Bertrand.Russel.-.A.Free.Man's.Worship.pdf

A Free Man’s Worship

Bertrand Russell

To Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told the history of the Creation, saying:

"The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow wearisome; for, after all,

did he not deserve their praise? Had he not given them endless joy? Would it not be more

amusing to obtain undeserved praise, to be worshipped by beings whom he tortured? He

smiled inwardly, and resolved that the great drama should be performed.

"For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At length it began to

take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the planets cooled, boiling seas and

burning mountains heaved and tossed, from black masses of cloud hot sheets of rain

deluged the barely solid crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the

ocean, and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest trees, huge ferns

springing from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing

away. And from the monsters, as the play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power

of thought, the knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship. And Man

saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is struggling to snatch, at any

cost, a few brief moments of life before Death's inexorable decree. And Man said: 'There

is a hidden purpose, could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must

reverence something, and in the visible world there is nothing worthy of reverence.' And

Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God intended harmony to come out of

chaos by human efforts. And when he followed the instincts which God had transmitted

to him from his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive him.

But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until he invented a divine Plan by

which God's wrath was to have been appeased. And seeing the present was bad, he made

it yet worse, that thereby the future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the

strength that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible. And God smiled; and

when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another

sun through the sky, which crashed into Man's sun; and all returned again to nebula.

"'Yes,' he murmured, 'it was a good play; I will ha ve it performed again.'"

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which

Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward

must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end

they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his

beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism,

no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that

all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness

of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that

the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a

universe in ruins -- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain,

that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of

these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation

henceforth be safely built.

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve

his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in

the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at

last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and

evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of

Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to

examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world

with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the

resistless forces that control his outward life.

The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence before the powers of

Nature; but having in himself nothing that he respects more than Power, he is willing to

prostrate himself before his gods, without inquiring whether they are worthy of his

worship. Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of

degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods:

surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is most precious has been freely given,

their lust for blood must be appeased, and more will not be required. The religion of

Moloch -- as such creeds may be generically called -- is in essence the cringing

submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master

deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power

may be freely worshipped, and receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction

of pain.

But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world begins to be felt;

and worship, if it is not to cease, must be given to gods of another kind than those created

by the savage. Some, though they feel the demands of the ideal, will still consciously

reject them, still urging that naked Power is worthy of worship. Such is the attitude

inculcated in God's answer to Job out of the whirlwind: the divine power and knowledge

are paraded, but of the divine goodness there is no hint. Such also is the attitude of those

who, in our own day, base their morality upon the struggle for survival, maintaining that

the survivors are necessarily the fittest. But others, not content with an answer so

repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the position which we have become accustomed

to regard as specially religious, maintaining that, in some hidden manner, the world of

fact is really harmonious with the world of ideals. Thus Man creates God, all-powerful

and all- good, the mystic unity of what is and what should be.

But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our judgment to it, there is

an element of slavishness from which our thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is

well to exa lt the dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of

non-human Power. When we have realised that Power is largely bad, that man, with his

knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a world which has no such

knowledge, the choice is again presented to us: Shall we worship Force, or shall we

worship Goodness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognised as the

creation of our own conscience?

The answer to this question is very momentous, and affects profoundly our whole

morality. The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche and the creed of

Militarism have accustomed us, is the result of failure to maintain our own ideals against

a hostile universe: it is itself a prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of our best to

Moloch. If strength indeed is to be respected, let us respect rather the strength of those

who refuse that false "recognition of facts" which fails to recognise that facts are often

bad. Let us admit that, in the world we know, there are many things that would be better

otherwise, and that the ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realised in the

realm of matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal of

perfection which life does not permit us to attain, though none of these things meet with

the approval of the unconscious universe. If Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it

from our hearts. In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God

created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which inspires the insight

of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of

outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow-men, free

from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live,

from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith which enables us to live

constantly in the vision of the good; and let us descend, in action, into the world of fact,

wit h that vision always before us.

When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a spirit of fiery revolt, of

fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary to the assertion of freedom. To defy with

Promethean constancy a hostile universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively

hated, to refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, appears to be the duty of all

who will not bow before the inevitable. But indignation is still a bondage, for it compels

our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world; and in the fierceness of desire from which

rebellion springs there is a kind of self-assertion which it is necessary for the wise to

overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires; the Stoic

freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the submission of our desires, but not of

our thoughts. From the submission of our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from

the freedom of our thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the vision

of beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant world. But the vision of

beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by the load

of eager wishes; and thus Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it

shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of Time.

Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of evil, yet

Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding that of the Promethean

philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted that, of the things we desire, some, though

they prove impossible, are yet real goods; others, however, as ardently longed for, do not

form part of a fully purified ideal. The belief that what must be renounced is bad, though

sometimes false, is far less often false than untamed passion supposes; and the creed of

religion, by providing a reason for proving that it is never false, has been the means of

purifying our hopes by the discovery of many austere truths.

But there is in resignation a further good element: even real goods, when they are

unattainable, ought not to be fretfully desired. To every man comes, sooner or later, the

great renunciation. For the young, there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with

the whole force of a passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by

death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that

the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave,

Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to

bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets.

This degree of submission to Power is not only just and right: it is the very gate of

wisdom.

But passive renunciation is not the whole of wisdom; for not by renunciation alone can

we build a temple for the worship of our own ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the

temple appear in the realm of imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled

kingdom of reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines and

glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from the

failures and disenchantments of the world of fact. In the contemplation of these things the

vision of heaven will shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the

world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs whatever is not

incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.

Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a cavern of darkness to be

traversed before that temple can be entered. The gate of the cavern is despair, and its

floor is paved with the gravestones of abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the

eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed

from the empire of Fate. But out of the cavern the Gate of Renunciation leads again to the

daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine

forth to gladden the pilgrim's heart.

When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to resign

ourselves to the outward rules of Fate and to recognise that the non- human world is

unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the

unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image

of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world -- in

the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even

in the very omnipotence of Death -- the insight of creative idealism can find the reflection

of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery

over the thoughtless forces of Nature. The more evil the material with which it deals, the

more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is its achievement in inducing the reluctant

rock to yield up its hidden treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling the opposing

forces to swell the pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the proudest, the

most triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy's country,

on the very summit of his highest mountain; from its impregnable watchtowers, his

camps and arsenals, his columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls the free life

continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the servile captains of

tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty. Happy

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