Pray Eternity May Be As Sweet

Joseph Ernest Renan, Brother & Sister: A Memoir and the Letters of Ernest and Henriette Renan, tr. Lady Mary Loyd (London: William Heinemann, 1896), 51-52:

The memory of those days is inexpressibly precious to me. The unavoidable delay connected with such work as we were occupied in winding up left me much leisure. I resolved to note down all the thoughts concerning the life of Jesus which had been stirring in my brain since my sojourn in the Tyrian country and my journey into Palestine. The personality of that great Founder had risen very clearly to my mind as I perused the Gospels in Galilee itself. Buried in the deepest conceivable retirement, with the help of the Gospels and of Josephus, I wrote a Life of Jesus, carrying the story while I was at Ghazir as far as the last journey to Jerusalem. Exquisite hours, departed all too quickly! I pray eternity may be as sweet! From morning till night I lived intoxicated, as it were, with the idea unfolding itself before my mental vision. I fell asleep pursuing it, and the first ray of sun shooting above the mountain revealed it to me yet clearer, stronger, than before. Henriette was the daily confidante of the progress of my labour. As fast as I could write a page she copied it. ‘‘I shall love this book,’’ she said, ‘‘because we have done it together, first of all, and then because I like it in itself.’’

The elevation of her thoughts had never struck me more. In the evening we used to walk on our terrace under the stars. Then she would give me the result of her reflections, full of tact and wisdom. Some of them were absolute revelations to me. She was perfectly happy, and this was certainly the most blessed moment in her life. Our intellectual and moral communion had never been so intimate. She repeatedly told me those days had been a paradise to her. A gentle mournfulness of tone pervaded everything she said. Her physical suffering was only numbed, and would wake, now and again, as though in sinister warning. Then she would complain that fate was miserly, and grudged her the few hours of perfect bliss it had ever granted her.

 

Ces jours m’ont laissé un inexprimable souvenir. Les lenteurs inséparables des difficiles opérations que nous achevions en ce moment me laissaient beaucoup de loisir. Je résolus d’écrire toutes les idées qui, depuis mon séjour dans le pays de Tyr et mon voyage de Palestine, germaient dans mon esprit sur la vie de Jésus. En lisant l’Évangile en Galilée, la personnalité de ce grand fondateur m’était fortement apparue. Au sein du plus profond repos qu’il soit possible de concevoir, j’écrivis, avec l’Évangile et Josèphe, une Vie de Jésus que je poussai à Ghazir jusqu’au dernier voyage de Jésus à Jérusalem. Heures délicieuses et trop vite évanouies ; oh ! puisse l’éternité vous ressembler ! Du matin au soir, j’étais comme ivre de la pensée qui se déroulait devant moi. Je m’endormais avec elle, et le premier rayon du soleil paraissant derrière la montagne me la rendait plus claire et plus vive que la veille. Henriette fut confidente jour par jour des progrès de mon ouvrage ; au fur et à mesure que j’avais écrit une page, elle la copiait : « Ce livre-ci, me disait-elle, je l’aimerai ; d’abord, parce que nous l’aurons fait ensemble, et puis, parce qu’il me plaît. » Jamais sa pensée n’avait été si haute. Le soir, nous nous promenions sur notre terrasse, à la clarté des étoiles ; là elle me faisait ses réflexions, pleines de tact et de profondeur, dont plusieurs ont été pour moi de vraies révélations. Sa joie était complète, et ce furent là sans doute les plus doux moments de sa vie. Notre communion intellectuelle et morale n’avait jamais été à un tel degré d’intimité. Elle me dit plusieurs fois que ces jours étaient son paradis. Un sentiment de douce tristesse s’y mêlait. Ses douleurs n’étaient qu’assoupies, elles se réveillaient par moments, comme un avertissement fatal. Elle se plaignait alors que le sort fût pour elle si avare et lui reprît les seules heures de joie parfaite qu’il lui eût concédées.

Life Of Study & Thought

Joseph Ernest Renan, The Future of Science: Ideas of 1848 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1891), xxi (emphasis mine; written to Monsieur Eugène Burnouf, March 1849):

    Monsieur

During the last twelvemonth my thoughts have frequently gone back to that memorable 25th February 1848, when after having scaled the barricades to get to the Collége de France we found our modest room transformed into a guardroom, to which we were welcomed like so many suspected individuals. That day I asked myself more seriously than ever whether a man could do better than devote every moment of his life to study and to thought, and after having consulted my conscience and strengthened my faith in human intellect, I resolutely answered; ‘‘No.’’ If science were nothing more than an agreeable pastime, a kind of diversion for the idle, a mere costly ornament, a hobby for the amateur, in short the least vain of all vanities, there might be times when the savant would have occasion to say with the poet;

Shame to him who sings, the while Rome burns.

But if science be a serious matter, if the destinies of mankind and the perfection of the individual be bound up with it, if it be a religion, it has like matters of religion its value every day, every moment of our lives. To devote to study and intellectual culture only our moments of peace and leisure is an insult to the human intellect, it is tacitly supposing that there is something more important than the pursuit of truth.

Revering The Dreams Of Early Youth

Friedrich Schiller, Don Carlos, tr. R. D. Boylan (in The Works of Friedrick Schiller, vol. III., London, 1872), 159 (the Marquis to the Queen):

Tell him, in manhood, he must still revere
The dreams of early youth, nor ope the heart
Of heaven’s all-tender flower to canker-worms 

Of boasted reason,—nor be led astray 

When, by the wisdom of the dust, he hears 

Enthusiasm, heavenly-born, blasphemed.

Giving of Oneself

Johan Huizinga, ‘‘Historical Ideals of Life (1915),’’ in The Course of Civilizations, tr. James S. Holmes & Hans van Marie (Providence: Cluny, 2018), 106:

We have spoken of the age-old impulse to abandon culture, to flee from the present day and its misery. In times such as these the impulse comes over us now and then more powerfully than ever. What will be the refuge? There are still a number of roads open. Though the past no longer proffers us the lovely dream of a peaceful perfection that may perhaps return in the future, ancient beauty and wisdom still grant sweet forgetfulness to the person who seeks it. Does the future have more to offer? We can observe this raging world from an absurd distance and say that it will take three thousand years for all the madness of the present conflict, the stupidity and the terror, the fate of states and nations, the very cultural values that now seem the highest stake to have become just as unimportant to humanity as the wars of Assyria are today. This is no consolation; that, too, is mere forgetfulness. And such resignation can also be achieved from a briefer distance: we can view all this through the eyes of those who have fallen. That is still the shortest road to liberation. The person who wants to abandon today with its heavy burden of history, has to abandon life. But the person who wants to carry that burden and still climb upward finds a fourth road open: that of the simple act—it makes no difference whether in the trenches or in any other serious work. Giving of oneself is the end and the beginning of every philosophy of life. Liberation is to be found not in the abandonment of culture, but in the abandonment of one’s own ego.

An Open Hand

Maria von Wedemeyer to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pätzig, 8 October 1943 (in Love Letters from Cell 92, tr. John Brownjohn (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995)), 96:

In words one so easily talks at cross purposes, but in music one experiences a communion. That’s what all the words you write are like—like an open hand which I can grasp, which I love and want to cling to.

Sad Lucidity Of Soul

Emery Neff, The Poetry of History: The Contribution of Literature and Literary Scholarship To the Writing of History since Voltaire (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1947; repr. 1961), 151-2:

Faith in the exceptional individual tended to replace faith in the group, in the nation, in the mass of mankind. Among men of letters, this revulsion of feeling was reinforced by growing awareness that increased literacy and cheap printing, instead of enlightening the masses, encouraged books with diluted or distorted thought and without art. Unwilling to stoop to meet the demand for literature as a mere commercial product, most of the ablest writers held themselves to exacting standards of art and thought. The extreme of this scorn of popular taste was the doctrine of art for art’s sake proclaimed by Gautier, Flaubert, and Baudelaire in France, by Swinburne, D. G. Rossetti, and Pater in England. “Let the Empire run along,” was the celebrated counsel of Flaubert, “Let us climb to the top of our ivory tower, to the last step, the one nearest the sky. It is cold there, sometimes, isn’t it? But what does that matter? You see the stars shine clear, and you do not hear the geese cackle any longer.”

Disgust with the present, with the spectacle of ignorant masses deluded and exploited by a vulgar plutocracy, with the ugliness of crass industrialism, turned many eyes to the past for refuge, for refreshment. In this mood Leconte de Lisle produced Poémes antiques (1852) and William Morris The Earthly Paradise (1868-1870); in this mood Flaubert, Thackeray, and Morris each composed a historical novel— Salammbô (1862), Henry Esmond (1852), and the historical romance A Dream of John Ball (1888). “I am going to write a novel whose action will take place three centuries before Christ,” Flaubert explained, “for I feel the need of escaping from the modern world, . . . which fatigues me as much to reproduce as it disgusts me to observe.” His theme was the “implacable war” of Carthage with her mercenaries brilliantly sketched by Michelet, a savage and remorseless struggle in which neither side engaged his sympathies. For, however refreshing a change from the present, the past was seldom idealized by authors who came to maturity after 1848. They contemplated both past and future with what Matthew Arnold called a “sad lucidity of soul.”

Gazing Irreverently, & Praising Instead Of Praying

Emery Neff, The Poetry of History: The Contribution of Literature and Literary Scholarship To the Writing of History since Voltaire (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1947; repr. 1961), 139-140: 

Michelet’s power of resurrection first comes into full play in explaining how the Middle Ages, especially France of the Middle Ages, “expressed in architecture its most intimate thought.” He repeoples the great churches. “Try to imagine the effect of lights in these prodigious monuments, when the clergy, circulating by aerial ramps, animated the dark masses with fantastic processions, passing and repassing along balustrades, on bridges of lacework, in rich costumes, with candles and chants; when lights and voices turned in circle after circle, while from below, in the shadow, the ocean of people responded. That was for this era the true drama, the true mystery play; the representation of the journey of humanity across the three worlds, that sublime initiation which Dante took from transitory reality to fix eternally in his Divine Comedy. This colossal theater of sacred drama has returned, after the long festival of the Middle Ages, to silence and shadow. The feeble voice one hears there, the voice of the priest, is impotent to fill the arches whose amplitude was designed to embrace and contain the thunder of the people’s voice. The church is widowed, empty. Its profound symbolism, which then spoke so loud, is mute; now an object of scientific curiosity, of Alexandrian interpretations. The church is a Gothic museum, visited by the sophisticated. They move about, gaze irreverently, praise instead of praying.” The very stones of these churches illustrated the philosophy of Vico by the sublime anonymity of the masons who shaped them. “To know with what care they toiled, obscure and lost in their guild, with what abnegation, you must go over the most retired, least accessible parts of the cathedrals. Mount to those aerial deserts, to the ultimate points of those spires where the roofer fears to venture. There you will often find, buffeted by eternal wind, some masterpiece of art and sculpture upon which the poor workman lavished his life. He worked for God only, for the cure of his soul.” Tombs told the same story. “In the first Christian ages, in the time of lively faith, sorrows were patient. Death seemed a brief divorce, it separated, but only to reunite. A sign of this belief in the soul, in the reunion of souls, is that, up to the twelfth century, the body, the mortal remains, seems to have less importance. It does not yet ask for magnificent tombs. Hidden in a corner of the church, a simple slab covers it; enough to mark it for the day of resurrection: Hinc surrectura.”

Divine Souls

Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Al-Maṭālib al-ʿĀliya min al-ʿIlm al-Ilāhī, ed. Aḥmad Ḥijāzī al-Saqqā, vol. 1 (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1987), 55–57 (personal trans.):

It has already been established, in our view, that human rational souls differ from one another in quiddity (māhiyyah) and substance (jawhar). Some are noble, divine, and celestial; others are dark, turbid, and profane. . . . Once this has been established, we say: among souls there are those whose very substance and essence are, from the outset, divine souls—disposed toward the Presence of Holiness [or the Holy], endowed with an abundant love for It, and deeply immersed in the degrees of its knowledge. Others possess something of these qualities, yet only in a weak measure. Still others are murky and darkened souls, devoid of these divine attractions and spiritual inclinations, submerged in the sea of passing passion and in the darkness of the world of the senses and fancy. 

To make these meanings more vividly clear, let me offer the following analogy. The mountains and hills of the world are of two kinds: in some there occurs mineral deposits, while in others there are not. Induction shows that mountains devoid of minerals are far more numerous than those in which minerals are formed. Furthermore, among the mountains that do produce minerals, some yield only inferiour, base substances, such as petroleum, sulfur, lime, and salt; while others produce precious, noble minerals, such as gold, silver, ruby, spinel, and the like. Again, induction shows that the mountains containing these precious and noble minerals are vastly fewer than those producing only the inferiour kinds. We may further observe that, among those mountains which contain these precious and noble minerals—the seven principal metallic bodies—the baser the metal, the more abundant its deposits; whereas the nobler the metal, the scarcer its occurrence.

Let human souls be understood by analogy with mountains and hills, and let the lights of the knowledge and love of God correspond to pure, refined gold. Just as most of the mountains and hills of this world contain no mineral deposits at all, so too the souls of most human beings are devoid of any inclination toward the world of spiritual realities. Moreover, even if souls of this kind were to devote themselves to the most rigourous bodily disciplines, they would derive but little benefit from them, just as a mountain lacking any mineral vein yields nothing at all, no matter how much effort one expends in excavating it.

And just as the mountains that do contain minerals differ from one another in degrees of richness and abundance beyond all possibility of precise measurement, so too the ranks of souls differ in strength and weakness, in greater and lesser capacity, by differences that admit of no exhaustive determination. And just as it is not impossible that, on rare occasions, there should exist a mountain containing a cavern filled with gold, so likewise it is not impossible that, in widely separated æons, there should arise a human being whose inward cavern of spirit is filled with the lights of the Divine Majesty.

Once you have grasped this analogy, you will understand that not everyone who undertakes spiritual discipline—even in its most arduous forms—is thereby destined to attain anything. Nor does everyone who attains something thereby reach the final end. Indeed, the ultimate end in this path admits of no limit. For just as there is no end to the Majesty of God or to the sublimity of His Greatness, so there is likewise no end to the degrees of beatitude attainable upon this path.

Therefore, keep this analogy constantly before your eyes and firmly fixed in your imagination, lest you be deceived into thinking that everyone who travels the path arrives, or that everyone who seeks necessarily finds. We do not deny that these spiritual disciplines have certain effects in some respects, for perseverance in practice does indeed produce effects of a certain kind. Yet it is evident that merely applying kohl to the eyes is not the same as possessing dark, thick eyelids.1

How excellent are the words of the Sage of Poets [= al-Mutanabbī]:

The heart is urged to forget you,

Yet innate nature refuses to be transformed.

Aristotle likewise said: ‘‘Whoever wishes to embark upon the pursuit of these divine sciences must acquire for himself another nature’’ What he means is that one must exert oneself to strip the intellect of its attachments to sense, to mere assumptions (wahm), and to fancy.

1 This line is from a line of verse by the poet al-Mutanabbī, which reads more beautifully in Arabic: وليس التكحُّل في العينين كالكَحَل.

The Unhappiness, Faults, & Follies Of Literary Men, & The History Of Genius

Thomas Carlyle, The Life of Friedrich Schiller (vol. 5 of the Library Edition of Carlyle’s Collected Works, London: Chapman and Hall), 51-52, 53-54:

If to know wisdom were to practise it; if fame brought true dignity and peace of mind; or happiness consisted in nourishing the intellect with its appropriate food and surrounding the imagination with ideal beauty, a literary life would be the most enviable which the lot of this world affords. But the truth is far otherwise. The Man of Letters has no immutable, all-conquering volition, more than other men; to understand and to perform are two very different things with him as with every one. His fame rarely exerts a favourable influence on his dignity of character, and never on his peace of mind: its glitter is external, for the eyes of others; within, it is but the aliment of unrest, the oil cast upon the ever-gnawing fire of ambition, quickening into fresh vehemence the blaze which it stills for a moment. Moreover, this Man of Letters is not wholly made of spirit, but of clay and spirit mixed: his thinking faculties may be nobly trained and exercised, but he must have affections as well as thoughts to make him happy, and food and raiment must be given him or he dies. Far from being the most enviable, his way of life is perhaps, among the many modes by which an ardent mind endeavours to express its activity, the most thickly beset with suffering and degradation. Look at the biography of authors! Except the Newgate Calendar, it is the most sickening chapter in the history of man. The calamities of these people are a fertile topic; and too often their faults and vices have kept pace with their calamities. Nor is it difficult to see how this has happened. Talent of any sort is generally accompanied with a peculiar fineness of sensibility; of genius this is the most essential constituent; and life in any shape has sorrows enough for hearts so formed. The employments of literature sharpen this natural tendency; the vexations that accompany them frequently exasperate it into morbid soreness. The cares and toils of literature are the business of life; its delights are too ethereal and too transient to furnish that perennial flow of satisfaction, coarse but plenteous and substantial, of which happiness in this world of ours is made. The most finished efforts of the mind give it little pleasure, frequently they give it pain; for men’s aims are ever far beyond their strength. And the outward recompense of these undertakings, the distinction they confer, is of still smaller value: the desire for it is insatiable even when successful; and when baffled, it issues in jealousy and envy, and every pitiful and painful feeling. So keen a temperament with so little to restrain or satisfy, so much to distress or tempt it, produces contradictions which few are adequate to reconcile. Hence the unhappiness of literary men, hence their faults and follies. [...]

Yet among these men are to be found the brightest specimens and the chief benefactors of mankind! It is they that keep awake the finer parts of our souls; that give us better aims than power or pleasure, and withstand the total sovereignty of Mammon in this earth. They are the vanguard in the march of mind; the intellectual Backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and the activity of their happier brethren. Pity that from all their conquests, so rich in benefit to others, themselves should reap so little! But it is vain to murmur. They are volunteers in this cause; they weighed the charms of it against the perils: and they must abide the results of their decision, as all must. The hardships of the course they follow are formidable, but not all inevitable; and to such as pursue it rightly, it is not without its great rewards. If an author’s life is more agitated and more painful than that of others, it may also be made more spirit-stirring and exalted: fortune may render him unhappy; it is only himself that can make him despicable. The history of genius has, in fact, its bright side as well as its dark. And if it is distressing to survey the misery, and what is worse, the debasement of so many gifted men, it is doubly cheering on the other hand to reflect on the few, who, amid the temptations and sorrows to which life in all its provinces and most in theirs is liable, have travelled through it in calm and virtuous majesty, and are now hallowed in our memories, not less for their conduct than their writings. Such men are the flower of this lower world: to such alone can the epithet of great be applied with its true emphasis. There is a congruity in their proceedings which one loves to contemplate: ‘he who would write heroic poems, should make his whole life a heroic poem.’