Terrors of Year Two 00 Gilson

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THE TERRORSOF THE YEARTWO THOUSAND


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Digitized by the Internet Archivein 2010 with funding from

University of Toronto

http://www.archive.org/details/terrorsofyeartwoOOgils


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THE TERRORSOF THE YEARTWO THOUSANDby

ETIENNE GILSON

University ofSt. Michael's College

Toronto 1984


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1949, 1984 University of St. Michael's CollegePrinted in Canada


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FOREWORDThe Terrors of the Year Two Thousand was first

published by St. Michael's College, Toronto, in 1949. It isnow re-issued in 1984 to mark the hundredth anniversaryof the birth of its author, Etienne Gilson, which took placeon 13 June 1884. St. Michael's honours the memory of itsmost distinguished professor of philosophy who lecturedin its classrooms almost annually from 1929 to 1972, andwho was the founder and life-time director of its PontificalInstitute of Mediaeval Studies. Gilson died in Auxerre inBurgundy, France, on 19 September 1978.

A member ofthe Academie Franchise, Etienne Gilsonis possibly the most renowned medievalist of hisgeneration. He was professor of medieval philosophies inthe Sorbonne and in the College de France from 1921. Hebecame also visiting professor of medieval thought atHarvard (1926) and at Toronto (1929). In the course of hislong productive life he delivered, in addition to countlessindividual lectures, the following outstanding series: theGifford Lectures in Aberdeen; the HenryJames Lectures atHarvard; the Powell Lectures at Bloomington, Indiana; theinaugural lectures of the Mercier Chair at Louvain; and thefourth series of the Mellon Lectures in the NationalGallery, Washington. The published bibliography ofGilson's full-length books and articles (Margaret McGrath,Toronto, 1982) contains 1210 items, all of them rich,revolutionary, beautiful and totally Christian.

As a national figure, Gilson represented France atmany international meetings: after WorldWar I in London,Naples and Cambridge (Mass.); after World War II atimportant conferences held in San Francisco (UnitedNations), London (UNESCO) and the Hague (UnitedEurope). For two years he was a conseiller or senator inthe French government.


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The story ofhow Gilson came to write We Terrors ofthe Year Two Tliousand carries its own interest: it is partlythe product of his friendship with Henri Focillon, partlyhis love of the Church in the persons of two Frencharchbishops, cardinals Suhard and Lienart. Focillon, likeGilson, was a philosopher whose interests carried himdeeply into other disciplines and arts. Focillon calledhimself "an engraver-philosopher" and most of his bookson art history are generously adorned with reproductionsof medieval treasures. Gilson became Focillon's friendand admirer during the 1920's and 1930's. In 1938,seconded by Paul Yalery. Gilson sponsored Focillon'sappointment to the College de France. When the resultsproved favourable. Gilson and Paul Valery rushedhilariously up the rue Saint-Jacques announcing theappointment to all and sundry.

It was Focillon who first impressed upon Gilson theimportance of an artist's hands. In the case of paintersespecially it is the hands that really matter: creationthrough the hands is more fundamental to great art(Croce, who in any event is only a critic, notwithstanding)than creation through the mind. Focillon and Gilson werestill close friends when Focillon died in 1948 leaving histreatise on Van mil unfinished. Gilson already knew thecontents of Van mil, and especially of that book'simportant Part I on "The problem of the Terrors" whichdealt with the extravagant histoires of the chronicler RaoulGlaber. It is from this Part I ofVan mil that Gilson in thepresent essay launches into his moving treatment of thephilosophical terrors besetting a world which is nowmoving toward Van deux mille.

The other part of the story of the Terrors is as simpleas two-plus-two equals four. The two cardinals invitedGilson as an intellectual to share his special competence inthe field of thought with the French episcopate. Like


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Focillon's death, this too happened in 1948. Gilsonimmediately teamed up with Paul Claudel, RomanoGuardini and Robert Speaight to revive the oncesuccessful but now moribund Semaines des IntellectuelsCatholiques.

Gilson prepared a brilliant talk on the topic "TheIntellectuals and Peace" in which he examined peace interms of the Nietzschian atheism permeating the existen-tial thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, for whom existentialismwas the will to extract the necessary consequences from acoherent atheism. Gilson used for this talk his ownhistorical and philosophical methods joined to themethods of his deceased friend Henri Focillon to draw acomparison between the outlook of people of 948 whowere expecting Antichrist and the people of 1948 whohave been told by philosophers that there is no God. If,said Gilson, there is no God, then everything is permitted.It was this essay "The Intellectuals and Peace" that Gilsonreshaped for his North American audience into theimaginative piece you are about to read.

The Terrors ofthe Year Two TJionsand is, in very truth,a beautiful, frightening, penetrating prose-poem. Gilsongives it to us without scholarly references, even enigmati-cally in what concerns his medieval base, the histoires ofRaoul Glaber. Yet the analysis ofwhat some philosopherswould do to us is devastating. This little book is aself-standing work of art consisent with Gilson's inmostbeing. It will be in the inmost being of the modern readerthat The Terrors of the Year Two Thousand will live.

Laurence K. Shook,Pontifical Institute ofMediaeval Studies,Toronto.


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Etienne Gilson


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M M F OLD> CHILDREN were caught to hold^fl | as certain that around the year OneM ^mW Thousand a great terror took possession^^^p M of people. We were told so, .it am rate,^^fcj-^md we believed it, and the really amazing thingis that all was not completely false in this story. Thescholars of today make fun of it and treat it as a legend.Nowhere, they say, can we find trace of this so-called panicwhich is supposed to have then paralyzed wholepopulations in the expectation of the approaching end ofthe world. These historians are right, at least to a degree,but even if they were wrong, we would probably smile aswe read today, in the Chronicle of the good monk RaoulGlaber, the report of all sorts of wonders which markedthe last years of the tenth century. A war. a pestilence, afamine, a fiery dragon and a whale the size ofan island?Wehave witnessed much better! This time the enemy ofmankind has got an earlier start; he has even improved hismethods considerably, and if the terrors of the year OneThousand are not a certainty for today's historians, those ofthe year Two Thousand will surely be so for futurehistorians.

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From 1914 to 1918, the world was ravaged by a warwhich had known no parallel. A mighty people brokethrough its boundaries and spread over Europe, leaving inits wake ruins past numbering, dead by the millions, andhistorical materialism, master of Holy Russia, whence laterwe have seen it menacing the whole earth. Even duringthat armistice of twenty years which we took for peace,what tragic bloodshed! China in perpetual war seems alittle far away for us to worry about what happens there,but have we already forgotten what took place during thatbarbarous civil war in Most Christian Spain, where manwas so cruel to man that those who saw it lower theirvoices to speak of it, and murmur: "Anything, rather thansee that again!" The tenth century famine? But I have onlyto shut my eyes for a moment to see once more, in thevillages of the Ukraine and on the banks of the Volga, thedead children in 1922, whose little corpses lay abandonedin their emptied schools; or again, wandering along therailways, those bands of children reduced to savagery wholater were to be mowed down with machine guns. At thebeginning of the twentieth century, as at the end of thetenth official documents bear witness to the fact parents devoured their offspring. Fathers and mothers likeour own, like ourselves, but who knew the meaning of thatfrightful word: hunger.

That, however was but a modest beginning. We sawthe German army hurled upon Europe a second time, likea great tidal wave; Poland vanquished, plundered,butchered; nations falling one after the other under theblows of an irresistible conqueror. France in agony, hervery honour wounded. Paris crumbles in its turn, and theecho of its downfall reverberates in the silence of anastonished world. A Raoul Glaber of the year TwoThousand would never stop multiplying the chapters ofthis woeful tale. He would have to describe the prodigiousPage Two


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series of disasters which now swoop down upon the entireworld and to which we ourselves, who witnessed them,can scarcely bear testimony. The sky everywhere furrowedby fiery dragons much more formidable than those which,on the threshold of the year One Thousand, crossed fromnorth to south the sky of France; in Japan, in the South SeaIslands, in China, in Russia, in Germany, in France, in Italy in that very England which believed itself shelteredbehind our army, its fleet and the depths of its surroundingseas a heap of ruins which has not yet been cleared awayand which is there for us to see; the numbers of deadincrease and they are still in our hearts for us to mourn; awhole race condemned to destruction, savagely wipedout, pursued by a hatred fierce and ingenious as only manis capable of conceiving for man. Germany opened for theJews, and closed upon them, charnel pits whose numberswe still do not know. Of course, all this was to be broughtto a close by a liberation, but we know what further detailsand further ruins this was to cost, even to that bomb ofHiroshima, whose solemn detonation announced to aterrified world, with the supposed close of a war which nopeace has yet followed, the dawn of a new era wherescience, formerly our hope and our joy, would be thesource of greatest terror.

Man has just made the most outstanding of hisdiscoveries, but by a symbolism the more striking forbeing quite involuntary, the great secret that science hasjust wrested from matter is the secret of its destruction. Toknow today is synonymous with to destroy. Nuclear fissionis not only the most intimate revelation ofthe nature ofthephysical world and the freeing of the most powerfulenergy7 that has ever been held, but at the same time andinevitably the most frightful agent of destruction whichman has ever had at his disposal. The three areinseparable. Atomic piles can be built more and more

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powerfui, and immense quantities of useful energy canthus be produced, but the operation ofthese piles yields asa by-product the very explosive of the atom bomb. Notonly does man know today so many things that he wondersif he will be able to control his own domination, but theconditions of his rule are such that they present to thescientist this tragic dilemma: formerly, it was by obeyingher that one mastered nature, now it is by destroying her.

And yet we are only at the beginning. The age ofatomic physics will see the birth of a new world, asdifferent from our own as ours is from the world beforesteam and electricity. Doubtless, it will be even more sofor things will move quickly especially when to the eraof physics there will succeed the still more redoubtableone of biology. Very few of those who work in laboratoriesdoubt it: we are on the verge of a great mystery which may,any day, surrender its secret. We will be able to work, notonly on inert matter, but even on life, and it is not only thebreadth of our power but its very nature which willbecome terrifying; and the more so that here again, and forthe same reason, the possibility of good is inseparablefrom that of evil.

Pasteurian arms is today a common term. It is ahorrible term, and it carries with it a symbolism that ismore impressive because it is entirely independent of allhuman intention. Pasteur never cultivated microbesexcept to attenuate the virulence of their cultures, and thussave human lives. Today, on the contrary, we are striving toincrease their virulence in order to kill and no longer tocure. The biology oftomorrow will allow more subtle, butnot the less formidable, interventions in human destiny.Can we imagine the repercussions which the freedetermination of the sexes will have some day, perhaps inthe near future? Can we picture what would happen in aworld where we could not only turn out males and femalesPage Four


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at will, but select them and produce human beingsadapted to various functions as do breeders with dogs orhorses or cattle? In that future society which will knowhow to give itself the slaves and even the reproducerswhich it needs, what will become ofthe liberty and dignityof the human person? For once, the most daringprophecies of H. G. Viells appear tame, for in We Island ofDr. Moreau they were still only working to transform wildbrutes into men; in the future society, it is men whom theywill be transforming into brutes to use them to fosterthe ends of a humanity thenceforth unworthy of the name.

And these are not today as in 948 fears localisedin a small corner ofthe earth. It is a world-wide terror, withthe whole planet as its domain, from Vladivostock aroundthe world to Alaska, by way of Moscow, Berlin, Paris,London and Washington. But do we really know its cause?

These men of the tenth century knew at least whatthey feared. Not at all as has been erroneouslyreiterated the end of the world, but an event which, onthe contrary, was to precede it by a sufficiently longinterval of time which was announced prophetically in theApocalypse, ch. 20. v. 7: "Then, when the thousand yearsare over, Satan will be let loose from his prison, and will goout to seduce the nations that live at the four corners of theearth that is the meaning of Gog and Magog andmuster them for battle, countless as the sand by the sea."That is the way St. John himself had said it, the enemy ofGod was soon to appear, ushering in a fearful era ofabomination and desolation.

By what signs would we recognize it? The questionwas asked with that curiosity which always tempersanxiety; and moreover the Middle Ages had on that pointprecisions that surprise us a little. The Beast with sevenheads and ten horns was Satan "and the names it bore on

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its heads were names of blasphemy", which theApocalypse describes: like a leopard, but it had bear's feetand a lion's mouth. A secret number formulates hisessence, and "let the reader, if he has the skill, cast up thesum of the figures in the beast's name, after our humanfashion, and the number will be six hundred and sixty-six".Why? It is, as St. Irenaeus says, that Noah was six hundredyears old at the time of the flood, the statue ofNabuchodonosor was sixty cubits high and six cubits wide:add the age ofNoah and the height and width of the statueofNabuchodonosor and you get six hundred and sixty-six.This is not only clear, it is evident! Would you know hisname? Evanthas, Lateinos, Titan, perhaps another.Irenaeus knows everything. He even informs us that theAntichrist will devastate the whole earth, reigning in theTemple three years and three months; and after that willcome the end of the world when creation will have lastedsix thousand years.

Today we cannot read these details without at first anamused smile on our lips. On that subject the Bishop ofLyons knows so many things, that the future unfolds beforehim with all the regulated precision of the scenario of asuper-film. We ourselves enter into the spirit of the thingand put a few questions to him, but he has an answer foreverything. Why should the world last exactly six thousandyears? It is because creation lasted six days and since a dayof creation is worth a thousand years, the world will cometo an end after the six days of creation have run theircourse. The answer is perfect! But here we stop smilingand an uncomfortable doubt slips into our mind. Sixthousand years? But how old was the world at the time ofChrist? Suppose the six thousand years of the world werenot finally to have expired until around the year TwoThousand? The scourges which have struck us, the menaceof the blows which await us, do not favour abandoning thisPage Six


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hypothesis. Ifthe drama which we live does not announcethe end of the world, it is a rather good dress rehearsal.Shall we see worse than Buchenwald. Lydice andOradour-sur-Glane? Perhaps it is not impossible, but it isdifficult to believe. At this point in our reflections, we castour eyes about and ask anxiously: "But where isAntichrist?'" And behold, he is right there!

Ecce homo, said Friedrich Neitzche of himself:behold the man! This time, no longer God who becomesman to make him divine, but man who makes himselfGodto usurp his place and who wishes to be his own god. Weare surprised at first, for he bears no resemblance to thefantastic beast of the Apocalypse. However, like it he has anumber, and it is a human number. On the body of a man,a man's head with a hard, wilful chin, a broad intellectualforehead crowned with blasphemies, and in his beautifuleyes the anguish of insanity. His name is none of thosewhich they had told us. He does not call himself Lateinos,Evanthas but Zarathustra, and behold he speaks like theone ofwhom St. Paul formerly prophesied, who will go sofar as to sit "in God's temple, and proclaim himself asGod". (II Thess. ii, 4).

That is indeed what Nietzche does, when he putshimself forward as the sole guardian of the terrifyingexplosive which humanity does not yet know and whichwill nevertheless change its destiny. More pow-erful thanthe bomb of Hiroshima which it prefigures, and athousand times more devastating still, the terrifyingmessage that Zarathustra murmurs to himself as he comestowards us is contained in these few very simple words:"They do not know that God is dead". He himself, at least,knows it, and that is why his name is Ante-christus as wellas Anti-christns. "Have you understood me?" he asks."Dionysus face to face with the Crucifix". He does not onlycome before Christ but against Him.

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This is the capital discovery of modern times, theevent of which all the rest, tragic as they may be, are onlythe corollaries or the sequels. Trace back as far as you likethe history of humanity and you will find no upheaval tocompare with this in the extent or in the depth of its cause.The demoniac grandeur of Nietzsche is that he does knowand that he says so. This is not just our imagination; it isenough to read hisEcceHomo to have proof of it: "I knowmy fate. A day will come when the remembrance of afearful event will be fixed to my name, the remembranceof a unique crisis in the history of the earth, of the mostprofound clash of consciences, of a decree enacted againstall that had been believed, exacted and sanctified rightdown to our days. I am not a man, I am dynamite." Do youdoubt for an instant that he would have said today "anatomic bomb"? And how right he is! From his verybeginning, man had thought nothing, said nothing, donenothing that did not draw its inspiration from this certitudethat there existed a God or gods. And behold, all of asudden, there is no longer one, or rather, we see that therenever was one! We shall have to change completely oureven- thought, word and deed. The entire human ordertotters on its base. Antichrist is still the only one whoknows this, the only one who foresees the appallingcataclysm of the "reversal of values" which is in themaking, for if the totality of the human past depended onthe certitude that God exists, the totality of its future mustneeds depend on the contrary certitude, that God does notexist. But see the folly of men who do not yet know this, orwho continue to act as if two or three among them did notknow it already! Everything that was true from thebeginning of the human race will suddenly become false,but what will become true? Whether he knows it or not,man alone must create for himself a new formula of life,which will be that of his destiny.

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Very well, let us get to work. But man will never usehis creative liberty as long as he believes that what isalready dead is still living. Nietzsche has definiteknowledge of his mission to destroy: "When truth openswar on the age-old falsehood, we shall witness upheavalsunheard of in the history of the world, earthquakes willtwist the earth, the mountains and the valleys will bedisplaced, and everything hitherto imaginable will besurpassed. Politics will then be completely absorbed bythe war of ideas and all the combinations of power of theold society will be shattered since they are all built onfalsehood: there will be wars such as the earth will neverhave seen before. It is only with me that great politicsbegin on the globe ... I know the intoxicating pleasure ofdestroying to a degree proportionate to my power ofdestruction."

Have we understood at last? That is not certain,because the announcement of a cataclysm of suchmagnitude ordinarily leaves but a single escape: todisbelieve it and, in order not to believe, to refuse tounderstand it. If Nietzsche speaks truly, it is the veryfoundations of human life which are to be overthrown.Before stating what will be true, we will have to say thateverything by which man has thus far lived, everything bywhich he still lives, is deception and trickery. "He whowould be a creator, both in good and evil, must first of allknow how to destroy and to wreck values." They are, infact, being wrecked around us, and under our very feet,everywhere. We have stopped counting the unheard oftheories thrown at us under names as various as theirmethods of thought, each the harbinger of a new truthwhich it promises to create shortly, joyously busypreparing the brave new world of tomorrow by first of allannihilating the world of today.

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Destroying today to create tomorrow, such is indeedthe mission of the seducer. "I am the first immoralist, I amthereby the destroyer par excellence." He knows hismission, and his disciples too have understood it. It is notonly to some of their novels, it is to their entire work thatThe Immoralist of Gide would serve as a rather good title.That is merely literature? Doubtless, and it is sometimesbeautiful but have we not long known that the seducerwould be handsome? That we should not have foreseenhim, is still forgivable. But that we should not understandwhat he is doing while he is doing it right under our eyes,just as we were told he would do it that bears witness toa stranger blindness. Can it really be that the herd ofhuman beings that is being led to slaughter has eyes andyet does not see?

It is none the less very simple! Whatever criticism canbe levelled at the venerable Artisan of the Bible, let us atleast do him the justice of admitting that he knew quitewell what "to create" means. He did not take himself forsome Greek demigod, fashioning to his idea a materialwhich did not owe him existence. Insofar as a thing ismade out of another, concession must be made to thematerial which is used. To create, on the contrary, is trulyto make something of nothing, in the supreme freedom ofan act which, since it is producing ex nihilo, nothingconditions, nothing determines, nothing limits. A trulygratuitous act of which one is the sole and completeauthor, that is the only act which is truly creative because italone is truly free. In an eternity which transcended time,Jehovah was free; but we are not, for even if the world wasnot created, everything appears to us as if it had beencreated, for it exists. And it is indeed that world whichrestricts us! Try as we may to fashion it and remodel it, in ahundred different ways, we shall only make of it what itsnature allows us to make. We shall perhaps be greatPage Ten


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manufacturers, but creators never! To create in his turnex nihilo, man must first of all reestablish everywhere thevoid.

It is too soon yet to create, but one can begin todestroy. Man is thus occupied on all sides with thatintoxicating joy which Neitzche has just told us is as greatas his power of destruction. Perhaps that is the answer tothe poignant question which so many of us are askingourselves: what does man want? Has he gone mad? Yes, in asense, but only with the supremely lucid madness of acreature who would annihilate the obstacle which beingplaces in the way of his creative ambitions. Such is theprofound sense of our solemn and tragic adventure.Antichrist is not among us, he is in us. It is man himself,usurping unlimited creative power and proceeding to thecertain annihilation of that which is, in order to clear theway for the problematic creation of what will be.

We are then in the decisive moment of a cosmicdrama. Quis ut Dens? It is I, says man. When we no longerwant to be the image of God, we still can be his caricature!The explosion of Hiroshima did not only silence thatatrocious clamour which swelled towards us from thecamps of slow death and the charnel pits of Germany, itwill resound for a long time, as a solemn assertion with adefinite meaning. We have at last seen through the secretof matter! We know exactly how it is made, since we areable to destroy it. How will the world end? We used tothink we knew; then science accustomed us to considerthese answers as myths, and behold it now produces itsown answer. On the threshold of a new millenium, manhas the proud conviction that the day is perhaps not far offwhen he himself will be able to explode the planet. Let usadmit that the adventure is enticing. You press a button,and the earth bursts like a gigantic bomb whosepulverized fragments are lost in a shower of stars which

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the startled eyes of the Martians if there be any willsee shooting through the night into space. As a child whoamuses himself by breaking his toy for no reason at all, justto see what it is like inside, so man will have smashed theworld. It is possible that another will then be born, but thatis not certain; in the meantime, what is certain is that ourswill be ended.

At least, it will be said, man is free! One canhenceforth attempt all things, and especially in the realmof the mind. So wrote Stephane Mallarme, whose wholework attests what has been called "the obsession toabolish", but who would abolish everything only that hehimself might perform a pure act of creation and thus, as ithas been said, "became equal to God". Is not that preciselythe sacrilegious effort whose meaning we would like todecipher? The terms which a critic of Mallarme used todescribe his poetic enterprise fit exactly the madambitions of modern man: "to construct a poetry whichwould have the value of a preternatural creation and whichwould be able to enter into rivalry with the world ofcreated things to the point of supplanting it totally".

To abolish existing creation in order to createanother: that is also the ambition of authentic surrealism,by which I mean the one which Andre Breton defined ashort while ago as: "something dictated by thought,released from all control of reason, divorced from allaesthetic or moral preoccupation". We will then be able tosay everything as well as to do everything. If we start byannihilating everything, what limits can stop us? Nonewhatever. Everything is possible, provided only that thiscreative spark which surrealism seeks to disclose deep inour being be preceded by a devastating flame. "The mostsimple surrealist act consists in this: to go down into thestreets, pistol in hand, and shoot at random, for all you areworth, into the crowd."Why not? This massacre ofvalues isPage Twelve


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necessary to create values that are really new. "Everythingis still to be done", affirms Andre Breton, "every meansbecomes good when employed to destroy the ideas offamily, native land, religion." Now that is not onlynecessary: since God is dead, it has become possible. Theeternal obstructor who has encumbered the heavens eversince the beginning of the world has suddenly disap-peared. The terrible interlocutor to whom, during ageswithout number, man gave only trembling reply beholdhe has suddenly vanished, leaving for the first time man,face to face with himself, alone in a world empty of God,and at last master of his destiny. "But, Smerdiakof ', saysold Karamazov, "if God does not exist, then everything ispermitted." What a prodigious liberation! Man knowshenceforward that he can do anything without the echo inhis ear of the redoubtable summons of the sovereignjudge, Adam, where art thou?" There is no longer anyjudge, save Adam himself, who, since he alone makes thelaw, alone applies it, without knowing yet that man is forhimself the hardest of masters and that, by a comparisonwith the yoke which he lays on his own shoulders, that ofthe Lord was light to bear.

To learn this, he needs a bit of time. Long after theamazing discovery that all is henceforth permitted, manstill continues to act as if that which had formerly beenforbidden still remained so. The ancient law of good andevil continues to rule his actions, but instead of beingcalled the divine law it is called the voice of conscience.Nothing has then been gained, and man has merelychanged the name of his master; until the inevitable daywhen conscience, finding herself but the lees of long use,doubts in her turn that even she has authority- to imposelaw. It is only then that all becomes actually permissible,and to the question: what must we do?, there is no longeran answer, but from the moment when there is indeed no

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longer anything that man must do, he no longer knowswhat he will do. As the soldier, on leave, knows thedesolation oftwenty-four hours passed with nothing to do,man knows today that infinitely more tragic desolation of alife which is all spent in the idleness of a liberty7 he ispowerless to use.

It is this nausea that has engendered contemporaryexistentialism and, we must admit, its courageous decisionto dispel it. "Existentialism", says Sartre, "is nothing otherthan an effort to draw all the consequences from acoherently atheistic position." That is true, and theseconsequences are terrible. Everything is permissible ifGod does not exist, but also, as a consequence, man isabandoned, for he finds neither within nor withouthimself anything on which to rely. Then begins for him thestern martyrdom of the paths of liberty. "We have neitherbehind us nor before us, in the bright domain of values,any justification or excuse. We are alone, without excuse.That is what I would express in saying that man iscondemned to be free . . . man, without any support andwithout any help, is condemned at each moment to inventman." A truly exhausting task, that of a perpetual inventionof self, without model, without purpose, without rule. Thefather of existentialism is not Prometheus bound, nor evenunbound, but rather Sisyphus, "the hero of the absurd".Tragic hero, because he knows, and by that very fact issuperior to his destiny. Is he not stronger than his rock,asks Albert Camus, since he rolls it eternally? "To live is tomake the absurd live. To make it live is above all tocontemplate it."

That the absurd creates itself out of nothing is notastonishing, nor that it nauseates him. But these are thesports of the princes of the mind. For unless we welcomethe eerie invitation to suicide, our problem is to live. Ahalf-dozen intellectuals may find a meaning for the absurdPage Fourteen


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in the literary success they gain by it. but such a justificationhas no value for the masses of ordinary men, liberated byatheism and who, having become gods without asking forit, do not know what to do with their divinity. The lattermake no pretence to save themselves, they eagerly beg tobe saved. Then there appear other men who undertake toexploit atheism in their turn, and who organize the cult ofthe new god. It is not without a profound philosophicalreason that Marxism required atheism as one of itsnecessary principles.

"Aragon and I", Andre Breton used to write. Let us notbe surprised that Aragon, a Marxist writer, made his debutunder the chief of the surrealists. Their paths have sinceparted, but all the creative ambitions of the man whomakes himself god at least find a harmony in the will todestroy which they presuppose. How could Marxism beable truly to free man, if it did not first free him of God?Since Feuerbach, we know exactly what is the essence ofChristianity and how man, who believed himself thecreature ofGod, is on the contrary His creator. Since thereis no longer anything between man and himself, there isno longer anything between man and other men. Onceagain, he is free, but is he truly free? Once he is free ofGod,he is no longer free of other men, between whom andhimself there never existed any other protection but Godand the law of God. It is a very old story. We read in dieBook ofJudges (xxi, 24): "In those days there was no kingin Israel: but even- one did that which seemed right tohimself. 1 ' The day came, however, when this free peoplegrew tired of its liberty, and as the prophet Samuel wasgrowing old, they went to him and said: "Make us a king, tojudge us, as all nations have." At these words, Samuelexperienced a great sadness, for he thought he had alwaysjudged according to the law of God, but he feared he hadcommitted some fault and by it had turned men from thatlaw.

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The Lord knew his thoughts, and said to him:"Hearken to the voice of the people in all that they say tothee. For they have not rejected thee, but me, that I shouldnot reign over them." However, before granting theJewishpeople the king that they asked, God made known to themthe rights that their future masters would not fail to claim:"He will take your sons and put them in his chariots, andwill make them his horsemen, and his running footmen torun before his chariots. And he will appoint of them toplough his fields, and to reap his corn, and to make himarms and chariots. Moreover, he will take the tenth ofyourcorn to give to his servants.' 1We have seen these things andworse still, for if governments today were satisfied with anincome tax of ten percent, what a sigh of relief would wehear in the world! Since men have refused to serve God,there is no longer an arbiter between them and the Statewhich dominates them. It is no longer God, it is the Statewhich judges them. But who, then, will judge the State?

To know the answer to this, it is enough to glance atwhat is going on round about us. To judge the State, thereis no one left. In every land and in all countries, the peoplewait with fear and trembling for the powerful of this worldto decide their lot for them. They hesitate, uncertain,among the various forms of slavery which are beingprepared for them. Listening with bated breath to thesounds of those countries which fall one after the otherwith a crash followed by a long silence, they wonder inanguish how long will last this little liberty they stillpossess. The waiting is so tense that many feel a vagueconsent to slavery secretly germinating within themselves.With growing impatience, they await the arrival of themaster who will impose on them all forms of slavery,starting with the worst and most degrading of all that ofthe mind. Blessed be he who will deliver us fromourselves! Alone under a heaven henceforth empty, manPage Sixteen


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offers to whoever is willing to take it, this futile libertywhich he does not know how to use. He is ready for all thedictators, leaders of these human herds who follow themas guides and who are all finally conducted by them to thesame place the abbatoir.

What, then, is to be done? To this question permit meto reply by another: In this year of grace, 1948, how muchgrace is there still left? And this would be the wholequestion if there did not remain a second one: Is manwilling to receive what still remains ofgrace today? For it isnot by wallowing in the evil but in turning our backs on itscause that the remedy can be found. Let us not say: it is toolate, and there is nothing left to do; but let us have thecourage to look for the evil and the remedy where theyexist. It is in losing God that man has lost his reason: he willnot find it again without having first found God again.

There was in the thirteenth century a philosopher towhom the sight of the world did not give nausea, but a joyever new, because he saw in it only order and beauty. Mandid not seem to him a Sisyphus hopelessly condemned tothe liberty of the absurd, for he read in his own heart theclear law of practical reason. On all sides, within as well aswithout, a single and self-same light enlightens theunderstanding and regulates things, for the spirit which isfound in them reconstructs them in the mind according tothe order of the same creative intelligibility. This harmonyofthought and reality which in our time Einstein describesas the most incomprehensible of mysteries, does notastonish our philosopher, for he knows its source thatsame God Whose pure existence is at the origin of allreality as well as of all knowledge. And what is liberty forcreated man, unless it be to accept himself lovingly, evenas his Creator wants and loves him? What is it to act as a freeman unless it be to regulate the will according to reason,and reason itself according to the divine law? The vastest

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community is the universe. God,Who created it, governs itaccording to the eternal law, of which the natural law, thehuman and the moral law are only so many particularexpressions. Not a sin, not a moral fault is there which isnot first of all an error made to the detriment of intelligiblelight, in violation of the laws of the supreme reason.

Eminently habitable, because it is Christian, is thisuniverse of St. Thomas Aquinas still ours? I am afraid not. Itis, however, the only one in which man can live withouthaving to create himself in the permanent anguish of hisown nothingness, without having eternally to push upagain and again the rock of Sisyphus or to yield to thefascination of a slavery which will deliver him even fromthe memory of liberty. This world is that of the divinewisdom which penetrates everything with its power andorders all with sweetness. Raoul Glaber reports that afterso many misfortunes and fateful presages, a sort of peacecame into the heavens and the earth was covered with awhite robe of churches. Thus disappeared the fears of theyear One Thousand. Salvation is the same today. There stillremains only God to protect man against man. Either wewill serve Him in spirit and in truth, or we shall enslaveourselves ceaselessly, more and more, to the monstrousidol which we have made with our own hands to our ownimage and likeness. The cause of so many miseries isindeed the ignorance which men have of an importantmessage: they no longer know that a Saviour is born to us.This is not the message of Zarathustra, it is the promise ofpeace which rang out, nearly two thousand years ago, inthe skies of Bethlehem.

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Terrors of Year Two 00 Gilson