Mr. Propter looked down again at the close-set lines of Molinos’ epistle. “ ‘Oirá y leerá el hombre racional estas espirituales materias,’ ” he read out once more. “ ‘Pero non llegerá a comprenderlas’ He’ll hear and read these things, but he won’t succeed in understanding them. And he won’t succeed,” said Mr. Propter, closing the file and handing it back to Jeremy, “he won’t succeed for one of two excellent reasons. Either he has never seen the giraffes in question, and so, being an hombre racional, knows quite well that there ain’t no such animal. Or else he has had glimpses of the creatures, or has some other reason for believing in their existence, but can’t understand what the experts say about them; can’t understand because of the inadequacy of the language in which the fauna of the spiritual world are ordinarily described. In other words, he either hasn’t had the immediate experience of eternity and so has no reason to believe that eternity exists; or else he does believe that eternity exists, but can’t make head or tail of the language in which it’s talked about by those who have had experience of it. Furthermore, when he wants to talk about eternity himself—and he may wish to do so either in order to communicate his own experiences to others or to understand them better, from the human point of view, himself—he finds himself on the horns of a dilemma.
For either he recognizes that the existing language is unsuitable—in which case he has only two rational choices: to say nothing at all, or to invent a new and better technical language of his own, a calculus of eternity, so to speak, a special algebra of spiritual experience (and if he does invent it, nobody who hasn’t learnt it will know what he’s talking about). So much for the first horn of the dilemma. The second horn is reserved for those who don’t recognize the inadequacy of the existing language; or else who do recognize it, but are irrationally hopeful enough to take a chance with an instrument which they know to be worthless. These people will write in the existing language, and their writing will be, in consequence, more or less completely misunderstood by most of their readers. Inevitably, because the words they use don’t correspond to the things they’re talking about. Most of them are words taken from the language of everyday life. But the language of everyday life refers almost exclusively to strictly human affairs. What happens when you apply words derived from that language to experiences on the plane of the spirit, the plane of timeless experience? Obviously, you create a misunderstanding; you say what you didn’t mean to say.”
Pete interrupted him. “I’d like an example, Mr. Propter,” he said.
“All right,” the other answered. “Let’s take the commonest word in all religious literature: love. On the human level the word means—what? Practically everything from Mother to the Marquis de Sade.”
The name reminded Jeremy yet again of what had happened to the “Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome.” Really it was too insufferable! The impudence of it … !
“We don’t even make the simple Greek distinction between erao and philo, eros and agape. With us, everything is just love, whether it’s self-sacrificing or possessive, whether it’s friendship or lust or homicidal lunacy. It’s all just love,” he repeated. “Idiotic word! Even on the human level it’s hopelessly ambiguous. And when you begin using it in relation to experiences on the level of eternity—well, it’s simply disastrous. ‘The love of God.’ ‘God’s love for us.’ ‘The saint’s love for his fellows.’ What does the word stand for in such phrases? And in what way is this related to what it stands for when it’s applied to a young mother suckling her baby? Or to Romeo climbing into Juliet’s bedroom? Or to Othello as he strangles Desdemona? Or to the research worker who loves his science?
Or to the patriot who’s ready to die for his country—to die, and, in the meantime, to kill, steal, lie, swindle and torture for it? Is there really anything in common between what the word stands for in these contexts and what it stands for when one talks, let us say, of the Buddha’s love for all sentient beings? Obviously, the answer is: No, there isn’t. On the human level, the word stands for a great many different states of mind and ways of behaving. Dissimilar in many respects, but alike at least in this: they’re all accompanied by emotional excitement and they all contain an element of craving. Whereas the most characteristic features of the enlightened person’s experience are serenity and disinterestedness. In other words, the absence of excitement and the absence of craving.”
“The absence of excitement and the absence of craving,” Pete said to himself, while the image of Virginia in her yachting cap, riding her pink scooter, kneeling in her shorts under the arch of the Grotto, swam before his inward eye.
“Distinctions in fact ought to be represented by distinctions in language,” Mr. Propter was saying. “If they’re not, you can’t expect to talk sense. In spite of which, we insist on using one word to connote entirely different things. ‘God is love,’ we say. The word’s the same as the one we use when we talk about ‘being in love,’ or ‘loving one’s children’ or ‘being inspired by love of country.’ Consequently we tend to think that the thing we’re talking about must be more or less the same. We imagine in a vague, reverential way, that God is composed of a kind of immensely magnified yearning.” Mr. Propter shook his head. “Creating God in our own image.
It flatters our vanity, and of course we prefer vanity to understanding. Hence those confusions of language. If we wanted to understand the world, if we wanted to think about it realistically, we should say that we were in love, but that God was x-love. In this way people who had never had any first-hand experience on the level of eternity would at least be given a chance of knowing intellectually that what happens on that level is not the same as what happens on the strictly human level. They’d know, because they’d seen it in print, that there was some kind of difference between love and x-love. Consequently, they’d have less excuse than people have today for imagining that God was like themselves, only a bit more so on the side of respectability and a bit less so, of course, on the other side.
“And naturally what applies to the word ‘love’ applies to all the other words taken over from the language of everyday life and used to describe spiritual experience. Words like ‘knowledge,’ ‘wisdom,’ ‘power,’ ‘mind,’ ‘peace,’ ‘joy,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘good.’ They stand for certain things on the human level. But the things that writers force them to stand for when they describe events on the level of eternity are quite different. Hence the use of them merely confuses the issue. They just make it all but impossible for any one to know what’s being talked about. And, meanwhile, you must remember that these words from the language of everyday life aren’t the only trouble-makers. People who write about experiences on the level of eternity also make use of technical phrases borrowed from various systems of philosophy.”
“Isn’t that your algebra of spiritual experience?” said Pete. “Isn’t that the special, scientific language you’ve been talking about?”
“It’s an attempt at such an algebra,” Mr. Propter answered. “But unfortunately a very unsuccessful attempt. Unsuccessful because this particular algebra is derived from the language of metaphysics—bad metaphysics, incidentally. The people who use it are committing themselves, whether they like it or not, to an explanation of the facts as well as a description. An explanation of actual experiences in terms of metaphysical entities, whose existence is purely hypothetical and can’t be demonstrated. In other words, they’re describing the facts in terms of figments of the imagination; they’re explaining the known in terms of the unknown. Take a few examples.
Here’s one: ‘ecstasy.’ It’s a technical term that refers to the soul’s ability to stand outside the body—and of course it carries the further implication that we know what the soul is and how it’s related to the body and the rest of the universe. Or take another instance, a technical term that is essential to the Catholic theory of mysticism, ‘infused contemplation’ Here the implication is that there’s somebody outside us who pours a certain kind of psychological experience into our minds. The further implication is that we know who that somebody is. Or consider even ‘union with God.’ ,What it means depends on the upbringing of the speaker.
It may mean ‘union with the Jehovah of the Old Testament’ Or it may mean ‘union with the personal deity of orthodox Christianity’ It may mean what it probably would have meant, say, to Eckhart, ‘union with the impersonal Godhead of which the God of orthodoxy is an aspect and a particular limitation’ Similarly, if you were an Indian, it may mean ‘union with Isvara’ or ‘union with Brahman’ In every case, the term implies a previous knowledge about the nature of things which are either completely unknowable, or at best only to be inferred from the nature of the experiences which the term is supposed to describe. So there,” Mr. Propter concluded, “you have the second horn of the dilemma—the horn on which all those who use the current religious vocabulary to describe their
