Mental activity and its expression, of a kind really needed by others, is the hardest and most painful calling for a man-his cross, as the Gospel expresses it. And the sole and indubitable indication of a man’s vocation for it is self-denial, a sacrifice of himself for the manifestation of the power implanted in him for the benefit of others.
One can teach how many insects there are in the world and examine the spots on the sun and write novels and operas, without suffering; but to teach men their welfare, which lies in denying oneself and serving others, and to express this teaching powerfully, is impossible without suffering.
The church existed as long as its teachers endured and suffered, but as soon as they became fat their teaching activity ended.
‘There used to be golden priests and wooden chalices; but now the chalices are golden and priests wooden,’ as the peasants say.
There was reason for Christ to die on the cross: the sacrifice of suffering conquers all.
Our science and art are provided for and diplomaed and people are only concerned how to provide for them still better, that is, make it impossible for them to serve mankind.
True science and true art have two indubitable indications: the first internal-that a minister of science or art fulfils his calling not for gain but with self-sacrifice; and the second external-that his productions are intelligible to all men whose welfare he has in view.
Whatever it may be that men regard as representing their vocation and welfare, science will teach that vocation and welfare, and art will express that teaching. The laws of Solon and Confucius are science; the teachings of Moses and of Christ are science; buildings in Athens, the psalms of David, the church service, are art; but studying the fourth dimension of matter and tabulating chemical compounds and so forth-never has been and never will be science.
The place of real science is occupied in our time by theology and jurisprudence, and the place of real art is occupied by church and state ceremonies, in neither of which do people believe and which no one regards seriously; but what among us is called science and art is a production of idle thought and feeling which aims at tickling similarly idle minds and feelings, and it is unintelligible and inarticulate to the people because it has not their welfare in view.
From the time we know anything of the life of man we everywhere and always find a dominant teaching falsely calling itself science, and not revealing to people, but concealing from them, the meaning of life. So it was among the Egyptians, the Hindus, the Chinese, and to some extent among the Greeks (the sophists), and later among the mystics, gnostics, and cabalists, and in the Middle Ages among the schoolmen and alchemists, and so on, everywhere, down to our own day.
What peculiar luck is ours that we live just at the particular time when the mental activity calling itself science not only does not err, but is (as we are constantly assured) extraordinarily successful! Does not this peculiarly good fortune result from the fact that man cannot and will not recognize his own deformity? How is it that of those other sciences, theological and cabalistic, nothing but words remain, while we are so peculiarly lucky?
Notice that the indications are exactly the same: the same self-satisfaction and blind assurance that we, just we and only we, are on the real path and are the first to tread it: the self-same expectation that there-directly-we shall discover something extraordinary; and above all the same sign exposing us, namely, that all our wisdom remains with us while the mass of the people neither understand, nor accept, nor need it. Our position is a very sad one, but why not face it as it is?
It is time to come to our senses and look around us.
For we are indeed nothing but scribes and Pharisees who have seated ourselves in Moses’ seat and taken the keys of the kingdom of heaven, neither entering in ourselves nor allowing others to enter. We priests of science and art are the most worthless frauds, with far less right to our position than the most cunning and depraved Church priests. For we have absolutely no right to our privileged position, we obtained it by guile and keep it by fraud.
The pagan priests and the clergy of our own and of the Catholic Church, however depraved they may be, or have been, had this right to their position-that they at least proposed to teach life and salvation to the people. We have undermined them and proved that they deceived, and have taken their place, but we do not teach people how to live: we even admit that it is no use trying to learn this. Yet we suck the juice out of the people, and in return teach our children our Talmud of Greek and Latin grammar, that they in their turn may continue to lead the same parasitic life as we do.
We say, there used to be castes but we have none. But how is it that some people and their children work while other people and their children do not? Bring a Hindu who does not know our language and show him our life as it has gone on for generations, and he will recognize the same two chief, distinct castes of workers and non-workers as exist among his people. As with them so with us, the right not to work is given by a special initiation, which we call science and art and in general-education.
It is this education, and the whole perversion of reason attached to it, that has brought us to the amazing state of insanity which causes us not to see what is so clear and indubitable.
We consume the lives of our brother men, and continue to consider ourselves Christian, humane, educated, and perfectly justified.
CHAPTER XXXVIII ‘WHAT then must we do? What must we do?’
This question-including an admission that our way of life is wrong and bad, together with a suggestion that all the same it is impossible to change it-this question I hear from all sides, and for that reason I chose it as the title of my work.
I have described my sufferings, my search, and my solution of this question. I am a man like everybody else, or if I am at all different from an ordinary man of our circle it is chiefly that I have served and connived at the false teaching of our world more than he, have been more praised by the men of the dominant school and have therefore been perverted and gone astray more than others.
And therefore I think the solution I have found for myself will be valid for all sincere men who set themselves the same question. First of all, to the question: What must we do? I replied to myself: I must not lie either to myself or to others, nor fear the truth wherever it may lead me. We all know what lying to other people means, and yet we lie unceasingly from morning to night: ‘Not at home,’ when I am at home; ‘Very pleased,’ when I am not at all pleased; ‘My respects,’ when I do not respect; ‘I have no money,’ when I have some, and so on. We consider lies to other people, especially certain kinds of lies, to be bad, but are not afraid of lying to ourselves; yet the very worst, most downright and deceptive lie to others, is as nothing in its consequences compared with that lie to ourselves on which we have built our whole life.
That is the lie we must not be guilty of, in order to be able to answer the question: What must we do?
How can the question be answered when all I do, my whole life, is based on a lie and I carefully give out this lie as truth to others and to myself? Not to lie, in that sense, means not to fear the truth, not to invent excuses to hide from myself the conclusions of reason and conscience, and not to accept such excuses when they are invented by others: not to fear to differ from all those around me or to be left alone with reason and conscience, and not to fear the position to which truth will lead me, believing firmly that what truth and conscience will lead me to, however strange it may be, cannot be worse than what is based on falsehood. Not to lie in our position as privileged mental workers, means not to fear to make up one’s accounts.
Perhaps we already owe so much that we cannot meet our obligations, but however that may be it is better to face the facts than not to know how we stand. However far we may have gone along a false path, it is better to return than to continue to go along it. Falsehood to others is simply disadvantageous. Every affair is settled more directly and more quickly by truth than by falsehood. Falsehood to others only confuses the matter and hinders its solution, but falsehood to oneself presented as truth, entirely ruins man’s life.
If a man having started on a wrong road accepts it as the right one, every step he takes along that road takes him farther from his aim. If a man who has been going for a long time along a false road guesses, or is told, that that road is wrong, but being frightened at the thought that he has
