NOTHING is more irritating than those works which “coordinate” the luxuriant products of a mind that has focused on just about everything except a system. What is the use of giving a so-called coherence to Nietzsche’s ideas, for example, on the pretext that they revolve around a central motif? Nietzsche is a sum of attitudes, and it only diminishes him to comb his work for a will to order, a thirst for unity. A captive of his moods, he has recorded their variations. His philosophy, a meditation on his whims, is mistakenly searched by the scholars for the constants it rejects.
The obsession with a system is no less suspect when it is applied to the study of the mystics. It will do, possibly, in the case of a Meister Eckhart, who took the trouble to discipline his thought: was he not a preacher? A sermon, however inspired, partakes of the course, sets forth a thesis, and labors to reveal its cogency. But what can we say of an Angelus Silesius, whose distichs readily contradict one another and possess only one theme in common: God—presented in so many aspects that it is difficult to identify the true one? The Cherubic Wanderer, a series of irreconcilable remarks, a splendor of confusion, expresses only the strictly subjective states of its author: to try to detect its unity, its system, is to spoil its capacities for seduction. Angelus Si-lesius is preoccupied less with God than with his own god. A host of poetical insanities are the consequence, which must bewilder the scholar and appall the theologian. But such is not the case. Both do their utmost to put these remarks in some kind of order, to simplify them, to compress them into some specific idea. Maniacs of rigor, they try to find out what their author thought about eternity and death. What he thought? Anything. They are experiences of his, personal and absolute. As for his god, never completed, always imperfect and changing, Angelus Silesius registers his moments and translates his becoming into a thought which is no less imperfect and changing. Let us beware of the definitive, let us avoid those who claim to possess an exact view of anything. To be surprised that Angelus Silesius in one distich should identify death with evil, and in another with good, is to lack both probity and humor. Since death itself is a becoming in us, let us consider its stages, its metamorphoses; to reduce it to a formula is to halt, to impoverish, to sabotage death.
The mystic experiences neither his ecstasies nor his disgusts within the limits of a definition: his claim is not to satisfy the demands of his thought, but those of his sensations. And he tends much more toward sensation than the poet, for it is by sensation that he verges upon God.
No frissons are identical, none may be repeated ad libitum: the identity of a word conceals, as a matter of fact, a number of divergent experiences. There are a thousand perceptions of Nothing, and only one word to translate them: the indigence of language renders the universe intelligible … In Angelus Silesius, the interval which separates one distich from another is diminished, if not canceled, by the familiar image of the same words which recur, by that poverty of language which makes his sighs and his horrors and his ecstasies lose their individuality. Hence the mystic denatures his experience by expressing it, almost as much as the scholar denatures the mystic by glossing him.
*
It is a mistake to suppose that mysticism derives from a softening of the instincts, from a compromised vitality. A Luis of Leon, a John of the Cross crowned an age of great enterprises and were necessarily contemporaries of the Conquest.
Far from being defectives, they fought for their faith, attacked God head on, appropriated heaven for themselves. Their idolatry of the wilFs abeyance, of gentleness and passivity, secured them against a scarcely bearable tension, against that superabundant hysteria which is responsible for their intolerance, their proselytism, their power over this world and the next. To get a sense of them, imagine a Hernando Cortez in the middle of an invisible geography.
The German mystics were conquerors too. Their penchant for heresy, for personal assertion, for protest expressed—on the spiritual level—the will of an entire nation to individualize itself. Such was the meaning of the Reformation which gave Germany its historical orientation. At the height of the Middle Ages, Eckhart overflows the tradition and follows his own path : his vitality anticipates Luther’s. He also suggests the direction German thought will take. But what assures him a unique position is that as the father of paradox in religious matters, he was the first to have given a tonality of intellectual drama to the relations between man and God. This tension was particularly appropriate to an age in which a whole people was in ferment and in search of itself.
There was something of the knight, the Ritter, in these mystics. Wearing a secret cuirass, invincible even in their passion for torturing themselves, they could moan with a swagger and possessed a contagious, incendiary madness. Suso yields nothing to the most extravagant anchorites, so skillful is he in varying his torments. The knightly spirit, turned toward the intemporal, perpetuates there the love of adventures. For mysticism is an adventure, a vertical adventure: it forays upward and seizes another form of space. Thereby it differs from those doctrines of the decadence, whose characteristic is not to well up from the spot, to come from elsewhere, like those transplanted from the Orient to Rome. Hence they answered only to the thirst for stagnation of a civilization incapable of creating a new religion or of cleaving still to the glamors of mythology. The same is true of today’s mystics, with their imported absolute, for the use of the weak and the disappointed.
Piety, that insolent sigh of the creature, is inseparable from energy and from vigor. Port-Royal, for all its idyllic appearance, was the expression of an exultant spirituality. There France knew her last moment of interiority. Subsequently she could lay claim to excess and power only in the lay world: she made the Revolution; after the advent of a sugared Catholicism, it was all she could undertake. Having lost the temptation of heresy, she became sterile in religious inspiration.
Refractory by vocation, rampant in their prayers, the mystics play with heaven, trembling the while. The Church has degraded them to the rank of supernatural mendicants so that, wretchedly civilized, they might serve as “models.” Yet we know that both in their lives and in their writings they were phenomena of nature and that no worse disaster could happen to them than to fall into the hands of the priests. Our duty is to wrest them away: only at this price could Christianity still admit even a hint of duration.
When I call them “phenomena of nature,” I am not claiming that their “health” was foolproof. We know that they were sick. But disease acted upon them like a goad, like a factor of excess. By sickness, they aimed at another genre of vitality than ours. Peter of Alcantara managed to sleep no more than one hour a night: was this not a sign of strength? And they were all strong, for they destroyed their bodies only in order to derive a further power from them. We think of them as gentle; no beings were tougher. What is it they propose? The virtues of disequilibrium. Avid for every kind of wound, hypnotized by the unwonted, they have undertaken the conquest of the only fiction worth the trouble; God owes them everything: his glory, his mystery, his eternity. They lend existence to the inconceivable, violate Nothing in order to animate it: how could gentleness accomplish such an exploit?
Contrary to that abstract, false void of the philosophers, the mystics’ nothingness glistens with plenitude: delight out of this world, discharge of duration, a luminous annihilation beyond the limits of thought. To deify oneself, to destroy in order to regain oneself, to engulf oneself in one’s own lucidity demands more resource and temerity than all the rest of our actions. Ecstasy—the limit-condition of sensation, fulfillment by the wreck of consciousness—is available only to those who, venturing outside themselves, substitute for the commonplace illusion which grounded their life another and supreme illusion in which everything is resolved, in which everything is transcended. Here the mind is suspended, reflection abolished and, with it, the logic of disarray. If we could, after the example of the mystics, pass beyond the evidence, beyond the impasse which proceeds from it, if we could become that dazzled, divine errantry, if we could, like them, reascend to the true nothingness! With what skill they plagiarize God, pillage Him, strip Him of His attributes with which they arm themselves in order to … remake Him! Nothing can resist the effervescence of their madness, that expansion of their soul forever threatening to fabricate another heaven, another earth. Everything they touch takes on the color of being. Having understood the disadvantage of seeing and of leaving things as they are, they have forced themselves to denature them. An optical defect on which they lavish all their care. No trace of reality, they know, subsists after the passage, after the devastations of clairvoyance. Nothing is, that is their point of departure, that is the evidence which they have managed to conquer, to reject, in order to reach the affirmation: everything is. Until we have followed the path which has led them to so surprising a conclusion, we shall never be on an equal footing with them.
*
Even in the Middle Ages, certain minds, tired of sifting the same themes, the same expressions, were obliged, in order to renew their piety and to emancipate it from the official terminology, to fall back on paradox, on the alluring, sometimes brutal, sometimes subtle formula. Hence Meister Eckhart. However rigorous, and however preoccupied with coherence, he was too much a writer not to seem suspect to Theology: his style, rather than his ideas, gained him the honor of being convicted of heresy. When we consider, in his treatises and sermons, the propositions condemned, we are amazed at the concern they betray for the niceties of expression; they reveal the inspired aspect of his faith. Like every heretic, he sinned on the side of form. An enemy of language, all orthodoxy; whether religious or political, postulates the usual expression. If almost all the mystics had their contentions with the Church, it is because they had too much talent; the Church demands none, and insists only on obedience, submission to its style. In the name of a sclerotic Word, the stakes, the pyres were erected. In order to escape them, the heretic had no other recourse than to change his formulas, to express his opinions in other terms, in terms that were consecrated. The Inquisition might nevei have existed if Catholicism had shown more indulgence and comprehension of the life of language, its departures, its variety, and its invention. When paradox is banned, one avoids martyrdom only by silence or banality.
Other reasons combine to make the mystic a heretic. If he is reluctant to let an external authority regulate his relations with God, he is no readier to admit meddling from on high: it is all he can do to tolerate Jesus. Anything but accommodating, he must nonetheless submit to certain compromises, mumble the recommended, the prescribed prayers, lacking the power to improvise ever-fresh ones. Let us forgive him this weakness. Perhaps he stoops to it only to prove that he is capable of lowering himself to the level of the vulgar and of employing their language; perhaps, too, to prove that he is not ignorant of the temptation of humility. But we know that he does not yield to it often, that he loves to innovate when he prays, that he invents on his knees, and that this is his way of breaking with the God of the common.
The mystic reanimates and rehabilitates faith, threatens and undermines it as an intimate, providential enemy. Without him, it would wither. We can guess now the reason why Christianity is dying and why the Church, deprived of both apologists and detractors, no longer thrives on praise or persecution. Fresh out of heretics, she would gladly stop demanding obedience if, in return, she discerned among her own a single fanatic who, deigning to attack her, to take her seriously, might give her some hope, some reason for alarm. To shelter so many idols and to glimpse not one iconoclast on the horizon! The faithful no longer vie with each other, nor the unbelievers, moreover: no one tries to come in first in the race for salvation or damnation …
A considerable occurrence: the two greatest modern poets, Shakespeare and Hölderlin, have bypassed Christianity. If they had yielded to its seduction, they would have made their own mythology out of it, and the Church would have had the luck of counting in her ranks two more heresiarchs. Without deigning to attack the Cross, still less to pull it up to their own level, one passed beyond it to the gods, the other resuscitated those of Greece. The first rose above prayer, the second invoked a heaven which he knew to be impotent, which he loved defunct: one is the precursor of our indifference, the other of our regrets.
*
The solitary, in his own way a combatant, feels the need to populate his solitude with enemies, whether real or imaginary. If he believes, he fills it with demons, as to whose reality he allows himself no. illusion. Without them, he would fall into insipidity: his spiritual life would suffer. It was appropriately that Jakob Boehme called the Devil “Nature’s cook,” whose art lends a. savor to everything. God himself, positing from the first the necessity of the adversary, acknowledged that He could not do without a struggle, attacking and being attacked.
As the mystic, in most cases, invents his adversaries, it follows that his thought asserts the existence of others by calculation, by artifice: it is a strategy of no consequence. His thought boils down, in the last instance, to a polemic with himself: he seeks to be, he becomes a crowd, even if it is only by making himself one new mask after the other, multiplying his” faces : in which he resembles his Creator, whose histrionics he perpetuates.
*
The mystical phenomenon lacks continuity: it flourishes, achieves its apogee, then degenerates and ends in a caricature. Such was the case of the religious flowering in Spain, in the Low Countries or in Germany. If, in the arts, the epigone manages to inspire respect, nothing is more pathetic, on the other hand, than a second-class mystic, parasite of the sublime, plagiarist of ecstasies. One can play at poetry, one can even give the illusion of originality: it suffices to have penetrated the secrets of the trade. These secrets count for nothing in the eyes of the mystic, whose art is only a means. Since he does not aspire to please men and seeks to be read elsewhere, he addresses himself to a rather limited public, a rather difficult audience which demands of him much more than talent or genius. What does he work for? To find what escapes or survives the disintegration of his experiences: the residue of intemporality under the ego’s vibrations. He erodes his senses in contact with the indestructible, contrary to the poet who exhausts his in contact with the provisional; one wrecks himself almost carnally in the Supreme (mysticism: the physiology of essences), the other revels on the surface of himself. Two sensualists, at different levels. Having once tasted appearances, the poet cannot forget their savor; it is the mystic who, unable to rise to the voluptuous pleasure of silence, restricts himself to that of the word. A chatterbox of quality, a suberior soliloquist.
*
When we read the Revelations of Margaret Ebner, when we follow her through her crises into her adorable hell, we are filled with … jealousy. For days at a time she could not unclench her teeth; when finally she opened her mouth, it was to utter cries which exalted and terrorized the convent. And what can we say about Angela of Foligno? Let us listen to her instead: “I contemplate, in the abyss into hieh I see I have fallen, the glut of my iniquities, I seek, to no avail, how to discover and manifest them to the world, I would walk naked through cities and squares, meat and fishes hung from my neck and crying out: here is the vile creature!”
Sanguine temperaments, delighting in the extremity of degradation and of purity, in the delirum of the depths and of the heights, the saints do not accommodate themselves to our rationalizations, nor to our cowardices. To see them as meditative souls is to deceive oneself altogether. Too unbridled, too fierce to be able to stop at meditation (which supposes self-control and hence a mediocrity of the blood), if they aspire to descend to the foundations of things, the steps that lead them there are not precisely “reflective.” Without prudence, without the least trace of stoicism in their gestures and their words, they believe everything is permitted to them, they parade their indiscretion through the hearts they trouble because they abominate peace and cannot endure a soul that has arrived. Indeed they would damn rather than accept themselves. Listen to Angela of Foligno once again: “Should all the sages of the world and all the saints of Paradise shower me with their consolations and their promises, and God Himself with His gifts, if He did not change me from such as I am, if He did not begin a new work in the depths of my soul instead of giving me ease, then the sages, the saints and God would exasperate beyond all expression my despair, my rage, my melancholy and my blindness.” Must we not, in the face of such declarations and such demands, liquidate our last vestiges of good sense and fling ourselves, like barbarians, toward the “darkness of the light”? Yet how can we bring ourselves to do it, fastened as we are to the infirmities of modesty? Our blood is too tepid, our appetites too well trained. No chance of getting beyond ourselves. Even our madness is too measured. To knock down the partitions of the mind, to shake it up, to seek its ruin—wellspring of the new! As it is, the mind is refractory to the invisible and perceives only what it already knows. To open itself to the true learning, it must be dislocated, must exceed its bounds, must pass through orgies of annihilation. Ignorance would not be our fate if we dared hoist ourselves above our certitudes and above that timidity which, keeping us from working miracles, bogs us down in ourselves. O for the pride of the saints!
If they keep their vigils and pray, it is to tap the secret of God’s power. Perfidious supplications, the prayers of these rebels around whom the Demon prowls by choice. Cunning, they tap his secret, too, and force him to work for them. The wicked principle which inhabits them they know how to use—in order to ascend. Those among them who break down do so with a certain complacency: they collapse not as victims but as colleagues of the Devil. Saved or lost, all bear a mark of non-humanity, all scorn to assign a limit to their undertakings. If they renounce, their renunciation is complete. But instead of being diminished and weakened thereby, they find themselves more powerful than the rest of us, who preserve what they have abandoned. These giants with their shattered bodies and souls—terrify us. Contemplating them, we are ashamed of being men and nothing more. And if, in their turn, they contemplate us, we decipher the words with which our mediocrity inspires their mercy: “Poor creatures who lack the courage to become unique, to become monsters.” Decidedly, the Devil labors for them and is no stranger to their aureole. What a humiliation for the rest of us, to have come to terms with him for nothing!
*
A destructor in the service of life, a demon oriented to good, the saint is the grand master of the effort against the ego. To vanquish his tendencies as much as in terror of himself, he keeps on a regimen of goodness and, supposing himself to have brothers and duties toward them, imposes on himself the overwork of pity. He suffers, and loves to suffer, but at the end of his sufferings, he makes beings into his playthings, rushes into the future, reads the thoughts of others, heals the incurable, infringes the laws of nature with impunity. It is to acquire this freedom and this power that he has prayed and resisted temptations. Pleasure, as he is aware, relaxes, softens: if he were to resort to it, he could no longer accede nor even aspire to the extraordinary, his strength and his faculties would diminish: no longer any energy in his desires nor any flexibility in his ambition. What he seeks are satisfactions of another order, and a kind of exemplary voluptuousness: that of equaling God. His horror of the senses is calculated, and anything but disinterested. He persecutes and rejects them, knowing he will rediscover them, transfigured, elsewhere.
The moment he aspires to substitute himself for the divinity, the saint agrees to pay the price: so great an end justifies any and every means. Convinced that eternity is the apanage of a dilapidated body, he will seek out all kinds of infirmities and conspire against his well-being, from whose ruin he will expect his salvation and his triumph. If he let himself follow his own nature, he would perish; but since he utilizes his mistreated vitality, he recovers. Too long contained, it explodes. And he becomes a fearful invalid who turns toward heaven in order to dislodge the usurper there. Such a favor, dispensed to those who, by suffering, have penetrated the secret of Creation, is met with only in periods when sanctity is identified with disgrace.
*
Every inspired state proceeds from a cultivated, willed inanition. Sanctity—uninterrupted inspiration—is an art of letting oneself die of hunger without … dying, a challenge hurled at one’s entrails, and a kind of demonstration of the incompatibility of ecstasy and digestion. A well-fed humanity produces skeptics, never saints. The absolute? A matter of diet. No “inner fire,” no “flame” without the virtually complete suppression of nourishment. Let us counter our appetites: our organs will burn, our substance catch fire. He who eats his fill is spiritually doomed.
Moved by savage impulses, the saints had managed to master them, hence to preserve them in secret. They were aware that charity derives its power from our physiological dramas, and that in order to attach themselves to beings they must declare war on the body, pervert it, martyr it, and subjugate it. Each of them evokes an aggressor who, suddenly converted to love, would subsequently employ himself in hating himself. And they knew how to hate themselves to the very end; but, since this self-hatred was exhausted, they were free, released from all shackles: the askesis had revealed to them the meaning, the usefulness of destruction, prelude to purity and deliverance. In their turn, they will reveal to us what pangs we must suffer if we, too, seek to be free.
At whatever level our life is lived, it will be truly our own only in proportion to our efforts to break its apparent forms. Ennui, despair, abulia itself will aid us here, on condition, of course, that we make our experience of them complete, that we live them through to the moment when, risking surrender, we rise up and transform them into auxiliaries of our vitality. What is more fruitful than the worst, for the man who knows how to desire it? For it is not suffering which liberates, but the desire to suffer.
*
How can we laugh at the hysteria of the Middle Ages? In your cell you sighed or shrieked: the others venerated you … Your troubles did not lead you to the psychiatrist. Lest you be cured of them, you exasperated them, while you concealed your health like a stigma, a vice. Disease was the general recourse, the great remedy. Nowadays, fallen into discredit, boycotted, it continues to reign, but no one loves k, no one seeks it out. Sick men, we are at a loss for what to do with our ills. More than one of our madnesses will remain forever unexploited.
There are other hysterias which are no less admirable, those which generate hymns to the Sun, to Being, to the Unknown. Dawn of Egypt, of Greece, frenzy of mythologies, accents in first contact with the elements! At their antipodes, we are unfit to thrill to the spectacle of origins: our interrogations, instead of leaping in rhythms, drag in the lees of concept or are disfigured beneath the sneer of our systems. Where is our hymnic sensibility, the intoxication of our beginnings, the dawn of our stupefactions? Let us fling ourselves at the Pythoness’ feet, returning to our old ecstasies: the philosophy of unique moments, the only philosophy …
*
Once we have ceased linking our secret life to God, we can ascend to ecstasies as effective as those of the mystics and conquer this world without recourse to the Beyond. And if, nonetheless, the obsession of another world were to pursue us, it would be permissible to construct, to project one for the occasion, if only to satisfy our thirst for the invisible. What matters are our sensations, their intensity and their virtues, as our capacity to fling ourselves into a madness that is not sacred. In the unknown, we can go as far as the saints, without making use of their means. It will be enough for us to constrain reason to a long silence. Handed over to ourselves, nothing will keep us from acceding to the delicious suspension of all our faculties. A man who has glimpsed these states knows that our movements there lose their habitual direction: we ascend to the abyss, we fall into heaven. Where are we? A question without object: we no longer take place …
The Temptation to Exist
Cioran
No comments:
Post a Comment