Examined and rejected. Top o’ the Stack.
Facebook advertisement: “Mercifully brief, perfectly rigorous, and indisputably sound.” I wouldn’t promote it that way here, of course.
Contemplating suicide? Look before you leap.
Julian Green, Diary 1928-1957, p. 230:
The yearning to leave the world is so strong at times that I don’t know how to resist it, but am nearly sure that this is the great temptation that must at all costs be warded off.
On occasion we encounter morally good people who are sincerely interested in our spiritual welfare, so much so that they fear that we will be lost if we differ from the views they cherish, even if our views are not so very different from theirs. Julian Green in his Diary 1928-1957, entry of 10 April 1929, p. 6, said to André Gide:
With the best will in the world, they never see you without a lurking idea of proselytism. They are worried about our salvation. They visibly have it on their minds., even when you talk to them of quite different matters. . . . “Yes indeed!” cries Gide. “They will use every means to draw you to them. When you are with them you find yourself in the situation of a woman faced with a man who would harbor intentions!”
I’d guess the alacrity and enthusiasm of Gide’s response to Green had its origin in Gide’s relation to Paul Claudel, a committed Roman Catholic who never ceased trying to bring Gide around to the true faith. The Claudel-Gide correspondence 1899-1926 makes for fascinating reading.
What I find objectionable about the proselytic mentality is the cocksurety with which the proselytes hold their views. They dogmatically affirm this and they dogmatically deny that, and are not in the least troubled by the fact that people as intellectually and morally virtuous as they are disagree. They ‘know’ what salvation is and the way to it. The critical attitude is foreign to them. The fervor of their beliefs boils over into something they wrongly consider knowledge.
Their attitude is mostly harmless, but there are toxic forms of it, as history has taught us. The Founders of our great republic were well aware of the religious wars and of the blood shed by the dogmatists. These days it is the spikes of the Islamic trident that are a clear and present threat: conversion, dhimmitude, the sword. The ascension of a madman to the mayoralty in our greatest city is a troubling sign.
Diary 1928-1957, entry of 6 October 1941:
The story of the manna gathered and set aside by the Hebrews is deeply significant. It so happened that the manna rotted when it was kept. And perhaps that means that all spiritual reading which is not consumed — by prayer and by works — ends by causing a sort of rotting inside us. You die with a head full of fine sayings and a perfectly empty heart.
The consumption of a comestible is its physiological appropriation. To appropriate is to make one’s own. Green is referring to spiritual appropriation, the making one’s own of spiritual sayings by prayer and practice.
Did edible bread once fall from the sky? I don’t deny it, but must I affirm it? Would it not be enough to take the Old Testament passage in its spiritual sense and bracket the question of its literal truth?
Julian Green, Diary 1928-1957, entry of 30 December 1940, p. 104:
Does our body never weary of desiring the same things? [. . .] There are only two types of humanity . . . the mystic and the profligate, because both fly to extremes , searching, each is his own way, for the absolute; but, of the two, the profligate is to my mind the most [more] mysterious, for he never tires of the only dish served up to him by his appetite and on which he banquets each times as though he had never tasted it before. Probably because of this, I have always had a tendency to consider an immoderate craving for pleasure as an accepted form of madness.
Only two types of humanity? No, but two types. Man is made for the Absolute, and some of us seek it. Mysticism and profligacy are two ways of seeking it. Eschewing the phony and conventional, some of us strive after the really real, τὸ ὄντως ὄν. Some by world-flight, others by immersion in sensual indulgence. An enlightened upward and a deluded downward seeking. The solid and stolid bourgeois type will consider both types of seekers mad. But only those who seek the really real in the pleasures of the flesh are truly mad. They are bound for a hell of their own devising as I suggest in A Theory of Hell. Excerpt:
To be in hell is to be in a perpetual state of enslavement to one's vices, knowing that one is enslaved, unable to derive genuine satisfaction from them, unable to get free, and knowing that there is true happiness that will remain forever out of reach. Hell would then be not as a state of pain but one of endless unsatisfying and unsatisfied pleasure. A state of unending gluttony for example, or of ceaseless sexual promiscuity. A state of permanent entrapment in a fool's paradise — think of an infernal counterpart of Las Vegas — in which one is constantly lusting after food and drink and money and sex, but is never satisfied. On fire with the fire of desire, endless and unfulfilled, but with the clear understanding that one is indeed a fool, and entrapped, and cut off permanently from a genuine happiness that one knows exists but will never experience.
