Initially limited to twenty members, the Oligarchy was expanded to thirty and then fifty. Today its fifty employees accomplish their task painfully, the principal part of which consists of listening to phonographs reciting complaints, criticisms and advice addressed by some work group or other. It is necessary to classify those documents, summarize their claims on a daily basis and to spell out the official logic that admits them or rejects them. Nothing obliges the Authority to satisfy a demand by citizens, even if that demand is unanimous, but it must explain its reasons clearly. If the public persists, the Oligarchy asks to resign. The citizens grant or refuse the resignation. In the former instance, a different group succeeds it
Not one work of science, art or letters is recognized as the result of a single personal effort. If a man writes a book, his whole group signs it. To all of them, it seems evident that if he was able to write the book, it is because his comrades’ words and the observations of which they were, for his intelligence, the object, made an infinite contribution to that effort.
Imagine France governed, in successive series, by several oligarchies, one composed of scientists attached to the Pasteur Laboratory, another of writers revealed by Les Soirées de Médan,28 a third of General Négrier and his general staff, a fourth of Francis Magnard and the editorial staff of Le Figaro, a fifth of Claude Monet and the Impressionists, a sixth of Monseigneur Hulst and his clergy, etc.29
Evidently, among us that system would soon collapse. Each coterie coming to power would strive to destroy all the work of the preceding coterie, stupidly. It is not the same here. Less barbaric, people consider themselves too skeptical to want to be sectarians. If an oligarchy of chemists arrives in government, it does not worry about undoing what the ethnographers established before it. It occupies itself above all in applying the benefits of its chemical knowledge to the universality of things. It transforms simultaneously the charges of torpedoes, culinary recipes and the composition of perfumes. If an oligarchy of mechanics follows, it ameliorates the machine-tools in the factories, the arms of the soldiers, and the smooth movement of the trams. If a group of artists replaces it, the buildings are embellished, corteges better adorned, and the streets are decorated. In sum, the State always remains a building under construction through which the various bodies of artisans pass successively. Politics does not exist. Let us agree to praise that absence of conflict, in practice.
Thus, and perhaps because of laxity, the people almost never insist on obtaining a reform if the authority has demonstrated its inconveniences. Even less does the latter refuse unless the trial appears absolutely impossible. The battle is fought in the domain of ideas. When a theory has produced its masterpiece, it is its adversaries who bear the men and women supporting it to power.
Jérôme the Founder inculcated that way of thinking into his soldiers from the outset. The proof has been made in the subject of religion. Some exalted atheism, others professed deism. In order to lay low the spirit of triumph, Jérôme decided that official education would be religious, even though the deists were certainly in the minority—except that he included the heresies propagated by Mani and the Gnostics, invoked interpretations due to cabalists like Fabre d’Olivet,30 and enlarged the Catholic dogma once established according to the needs of barbaric minds in accordance with the curiosities of ignorance, and subsequently become too naïve for the requirements of modern intellectuality.
Before quitting Minerve, during my visit to the girls’ gymnasium, I had the opportunity to understand how the opinions of the race are formed. This is how it works:
The scene is set in a room looking out through arcades upon the richness of tropical vegetation. A hundred Chinese, Malay, European and mulatto adolescents, a few blonde but the majority brunette, are sitting on a series of steps. A quadragenarian dame in a Trissotin costume,31 the instructress, is interrogating a dainty little Japanese with slender hands.
“What is God?”
“The ensemble of Forces,” stammers the shrill and musical voice.
“What is a force?”
“That which creates movement, heat, electricity, all the states and aspects of nature, and in consequence, the universal physical laws, the attractive relationships of heavenly bodies, nebulae, suns, planets, vapors, seas, waters, vegetation, plasmatic cells, mollusks, fish, amphibians, quadrupeds and humans.
“Did God, then, create humans?
“Yes, through the series of the three kingdoms, and in order that humans, in their turn, in accordance with the evolution of races, would know and adore the harmony of Forces.”
“What do you know about Adam and Eve?”
“Adam is the red Earth, the incandescent Earth before the gradual cooling of the planet. Eve is Aïscha, or the volitional faculty, the energy that permits the evolution of life, from the humblest cell of vegetal plasma to the scientist and the hero. Because of that, the priests taught that Eve was taken from Adam’s rib—which is to say that human intelligence was extracted by the evolution of cooling matter.”
“According to you, then, Mademoiselle, Adam and Eve are therefore the origins, or the parents, of all humankind? Tell us how they were expelled from Eden.”
“Adam and Eve lived in bliss so long as they did not concern themselves with judging. They accepted as a splendor the equilibrium between life and the death that engenders life by its fertile corruption. They admired and adored. But the serpent Nakasch, their instinct, counseled the will of Eve, and praised the precellence of life over death. ‘For,’ it said, ‘in prolonging individual life, Eve and Adam will prolong egotistical enjoyment, and life will be good, and death will be evil,’ Adam and Eve lost all confidence in death, when they had tasted the fruit offered by the lie of the serpent, their instinct. They immediately lost the happiness of admiring the Harmony of the World. They restricted their views, their admiration and their concerns to themselves. They perceived their paltry reality, their nudity, their weakness, and they hid themselves with fig leaves, in order that the other Forces would not make them ashamed. The preoccupation with existing longer as individuals caused them to lose the sense of eternal and divine life in which the forces intersect, collide, are transformed and perish, without ever dying. In order to defend their lives, they admired hatred. They distinguished God from Evil: that which helped them from that which harmed them. Adam and Eve lost the felicity of paradise.”
The young child of fifteen years repeated the lesson without too many faults, her eyes attached to the blue stucco that covered the ground.
“Is it unnecessary to fear death?” asked the instructress.
“It unnecessary to fear death,” replied the hundred voices of the disciples in chorus, in a joyful tone.
“Why is it unnecessary to fear death?”
“It is unnecessary to fear death,” replied a plump little blonde, indicated by the mistress, “because ideas are immortal, and our consciousness, made of united ideas, is immortal.”
“Is the soul immortal, then?”
“The soul of humankind is immortal,” replied the hundred joyful voices of the children, in chorus—and their hundred little hands traced a hundredfold sign of the cross.”
“How do you explain that ideas are immortal?”
“The positivists of our time are merely continuing the evolutionism of the sages of Ionia, the perpetual becoming of the Greeks. Through the races, ideas grow, from century to century. They express themselves by means of the human voice, the development of cities, the social amour that multiplies the presence of humans in cities, for reasons of war and those of social conflict. The Idea is God.”
Rising to their feet on the steps, one after another, the girls continued: “The Father is the unknown cause of causes, the egg of universal laws, the center that extends to the utmost limits of the sphere. He is the center and the periphery, the beginning and the end.”
“What is the Son?”
“The Son is the recognition of God in the human soul in accordance with the process
es of planetary evolution. Thus, he was engendered of the race of David, who descended from Adam, the red Earth, as the Scriptures say.”
“Do you know several incarnations of the Son?”
“All the Gods of all the religions. The Son is the Word, the speech of the world.”
“Is the Word God?”
“Yes, for the Word alone is real. We do not know whether the vocables correspond to realities. For example, the mother qualifies as red, before her offspring, an object that he might perhaps see as green. Throughout his life, that child will name red things perceived green by his organ. No one will contradict him. In fact, other disciples, if they perceive yellow the object that the educator qualifies as red, or if they perceive it as black or blue, they will all call it red, as the authority of the master indicates. Perhaps, since the origins, no one had perceived the colors in a fashion identical to another, but by virtue of tradition everyone names different sensations by means of the same word. Daltonism proves that some people cannot distinguish cherries from foliage by their color. The errors of the senses are innumerable, as science reveals. As the proverb says, ‘It is necessary not to argue about tastes and colors.’ so much does it seem that my soul knows the world especially. Everyone’s universe is different, and the philosophies of the epochs indicate the uncertainty of relationships between names and objects. No philosophy can say whether the external world corresponds to what we think about it. Humans perceive within the prison of the senses. They follow the fatality of the Word blindly. The Word is God.”
“Are the Cause, the Word and the Idea the three distinct persons of the one God, One and Triple?”
“One is the center; two is the periphery of the sphere; three is the relationship between the circle and the center. One is the Father, two is the Word, three is the Evolution, the Spirit that radiates from the Father to the Son: from the Original Force to the human being who recognizes it.”
“In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
“So shall it be.”
The instructress made a gesture. The adolescents quit their steps and spread out through the arcades of the cloister, chatting. They leap in their gaiters; the short blonde or chestnut curls and the wiry wisps also leap toward the fresh gleam of their eyes.
They assembled in the sun and turned in a circle, holding hands.
I made enquiries of the mistress about that abstract religion.
“Monsieur,” the lady replied, “that is the supreme stage of religious instruction. When very small they learn the ordinary responses of the catechism. From class to class explanations are added that render the Christian dogmas acceptable. On Sunday they take communion. When absorbing the host, I believe that not one doubts the Real Presence. At that moment they will think that, made of wheat, the fruit of the Sun, itself fecundated by the Harmony of Forces, the definition of God, the host contains the Real Presence of the God who sanctifies the sacrament of the Holy Altar. I inform them, therefore, that Abel incarnates centrifugal force, the chemical dilatation of substances, the impulse of the amplified soul toward pure verities; that Cain embodies centripetal force, the cold that shrinks, the tendencies of egotism leading the mind only to conceive the immediate good of instinct.”
I contemplated the round-dances, the pretty gestures of the adolescents, their games.
“Certainly,” the instructress went on, “if we only counted European pupils, the teaching of Christianity would have had no result. Jérôme the Founder sent emissaries to collect the children of unfortunate families from China and the islands, mingled the overly mobile minority of Occidental souls with ten times the number of Oriental minds capable of grasping abstractions. The desire to match one another animated those young intelligences, and the mutual commerce of their ideas fashioned a median mind very capable of being interested in our lessons, hard as they might seem to you.
“On the other hand, pedagogy here is founded on an amusing system. It differs from your Roman disciplines. By means of grammar, declensions, conjugations, syntax and a thousand numbered and rebarbative rules, your professors put children off from the start. By force, under pain of impositions and detentions, you oblige them to learn by heart, without their being interested, the avatars of the past participle. By contrast, we begin by amusing the pupils. We read them history. We tell them how rain is formed and storms, and why ink stains their fingers. They immediately like the adventures of Romulus and those of Noah. They call their dolls Cleopatra and their puppets Caesar. By means of history they learn geography, which is no longer a tedious enumeration of sub-prefectures but the evocation of places where people fought.
“Later, we add to historical certainties the classification of dates, those of social economy, the presentation of the philosophical ideas by which governments and their adversaries were inspired, and, finally, the languages that the great peoples spoke—but all of that is framed by objective facts. Our programs never include things analogous to your themes and Latin discourse. Grammar is only taught to the adolescent, like mathematics, when the child’s mind, awakened by stories of history, spontaneously seeks an exact measurement of that knowledge.
“Thus, philosophical, mathematical and grammatical abstractions are not intimidating. They complete anterior notions. They come to satisfy a curiosity, a veritable desire—whereas your pupils, bewildered too young, deterred by declensions, syntax and exemplars, only find at the end of their courses, in philosophy and science, a summation of past ennuis. They learn poorly, mechanically, stuffing their memory with a view to examinations; they acquire forever a hatred of the sciences, of which they do not want to know anything after college. They no longer read anything but novels and newspapers. Our pupils retain for life the avidity to increase their intelligence. It’s a pleasure.”
In fact, when the break was over, the pupils returned to the steps without any reluctance.
“What is the second mystery, after that of the Trinity?” asked the dame.
“The mystery of the Incarnation.”
“Explain it.”
“Mary contains within her two contradictory principles, virginity and maternity. If we cannot conceive something as Being and Not Being at the same time, and in the same frame, that comes from the weakness of the human mind. By the mystery of the Incarnation, God informs us that the pure Phenomenon, the absolute, exists outside those two forms of conception. The Virgin Mother engenders God, or the absolute, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, for intelligence can succeed in making the Pure Phenomenon of Being conceivable, beyond its temporary appearances of existence and non-existence, life and death, good and evil. Thus the Holy Virgin conceived without sin because she conceived, thanks to the Spirit, without differentiating being and non-being, in the same state in which Adam and Eve, substance and will, thought before the original sin. Mary’s virginity denies the existence within her of God and her maternity affirms that existence. Because of that, she engenders the absolute, the Man-God, the identity of the microcosm and the macrocosm.”
“What is the original sin? Is it true that we bear its punishment?”
“Adam and Eve having differentiated life from death, all their weakness became manifest to them and hatred was born. By atavism, we continue to know that weakness, to fear death and to hate.”
“Explain the mystery of the Redemption.”
“The macrocosm, or the greatest expansion of God, is identified with the microcosm, the planet of which humankind is the cerebrality. God is made human. Unlimited, he accepts limits. Eternal, he dies on the cross. Universal life, Jesus suffers individual death, and departs from Life. He redeems humankind from fear and science in reestablishing, by means of the torture of Calvary, the identity of being and non-being, of the infinite and the limited. Whoever dies for the triumph of eternal life, for the glory of the immortal idea, recommences the sacrifice of Jesus and redeems the sin of Adam. He becomes unlimited in eternity.”
“What is the cross?”
“It is
the Center, the point at which the radii of a circle meet; it is also the sign of fecundity, the phallus, the horizontal jod, traversing the vertical kteis,32 the origin of all life; it is the Cause, or the Father. Thereon the Son died, by the operation of the Holy Spirit. The Trinity of God, the world, was brought back to the single point of the One, the Center.”
“What was Mary?”
“The form or the appearance of things, the illusion, mother of the Word. Like Isis, Mary is the sensible world that engenders the Word, which disappears on the cross absorbed in God...”
A bell rang. The church was summoning its faithful. The disciples arranged themselves in two files, intoned a canticle, and we followed them along the paths of the garden.
In the image of Byzantine naves, the basilica supports several cupolas. Under the sky of the largest, a central Virgin is painted, gigantic, with mountains, rivers, cities, seas, animals and peoples on her robe. All the way to the iconostase, lateral chapels to the right and left contain, in accordance with the banal eclecticism of pantheons, several elevated altars, one to the Buddha in a Japanese décor, others to Mohammed, in a Moorish décor; to Siva, in a Hindu décor; to Isis, in an Egyptian décor; to the gods of Olympus in a Hellenic décor; to Astarté, Moloch, the gods of Mexico and Peru, to Mani. That would give the impression of a bazaar were the proportions of the edifice not imposing in their immensity.
The organs play. The iconostase opens. A Catholic altar appears, where a priest in a chasuble officiates. The service of the mass does not differ significantly from ours.
One savors the odor of incense, the freshness of choral voices. I thought I remarked a sincere attitude of meditation among the girls kneeling on little padded cushions.
LETTER V
Jupiter, November.
The Humanisphere Page 31
