2. Reformers and
transformers of the milieu social.
Those who, from the height of a
blissful optimism, proclaim that Society is perfect are rare. As a result
reformers, improvers and transformers of Society are legion. It is so far from
the case that individuals are contents with their condition, that everyone complains
about their lot in life, even those best provided for. Without seeking the degree
of sincerity that these lamentations contain, the fact is patent and the sorrow
is proclaimed as “universal.”
It is a commonplace to write that
contemporary civilization has failed. That the previous civilizations did not
succeed any better, no one will deny. They have all run aground on this: they
have never been able to insure for the human beings that they gather under
their aegis a sum of happiness sufficient that life–the individual life and the
collective life–should be found good and pleasant to live. It is true that the civilizations
which have followed one another have not always set themselves this goal, or
that they have only proposed it in a very imperfect manner, and it is obvious
that they have often excluded from participation in that happiness, such as
they imagine it, a considerable share of sub-humans: outcasts of all categories,
slaves, serfs and others. However, more or less completely, with more or less exceptions,
the great civilizations which have shone on the planet had in view, in a
general fashion, the happiness of the people for or among with they flourished.
I claim that
they have failed, and failed miserably. I readily concede that the conductors who directed them in
the most glorious, remarkable, and prosperous epochs of their history, have
contributed all the effort of which they were capable. I nonetheless maintain
that the “civilized” life, the “social” life, formerly and today, is a load, a
burden, even a constant sorrow for the majority of the living—and this to such an extent that one wonders if life
"in society" and woe
are not synonymous terms. No doubt there are
exceptions, but they are so few,
and they are the
prerogative of such a limited number of privileged
persons, that they do little more
than confirm the thesis of
universal suffering.
It would be tedious to enumerate all
the classes and sub-classes in the catalog of reformers and transformers of the
social environment. A thick volume would not be sufficient and it is not the
aim of our book. Three large divisions will suffice to cover them all. The most
ancient are the religious reformers.
For sophisticated minds, their theories
present no more than a retrospective interest. Their fantasies were valuable in
the time–not always very remote–when individuals, even the most gifted, fearful
in the face of poorly explained phenomena or of accidental incidents of existence,
sought a recourse, a support, a response to their questions in an extra-human intervention.
For it is an extra-human, extra-natural, intervention, will of the divinity or revelation
of his will that the religious reformers always return to. The member of
Society, or rather the creature, is a plaything in the hands of the creator; the
great drama of the historical evolution of human groupings, the inequality of
births or aptitudes, the control of the powerful and arrogant over the rest of
humanity, all of that arises from the good will of the divinity – it is the
tangible expression of its work. “Let the divine will be done!”—that is the
last word of the most spiritual souls, the most frantically religious, even
when that so-called will implies annihilation of the individual personality,
passive acceptance of all that which suppress the growth and blossoming of the
individual life.
But there is another point of view
that must be studied in order to consider the religious problem in its full
extent and to understand well the “state of the religious soul.” The deeply,
sincerely religious being is devoured by an unquenchable, insatiable need for atonement.
Even when irreproachable from the moral and social point of view, it feels an
almost irresistible desire to renounce its faculties of reflection in order to
find a bitter, nagging joy in a keen feeling of regret and remorse for not
finding itself in conformity to a certain ideal of value or moral level, whether
it has drawn that ideal itself, or if it has been recommended to it by dogma or
shown by the priest. The sincerely religious being places in an absolute of
purity and sanctity that it calls God the sum of all the spiritual values that
it is capable of conceiving or imagining. It always feels that it is powerless
and miserable in relation to that spiritual absolute, with regard to which it
is conscious of being morally responsible.
It establishes such a difference between
the being preyed on by sensual passions that it is and the extra-natural phantom
that is has created, that it constantly feels itself in a more or less heightened
state of disobedience. What indeed is “sin,” if not having yielded to the pull
of the passions, having preferred tangible enjoyments and the stimulations they
bring, to the denials and annihilations of “the flesh,” or to the observation of
certain rites and ceremonies? The fundamentally religious being is a tormented
soul, who goes through life always asking itself how it will go about atoning
for its shortcomings, redeeming its sin. It goes without saying that the
sacrifice of a heifer or a goat, or even of a mournful turtle dove, symbolic as
it is, will not satisfy the delicacy of conscience of an eminently spiritual
being. Blood alone, life, redeems sin. To atone, the man in a religious state
of mind will sacrifice himself, consecrate himself, renounce himself. He will
give his life: of his flesh and his blood, he will mortify his flesh by
imposing silence on the boiling of his blood, even to the point of inflicting
bodily suffering on himself. He will consecrate himself to the service of the
divinity, he will impose all sorts of privations on himself, he will abstain—despite
the desire that devours him—from tasting the joys of existence, anxious until
the hour of death with a poignant doubt, not knowing if he has accomplished
enough, or in the right way, to calm the anger of God, of that jealous Absolute
who demands of his faithful, his creatures, a complete submission and devotion.
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