, had we all been agreed. But, as for every opinion expressed by one of us, there instantly appeared from another one diametrically opposite. We had to hesitate before accepting it. But this we passed over. We received money, and were praised by those who agreed with us. Consequently, we were in the right. It is now clear to me that between ourselves and the inhabitants of a madhouse there was no difference.
At the time I only vaguely suspected this, and, like all madmen, thought all were mad except myself.
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3 03 - Chapter 03 10:35
I lived in this senseless manner another six years, up to the time of my marriage. During the interval I had been abroad. My life in Europe and my acquaintance with many eminent and learned foreigners Confirmed my belief in the doctrine of general perfectibility, as I found the same theory prevailed among them. This belief took the form which is common among most cultivated men of the day. It may be summed up in the word progress. It then appeared to me this word had a real meaning. I did not understand that, tormented like other men by the question, how was I to better my life, when I answered that I must live for progress, I was only repeating the answer of a man carried away in a boat by the waves and the wind, who, to the one important question for him, Where are we to steer, should answer, saying, We are being carried somewhere.
This I then did not see. It was only at rare intervals that my feelings, and not my reason, were roused against the common superstition of our age, which leads men to ignore their own ignorance of life. Thus, during my stay in Paris, The sight of a public execution revealed to me the weakness of my superstitious belief in progress. When I saw the head divided from the body, and heard the sound with which they fell separately into the box, I understood, not with my reason, but with my whole being, that no theory of the wisdom of all established things, nor of progress, could justify such an act, and that if all the men in the world from the day of creation, by whatever theory, Had found this thing necessary, it was not so.
It was a bad thing, and that therefore I must judge of what was right and necessary, not by what men said and did, not by progress, but what I felt to be true in my heart. Another instance of the insufficiency of this superstition of progress as a rule for life was the death of my brother. He fell ill while still young, suffered much during a whole year, and died in great pain. He was a man of good abilities, of a kind heart, and of a serious temper. But he died without understanding why he had lived, or what his death meant for him. No theories could give an answer to these questions, either to him or to me, during the whole period of his long and painful lingering. Then, occasions for doubt, however, were few and far between.
On the whole, I continued to live in the profession of the faith of progress. Everything develops, and I myself develop as well, and why this is so will one day be apparent was the formula I was obliged to adopt. On my return from abroad, I settled in the country, and occupied myself with the organization of schools for the peasantry. This occupation was especially grateful to me, because it was free from the spirit of falseness so evident to me in the career of a literary teacher. Here again I acted in the name of progress, But this time I brought a spirit of critical inquiry to the system on which the progress rested. I said to myself that progress was often attempted in an irrational manner, and that it was necessary to leave a primitive people and the children of peasants perfectly free to choose the way of progress which they thought best.
In reality, I was still bent on the solution of the same impossible problem, how to teach without knowing what I had to teach. In the highest sphere of literature, I had understood that it was impossible to do this, because I had seen that each taught differently, and that the teachers quarreled among themselves, and scarcely succeeded in concealing their ignorance. Having now to deal with peasants' children, I thought that I could get over this difficulty by allowing the children to learn what they liked. It seems now absurd when I remember the expedience by which I carried out this whim of mine to teach. Though I knew in my heart that I could teach nothing useful, because I myself did not know what was necessary.
After a year spent in this employment with the schools, I again went abroad, for the purpose of finding out how I was to teach under these conditions. I believed that I had found a solution abroad, and, armed with that conviction, I returned to Russia the same year in which the peasants were freed from serfdom. And, accepting the office of a country magistrate or arbitrator, I began to teach the uneducated people in the schools, and the educated classes in the journals which I published. Things seemed to be going on well, but I felt that my mind was not in a normal state, and that a change was near. I might then, perhaps, have come to that state of absolute despair to which I was brought fifteen years later, if it had not been for a new experience in life which promised me safety.
The home life of a family man. For a year, I occupied myself with my duties as arbitrator, with the schools and my newspaper, and got so involved that I was harassed to death. My arbitration was one continual struggle. What to do in the schools became less and less clear, and my newspaper shuffling more and more repugnant to me, always the same thing, trying to teach without knowing how or what. So that I fell ill more with a mental than physical sickness, gave up everything, and started for the steps to breathe a fresher air, to drink mare's milk and live a mere animal life. Soon after my return, I married. The new circumstances of a happy family life, by which I was now surrounded, completely led my mind away from the search after the meaning of life as a whole.
My life was concentrated in my family, my wife and children. and consequently in the care for increasing the means of supporting them. The effort to effect my own individual perfection, already replaced by the striving after general progress, was again changed into an effort to secure the particular happiness of my family. In this way, fifteen years passed. Notwithstanding that during these fifteen years I looked upon the craft of authorship as a very trifling thing, I continued all the time to write, I had experienced the seductions of authorship, the temptations of an enormous pecuniary reward, and of great applause for valueless work, and gave myself up to it as a means of improving my material position, and of stifling all the feelings which led me to question my own life and that of society for the meaning in them.
In my writings I taught what for me was the only truth, that the object of life should be our own happiness and that of our family. By this rule, I lived. But five years ago, a strange state of mind-torpor began at times to grow upon me. I had moments of perplexity, of a stoppage, as it were, of life, as if I did not know how I was to live, what I was to do. I began to wander, and was a victim to low spirits. This, however, passed, and I continued to live as before. Later, these periods of perplexity grew more and more frequent, and invariably took the same form. During their continuance, the same questions always presented themselves to me. Why? And what after? At first, it seemed to me that these were empty and unmeaning questions, that all they asked about was well known, and that whenever I wished to find answers to them, I could do so without much trouble.
Then I had no time for it. But these questions presented themselves to my mind with ever-increasing frequency, demanding an answer with still greater and greater persistence, grouping themselves into one dark and ominous spot. It was with me as in every case of a hidden mortal disease. At first the symptoms as to its position are slight, and are disregarded by the patient, while later they are repeated more and more frequently, till they end in a period of uninterrupted suffering. The sufferings increase, and the patient, before he has time to seek a remedy, is confronted with the fact that what he took for a mere indisposition has become more important to him than anything else on earth, that he is face to face with death.
This is exactly what happened mentally to myself. I became aware that this was not a mere passing phase of mental ill-health, that the symptoms were of the utmost importance, and that if these questions continued to recur, I must find an answer to them. I tried to answer them. The questions seemed so foolish, so simple, so childish. But no sooner had I begun my attempt to decide them than I was convinced that they were neither childish nor silly, but were concerned with the deepest problems of life, and again that I was, think of them as I would, utterly unable to find an answer to them. Before occupying myself with my estate, with the education of my son, with the writing of books, I was bound to know why I did these things.
Till I know the reasons for my own acts, I can do nothing, I cannot live. While thinking of the details of the management of my household and estate, which in these days occupied much of my time, the following question came into my head. Well, I have now six thousand desatines in the government of Samara, and three hundred horses. What then? I was quite disconcerted, and knew not what to think. Another time, dwelling on the thought of how I should educate my children, I asked myself, Why? Again, when considering by what means the well-being of the people might best be promoted, I suddenly exclaimed, But what concern have I with it? When I thought of the fame which my works had gained me, I used to say to myself, Well, what if I should be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Moliere, than all the writers of the world?
Well, and what then? I could find no reply. Such questions demand an answer, and an immediate one. Without one it is impossible to live, but answer, there was none.
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4 04 - Chapter 04 11:12
My life had come to a sudden stop. I was able to breathe, to eat, to drink, to sleep. I could not indeed help doing so, but there was no real life in me. I had not a single wish to strive for the fulfillment of what I could feel to be reasonable. If I wished for anything, I knew beforehand that were I to satisfy the wish, nothing would come of it. I should still be dissatisfied. Had a fairy appeared and offered me all I desired, I should not have known what to say. If I seemed to have, at a given moment of excitement, not a wish, but a mood resulting from the tendencies of former wishes, at a calmer moment, I knew that it was a delusion. that I really wished for nothing. I could not even wish to know the truth, because I guessed what the truth was.
The truth lay in this, that life had no meaning for me. Every day of life, every step in it, brought me nearer to the edge of a precipice, whence I saw clearly the final ruin before me. To stop, to go back, were alike impossible. Nor could I shut my eyes so as not to see the suffering that alone awaited me, the death of all in me, even to annihilation. Thus I, a healthy and a happy man, was brought to feel that I could live no longer, that an irresistible force was dragging me down into the grave. I do not mean that I had an intention of committing suicide. The force that drew me away from life was stronger, fuller, and concerned with far wider consequences than any mere wish. It was a force like that of my previous attachment to life, only in a contrary direction.
The idea of suicide came as naturally to me as formerly that of bettering my life. It had so much attraction for me that I was compelled to practice a species of self-deception, in order to avoid carrying it out too hastily. I was unwilling to act hastily, only because I had determined first to clear away the confusion of my thoughts, And that, once done, I could always kill myself. I was happy, yet I hid away a cord to avoid being tempted to hang myself by it to one of the pegs between the cupboards of my study, where I undressed alone every evening, and ceased carrying a gun because it offered too easy a way of getting rid of life. I knew not what I wanted. I was afraid of life. I shrank from it, and yet there was something I hoped for from it.
Such was the condition I had come to at a time when all the circumstances of my life were pre-eminently happy ones, and when I had not reached my fiftieth year. I had a good, a loving, and a well-beloved wife, good children, a fine estate, which, without much trouble on my part, continually increased my income. I was more than ever respected by my friends and acquaintances, I was praised by strangers, and could lay claim to having made my name famous without much self-deception. Moreover, my mind was neither deranged nor weakened. On the contrary, I enjoyed a mental and physical strength, which I have seldom found in men of my class and pursuits. I could keep up with a peasant in mowing, and could continue mental labor for ten hours at a stretch without any evil consequences.
The mental state in which I then was seemed to me summed up in the following. My life was a foolish and wicked joke played upon me by I knew not whom. Notwithstanding my rejection of the idea of a creator, that of a being who thus wickedly and foolishly made a joke of me seemed to me the most natural of all conclusions, and the one that threw the most light upon my darkness. I instinctively reasoned that this being, wherever he might be, was one who was even then diverting himself at my expense as he watched me, after from thirty to forty years of a life of study and development, of mental and bodily growth, with all my powers matured, and having reached the point at which life as a whole should be best understood, standing like a fool with but one thing clear to me, that there was nothing in life, that there never was anything and never will be.
To him I must seem ridiculous. But was there, or was there not, such a being? Neither way could I feel it help me. I could not attribute reasonable motive to any single act, much less to my whole life. I was only astonished that this had not occurred to me before, from premises which had so long been known. Illness and death would come, indeed they had come, if not today, then tomorrow, to those whom I loved, to myself, and nothing would remain but stench and worms. All my acts, whatever I did, would sooner or later be forgotten, and I myself be nowhere. Why then busy oneself with anything? How could men see this and live? It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us. As soon as we are sober again, we see that it is all a delusion and a stupid one.
In this, indeed, there is nothing either ludicrous or amusing. It is only cruel and absurd. There is an old eastern fable about a traveler in the steppes who is attacked by a furious wild beast. To save himself, the traveler gets into a dried-up well, but at the bottom of it he sees a dragon with its jaws wide open to devour him. The unhappy man dares not get out for fear of the wild beast, and dares not descend for fear of the dragon. So he catches hold of the branch of a wild plant growing in a crevice of the well. His arms grow tired, and he feels that he must soon perish, death awaiting him on either side, but he still holds on, and then he sees two mice, one black and one white, gnawing through the trunk of the wild plant, as they gradually and evenly made their way round it.
The plant must soon give way, break off, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveler sees this, and knows that he must inevitably perish, But, while still hanging, he looks around him, and finding some drops of honey on the leaves of the wild plant, he stretches out his tongue and licks them. Thus do I cling to the branch of life, knowing that the dragon of death inevitably awaits me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand why such tortures have fallen to my lot. I also strive to suck the honey which once comforted me, but it palls on my palate, While the white mouse and the black, day and night, gnaw through the branch to which I cling. I see the dragon too plainly, and the honey is no longer sweet.
I see the dragon from whom there is no escape, and the mice, and I cannot turn my eyes away from them. It is no fable, but a living, undeniable truth, to be understood of all men. The former delusion of happiness in life, which hid me from the horror of the dragon, no longer deceives me. However, I may reason with myself that I cannot understand the meaning of life, that I must live without thinking. I cannot again begin to do so, because I have done so too long already. I cannot now help seeing that each day and each night as it passes brings me nearer to death. I can see but this, because this alone is true. All the rest is a lie. The two drops of honey, which more than anything else drew me away from the cruel truth, My love for my family and for my writings, to which latter I gave the name of art, no longer tastes sweet to me.
My family, thought I, but a family, a wife and children, are also human beings, and subject to the same conditions as myself. They must either be living in a lie, or they must see the terrible truth. Why should they live? Why should I love, care for, bring up and watch over them? To bring them to the despair which fills myself, or to make dolts of them? As I love them, I cannot conceal from them the truth. Every step they take in knowledge leads them to it, and that truth is death. But art, then, but poetry. Under the influence of success, and flattered by praise, I had long persuaded myself that these were things worth working for, notwithstanding the approach of death, the great destroyer, to annihilate my writings in the memory of them.
But now I soon saw that this was only another delusion. I saw clearly that art is only the ornament and charm of life. Life having lost its charm for me, how could I make others see a charm in it? While I was not living my own life, but one that was external to me, as long as I believed that life had a meaning, though I could not say what it was, life was reflected for me in the poetry and art which I loved. It was pleasant to me to look into the mirror of art. But when I tried to discover the meaning of life, When I felt the necessity of living myself, the mirror became either unnecessary or painful. I could no longer take comfort from what I saw in the mirror, that my position was a stupid and desperate one.
It warmed my heart when I believed that life had a meaning, when the play of the light on the glass showed me all that was comic, tragic, touching, beautiful, and terrible in life and comforted me. But when I knew that life had no meaning at all, and was only terrible, The play of the light no longer amused me. No honey could be sweet upon my tongue when I saw the dragon, and the mice eating away the stay which supported me. Nor was that all. Had I simply come to know that life has no meaning, I might have quietly accepted it as my allotted portion. I could not, however, remain thus unmoved. Had I been like a man in a wood, out of which he knows that there is no issue, I could have lived on. But I was like a man lost in a wood, and who, terrified by the thought, rushes about trying to find a way out, and, though he knows each step can only lead him farther astray, cannot help running backwards and forwards.
It was this that was terrible, this which to get free from I was ready to kill myself. I felt a horror of what awaited me. I knew that this horror was more terrible than the position itself, but I could not patiently await the end. However persuasive the argument might be, that all the same, something in the heart or elsewhere would burst and all be over, still I could not patiently await the end. The horror of the darkness was too great to bear, and I longed to free myself from it by a rope or a pistol ball. This was the feeling that, above all, drew me to think of suicide.
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5 05 - Chapter 05 13:45
It was possible, however, that I had overlooked something, that I had failed to understand something, and I often asked myself if such a state of utter despair could be what man was born to. I sought an explanation of the questions which tormented me in every branch of human knowledge. I sought that explanation painfully and long, not out of mere curiosity nor apathetically, but obstinately day and night. I sought it as a perishing man seeks safety, and I found nothing. I searched not only failed, but I convinced myself that all those who had searched like myself had failed also. and come, like me, to the despairing conviction that the only absolute knowledge man can possess is this, that life is without a meaning.
I sought in all directions, and thanks to a life of study, and also to the footing which I had gained in learned society, all the sources of knowledge were open to me, not merely through books, but through personal intercourse. I had the advantage of all that learning could answer to the question, What is life? It was long before I could believe that human learning had no clear answer whatever to this question. It seemed to me, when I considered the importance which science attributed to so many theories unconnected with the problem of life, and the serious tone which pervaded her inquiries into them, that I must have misunderstood something. For a long time I was too timid to oppose the learning of the day, And I fancied that the insufficiency of the answers which I received was not its fault, but was owing to my own gross ignorance.
But this thing was not a joke to pass the time with me, but the business of my life, and I was at last forced to the conclusion that these questions were just and necessary ones underlying all knowledge, and that it was not I that was in fault in putting them, but science in pretending to have an answer to them. The question, which in my fiftieth year had brought me very close to suicide, was the simplest of all questions, one to make itself heard in the heart of every man from undeveloped childhood to wisest old age. A question without which, as I had myself experienced, life became impossible. That question was as follows. What result will there be from what I am doing now, and may do tomorrow?
What will be the issue of my life? Otherwise expressed, it may run, Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything? Why should I do anything? Again, in other words, it is, is there any meaning in my life which can overcome the inevitable death awaiting me? To this question, one and the same, though variously expressed, I saw an answer in human knowledge, and I found that with respect to this question, all human knowledge may be divided into two opposite hemispheres with their respective poles, The one negative, the other affirmative, but that at neither end is to be found an answer to the problem of life. One system of knowledge seems to deny that there is such a question, but on the other hand has a clear and exact answer to all its own independent inquiries.
It is a system of experimental science, at the extreme end of which is mathematics. Another system accepts the question, but does not answer it. It is that of theoretic philosophy, and at its extremity is metaphysics. I had been addicted from my youth to theoretical study. Later, mathematics and the exact sciences had attracted me. Until I came to put clearly to myself this question as to the meaning of life, until it grew up in me, as it were, of itself, until I felt that it demanded an immediate answer, I was content with the artificial and conventional answers given by learning. For the practical side of life, I used to say to myself, all is development and differentiation. All tends to complication and perfection, and there are laws which govern this process.
You are yourself a part of the whole. Learn as much as possible of this whole, and learn the law of its development. You will then know your own place in the great unity, and know yourself as well. Though I feel shame in confessing it, I must needs own that there was a time when I was myself developing, when my muscles and memory were strengthening, my power of thinking and understanding on the increase, that I, feeling this, very naturally thought that the law of my own growth was the law of the universe, and explained the meaning of my own life. But there came another time when I had ceased to grow, and I felt that I was not developing but drying up. My muscles grew weaker, my teeth began to fall out, and I saw that this law of growth not only explained nothing, but that such a law did not and could not exist, that I had taken for a general law what only affected myself at a given age.
On looking more closely into the nature of this pretended law, it was clear to me that there could be no law of eternal development, that to say everything in infinite space and time is developed, complicated, differentiated, and perfected, is to talk nonsense. Such words have no meaning, for the infinite can know nothing of simple and compound, of past and future, of better and worse. It was a personal question that was of such importance to me, and which remained without an answer. What am I myself with all my desires? I understood that the acquirement of knowledge was interesting and attractive, but that it could only give clear and exact results in proportion to its inapplicability to the question of life.
The less it had to do with these questions, the clearer and more exact it was. The more it took the character of a solution of these questions, the obscurer and less attractive they became. If we turn to those branches of knowledge in which men have tried to find a solution to the problem of life, to physiology, psychology, biology, sociology. We meet with a striking poverty of thought, with the greatest obscurity, with an utterly unjustifiable pretension to decide questions beyond their competence, and a constant contradiction of one thinker by another, and even by himself. If we turn to the branches of knowledge which are not concerned with the problem of life, but find an answer to their own particular scientific questions, We are lost in admiration of man's mental powers.
But we know beforehand that we shall get no answer to our questions about life itself, for these branches of knowledge directly ignore all questions concerning it. Those who profess them say, We cannot tell you what you are and why you live. Such questions we do not study. But if you wish to know the laws of light, of chemical affinities, of the development of organisms, if you wish to know the laws that govern different bodies, their form, and relations to number and size, if you wish to know the laws of your own mind, we can give you clear, exact, and absolutely certain answers on every point. The relation of experimental science to the question of the meaning of life may be put as follows.
Why do I live? A. Infinitely small particles, in infinite combinations, in endless space and endless time, eternally change their forms, and when you have learned the laws of these changes, you will know why you live. I used to say to myself when theorizing, Spiritual causes lie at the root of man's life and development, and they are the ideals which govern him. These ideals find expression in religion, in science, in art, and in the forms of government. and rise higher from one stage to another till man at last reaches his highest good. I am myself a man, and am therefore called upon to assist in making the ideals of humanity known and accepted. In the days of my mental weakness this reasoning sufficed for me.
But as soon as the problem of life really, as it were, arose within me, the whole theory fell to pieces at once. Not to speak of the dishonest inaccuracy by which learning of this kind is made to give as general results those due to the study of but a small part of mankind. Not to speak of the many contradictions among the various champions of this theory as to what are the ideals of humanity. The strangeness, if it be not the silliness, of this way of thinking is that in order to answer the question which occurs to every man, What am I, or why do I live, or what am I to do? We must first answer this other question. What is the life of that unknown quantity to us, mankind, of which we are acquainted with but one minute part in one minute period of time?
In order to understand what he is himself, a man must first know what that mysterious humanity is, which is formed of other men like himself, and who again are ignorant of what they are. I confess there was a time when I believed this. That was when I had my own cherished ideals which determined my caprices, and I would strive to evolve a theory which should enable me to look upon my fancies as a law belonging to humanity. As soon, however, as the question of the meaning of life made itself clearly felt within me, my theoretical answer was forever confuted. I understood that, as in the experimental sciences there are real sciences and semi-sciences which pretend to give answers to questions beyond their competence, so in the province of theoretical knowledge is there a wide range of highly cultivated philosophy which attempts to do the same.
The semi-sciences of this division, jurisprudence and historical sociology, endeavoured to decide the questions concerning man and his life, By deciding each in his own way another question, that of the life of humanity as a whole. But, as in the sphere of exact science, a man who earnestly seeks an answer to the question, How am I to live, cannot content himself with the answer that if he studies in infinite space and time the endless combinations and changes of infinite particles, he will know what his own life means. So a sincere man cannot be satisfied with this other answer, Study the life of humanity as a whole, and then, though we know neither its beginning nor its end, and are ignorant of its parts, you will know what your life means.
It is the same with these sham sciences as with the sham experimental ones. They contain obscurity, inaccuracy, stupidity and contradiction, exactly in proportion to their divergence from their proper sphere. The problem of exact science is the succession of cause and effect in material phenomena. If exact science raises the question of a finite cause, it stumbles against an absurdity. The problem of theoretical science is the conception of the uncaused existence of life. Directly the question of the cause of phenomena is raised. As, for instance, of social and historical phenomena, theoretical science lands also in an absurdity. Experimental science gives positive results, and shows the grandeur of man's intellect only when it does not inquire into finite causes, while, on the contrary, theoretical science only shows the greatness of man's mental powers is only a science at all when it gets rid altogether of the succession of phenomena, and looks upon man only in relation to finite causes.
Such in this department of science is the office of its most important branch, of the one which is the pole, as it were, of all the others, of metaphysics or philosophy. This science puts the clear question, what am I, and what is the whole world around me? Why do I and the world exist? And it has always answered it in the same way. Whatever name the philosopher may give to the principle of life existing in me and in all other living beings, whether he call it an idea, a substance, a spirit, or a will, he still says ever that it is a reality and that I have a real existence. But why this is so he does not know, and does not try to explain, if he is an exact thinker. I ask, why should this reality be?
What comes of the fact that it is and will be? Philosophy cannot answer. It can only itself put the same question. If it be, then, a true philosophy, its whole labour consists in this, that it should put this question clearly. If it keep firmly to its proper sphere, it can only answer the question, What am I, and the whole world around me, by saying all and nothing, and to that other question, Why, by adding, I do not know. Thus, however I examine and twist the theoretical replies of philosophy, I never receive an answer to my question, and that, not as in the sphere of experimental knowledge, because the answer does not relate to the question, but because here, although great mental labor has been applied directly to the question, there is no answer, and instead of one I get back my own question, repeated in a more complicated form.
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6 06 - Chapter 06 16:57
In my search for a solution of the problem of life, I experience the same feeling as a man who has lost himself in a wood. He comes to an open plain, climbs up a tree, and sees around him a space without end, but nowhere a house. He sees clearly that there can be none. He goes into the thick of the wood, into the darkness, and sees darkness, but again no house. Thus had I lost my way in the wood of human knowledge, in the twilight of mathematical and experimental science, which opened out for me a clear and distant horizon in the direction of which there could be no house, and in the darkness of philosophy, plunging me into a greater gloom with every step I took. Until I was at last persuaded that there was and could be no issue.
When I followed what seemed the bright light of learning, I saw that I had only turned aside from the real question. Notwithstanding the attraction of the distant horizon unfolded so clearly before me, notwithstanding the charm of losing myself in the infinity of knowledge, I saw that the clearer it was, the less was it needed by me, the less did it give me an answer to my question. I said to myself, I know now all that science so obstinately seeks to learn, but an answer to my question as to the meaning of my life is not to be obtained from science. I saw that philosophy, notwithstanding that, or, perhaps, because, an answer to my question had become the direct object of its inquiries, gave no answer but the one I had given to myself, What is the meaning of my life?
It has none. Or what will come of my life? Nothing. Or why does all that is exist? And why do I exist? Because it does exist. When I turned to one branch of science, I obtained an endless number of exact answers to questions I had not proposed. About the chemical elements of the stars and planets, about the movement of the sun with the constellation of Hercules on the origin of species and of man, about the infinitely small and weightless particles of ether. But the only answer to my question as to the meaning of my life was this. You are what you call life, that is, a temporary and accidental agglomeration of particles. The mutual action and reaction of these particles on each other has produced what you call your life.
This agglomeration will continue during a certain time, then the reciprocal action of these particles will cease, and with it ends what you call your life and all your questions as well. You are an accidentally combined lump of something. The lump undergoes decomposition, this decomposition men call life, The lump falls asunder, decomposition ceases, and with it all doubting. This is the answer from the clear and positive side of human knowledge, and if true to its own principles, it can give no other. Such an answer, however, is no answer to the question at all. I want to know the meaning of my life, and that it is an infinite particle not only does not give a meaning to it, but destroys the possibility of a meaning.
The compromise which Experimental makes with theoretical science, when it is said that the meaning of life is development, and the efforts made towards its attainment from its obscurity and inaccuracy cannot be considered an answer. The theoretical side of human knowledge, when it keeps firmly to its own principles, through all time has ever answered and still answers one and the same. The world is something which is eternal and not to be understood. The life of man is an inconceivable part of this inconceivable whole. Again, I set aside all the compromises between theoretical and experimental science, which are the product of the sham sciences, of so-called jurisprudence, of political economy, and of history.
In these sciences we have again a false conception of development and perfection. With this difference, that formerly it was a development of everything, and now it is a development of human life. The inaccuracy is again the same. Development and perfection in infinity can have no object, no direction, and therefore can give no answer to my question. Whenever theoretical knowledge is exact, where philosophy is true to itself and does not simply serve like what Schopenhauer calls professorial philosophy, To divide all existing phenomena into new columns, and give to them new names. Wherever the philosopher does not overlook the great question of all, the answer is always the same. The answer given by Socrates, Schopenhauer, Solomon, and Buddha.
We approach truth only in the proportion, as we are farther from life, says Socrates, when preparing to die. What do we who love truth seek in life? In order to be free from the body and all the ills that accompany life in it? If so, then, how shall we not be glad of the approach of death? A wise man seeks death all his life, and death has no terrors for him. This is what Schopenhauer says. Accept will as the ultimate principle of the universe, and in all phenomena, from the unconscious tendencies of the unknown forces of nature to the conscious activity of man, acknowledge only conscious activity of man, acknowledge only the objectivity of that will. From the unconscious tendencies of the unknown forces of nature to the conscious activity of man, acknowledge only the objectivity of that will.
And we still cannot get rid of this logical consequence, that directly that will uses its freedom to abdicate, to deny and destroy itself. All phenomena disappear with it. There is an end to the constant efforts and impulses now going on, without aim and without intermission, in every degree of the objectivity in which and through which the universe exists. There is an end to the varieties of successive forms, and with form vanish its postulates, space and time, even to the last and fundamental elements of form, the subject and the object. If there is no will, no phenomenal appearance, then there is no universe. The only thing that remains to us is nothing. But this passage to annihilation is opposed by our own nature, by our will to live.
which causes our existence and that of the universe. That we so fear annihilation, or, what is the same, that we so wish to live, only shows that we ourselves are nothing but that wish, and know nothing beyond it. Consequently, what remains to us after the annihilation of will, except will again, is assuredly nothing. On the other hand, for those in whom will has destroyed itself, The whole of this material universe of ours, with all its suns and its Milky Ways, is nothing. Vanity of vanities, says Solomon, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth for ever.
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be. And that which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there anything whereof it may be said? See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things, neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those it shall come after. I, the preacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven. This sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun, and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.
I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem. Yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge, and I gave my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit, for in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. I said in mine heart, Go to now. I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure, and behold, this also is vanity. I said of laughter, it is mad, and of mirth, what doeth it? I sought in mine heart to give myself unto wine, yet acquainting my heart with wisdom, and to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was that good for the sons of men, which they should do unto the heaven all the days of their life.
I made me great works. I builded me houses. I planted me vineyards. I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kinds of fruits. I made me pools of water, to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees. I got me servants and maidens, and had servants born in my house. Also I had great possessions of great and small cattle, above all that were in Jerusalem before me. I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings and of the provinces. I gat me men-singers and women-singers, and the delights of the sons of men as musical instruments, and that of all sorts. So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem. Also my wisdom remained with me.
And whatsoever mine eyes desired, I kept not from them. I withheld not mine heart from any joy. Then I looked on all the works my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do, and behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun. And I turned myself to behold wisdom, and madness, and folly. And I myself perceive also that one event happeneth to them all. Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me. And why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart that this also is vanity, for there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool forever, seeing that which now is in the days to come shall be forgotten.
And how dieth the wise man? As the fool! Therefore I hated life, because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me, for all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Yea, I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun, because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me. For what hath man of all his labour, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun? For all his days are sorrows, and his travail grief. Yea, his heart taketh not rest in the night. This is also vanity. There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour. This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God.
All things come alike to all. There is one event to the righteous and to the wicked, to the good and to the clean and to the unclean, to him that sacrificeth and to him that sacrificeth not. As is the good, so is the sinner, and he that sweareth as he that feareth an oath. This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all. Yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead. For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die, but the dead know not anything. Neither have they any more a reward, for the memory of them is forgotten.
Also their love and their hatred and their envy is now perished. Neither have they any more a portion forever in anything that is done under the sun. Thus speaks Solomon, or the one who wrote the above, and this is what an Indian sage says. Sakyamuni, the young and happy heir to a great throne, from whom had been kept the sight of illness, old age and death, once while out driving saw a horrible-looking toothless old man. The prince was much astonished, and asked the driver what it meant, and why the man was in such a pitiable and disgusting state. When he learned that this was the common lot of all men, and that he himself, prince and young though he was, must inevitably one day be the same, he was unable to continue his drive, and ordered the carriage to be driven home that he might have time to think it all over.
He shut himself up alone and thought it over. He probably thought of something which consoled him, for again he got into his carriage and drove off merry and happy. This time he is met by a sick man. He sees a worn-out, tottering man, who is quite blue in the face and has dim eyes. The prince stopped and asked what it was. When he was told that it was illness, that old men are subject to it, and he himself, young and happy prince though he was, might fall ill the next day, he again lost all desire for amusement and gave orders to drive home. There he again sought peace of mind, and probably found it. For soon after he started again for the third time in his carriage. This time, however, he saw something new also.
Some men were carrying something by. What is that? A dead body. What does a dead body mean? asked the prince. And he is told that to become one means to become what the man before him now is. The prince descends and approaches the body, uncovers it and looks at it. What will become of him? asked the prince. He is told that the body will be thrust into a hole dug in the earth. Why? Because he will never be alive again, and only stench and worms can come from him. And that is the lot of all men? And it will be so with me? I shall be put underground to stink and have worms come from me? Yes. Back? I will not go for the drive, and never will go again. So Sakyamuni could find no comfort in life. And he decided that life was a very great evil, and applied all his energies to freeing himself and others from it, so that after death life should in no way be renewed, and the very root of life should be destroyed.
Thus speak all the Indian sages. Here we have the only direct answers which human wisdom can give to the problem of life. The life of the body is evil and a lie, and so the annihilation of that life is a good for which we ought to wish, says Socrates. Life is what it ought not to be. An evil, and a passage from it into nothingness, is the only good in life, says Schopenhauer. Everything in the world, both folly and wisdom, both riches and poverty, rejoicing and grief, all is vanity and worthless. Man dies, and nothing is left of him, and this again is vanity, says Solomon. To live, knowing that sufferings, illness, old age and death are inevitable, is not possible. We must get rid of life, get rid of the possibility of living, says Buddha.
And what these powerful minds have said, what millions on millions of men have thought and felt, has been thought and felt by me. Thus my wanderings over the fields of knowledge not only failed to cure me of my despair, but increased it. One branch of knowledge gave no answer at all to the problem of life. Another gave a direct answer which confirmed my despair, and showed that the state to which I had come was not the result of my going astray of any mental disorder, But on the contrary of my thinking rightly, of my being in agreement with the conclusions of the most powerful intellects among mankind, I could not be deceived. All was vanity, a misfortune to be born. Death was better than life, and life's burden must be got rid of.
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7 07 - Chapter 07 12:13
Having failed to find an explanation in knowledge, I began to seek it in life itself, hoping to find it in the men who surrounded me. And I began to watch men like myself, to observe how they lived, and how they practically treated the question which had brought me to despair. And this is what I found among those of the same social position and culture as myself. I found that for those who occupy the same position as myself, there were four means of escape from the terrible state in which we all were. The first means of escape is through ignorance. It consists in not perceiving and understanding that life is an evil and an absurdity. People of this class, for the greater part women, or men who are either very young or very stupid, have not understood the problem of life as it presented itself to Schopenhauer, to Solomon, and to Buddha.
They see neither the dragon awaiting them, nor the mice eating through the plant to which they cling, and they taste the drops of honey. But they only lick the honey for a time. Something directs their attention to the dragon and the mice, and there is an end to their tasting. From these I could learn nothing. We cannot unknow what we do know. The second means of escape is the Epicurean. It consists in, while we know the hopelessness of life, taking advantage of every good there is in it, in avoiding the sight of the dragon and mice, and in seeking the honey as best we can. Especially wherever there is most of it. Solomon points out this issue from the difficulty thus. Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun than to eat and to drink and to be merry.
For that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun. Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity, for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might, for there is no work nor device nor knowledge nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest. Such is the way in which most people, who belong to the circle in which I move, reconcile themselves to their fate and make living possible.
They know more of the good than the evil of life from the circumstances of their position, and their blunted moral perceptions enable them to forget that all their advantages are accidental, and that all men cannot have harems and palaces like Solomon, that for one man who has a thousand wives, There are thousands of men who have none, and for each palace there must be thousands of men to build it with the sweat of their brow, and that the same chance which has made me a Solomon to-day may make me Solomon's slave to-morrow. The dullness of their imagination enables these men to forget what destroyed the peace of Buddha, the inevitable sickness, old age and death, which, if not to-day, then to-morrow, must be the end of all their pleasures.
Thus think and feel the majority of the men of our time of the upper classes. That some of them call their dullness of thought and imagination by the name of positive philosophy does not, in my opinion, separate them from those who, in order not to see the real question, search for and lick the honey. I could not imitate such as these. My imagination not being blunted like theirs, I could not artificially prevent its action. Like every man who really lives, I could not turn my eyes aside from the mice and the dragon when I had once seen them. The third means of escape is through strength and energy of character. It consists in destroying life when we have perceived that it is an evil and an absurdity.
Only men of strong and unswerving character act thus. Understanding all the stupidity of the joke, that is played with us in understanding far better the happiness of the dead than of the living, they put an end at once to the parody of life, and bless any means of doing it—a rope round the neck, water, a knife in the heart, or a railway train. The number of those in my own class who thus act continually increases, and those who do this are generally in the prime of life, with their physical strength matured and unweakened, and with but few of the habits that undermine man's intellectual powers yet formed. I saw that this means of escape was the worthiest, and wished to make use of it. The fourth means of escape is through weakness.
It consists, though the evil and absurdity of life are well known, in continuing to drag on, though aware that nothing can come of it. People of this class of mind know that death is better than life. But have not the strength of character to act as their reason dictates, to have done with deceit and kill themselves. They seem to be waiting for something to happen. This way of escape is due solely to weakness. For if I know what is better, and it is within my reach, why not seize it? To this class of men I myself belonged. Thus do those of my own class, in four different ways, save themselves from a terrible contradiction. With the most earnest intellectual efforts, I could not find a fifth way.
One way is to ignore life's being a meaningless jumble of vanity and evil, not to know that it is better not to live. For me, not to know this was impossible, and when I once saw the truth, I could not shut my eyes to it. Another way is to make the best of life as it is without thinking of the future. This again I could not do. I, like Sakya Muni, Could not drive to the pleasure ground when I knew of the existence of old age, suffering, and death. My imagination was too lively for that. Moreover, my heart was ungladdened by the passing joys which fell for a few rare instants to my lot. The third way is knowing that life is an evil and a foolish thing, to put an end to it to kill oneself. I understood this, but still did not kill myself.
The fourth way is to accept life as described by Solomon and Schopenhauer, to know that it is a stupid and ridiculous joke, and yet live on, to wash, dress, dine, talk, and even write books. This position was painful and disgusting to me, but I remained in it. I now see that I did not kill myself, because I had, in a confused sort of way, an inkling that my ideas were wrong. However persuasive and unanswerable the idea, which I shared with the wisest on earth, that life has no meaning, appeared to me, I still felt a confused doubt in the truth of my conclusions, which formed itself thus. My reason tells me that life is contrary to reason. If there is nothing higher than reason, and there is nothing, reason is the creator of my life.
Were there no reason, there would be no life for me. How can it be that reason denies life, and is at the same time its creator? Again, from the other side, if there were no life, I should have no reason. Consequently, reason is born of life, and life is all. Reason is the product of life, and yet it denies life. I felt that something here was wrong. I said to myself, Life undoubtedly has no meaning, and is evil, but I have lived and am still alive. and so also have lived, and are living the whole human race. How is it, then? Why do all men live, when all men are able to die? Is it that I and Schopenhauer alone are wise enough to have understood the unmeaning emptiness and evil of life? To see the inanity of life is a simple matter enough.
And it has long been apparent to the simplest amongst us, but men still live on. Yes, Men still live on and never think of calling in question the reasonableness of life. My acquired knowledge, confirmed by the wisdom of the wisest of the world, showed me that everything on earth, organic or inorganic, was arranged with extraordinary wisdom, and that my own position alone was a foolish one. But all the same, the enormous masses of those fools, my fellow-men, know nothing of the organic or inorganic structure of the world, But live on, and it seems to them that their lives are subjected to perfectly reasonable conditions. Then I thought to myself, but what if there be something more for me to know?
Surely this is the way in which ignorance acts. Why, it always says exactly what I do now. What men are ignorant of, they say is stupid. It really comes to this, that mankind as a whole have always lived, and are living as if they understood the meaning of life, For not doing so, they could not live at all. And yet I say that all this life has no meaning in it, and that I cannot live. Nobody prevents our denial of life by suicide. But then kill yourself, and you will no longer argue about it. If you dislike life, kill yourself. If in your life you cannot find a reason for it, put an end to it, and do not go on talking and writing about being unable to understand life. You have got into a gay company in which all are well satisfied, all know what they are doing, and you alone are wearied and repelled.
Then get out of it. And after all, then, what are we, who, persuaded of the necessity of suicide, still cannot bring ourselves to the act, but weak, inconsistent men, to speak more plainly, stupid men, who carry about with them their stupidity, as the fool carries his name written upon his cap? Our wisdom, indeed, however firmly it be grounded on truth, has not imparted to us a knowledge of the meaning of life. Yet all the millions that share in the life of humanity do not doubt that life has a meaning. It is certainly true that from the far distant time, when that life began, of which even I know something, men lived, who, though they knew what proved to me that life had no meaning, The argument of its inanity still lived on, and gave to life a meaning of their own.
Since any sort of life began for men, they have had some conception of their own about it, and have so lived down to my own time. All that is in and around me, physical or immaterial, it is all the fruit of their knowledge of life. The very mental instruments which I have employed against that life, to condemn it, were fashioned not by me, but by them. I was born and bred, and have grown up thanks to them. They dug out the iron, taught how to hew down the forests, to tame the cows and the horses, to sow corn, to live one with another. They gave order and form to our life. Moreover, they taught me how to think and how to speak. And I, the work of their hands, their foster-child, the pupil of their thoughts and sayings, have proved to them they themselves had no meaning.
There must be something here, said I, that is wrong. I have made some mistake. I could not, however, discover where the mistake lay.
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8 08 - Chapter 08 6:34
All these doubts, which I am now able to express more or less clearly, I could not have then explained. I only felt that despite the logical certainty of my conclusions as to the inanity of life, And, confirmed as they were by the greatest thinkers, there was something wrong in them. Whether in the conclusion itself, or in the way of putting the question, I did not know. I only felt that, though my reason was entirely convinced, that was not enough. All my reasoning could not induce me to act in accordance with my convictions, that is, to kill myself. I should not speak the truth if I said that my reason alone brought me to the position in which I was. Reason had been at work, no doubt, but something else had worked, too, something which I can only call an instinctive consciousness of life.
There also worked in me a force which determined my attention to one thing rather than to another, and it was this that drew me out of my desperate position and completely changed the current of my thoughts. This force led me to the idea that I, with thousands of other men like me, did not form the whole of mankind, that I was still ignorant of what human life was. When I watched the restricted circle of those who were my equals in social position, I saw only people who did not understand the question, people who kept down their understanding of it by the excitement of life, people who understood it and put an end to life, and people who, understanding, lived on through weakness and despair. and I saw no others.
It seemed to me that the small circle of learned rich and idle people to which I myself belonged formed the whole of humanity, and that the millions living outside it were animals, not men. However strange, improbable and inconceivable, it now seems to me that I, reasoning about life, could overlook the life of mankind surrounding me on all sides, and fall into such an error as to think that the life of a solomon, a schopenhauer, and my own was alone real and fit, and the life lived by unconsidered millions, a circumstance unworthy of attention. However strange this appears to me now, I see that it was so then. Led away by intellectual pride, it seemed not to be doubted that I, with Solomon and Schopenhauer, had put the question so exactly and truly that there could be no other form of it.
It seemed unquestionable that all these millions of men had failed to conceive the depth of the question, that I had sought the meaning of my life. And it never once occurred to me to think, but what meaning has been given, what meaning is given now, by the millions of those who have lived and are living on Earth. I long lived in this state of mental aberration, which, though its theories are not always openly professed, is not the less common among those who are supposed to be the most learned and most liberal part of society. But whether, thanks to my strange kind of instinctive affection for the laboring classes, which impelled me to understand them, and to see that they are not so stupid as we think, or, thanks to the sincerity of my conviction, that I could know nothing beyond the advisability of hanging myself, I felt that if I wished to live and understand the meaning of life, I must seek it not amongst those who have lost their grasp on it and wish to kill themselves, but among the millions of the living and the dead.
who have made our life what it is, and on whom now rests the burden of our life and their own. So I watched the life common to such enormous numbers of the dead and the living, the life of simple, unlearned and poor men, and found something quite different. I saw that all these millions, with rare exceptions, did not come under any division of the classification which I had made. I could not count them among those who do not understand the question, Because they not only put it, but answer it very clearly. To count them among the Epicureans, I was also unable, because their life has far more of privation and suffering than of enjoyment. To count them amongst those who against their reason live through a life without meaning was still less possible, because every act of their lives, and death itself, is explained by them.
Self-murder they look upon as the greatest of evils. It appeared that throughout mankind there was a sense given to the meaning of life which I had neglected and despised. It came to this, that the knowledge based on reason denied a meaning to life, and declined to make it a subject of inquiry, while the meaning given by the millions that form the great whole of humanity was founded on a despised and fallacious knowledge. The knowledge based on reason, the knowledge of the learned and the wise, Denies a meaning in life. And the great mass of all the rest of mankind have an unreasoning consciousness of life which gives a meaning to it. This unreasoning knowledge is the faith which I could not but reject.
This is God, one and yet three. This is the creation in six days, the devils and the angels, and all that I cannot, while I keep my senses, understand. My position was a terrible one. I knew that from the knowledge which reason has given man, I could get nothing but the denial of life, and from faith, nothing but the denial of reason, which, last, was even more impossible than the denial of life. The result of the former was that life is an evil, and that men know it to be one, that men may cease to live if they will, but that they always go on living. I myself lived on, though I had long known that life had no sense nor good in it. The result of the latter was that in order to understand the meaning of life, I must abandon the guide without which there can be no meaning in anything, my reason itself.
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9 09 - Chapter 09 11:39
I was stopped by a contradiction which could only be explained in two ways. Either what I called reasonable was not so reasonable as I thought it, or what I called unreasonable was not so unreasonable as I thought it. I began by verifying the process of thinking, through which I had been led to the conclusions of reasoning knowledge. On doing this, I found the process complete without a flaw. The conclusion that life was nothing was inevitable, but I discovered a mistake. The mistake was that I had not confined my thoughts to the question proposed. The question was why should I live, that is, what of real and imperishable will come of my shadowy and perishable life, What meaning has my finite existence in the infinite universe?
And I had tried to answer this by studying life. It was evident that the decision of any number of questions concerning life could not satisfy me, because my question, however simple it seemed at first, including the necessity of explaining infinity by infinity and the contrary, I asked myself what meaning my life had, apart from time, causation and space. After long and earnest efforts of thinking, I could only answer, none at all. Through all my reasoning with myself, I constantly compared, and I could not do otherwise, the finite with the finite, and the infinite with the infinite, and the conclusion was consequently inevitable. A force is a force, matter is matter, will is will, infinity is infinity, nothing is nothing, and beyond that there was no result.
It was like what happens in mathematics, when instead of an equation to resolve, we get identical terms. The process of solution is correct, but our answer is A A, X X, or 0 0. This happened to me in my inquiries into the meaning of my life. The answers given by science to the question were all identity. Strict scientific inquiry, like that carried on by Descartes, begins undoubtedly with a doubt of everything. Throws aside all knowledge founded on belief, and reconstructs all in accordance with the laws of reason and experience, while it can give but one answer to the question about the meaning of life, the one which I myself obtained, an indefinite one. It seemed to me at first that science did give a positive answer, the answer of Schopenhauer.
Life has no meaning. It is an evil. But, when I inquired more closely into the matter, I perceived that the answer was not positive, that it was my own feeling alone made me think it so. The answer is expressed in the same terms, as is that of the Brahmins, of Solomon, and of Schopenhauer, and is only an indefinite one. The identity of zero and zero, life is nothing. This philosophical knowledge denies nothing, but answers that the question cannot be decided by it, That the matter remains indefinite. When I had come to this conclusion, I understood that it was useless to seek an answer to my question from scientific knowledge, because the latter only shows that no answer can be obtained till the question is put differently, till the question be made to include the relation between the finite and the infinite.
I also understood that however unreasonable and monstrous the answers given by faith, They do bring in the relation of the finite to the infinite. However the question, how am I to live, be foot? The same answer is obtained, by the law of God. Will anything real and positive come of my life, and what? Eternal torment or eternal bliss? Is there a meaning in this not to be destroyed by death, and if so, what? Union with an infinite God, Paradise? In this way, I was compelled to admit that besides the reasoning knowledge, which I once thought the only true knowledge, there was in every living man another kind of knowledge, an unreasoning one, but which gives a possibility of living, faith. All the unreasonableness of faith remained for me the same as ever.
But I could not but confess that faith alone gave man an answer as to the meaning of life, and the consequent possibility of living. When scientific reasoning brought me to the conclusion that my life had no meaning, life stood still in me, and I wished to end it. When I looked at the men around me, at humanity as a whole, I saw that men did live, and that they affirmed their knowledge as to the meaning of life. For other men, as for myself, faith gave a possibility of living and a meaning to life. On examining life in other countries than my own, as well among my contemporaries as among those who have passed away, I found it but one and the same. From the beginning of the human race, wherever there is life, there is the faith which makes life possible, and everywhere the leading characteristics of that faith are the same.
Whatever answers any kind of faith ever gives to anyone, Every one of these answers clothes with infinity the finite existence of man, gives a meaning to life which triumphs over suffering, privation and death. In faith, therefore, alone is found a possibility of living and a meaning in life. What is this faith? I understood that faith is not only the apprehension of things unseen, is not only a revelation, that is only a definition of one of the signs of faith, is not the relation of man to God. Faith must first be determined, and then God, and not faith through God, and is not, as it has so often been understood, acquiescence. Faith is the knowledge of the meaning of man's life, through which man does not destroy himself, but lives.
Faith is the force of life. If a man lives, he believes in something. If he did not believe that there was something to live for, he would not live. If he does not see and understand the unreality of the finite, he believes in the finite. If he sees that unreality, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith there is no life. I then went back upon all the past stages of my mental state and was terrified. It was now clear to me that for anyone to live, it was necessary for him either to be ignorant of infinity, Or to accept an explanation of the meaning of life which should equalise the finite and the infinite. Such an explanation I had, but I had no need of it while I believed in the finite, and I began to apply to my explanation the tests of reason, and in the light of the latter all former explanations were shown to be worthless.
But the time when I ceased to believe in the finite passed. And I tried to raise my mental structure on the foundation that I knew an explanation which gave a meaning to life, but I tried in vain. Like so many of the greatest minds of Earth, I came only to the conclusion that 0 equals 0, and though nothing else could have come of it, I was much astonished to have obtained such an answer to my problem. What did I do when I sought an answer in the study of experimental science? I wanted to know why I lived, and to that end I studied everything outside myself. Clearly in this way I might learn much, but nothing of that which I needed. What did I do when I sought an answer in the study of philosophy?
I studied the thoughts of others in the same position as myself, and who had no answer to the question, What is life? Clearly I could in this way learn nothing but what I myself knew, namely, that it was impossible to know anything. What am I? A part of the infinite whole. In those few words lay the whole problem. Could it be that men had only now begun to put this question to themselves? Could it be that no one before myself had asked this simple question, that must occur even to the mind of an intelligent child? Since man has been on earth, this question has to a certainty been put. And to a certainty it has been understood that the decision of this question is equally unsatisfactory, whether the finite be compared with the finite, and the infinite with the infinite, or the solution sought and expressed in the relation of the finite to the infinite.
All these conceptions of the equality of the finite and the infinite, through which we receive the ideas of life, of God, of freedom, of good, when we submit them to logical analysis, will not bear the tests of reason. If it were not so terrible, it would be laughable to think of the pride and self-confidence with which we, like children, pull out our watches, take away the spring, make a plaything of them, and are then astonished that they will no longer keep time. The decision of the contradiction between the finite and the infinite And such an answer to the question of what is life, as shall enable us to live, is wanted by and is dear to us. The only answer is the one to be found everywhere, always and among all nations.
An answer which has come down to us from the times in which the origin of human life is lost. An answer so difficult that we could never ourselves have come to it. This answer we, in our careless indifference, got rid of by again raising the question which presents itself to everyone, but which no one can answer. The conception of an infinite God, of the divinity of the soul, of the way in which the affairs of men are related to God, of the unity and reality of the spirit, man's conception of moral good and evil, these are conceptions worked out through the infinite mental labours of mankind. conceptions without which there would be no life, without which I should not myself exist, and yet I dared to reject the labours of the whole human race, and to venture on working out the problem again in my own way alone.
I did not at the time think so, but the germs of these thoughts were already within me. I understood, one, that the position assumed by Schopenhauer, Solomon, and myself, with all our wisdom, was a foolish one. We understand that life is an evil, and yet we live. This clearly is foolish, because if life is foolish, and I care so much for reason, life should be put an end to, and then there would be no one to deny it. Two. I understood that all our arguments turned in a charmed circle, like a cog-wheel, the teeth of which no longer catch in another. However much and however well we reason, we get no answer to our question. It will always be zero equals zero, and consequently our method is probably wrong.
3. I began to understand that in the answers given by faith was to be found the deepest source of human wisdom, that I had no reasonable right to reject them, and that they alone solved the problem of life.
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10 10 - Chapter 10 8:39
I understood what I have just stated, but my heart was none the lighter for it. I was now ready to accept any faith that did not require of me a direct denial of reason, for that would be to act a lie. And I studied the books of the Buddhists and the Mahometans, and especially also Christianity, both in its writings and in the lives of its professors around me. I naturally turned my attention at first to the believers in my own immediate circle, to learned men, to orthodox divines, to the elders among the monks, to the teachers of a new shade of doctrine, the so-called new Christians, who preach salvation through faith in a Redeemer. I seized upon these believers and demanded from them what they believed in, and what for them gave a meaning to life.
Notwithstanding that I made every possible concession, that I avoided all disputes, I could not accept the faith of these men. I saw that what they called their faith did not explain but obscure the meaning of life, and that they professed it, not in order to answer the question as to life which had attracted me towards faith, but for some other purpose to which I was a stranger. I remember how terribly I felt the return of the old feeling of despair, after the hopes with which my connection with these people had from time to time inspired me. The more minutely they laid their doctrines before me, the more clearly I perceived their error, the more I lost all hope of finding in their faith an explanation of the meaning of life.
I was not so much alienated by the unnecessary and unreasonable doctrines, which they had mingled with the Christian truths, always so dear to me, as by the fact that their lives were like my own, the only difference being that they did not live according to the doctrines which they professed. I felt that they deceived themselves, and that for them, as for myself, the only meaning of life was to live from hand to mouth, and take each for himself, all that his hands can lay hold on. I saw this because, had the ideas of life which they conceived done away with fear, privation, suffering, and death, they would not have feared them. But these believers of my own class, the same as I myself, lived in comfort and abundance, struggled to increase and preserve it, were afraid of privation, suffering, and death, and again, like myself and all other not true believers, satisfied the lusts of the flesh, and led lives as evil as, If not worse than those of infidels themselves.
No arguments were able to convince me of the sincerity of the faith of these men. Only actions proving their conception of life to have destroyed that fear of poverty, illness and death so strong in myself could have convinced me, and such actions among them I could not see. Such actions I saw, indeed, among the open infidels of my own class and life, but never among its so-called believers. I understood, then, that the faith of these men was not the faith which I sought, that it was no faith at all, but only an epicurean consolation. I understood that this faith, if it could not really console, could at least soothe the repentant mind of a Solomon on his death-bed, but that it could not serve the enormous majority of mankind, who are born not to be comforted by the labours of others, But to create a life for themselves.
For mankind to live, for it to continue to live and be conscious of the meaning of its life, all these millions must have another and a true conception of faith. It was not, then, that I, Solomon, and Schopenhauer had not killed ourselves, which convinced me that faith existed, but that these millions have lived and are now living, carrying along with them on the impulse of their life both Solomon and ourselves. I began to draw nearer to the believers among the poor, the simple and the ignorant, the pilgrims, the monks, the sectaries and the peasants. The doctrines of these men of the people, like those of the professed believers of my own class, were Christian. Here also much that was superstitious was mingled with the truths of Christianity, but with this difference, that the superstition of the believers of my own class was not needed by them.
and never influenced their lives beyond serving as a kind of epicurean distraction. While the superstition of the believing laboring class was so interwoven with their lives that it was impossible to conceive them without it, it was a necessary condition of their living at all. The whole life of the believers of my own class was in flat contradiction with their faith, and the whole life of the believers of the people was the confirmation of the meaning of life which their faith gave them. Thus I began to study the lives and the doctrines of the people, and the more I studied, the more I became convinced that a true faith was among them, that their faith was for them a necessary thing, and alone gave them a meaning in life and a possibility of living.
In direct opposition to what I saw in my own circle, the possibility of living without faith, and not one in a thousand who professed himself a believer. Amongst the people there was not in thousands a single unbeliever. In direct opposition to what I saw in my own circle, a whole life spent in idleness, amusement and dissatisfaction with life, I saw among the people whole lives passed in heavy labor and unrepining content. In direct opposition to what I saw in my own circle, Men resisting and indignant with the privations and sufferings of their lot, the people unhesitatingly and unresistingly accepting illness and sorrow, in the quiet and firm conviction that all was for the best. In contradiction to the theory that the less learned we are, the less we understand the meaning of life, and see in our sufferings and death but an evil joke, these men of the people live, suffer, and draw near to death, In quiet confidence, and oftenest with joy.
In contradiction to the fact that an easy death, without terror or despair, is a rare exception in my own class, a death which is uneasy, rebellious and sorrowful, is among the people the rarest exception of all. These men, deprived of all that for us and for Solomon makes the only good in life, experience the highest happiness, both in amount and kind. I looked more carefully and more widely around me. I studied the lives of the past and contemporary masses of humanity, and I saw that not two or three, not ten or a hundred, but thousands and millions had so understood the meaning of life that they were able both to live and to die. All these men, infinitely divided by manners, powers of mind, education and position, all alike in opposition to my ignorance, were well acquainted with the meaning of life and of death, quietly laboured, endured privation and suffering, lived and died, and saw in all this not a vain, but a good thing.
I began to grow attached to these men. The more I learned of their lives, the lives of the living and of the dead of whom I read and heard, the more I liked them, and the easier I felt it so to live. I lived in this way during two years, and then there came a change which had long been preparing in me, and the symptoms of which I had always dimly felt. The life of my own circle of rich and learned men not only became repulsive, but lost all meaning whatever. All our actions, our reasoning, our science and art, all appeared to me in a new light. I understood that it was all child's play, that it was useless to seek a meaning in it.
The life of the working classes, of the whole of mankind, of those that create life, appeared to me in its true significance. I understood that this was life itself, and that the meaning given to this life was a true one, and I accepted it.
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11 11 - Chapter 11 6:41
When I remembered how these very doctrines had repelled me, how senseless they had seemed when professed by men whose lives were spent in opposition to them, and how they had attracted me and seemed thoroughly reasonable when I saw men living in accordance with them, I understood why I had once rejected them and thought them unmeaning, why I now adopted them and thought them most reasonable. I understood that I had erred, and how I had erred. I had erred not so much through having thought incorrectly as through having lived ill. I understood that the truth had been hidden from me, not so much because I had erred in my reasoning as because I had led the exceptional life of an epicure bent on satisfying the lusts of the flesh.
I understood that my question as to what my life was, and the answer, an evil, were in accordance with the truth of things. The mistake lay in my having applied an answer which only concerned myself to life in general. I had asked what my own life was, and the answer was an evil and a thing without meaning. Exactly so. My life was but a long indulgence of my passions. It was a thing without meaning, an evil. And such an answer, therefore, referred only to my own life, and not to human life in general. I understood the truth, which I afterwards found in the Gospel, that men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every man that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.
I understood that, for the meaning of life to be understood, It was first necessary that life should be something more than an evil and unmeaning thing discovered by the light of reason. I understood why I had so long been near to without apprehending this self-evident truth, and that if we would judge and speak of the life of mankind, we must take that life as a whole, and not merely certain parasitic adjuncts to it. This truth was always a truth, as two times two equals four, but I had not accepted it, Because, besides acknowledging two times two equals four, I should have acknowledged that I was evil. It was of more importance to me to feel that I was good, more binding on me than to believe two times two equals four.
I loved good men, I hated myself, and I accepted truth. Now it was all clear to me. What if the executioner, who passes his life in torturing and cutting off heads, or a confirmed drunkard, asked himself the question, What is life? He could but get the same answer as a madman would give, who had shut himself up for life in a darkened chamber, and who believed that he would perish if he left it. And that answer could but be, life is a monstrous evil. The answer would be a true one, but only for the man who gave it. Here, then, was I such a madman? Were all of us rich, clever, idle men, mad like this? I understood at last that we were, that I, at any rate, was. Look at the birds. They live but to fly, to pick up their food, to build their nests.
And when I see them doing this, their gladness rejoices me. The goat, the hare, the wolf live but to feed and multiply and bring up their young. And when I see them doing this, I am well convinced of their happiness, and that their life is a reasonable one. What then should man do? He also must gain his living like the animals, but with this difference, that he will perish if he attempt it alone. He must labour not for himself, but for all. And when he does so, I am firmly convinced he is happy and his life is a reasonable one. What had I done during my thirty years of conscious life? I had not only not helped the life of others, I had done nothing for my own. I had lived the life of a parasite, and contented myself with my ignorance of the reason why I lived at all.
If the meaning of the life of man lies in his having to work out his life himself, How could I, who during thirty years had done my best to ruin my own life and that of others, expect to receive any other answer to my questioning of life but this, that my life was an evil and had no meaning in it? It was an evil. It was without meaning. The life of the world goes on through the will of someone. Someone makes our own life and that of the universe his own inscrutable care. To have a hope of understanding what that will means, we must first carry it out. We must do what is required of us. Unless I do what is required of me, I can never know what that may be, and much less know what is required of us all and of the whole universe.
If a naked, hungry beggar be taken from the crossroads into an enclosed space in a splendid establishment, to be well clothed and fed, and made to work a handle up and down, It is evident that the beggar, before seeking to know why he has been taken, why he must work the handle, whether the arrangements of the establishment are reasonable or not, must first do as he has directed. If he do so, he will find that the handle works a pump, the pump draws up water, and the water flows into numerous channels for watering the earth. He will then be taken from the well and set to other work. He will gather fruits and enter into the joy of his lord. As he passes from less to more important labours, he will understand better and better the arrangements of the whole establishment, and he will take his share in them without once stopping to ask why he is there, nor will he ever think of reproaching the lord of that place.
And thus it is with those that do the will of their master. No reproaches come from simple and ignorant workingmen, from those whom we look upon as brutes. But we, the while, wise men that we are, devour the goods of the master, and do nothing of that which he wills us to do, but instead seat ourselves in a circle to argue why we should move the handle, for that seems to us stupid. And when we have thought it all out, what is our conclusion? Why, that the master is stupid, or that there is none, while we ourselves are wise, only we feel that we are fit for nothing, and that we must somehow or other get rid of ourselves.
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12 12 - Chapter 12 10:43
Chapter Twelve My Conviction of the error into which all knowledge based on reason must fall assisted me in freeing myself from the seductions of idle reasoning. The conviction that a knowledge of truth can only be gained by living led me to doubt the justness of my own life. But I had only to get out of my own particular groove and look around me to observe the simple life of the real working class, to understand that such a life was the only real one. I understood that, if I wished to understand life and its meaning, I must live not the life of a parasite but a real life, and, accepting the meaning given to it by the combined lives of those that really form the great human whole, Submit it to a close examination.
At the time I am speaking of, the following was my position. During the whole of that year, when I was constantly asking myself whether I should or should not put an end to it all with a cord or a pistol, during the time that my mind was occupied with the thoughts which I have described, my heart was oppressed by a tormenting feeling, which I cannot describe otherwise than as a searching after God. This search after a god was not an act of my reason, but a feeling. And I say this advisedly because it was opposed to my way of thinking. It came from the heart. It was a feeling of dread, or orphanhood, of isolation, amid things all apart from me, and of hope in a help I knew not from whom. Though it was well convinced of the impossibility of proving the existence of god, Kant had shown me, and I had thoroughly grasped his reasoning that this did not admit of proof.
I still sought to find a god, still hoped to do so, and still, from the force of former habits, address myself to one in prayer. Him whom I sought, however, I did not find. At times I went over in my mind the arguments of Kant and of Schopenhauer, showing the impossibility of proving the existence of the deity. At times I began to refute their reasoning. I would say to myself that causation is not in the same category as thought and space and time. If I am, there is a cause of my being, and that the cause of all causes. That cause of all things is what is called God. And I dwelt upon this idea, and strove with all the force that was in me, to reach a consciousness of the presence of this cause.
No sooner was I conscious of a power over me than I felt a possibility of living. Then I asked myself, What is this cause, this power? How am I to think of it? What is my relation to what I call God? And only the old familiar answer came into my mind. He is the Creator, the Giver of all. This answer did not satisfy me, and I felt that the staff of life failed me. I fell into great fear, and began to pray to him whom I sought that he would help me. But the more I prayed, the clearer it became that I was not heard, that there was no one to whom to pray. With despair in my heart that there was no God, I cried, Lord, have mercy on me and save. O Lord, my God, teach me. But no one had mercy on me, and I felt that life stood still within me.
Again and again, however, the conviction came back to me that I could not have appeared on earth without any motive or meaning, that I could not be such a fledgling dropped from a nest, As I felt myself to be. What if I wail, as the fallen fledgling does, on its back in the grass? It is because I know that a mother bore me, cared for me, fed me, and loved me. Where is that mother? If I have been thrown out, then who threw me? I cannot but see that someone who loved me brought me into being. Who is that someone? Again the same answer, God. He knows and sees my search, my despair, my struggle. He is, I said to myself. I had only to admit that for an instant to feel that life re-arose in me, to feel the possibility of existing and the joy of it.
Then again, from the conviction of the existence of God, I passed to the consideration of our relation towards Him. And again I had before me the Triune God, our Creator, who sent His Son, the Redeemer. Again I felt this to be a thing apart from me and from the world. This God melted as ice melts from before my eyes. Again there was nothing left. Again the source of life dried up. I fell once more into despair, and felt that I had nothing to do but to kill myself, while, worst of all, I felt also that I should never do it. I went through these changes of conviction and mood, not once, not twice, but hundreds of times. Now joy and excitement, now despair from the knowledge of the impossibility of life.
I remember one day in the early springtime I was listening to the sounds of a wood, and thinking only of one thing, the same of which I had constantly thought for two years. I was again seeking for a god. I said to myself, It is well. There is no god. There is none that has a reality apart from my own imaginings, none as real as my own self. There is none such. Nothing. No miracles can prove there is, for miracles only exist in my own unreasonable imagination. Then I asked myself, but my conception of the God whom I seek, whence comes it? And again life flashed joyously through my veins. All around me seemed to revive, to have a new meaning. My joy, though, did not last long, for reason continued its work.
The conception of God is not God. Conception is what goes on within myself. The conception of God is an idea which I am able to rouse in my mind or not, as I choose. It is not what I seek, something without which life could not be. Then again all seemed to die around and within me, and again I wished to kill myself. After this I began to retrace the process which had gone on within myself, the hundred times repeated discouragement and revival. I remembered that I had lived only when I believed in a God. As it was before, so it was now. I had only to know God, and I lived. I had only to forget Him, not to believe in Him, and I died. What was this discouragement and revival? I do not live when I lose faith in the existence of a God.
I should long ago have killed myself, if I had not had a dim hope of finding Him. I only really live when I feel and seek Him. What more, then, do I seek? A voice seemed to cry within me, This is He, He without whom there is no life. To know God and to live are one. God is life. Live to seek God, and life will not be without Him. And stronger than ever rose up life within and around me, and the light that then shone never left me again. Thus I was saved from self-murder. When and how this change in me took place I could not say. As gradually, imperceptibly as life had decayed in me, till I reached the impossibility of living, till life stood still and I longed to kill myself, so gradually and imperceptibly I felt the glow and strength of life return to me.
It was strange, but this feeling of the glow of life was no new sensation. It was old enough, for I had been led away by it in the earlier part of my life. I returned, as it were, to the past, to childhood and my youth. I returned to faith in that will which brought me into being, and which required something of me. I returned to the belief that the one single aim of life should be to become better, that is, to live in accordance with that will. I returned to the idea that the expression of that will was to be found in what, in the dim obscurity of the past, the great human unity had fashioned for its own guidance. In other words, I returned to a belief in God, in moral perfectibility, and in the tradition which gives a meaning to life.
The difference was that formerly I had unconsciously accepted this, whereas now I knew that without it I could not live. The state of mind in which I then was may be likened to the following. It was as if I had suddenly found myself sitting in a boat which had been pushed off from some shore unknown to me, had been shown the direction of the opposite shore, had had oars given me, and had been left alone. I use the oars as best I can, and row on, but the farther I go towards the centre, the stronger becomes the current which carries me out of my course, and the oftener I meet other navigators like myself carried away by the stream. There are here and there solitary sailors who row hard. There are others who have thrown down their oars, There are large boats and enormous ships crowded with men.
Some struggle against the stream, others glide on with it. The farther I get, the more, as I watch the long line floating down the current, I forget the course pointed out to me as my own. In the very middle of the stream, beset by the crowd of boats and vessels, and carried like them along, I forget altogether in what direction I started and abandoned my oars. From all sides, the joyful and exulting navigators, as they row or sail downstream, with one voice cry out to me that there can be no other direction. I believe them and let myself go with them. I am carried far, so far that I hear the roar of the rapids in which I must perish, and I already see boats that have been broken up within them.
Then I come to myself. It is long before I clearly comprehend what has happened. I see before me nothing but destruction. I am hurrying towards it. What, then, must I do? On looking back, however, I perceive a countless multitude of boats engaged in a ceaseless struggle against the force of the torrent. And then I remember all about the shore, the oars and the course, and all at once I begin to row hard up the stream, and again towards the shore. The shore is God, the course tradition, the ores are the free will given me to make for the shore, to seek union with the deity. And thus the vital force was renewed in me, and I began again to live.
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13 13 - Chapter 13 8:28
I renounced the life of my own class, for I had come to confess that it was not a real life, only the semblance of one, that its superfluous luxury prevented the possibility of understanding life, and that in order to do so I must know not an exceptional parasitic life, but the simple life of the working classes, the life which fashions that of the world and gives it the meaning which the working classes accept. The simple laboring men around me were the Russian people, and I turned to this people and to the meaning which it gives to life. This meaning may perhaps be expressed as follows. We have all of us come on earth by the will of God. And God has so created man that each of us is able to ruin or to save his soul.
The problem of man's life being to save his soul, he must live after God's Word. To live after God's Word, he must renounce all the pleasures of life, labor, be humble, endure, and be charitable to all men. This to the people is the meaning of the whole system of faith. as it has come down to them through, and is now given them by, the pastors of their church and the traditions which exist among them. This meaning was clear to me, and dear to my heart. This popular faith, however, among the non-sectarian communities in which I moved, was inextricably bound up with something else so incapable of being explained that it repelled me. I mean the sacraments of the church, the fasts and the bowing before relics and images, The people were unable to separate these things, and no more could I.
Though many things belonging to the faith of the people appeared strange to me, I accepted everything. I attended the church services, prayed morning and evening, fasted, prepared for the communion, and while doing all this, for the first time felt that my reason found nothing to object to. What had formerly seemed to me impossible now roused not the slightest opposition in me. The position which I occupied with relation to questions of faith had become quite different to what it once was. Formerly, life itself had seemed to me full of meaning, and faith an arbitrary assertion of certain useless and unreasonable propositions which had no direct bearing on life. I had tried to find out their meaning, and once convinced they had none, had thrown them aside.
Now, on the contrary, I knew for certain that my life had not and could not have any meaning, and that the propositions of faith not only appeared no longer useless to me, but had been shown beyond dispute by my own experience to be that which alone gave a meaning to life. Formerly, I looked upon them as a worthless, illegible scrawl. Now, I did not understand them, but knew that they had a meaning, and resolved to find it out. I reasoned thus. Faith springs, like man and his reason, from the mysterious first cause. That cause is God, in whom begin the body and the mind of man. As my body proceeded through successive gradations from God to me, so have my reason and my conception of life proceeded from Him, and consequently the steps of this process of development cannot be false.
All that men sincerely believe in must be true. It may be differently expressed, but it cannot be a lie, and consequently, if it seemed to me a lie, that must be because I do not understand it. Again, I said to myself, the true office of faith is to give a meaning to life which death cannot destroy. It is only natural that for faith to give an answer to the question of the king dying amid every luxury, of the old and labour-worn slave, of the unthinking child, of the aged sage, of the half-witted old woman, of the happy girl full of the strong passions of youth, of all of both sexes under all possible differences of position and education. It is only natural that, if there be but one answer to the one eternally repeated question, Why do I live, and what will come of my life, the answer, though one and the same in reality, should be infinitely varied in its form.
that, in exact proportion to its unvarying unity, to its truth and its depth, it should appear strange, and even monstrous, in the attempts to find due expression which are owing to the bringing-up and the social state of each individual answerer. But this reasoning, which justified the oddities of the ritual side of faith, was insufficient to make me feel that I had a right, in a matter like faith, now become the one business of my life, To take part in acts of which I still am doubtful. I ardently desired to be one with the people, and conformed to the rites which they practiced, but I could not do it. I felt that I should lie to myself and mock what I held most sacred if I did this thing. At this point, our new Russian theologians came to my assistance.
According to the explanation of these divines, the fundamental dogma of faith is the infallibility of the church. From the acceptance of this dogma follows, as a necessary consequence, the truth of all that is taught by the church. The church, as the assembly of believers united in love, and consequently possessing true knowledge, becomes the foundation of my faith. I argued that the truth which is in God cannot be attained by any one man. It can only be reached by the union of all men through love. In order to attain the truth, we must not go each his own way, And, to avoid division, we must have love one to the other, and bear with things which we do not agree with. Truth is revealed in love, and therefore if we do not obey the ordinances of the church, we destroy love, and make it impossible for us to know truth.
At the time I did not perceive the sophism involved in this reasoning. I did not then see that union through love may develop love to the highest degree, but can never give the truth that comes from God, As stated in the words of the Nicene Creed, that love can never make any particular form of creed binding on all believers. I did not then see error in this reasoning, and thanks to it, I was able to accept and practice all the rites of the Orthodox Church, but without understanding the greater part of them. I struggled earnestly to set aside all reasoning, all contradictions, and endeavored to explain as reasonably as I could all the doctrines of the Church, which presented any difficulty. While thus fulfilling the ordinances of the church, I submitted my reason to the tradition adopted by the mass of my fellow-men.
I united myself to my ancestors, to my beloved father, mother, and grandparents. They, and all before them, lived and believed and brought me into being. I joined the millions of the people whom I loved. Moreover, there was nothing bad in all this, for bad with me meant the indulgence of the lusts of the flesh. When I got up early to attend divine service, I knew that I did well, were it only because, for the sake of a closer union with my ancestors and contemporaries, I tamed my intellectual pride, and, in order to seek for a meaning in life, sacrificed my bodily comfort. It was the same with preparing for the communion, the daily reading of prayers, the bowing to the ground, and the observance of all the fasts.
However insignificant the sacrifices were, They were made in a good cause. I prepared for the communion, fasted, and observed regular hours for prayer, both at home and at church. While listening to the church service, I weighed every word, and gave it a meaning whenever I could. At Mass, the words which appeared to me to have most importance were the following, Let us love one another in unity. What follows, the confession of belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I passed over because I could not understand it.
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14 14 - Chapter 14 6:30
It was so necessary for me at that time to believe in order to live that I unconsciously concealed from myself the contradictions and the obscurities in the commonly received doctrines, This interpretation of the sense of the ritual had, however, its limits. Though the leading points of the liturgy became clearer and clearer to me, though I gave a kind of meaning to such expressions as, remembering our Sovereign Lady, the Most Holy Mother of God, and all the saints, let us devote ourselves each other and our whole lives to the Christ God, though I explained the frequent repetition of prayers for the Emperor and his family by the fact that they were more exposed to temptation than others, and were therefore more in need of prayer, and the prayers for victory over our enemies and opponents to mean victory over the principle of evil, nevertheless the hymn of the cherubim, the preparation of the bread and wine, the adoration of the Virgin, in short two-thirds of the whole service, either remained for me without an explanation at all, or made me feel that the only one I could apply to them was false.
While to lie was to break off my connection with God, and lose utterly the possibility of believing. I felt the same at the celebration of the principal church holidays. I could understand the seventh day, the consecration of a day to communion with God. The great holiday, however, was in remembrance of the resurrection, the reality of which I could neither imagine nor understand. It was this which gave a name to the holiday in each week, to the Sunday, to the day on which the sacrament of the Eucharist was given, A mystery which to me was utterly inconceivable. The other twelve holidays, with the exception of Christmas, were all in remembrance of miracles, which I tried not to think of in order not to deny.
The Ascension, Pentecost, Epiphany, the Intercession of the Virgin, and so on. On these holidays I felt that the greatest importance was given to what I believed to be of the least, and I either held fast to the explanation which quieted me most, Or else shut my eyes so as not to see what disquieted me. This feeling came upon me strongest whenever I took part in the most ordinary and generally considered the most important sacraments, as Christening and the Holy Communion. Here I had to do with nothing difficult, but with what was easy to be understood. Such acts appeared to me a delusion, and I was on the horns of a dilemma, to lie or to reject. I shall never forget the painful feeling I experienced, When I took the communion for the first time, after many years, the service, the confession, the prayers, all this was understood by me, and produced the glad conviction that the meaning of life lay open to me.
The communion I explained to myself as an action done in remembrance of Christ, and as signifying a cleansing from sin and a complete acceptance of Christ's teaching. If this explanation was an artificial one, I at least did not perceive it. It was such happiness for me to humble myself with a quiet heart before the priest, a simple and mild old man, and repenting of my sins, to lay bare all the past troubles of my soul. It was such happiness to be united in spirit with the meek fathers of the church who composed these prayers, such happiness to be one with all who have believed and who do believe, that I could not feel my explanation was an artificial one. But when I drew near to the altar, and the priest called upon me to repeat that I believed that what I was about to swallow was the real body and blood, I felt a sharp pain at the heart.
It was no unconsidered word. It was the hard demand of one who could never have known what faith was. I now allow myself to say that it was a hard demand, but then I did not think so. It was only exquisitely painful. I no longer thought, as I had done in my youth, That all was clear in life. I had been drawn towards faith, because outside it I had found nothing but ruin. And as therefore I could not throw faith aside, I had believed and submitted. I had found in my heart a feeling of humility and meekness which had helped me to do this. I humbled myself again. I swallowed the blood in the body without any mocking thoughts and the wish to believe. But the shock had been given. And knowing what awaited me another time, I could never go again.
I still continued an exact observance of the rites of the church, and I still believed that the doctrines I followed were true. And then there happened to me a thing which now is clear enough, but which then appeared to me very strange. I once listened to the discourse of an unlettered peasant pilgrim. He spoke of God, of faith, of life, and of salvation, And a knowledge of what faith was seemed open to me. I went amongst the people, familiarising myself with their ideas of life and faith, and the truth became clearer and clearer to me. It was the same when I read the Martyrology and Prologues. They became my favourite books. With the exception of the Miracles, and looking upon these as fables to bring out forcibly the thought, the reading of these books revealed to me the meaning of life, There I found the lives of Macarius the Great, of Tosaf the Prince, the story of Buddha, the discourses of St.
Chrysostom, the story of the traveler in the well, of the monk who found gold, of Peter the Publican. This is the history of the martyrs, of those who have all testified the same, that life does not end with death. Here we have the story of unlettered foolish men, who knew nothing of the doctrines of the Church. But no sooner did I mix with learned believers or consult their books than doubts, uneasiness, and the bitterness of dispute came over me, and I felt that the more I studied their discourses, the more I wandered from the truth, the nearer I came to the precipice.
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15 15 - Chapter 15 9:15
How often have I not envied the peasant, unable to read or write his lack of learning. The very doctrines of faith, which to me were nonsense, contained for him nothing that was false. He was able to accept them and to believe in truth the same truth in which I believed, while to me, unhappy one, it was clear that truth was connected with falsehood by the finest threads of difference, and that I could not receive it in such a form. In this condition I lived for three years, and when I first, like a new convert, little by little drew nearer to truth, and, led by an instinct, groped my way to the light, these obstacles seemed to me less formidable. When I failed to understand anything, I said, I am wrong, I am wicked.
But the more I became imbued with the spirit of the truths which I studied, the more surely I saw them to be the substratum of life. The greater and more formidable became the obstacles, the more clearly defined the line which I was unable to understand, and of which I could only seek an explanation through lying unto myself. Notwithstanding all my doubts and sufferings, I still remained in the Orthodox Church. But practical questions arose which required immediate decision, and the decisions of the Church, contrary to the elementary principles of the faith by which I lived, compelled me finally to abandon all communion with it. The questions were, in the first place, the relation of the Orthodox Church to other churches, to Catholicism and the so-called sectaries.
The interest which I took in this great question of faith led me at this time to form acquaintances with the professors of different creeds, Catholics, Protestants, old believers, new dissenters, and others. And among them I found many who sincerely believed and obeyed the highest moral standard. I desired to be a brother to these men, and what came of it. The doctrines which had seemed to promise me the union of all men in faith and love, in the persons of their best representatives, Showed themselves but capable of educating men in a lie. Resulted but in this, that which gave them strength to live is a temptation of the devil, the belief that they alone possessed the possibility of knowing truth.
And I saw that the members of the Orthodox Church consider all those who do not profess the same faith as themselves to be heretics, exactly as Catholics and others account our orthodoxy to be heresy. I saw that all consider others who did not adopt the same outward symbols and the same formulas of faith as themselves as their enemies. The Orthodox Church does this, though she tries to conceal it. And it must be so in the first place, because the assertion that you live a lie and I am in the truth is the hardest thing that one man can say to another. In the second place, because a man who loves his children and his relations cannot but feel at enmity with those who desire to convert them to another faith.
Moreover, this enmity increases as men learn more of the particular doctrines which they adopt. Thus I, who had believed faith was to be found in the union of love, was unwillingly forced to see that the doctrines of faith destroy the very thing which they should produce. This snare is so evident to men living like ourselves in countries where different faiths are professed And witnessing the contempt and self-confidence with which the Catholic absolutely rejects Protestantism and Orthodoxy, repaid by the scorn of the Orthodox for the Catholic and the Protestant, and that of the latter for both the others, while the same relation of enmity includes the old believers, the revivalists, the shakers, and all other creeds, that at first it perplexes us.
We say to ourselves, No, it cannot be so simple as that. And yet these men have not seen that when two propositions flatly contradict each other, the truth on which faith should rest is in neither. There must be some cause for this, there must be some explanation. I myself thought there was, and sought for it. I read everything I could get on the subject, and consulted with as many as I could. But the only explanation I obtained was that of the Hussar, who accounts his regiment, the first in the world, While his friend, the Lancer, says the same of his own. The clergy of all religions, the best among them, all told me of their belief that they alone were right and all others wrong, and that all they could do for those who were in error was to pray for them.
I went to the Archimandrites, the Arch-Prelates, the Priors and the monks, and asked them, but no one made the slightest attempt to explain this snare to me but one, and his explanation was such that I put no more questions to anyone. I said that for every unbeliever who returns to belief, in which category I place the whole of the present young generation, the principal question is, why is truth to be found in the Orthodox Church, and not in the Lutheran nor the Catholic one? He is taught in his gymnasium, and he cannot but know what the peasant is ignorant of, that Protestants and Catholics equally affirm their own faith to be the only true one. Historical proofs, twisted by each party to serve their own purpose, are insufficient.
Is it not possible, as I have already said, for a higher knowledge to issue from the disappearance of these differences, as they do already disappear for those who sincerely believe? Can we not go farther on our way to meet the old believers? They affirm that our way of signing the cross, of singing Hallelujah, and of moving round the altar, is not the same as theirs. We say, you believe in the Nicene Creed, in all the sacraments, and we also believe. Let us add, keep to that, and for the rest do as you will. We shall then be united to them by this, that we both place the essential points of faith above the unessential. Again, can we not say to Catholics, you believe in certain things which are essential, and for what concerns the dispute about the procession of the Trinity and the Pope, do as you please?
Can we not say, the same to the Protestant, and unite with him in what is really important. My fellow-disputant agreed with me, but added that such concessions draw down the reproach that the clergy have receded from the faith of their forefathers and favoured dissent, while the office of those in authority in the church is to preserve the purity of the Russian-Greek Orthodox faith as handed down from our ancestors. Then I understood it all. I am in search of faith, the staff and strength of life, While these men seek the best means of fulfilling in the sight of men certain human obligations, and having to deal with earthly affairs, they fulfill them as ordinary men ever do. However much they may talk of their pity for the errors of their brethren, of praying for them at the throne of the Most High, for earthly affairs force is needed, and force always has been, is, and will be applied.
If two religious sects each believe that truth resides in themselves, and that the faith of the other is a lie, they will preach their doctrines in the hope of converting their brethren to the truth, and, if false doctrines are taught to the inexperienced sons of the church who still tread in the ways of truth, she cannot but burn the books and banish the men who seduce her sons. What can be done with the sectaries who, in their enthusiasm for a faith which the church pronounces false, seduce her sons? What can be done with them but to cut off their heads or imprison them? In the time of Alexei Mikhailovich, men were burnt at the stake. In other words, the severest punishment of the time was applied, and in our days also the severest punishment is applied.
Men are condemned to solitary confinement. When I looked around me at all that was done in the name of religion, I was horrified, and almost entirely withdrew from the Orthodox Church. The second point which concerned the relations of the church to the problems of life was her connection with war and executions. It was the time of the war in Russia. Russians slew their brethren in the name of Christian love. Not to think of this was impossible. Not to see that murder is an evil, contrary to the very first principles of every faith, was impossible. In the churches, however, men prayed for the success of our arms, and the teachers of religion accepted these murders as acts which were the consequence of faith.
Not only murder in actual warfare was approved, but, during the troubles which ensued, the authorities of the church, her teachers, monks and ascetics, approved the murder of erring and helpless youths. I looked round on all that was done by men who professed to be Christians, and I was horrified.
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16 16 - Chapter 16 9:00
I ceased from this time to doubt, and became firmly convinced that all was not truth in the faith which I had joined. Formerly I should have said that all that in this faith was false, but now it was impossible to say so. that the men of the people had a knowledge of truth was incontestable, for otherwise they could not live. Moreover, this knowledge of truth was open to me. I already lived by it and felt all its force, but in that same knowledge there was also error. Of that again I could not doubt. All, however, that had formerly repelled me now presented itself in a vivid light. Although I saw that there was less of what had repelled me as false, among the people, then among the representatives of the church, I also saw that in the belief of the people what was false was mingled with what was true.
Whence, then, came this truth and this falsehood? Both the falsehood and the truth came to them from what is called the church. Both are included in the so-called sacred traditions and writings. I was thus, whether I would or not, brought to the study and analysis of these writings and traditions, a study which up to that time I had feared, And I turned to the study of theology, which I had once thrown aside with contempt as useless. Then theology had seemed to me but profitless, trifling with nonsense, for I was surrounded by the phenomena of life, and I thought them clear and full of meaning. Now I should have been glad to throw off ideas unsuited to a healthy state of mind, but I could not.
On this doctrinal basis was founded, or at least with it was very intimately bound up, the only explanation of the meaning of the life I had so lately discovered. However strange it might seem to my worn but practised intellect, it was the only hope of salvation. To be understood, it must be cautiously and carefully examined. Even though the result might not be the certain knowledge of science, which, aware as I was of the special character of religious inquiry, I did not and could not seek to obtain. I would not attempt to explain everything. I knew that the explanation of the whole, like the beginning of all things, was hidden in infinity. I wished to be brought to the inevitable limit where the incomprehensible begins.
I wished that what remained uncomprehended should be so, not because the mental impulse to inquiry was not just and natural, all such impulses are, and without them I could understand nothing, but because I had learned the limits of my own mind. I wished to understand so that every unexplained proposition should appear to my reason necessarily unexplainable, and not an obligatory part of belief. I never doubted that the doctrines contained both truth and falsehood, and I was bound to separate the one from the other. I began to do this. What I found of false and of true, and to what results I came, forms the second part of this work. My religion, which, if it be thought worthwhile, and if it can be useful to anyone, will probably be some day published.
The above was written by me three years ago. The other day, on looking over this part again, on returning to the succession of ideas and feelings through which I had passed while writing it, I saw a dream. This dream repeated for me in a condensed form all that I had lived through and described. And I therefore think that a description of it may, for those who have understood me, serve to render clearer, to refresh the remembrance of, and to collect into one whole, all that has been described at so much length in these pages. The dream was as follows. I am lying on my back in bed, and I feel neither particularly well and comfortable, nor the contrary. I begin to think whether it is well for me to lie, and something makes me feel uncomfortable in the legs.
If the bed be too short or ill-made, I know not, but something is not right. I move my legs about, and at the same time begin to think how and on what I am lying, a thing which previously had never troubled me. I examine the bed, and see that I am lying on a network of cords fastened to the sides of the bedstead. My heels lie on one of these cords, my legs on another, and this is uncomfortable. I am somehow aware that the cords can be moved, and with my legs I push the cord away, and it seems to me that thus it will be easier. But I had pushed the cord too far. I try to catch it with my legs, but this movement causes another cord to slip from under me, and my legs hang down. I move my body to get right again, convinced that it will be easy, but this movement causes other cords to slip and change their places beneath me.
And I perceive that my position is altogether worse. My whole body sinks and hangs without my legs touching the ground. I hold myself up only by the upper part of the back, and I feel now not only discomfort, but horror. I now begin to ask myself what I had not thought of before. I ask myself where I am and on what I am lying. I begin to look round, and first I look below, to the place towards which my body sank, and where I feel it must soon fall. I look below, and I cannot believe my eyes. I am on a height, far above that of the highest tower or mountain, a height beyond all my previous powers of conception. I cannot even make out whether I see anything or not below me, in the depths of that bottomless abyss over which I am hanging, and into which I feel drawn.
My heart ceases to beat, and horror fills my mind. To look down is too terrible. I feel that if I look down, I shall slip from the last chord and perish. I stop looking, but not to look is still worse, for then I think of what will at once happen to me when the last chord breaks. I feel that I am losing in my terror the last remnant of my strength, and that my back is gradually sinking lower and lower. Another instant, and I shall fall. Then all at once came into my mind the thought that it could not be true, that it was a dream. I will awake. I strive to wake myself and cannot. What can I do, I ask myself, and as I put the question, I look above. Above stretches another gulf. I look into this and try to forget the abyss below, and I do forget.
The infinite depth repels and horrifies me. The infinite height attracts and satisfies me. I still hang on the last chords which have not yet slipped from under me over the precipice. I know that I am hanging thus, but I look only upwards, and my fear leaves me. As happens in dreams, I hear a voice saying, Look well, it is there. I pierce farther and farther into the infinity above, and I feel that it calms me. I remember all that has happened, how I moved my legs, how I was left hanging in air, how I was terrified, and how I was saved from my fears by looking above. I ask myself, And now, am I not hanging still? and I feel in all my limbs, without looking, the support by which I am held. I perceive that I no longer hang nor fall, but have a fast hold.
I question myself how it is that I hold on. I touch myself, I look around, and I see that under the middle of my body there passes a stay, and on looking up I find that I am lying perfectly balanced, and that it was this stay alone that held me up before. As it happens in dreams, The mechanism by which I am supported appears perfectly natural to me, a thing to be easily understood and not to be doubted, although this mechanism has no apparent sense when I am awake. In my sleep I was even astonished that I had not understood this before. At my bedside stands a pillar, the solidity of which is beyond doubt, though there is nothing for it to stand upon. From this pillar runs a cord, somehow cunningly and simply fixed, and if I lie across this cord and look upwards, there cannot be even a question of my falling.
All this was clear to me, and I was glad and easy in my mind. It seemed as if someone said to me, See that you remember, and I awoke. Leo N. Tolstoy, 1882. End of chapter 16. Recording by expatriate in Bangor, Maine. End of my confession by Leo Tolstoy