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A Free Man's Worship
by Bertrand
Russell
A brief introduction: A Free Man's
Worship
Worshipin Dec. 1903) is perhaps
Bertrand Russell's best known and most
reprinted essay. Its mood and language have
often been explained, even by Russell
himself,
as reflecting a particular time in his life;
epend(s),
the essay sounds many
characteristic Russellian themes and
preoccupations and
deserves consideration--and
further serious study--as an historical landmark
of
early-twentieth-century European thought.
For a scholarly edition with some
documentation, see Volume 12 of The Collected
Papers of Bertrand Russell,
entitled
Contemplation and Action, 1902-14 (London, 1985;
now published by
Routledge). To Dr. Faustus in
his study Mephistopheles told the history of the
Creation, saying:
ess 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.
ess 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.
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 exalt 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 of
factswhich 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, with 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 those sacred ramparts,
thrice
happy the dwellers on that all-seeing
eminence. Honour to those brave warriors
who,
through countless ages of warfare, have preserved
for us the priceless
heritage of liberty, and
have kept undefiled by sacrilegious invaders the
home of
the unsubdued.
But the beauty
of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which,
in more or less
obvious shapes, is present
always and everywhere in life. In the spectacle of
Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain,
and in the irrevocableness of a
vanished past,
there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a
feeling of the
vastness, the depth, the
inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as
by some
strange marriage of pain, the sufferer
is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In
these moments of insight, we lose all
eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling
and striving for petty ends, all care for the
little trivial things that, to a superficial
view, make up the common life of day by day;
we see, surrounding the narrow raft
illumined
by the flickering light of human comradeship, the
dark ocean on whose
rolling waves we toss for
a brief hour; from the great night without, a
chill blast
breaks in upon our refuge; all the
loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is
concentrated upon the individual soul, which
must struggle alone, with what of
courage it
can command, against the whole weight of a
universe that cares
nothing for its hopes and
fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers
of
darkness, is the true baptism into the
glorious company of heroes, the true
initiation into the overmastering beauty of
human existence. From that awful
encounter of
the soul with the outer world, enunciation,
wisdom, and charity are
born; and with their
birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost
shrine of the
soul the irresistible forces
whose puppets we seem to be--Death and change, the
irrevocableness of the past, and the
powerlessness of Man before the blind hurry
of
the universe from vanity to vanity--to feel these
things and know them is to
conquer them.
This is the reason why the Past has such
magical power. The beauty of its
motionless
and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity
of late autumn, when
the leaves, though one
breath would make them fall, still glow against
the sky in
golden glory. The Past does not
change or strive; like Duncan, after life's fitful
fever
it sleeps well; what was eager and
grasping, what was petty and transitory, has
faded away, the things that were beautiful and
eternal shine out of it like stars in
the
night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is
unendurable; but to a soul which
has conquered
Fate it is the key of religion.
The life
of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in
comparison with the
forces of Nature. The
slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and
Death,
because they are greater than anything
he finds in himself, and because all his
thoughts are of things which they devour. But,
great as they are, to think of them
greatly,
to feel their passionless splendour, is greater
still. And such thought makes
us free men; we
no longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental
subjection, but we
absorb it, and make it a
part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for
private
happiness, to expel all eagerness of
temporary desire, to burn with passion for
eternal things--this is emancipation, and this
is the free man's worship. And this
liberation
is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for Fate
itself is subdued by the
mind which leaves
nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of
Time.
United with his fellow-men by the
strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom,
the free man finds that a new vision is with
him always, shedding over every daily
task the
light of love. The life of Man is a long march
through the night,
surrounded by invisible
foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a
goal that
few can hope to reach, and where
none may tarry long. One by one, as they march,
our comrades vanish from our sight,
seized by the silent orders of omnipotent
Death. Very brief is the time in which we can
help them, in which their happiness
or misery
is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their
path, to lighten their
sorrows by the balm of
sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-
tiring
affection, to strengthen failing
courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let
us
not weigh in grudging scales their merits
and demerits, but let us think only of
their
need--of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps
the blindnesses, that make the
misery of their
lives; let us remember that they are fellow-
sufferers in the same
darkness, actors in the
same tragedy as ourselves. And so, when their day
is over,
when their good and their evil have
become eternal by the immortality of the past,
be it ours to feel that, where they suffered,
where they failed, no deed of ours was
the
cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire
kindled in their hearts, we were
ready with
encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in
which high
courage glowed.
Brief and
powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race
the slow, sure doom falls
pitiless and dark.
Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction,
omnipotent
matter rolls on its relentless way;
for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest,
to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of
darkness, it remains only to
cherish, ere yet
the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble
his little day;
disdaining the coward terrors
of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine
that
his own hands have built; undismayed by
the empire of chance, to preserve a
mind free
from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward
life; proudly defiant of
the irresistible
forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge
and his
condemnation, to sustain alone, a
weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his
own ideals have fashioned despite the
trampling march of unconscious power.
Electronic colophon: This electronic text was
typed for the BRS Home Page in July,
1996 by
John R. Lenz from the 1929 U.S. edition (pp.
46-57) of Mysticism and
Logic (London, 1918).
I used a copy of this book signed by BR himself.
Russell's
signature in the title of this
electronic version is that very signature, which I
reproduced using a scanner and irony. Another
essay in the same collection is
ouble irony.