Anarchism; Atheism; Christianity -- Controversial literature
How did it manage to lodge a thing absolutely immaterial in a thing
absolutely material; how can the body contain, enclose, limit, paralyze
pure spirit? This, again, is one of those questions which faith alone,
that passionate and stupid affirmation of the absurd, can solve. It is
the greatest of miracles. Here, however, we have only to establish the
effects, the practical consequences of this miracle.
After thousands of centuries of vain efforts to come back to itself,
Divinity, lost and scattered in the matter which it animates and
sets in motion, finds a point of support, a sort of focus for
self-concentration. This focus is man, his immortal soul singularly
imprisoned in a mortal body. But each man considered individually is
infinitely too limited, too small, to enclose the divine immensity; it
can contain only a very small particle, immortal like the whole, but
infinitely smaller than the whole. It follows that the divine being, the
absolutely immaterial being, mind, is divisible like matter. Another
mystery whose solution must be left to faith.
If God entire could find lodgment in each man, then each man would be
God. We should have an immense quantity of Gods, each limited by all the
others and yet none the less infinite--a contradiction which would imply
a mutual destruction of men, an impossibility of the existence of more
than one. As for the particles, that is another matter; nothing more
rational, indeed, than that one particle should be limited by another
and be smaller than the whole. Only, here another contradiction
confronts us. To be limited, to be greater and smaller are attributes of
matter, not of mind. According to the materialists, it is true, mind
is only the working of the wholly material organism of man, and the
greatness or smallness of mind depends absolutely on the greater or less
material perfection of the human organism. But these same attributes
of relative limitation and grandeur cannot be attributed to mind as
the idealists conceive it, absolutely immaterial mind, mind existing
independent of matter. There can be neither greater nor smaller nor any
limit among minds, for there is only one mind--God. To add that the
infinitely small and limited particles which constitute human souls are
at the same time immortal is to carry the contradiction to a climax. But
this is a question of faith. Let us pass on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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