The terrors of the year two thousand

THE TERRORS

OF THE YEAR
TWO THOUSAND

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2010 with funding from

University of Toronto

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THE TERRORS

OF THE YEAR
TWO THOUSAND

by
ETIENNE GILSON

University of

St. Michael's College

Toronto 1984

© 1949, 1984 University of St. Michael's College
Printed in Canada

FOREWORD

The Terrors of the Year Two Thousand was first
published by St. Michael's College, Toronto, in 1949. It is
now re- issued in 1984 to mark the hundredth anniversary
of the birth of its author, Etienne Gilson, which took place
on 13 June 1884. St. Michael's honours the memory of its
most distinguished professor of philosophy who lectured
in its classrooms almost annually from 1929 to 1972, and
who was the founder and life-time director of its Pontifical
Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Gilson died in Auxerre in
Burgundy, France, on 19 September 1978.

A member of the Academie Franchise, Etienne Gilson
is possibly the most renowned medievalist of his
generation. He was professor of medieval philosophies in
the Sorbonne and in the College de France from 1921. He
became also visiting professor of medieval thought at
Harvard (1926) and at Toronto (1929). In the course of his
long productive life he delivered, in addition to countless
individual lectures, the following outstanding series: the
Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen; the Henry James Lectures at
Harvard; the Powell Lectures at Bloomington, Indiana; the
inaugural lectures of the Mercier Chair at Louvain; and the
fourth series of the Mellon Lectures in the National
Gallery, Washington. The published bibliography of
Gilson's full-length books and articles (Margaret McGrath,
Toronto, 1982) contains 1210 items, all of them rich,
revolutionary, beautiful and totally Christian.

As a national figure, Gilson represented France at
many international meetings: after World War I in London,
Naples and Cambridge (Mass.); after World War II at
important conferences held in San Francisco (United
Nations), London (UNESCO) and the Hague (United
Europe). For two years he was a conseiller or senator in
the French government.

The story of how Gilson came to write We Terrors of
the Year Two Tliousand carries its own interest: it is partly
the product of his friendship with Henri Focillon, partly
his love of the Church in the persons of two French
archbishops, cardinals Suhard and Lienart. Focillon, like
Gilson, was a philosopher whose interests carried him
deeply into other disciplines and arts. Focillon called
himself "an engraver-philosopher" and most of his books
on art history are generously adorned with reproductions
of medieval treasures. Gilson became Focillon's friend
and admirer during the 1920's and 1930's. In 1938,
seconded by Paul Yalery. Gilson sponsored Focillon's
appointment to the College de France. When the results
proved favourable. Gilson and Paul Valery rushed
hilariously up the rue Saint-Jacques announcing the
appointment to all and sundry.

It was Focillon who first impressed upon Gilson the
importance of an artist's hands. In the case of painters
especially it is the hands that really matter: creation
through the hands is more fundamental to great art
(Croce, who in any event is only a critic, notwithstanding)
than creation through the mind. Focillon and Gilson were
still close friends when Focillon died in 1948 leaving his
treatise on Van mil unfinished. Gilson already knew the
contents of Van mil, and especially of that book's
important Part I on "The problem of the Terrors" which
dealt with the extravagant histoires of the chronicler Raoul
Glaber. It is from this Part I of Van mil that Gilson in the
present essay launches into his moving treatment of the
philosophical terrors besetting a world which is now
moving toward Van deux mille.

The other part of the story of the Terrors is as simple
as two-plus-two equals four. The two cardinals invited
Gilson as an intellectual to share his special competence in
the field of thought with the French episcopate. Like

Focillon's death, this too happened in 1948. Gilson
immediately teamed up with Paul Claudel, Romano
Guardini and Robert Speaight to revive the once
successful but now moribund Semaines des Intellectuels
Catholiques.

Gilson prepared a brilliant talk on the topic "The
Intellectuals and Peace" in which he examined peace in
terms of the Nietzschian atheism permeating the existen-
tial thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, for whom existentialism
was the will to extract the necessary consequences from a
coherent atheism. Gilson used for this talk his own
historical and philosophical methods joined to the
methods of his deceased friend Henri Focillon to draw a
comparison between the outlook of people of 948 who
were expecting Antichrist and the people of 1948 who
have been told by philosophers that there is no God. If,
said Gilson, there is no God, then everything is permitted.
It was this essay "The Intellectuals and Peace" that Gilson
reshaped for his North American audience into the
imaginative piece you are about to read.

The Terrors of the Year Two TJionsand is, in very truth,
a beautiful, frightening, penetrating prose-poem. Gilson
gives it to us without scholarly references, even enigmati-
cally in what concerns his medieval base, the histoires of
Raoul Glaber. Yet the analysis of what some philosophers
would do to us is devastating. This little book is a
self-standing work of art consisent with Gilson's inmost
being. It will be in the inmost being of the modern reader
that The Terrors of the Year Two Thousand will live.

Laurence K. Shook,
Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies,
Toronto.

Etienne Gilson

M M F OLD> CHILDREN were caught to hold

■ ^fl | as certain that around the year One

M ^mW Thousand a great terror took possession

^^^p M of people. We were told so, .it am rate,
^^fcj-^md we believed it, and the really amazing thing
is that all was not completely false in this story. The
scholars of today make fun of it and treat it as a legend.
Nowhere, they say, can we find trace of this so-called panic
which is supposed to have then paralyzed whole
populations in the expectation of the approaching end of
the world. These historians are right, at least to a degree,
but even if they were wrong, we would probably smile as
we read today, in the Chronicle of the good monk Raoul
Glaber, the report of all sorts of wonders which marked
the last years of the tenth century. A war. a pestilence, a
famine, a fiery dragon and a whale the size of an island? We
have witnessed much better! This time the enemy of
mankind has got an earlier start; he has even improved his
methods considerably, and if the terrors of the year One
Thousand are not a certainty for today's historians, those of
the year Two Thousand will surely be so for future
historians.

Page One

From 1914 to 1918, the world was ravaged by a war
which had known no parallel. A mighty people broke
through its boundaries and spread over Europe, leaving in
its wake ruins past numbering, dead by the millions, and
historical materialism, master of Holy Russia, whence later
we have seen it menacing the whole earth. Even during
that armistice of twenty years which we took for peace,
what tragic bloodshed! China in perpetual war seems a
little far away for us to worry about what happens there,
but have we already forgotten what took place during that
barbarous civil war in Most Christian Spain, where man
was so cruel to man that those who saw it lower their
voices to speak of it, and murmur: "Anything, rather than
see that again!" The tenth century famine? But I have only
to shut my eyes for a moment to see once more, in the
villages of the Ukraine and on the banks of the Volga, the
dead children in 1922, whose little corpses lay abandoned
in their emptied schools; or again, wandering along the
railways, those bands of children reduced to savagery who
later were to be mowed down with machine guns. At the
beginning of the twentieth century, as at the end of the
tenth — official documents bear witness to the fact —
parents devoured their offspring. Fathers and mothers like
our own, like ourselves, but who knew the meaning of that
frightful word: hunger.

That, however was but a modest beginning. We saw
the German army hurled upon Europe a second time, like
a great tidal wave; Poland vanquished, plundered,
butchered; nations falling one after the other under the
blows of an irresistible conqueror. France in agony, her
very honour wounded. Paris crumbles in its turn, and the
echo of its downfall reverberates in the silence of an
astonished world. A Raoul Glaber of the year Two
Thousand would never stop multiplying the chapters of
this woeful tale. He would have to describe the prodigious

Page Two

series of disasters which now swoop down upon the entire
world and to which we ourselves, who witnessed them,
can scarcely bear testimony. The sky everywhere furrowed
by fiery dragons much more formidable than those which,
on the threshold of the year One Thousand, crossed from
north to south the sky of France; in Japan, in the South Sea
Islands, in China, in Russia, in Germany, in France, in Italy
— in that very England which believed itself sheltered
behind our army, its fleet and the depths of its surrounding
seas — a heap of ruins which has not yet been cleared away
and which is there for us to see; the numbers of dead
increase and they are still in our hearts for us to mourn; a
whole race condemned to destruction, savagely wiped
out, pursued by a hatred fierce and ingenious as only man
is capable of conceiving for man. Germany opened for the
Jews, and closed upon them, charnel pits whose numbers
we still do not know. Of course, all this was to be brought
to a close by a liberation, but we know what further details
and further ruins this was to cost, even to that bomb of
Hiroshima, whose solemn detonation announced to a
terrified world, with the supposed close of a war which no
peace has yet followed, the dawn of a new era where
science, formerly our hope and our joy, would be the
source of greatest terror.

Man has just made the most outstanding of his
discoveries, but by a symbolism the more striking for
being quite involuntary, the great secret that science has
just wrested from matter is the secret of its destruction. To
know today is synonymous with to destroy. Nuclear fission
is not only the most intimate revelation of the nature of the
physical world and the freeing of the most powerful
energy7 that has ever been held, but at the same time and
inevitably the most frightful agent of destruction which
man has ever had at his disposal. The three are
inseparable. Atomic piles can be built more and more

Page Tfjree

powerfui, and immense quantities of useful energy can
thus be produced, but the operation of these piles yields as
a by-product the very explosive of the atom bomb. Not
only does man know today so many things that he wonders
if he will be able to control his own domination, but the
conditions of his rule are such that they present to the
scientist this tragic dilemma: formerly, it was by obeying
her that one mastered nature, now it is by destroying her.

And yet we are only at the beginning. The age of
atomic physics will see the birth of a new world, as
different from our own as ours is from the world before
steam and electricity. Doubtless, it will be even more so —
for things will move quickly — especially when to the era
of physics there will succeed the still more redoubtable
one of biology. Very few of those who work in laboratories
doubt it: we are on the verge of a great mystery which may,
any day, surrender its secret. We will be able to work, not
only on inert matter, but even on life, and it is not only the
breadth of our power but its very nature which will
become terrifying; and the more so that here again, and for
the same reason, the possibility of good is inseparable
from that of evil.

Pasteurian arms is today a common term. It is a
horrible term, and it carries with it a symbolism that is
more impressive because it is entirely independent of all
human intention. Pasteur never cultivated microbes
except to attenuate the virulence of their cultures, and thus
save human lives. Today, on the contrary, we are striving to
increase their virulence in order to kill and no longer to
cure. The biology of tomorrow will allow more subtle, but
not the less formidable, interventions in human destiny.
Can we imagine the repercussions which the free
determination of the sexes will have some day, perhaps in
the near future? Can we picture what would happen in a
world where we could not only turn out males and females

Page Four

at will, but select them and produce human beings
adapted to various functions as do breeders with dogs or
horses or cattle? In that future society which will know
how to give itself the slaves and even the reproducers
which it needs, what will become of the liberty and dignity
of the human person? For once, the most daring
prophecies of H. G. Viells appear tame, for in We Island of
Dr. Moreau they were still only working to transform wild
brutes into men; in the future society, it is men whom they
will be transforming into brutes — to use them to foster
the ends of a humanity thenceforth unworthy of the name.

And these are not today — as in 948 — fears localised
in a small corner of the earth. It is a world-wide terror, with
the whole planet as its domain, from Vladivostock around
the world to Alaska, by way of Moscow, Berlin, Paris,
London and Washington. But do we really know its cause?

These men of the tenth century knew at least what
they feared. Not at all — as has been erroneously
reiterated — the end of the world, but an event which, on
the contrary, was to precede it by a sufficiently long
interval of time which was announced prophetically in the
Apocalypse, ch. 20. v. 7: "Then, when the thousand years
are over, Satan will be let loose from his prison, and will go
out to seduce the nations that live at the four corners of the
earth — that is the meaning of Gog and Magog — and
muster them for battle, countless as the sand by the sea."
That is the way St. John himself had said it, the enemy of
God was soon to appear, ushering in a fearful era of
abomination and desolation.

By what signs would we recognize it? The question
was asked with that curiosity which always tempers
anxiety; and moreover the Middle Ages had on that point
precisions that surprise us a little. The Beast with seven
heads and ten horns was Satan "and the names it bore on

Page Fit }e

its heads were names of blasphemy", which the
Apocalypse describes: like a leopard, but it had bear's feet
and a lion's mouth. A secret number formulates his
essence, and "let the reader, if he has the skill, cast up the
sum of the figures in the beast's name, after our human
fashion, and the number will be six hundred and sixty-six".
Why? It is, as St. Irenaeus says, that Noah was six hundred
years old at the time of the flood, the statue of
Nabuchodonosor was sixty cubits high and six cubits wide:
add the age of Noah and the height and width of the statue
of Nabuchodonosor and you get six hundred and sixty-six.
This is not only clear, it is evident! Would you know his
name? Evanthas, Lateinos, Titan, perhaps another.
Irenaeus knows everything. He even informs us that the
Antichrist will devastate the whole earth, reigning in the
Temple three years and three months; and after that will
come the end of the world when creation will have lasted
six thousand years.

Today we cannot read these details without at first an
amused smile on our lips. On that subject the Bishop of
Lyons knows so many things, that the future unfolds before
him with all the regulated precision of the scenario of a
super-film. We ourselves enter into the spirit of the thing
and put a few questions to him, but he has an answer for
everything. Why should the world last exactly six thousand
years? It is because creation lasted six days and since a day
of creation is worth a thousand years, the world will come
to an end after the six days of creation have run their
course. The answer is perfect! But here we stop smiling
and an uncomfortable doubt slips into our mind. Six
thousand years? But how old was the world at the time of
Christ? Suppose the six thousand years of the world were
not finally to have expired until around the year Two
Thousand? The scourges which have struck us, the menace
of the blows which await us, do not favour abandoning this

Page Six

hypothesis. If the drama which we live does not announce
the end of the world, it is a rather good dress rehearsal.
Shall we see worse than Buchenwald. Lydice and
Oradour-sur-Glane? Perhaps it is not impossible, but it is
difficult to believe. At this point in our reflections, we cast
our eyes about and ask anxiously: "But where is
Antichrist?'" And behold, he is right there!

Ecce homo, said Friedrich Neitzche of himself:
behold the man! This time, no longer God who becomes
man to make him divine, but man who makes himself God
to usurp his place and who wishes to be his own god. We
are surprised at first, for he bears no resemblance to the
fantastic beast of the Apocalypse. However, like it he has a
number, and it is a human number. On the body of a man,
a man's head with a hard, wilful chin, a broad intellectual
forehead crowned with blasphemies, and in his beautiful
eyes the anguish of insanity. His name is none of those
which they had told us. He does not call himself Lateinos,
Evanthas but Zarathustra, and behold he speaks like the
one of whom St. Paul formerly prophesied, who will go so
far as to sit "in God's temple, and proclaim himself as
God". (II Thess. ii, 4).

That is indeed what Nietzche does, when he puts
himself forward as the sole guardian of the terrifying
explosive which humanity does not yet know and which
will nevertheless change its destiny. More pow-erful than
the bomb of Hiroshima which it prefigures, and a
thousand times more devastating still, the terrifying
message that Zarathustra murmurs to himself as he comes
towards us is contained in these few very simple words:
"They do not know that God is dead". He himself, at least,
knows it, and that is why his name is Ante-christus as well
as Anti-christns. "Have you understood me?" he asks.
"Dionysus face to face with the Crucifix". He does not only
come before Christ but against Him.

Page Seven

This is the capital discovery of modern times, the
event of which all the rest, tragic as they may be, are only
the corollaries or the sequels. Trace back as far as you like
the history of humanity and you will find no upheaval to
compare with this in the extent or in the depth of its cause.
The demoniac grandeur of Nietzsche is that he does know
and that he says so. This is not just our imagination; it is
enough to read hisEcceHomo to have proof of it: "I know
my fate. A day will come when the remembrance of a
fearful event will be fixed to my name, the remembrance
of a unique crisis in the history of the earth, of the most
profound clash of consciences, of a decree enacted against
all that had been believed, exacted and sanctified right
down to our days. I am not a man, I am dynamite." Do you
doubt for an instant that he would have said today "an
atomic bomb"? And how right he is! From his very
beginning, man had thought nothing, said nothing, done
nothing that did not draw its inspiration from this certitude
that there existed a God or gods. And behold, all of a
sudden, there is no longer one, or rather, we see that there
never was one! We shall have to change completely our
even- thought, word and deed. The entire human order
totters on its base. Antichrist is still the only one who
knows this, the only one who foresees the appalling
cataclysm of the "reversal of values" which is in the
making, for if the totality of the human past depended on
the certitude that God exists, the totality of its future must
needs depend on the contrary certitude, that God does not
exist. But see the folly of men who do not yet know this, or
who continue to act as if two or three among them did not
know it already! Everything that was true from the
beginning of the human race will suddenly become false,
but what will become true? Whether he knows it or not,
man alone must create for himself a new formula of life,
which will be that of his destiny.

Page Eight

Very well, let us get to work. But man will never use
his creative liberty as long as he believes that what is
already dead is still living. Nietzsche has definite
knowledge of his mission to destroy: "When truth opens
war on the age-old falsehood, we shall witness upheavals
unheard of in the history of the world, earthquakes will
twist the earth, the mountains and the valleys will be
displaced, and everything hitherto imaginable will be
surpassed. Politics will then be completely absorbed by
the war of ideas and all the combinations of power of the
old society will be shattered since they are all built on
falsehood: there will be wars such as the earth will never
have seen before. It is only with me that great politics
begin on the globe ... I know the intoxicating pleasure of
destroying to a degree proportionate to my power of
destruction."

Have we understood at last? That is not certain,
because the announcement of a cataclysm of such
magnitude ordinarily leaves but a single escape: to
disbelieve it and, in order not to believe, to refuse to
understand it. If Nietzsche speaks truly, it is the very
foundations of human life which are to be overthrown.
Before stating what will be true, we will have to say that
everything by which man has thus far lived, everything by
which he still lives, is deception and trickery. "He who
would be a creator, both in good and evil, must first of all
know how to destroy and to wreck values." They are, in
fact, being wrecked around us, and under our very feet,
everywhere. We have stopped counting the unheard of
theories thrown at us under names as various as their
methods of thought, each the harbinger of a new truth
which it promises to create shortly, joyously busy
preparing the brave new world of tomorrow by first of all
annihilating the world of today.

Page Nine

Destroying today to create tomorrow, such is indeed
the mission of the seducer. "I am the first immoralist, I am
thereby the destroyer par excellence." He knows his
mission, and his disciples too have understood it. It is not
only to some of their novels, it is to their entire work that
The Immoralist of Gide would serve as a rather good title.
That is merely literature? Doubtless, and it is sometimes
beautiful — but have we not long known that the seducer
would be handsome? That we should not have foreseen
him, is still forgivable. But that we should not understand
what he is doing while he is doing it right under our eyes,
just as we were told he would do it — that bears witness to
a stranger blindness. Can it really be that the herd of
human beings that is being led to slaughter has eyes and
yet does not see?

It is none the less very simple! Whatever criticism can
be levelled at the venerable Artisan of the Bible, let us at
least do him the justice of admitting that he knew quite
well what "to create" means. He did not take himself for
some Greek demigod, fashioning to his idea a material
which did not owe him existence. Insofar as a thing is
made out of another, concession must be made to the
material which is used. To create, on the contrary, is truly
to make something of nothing, in the supreme freedom of
an act which, since it is producing ex nihilo, nothing
conditions, nothing determines, nothing limits. A truly
gratuitous act of which one is the sole and complete
author, that is the only act which is truly creative because it
alone is truly free. In an eternity which transcended time,
Jehovah was free; but we are not, for even if the world was
not created, everything appears to us as if it had been
created, for it exists. And it is indeed that world which
restricts us! Try as we may to fashion it and remodel it, in a
hundred different ways, we shall only make of it what its
nature allows us to make. We shall perhaps be great

Page Ten

manufacturers, but creators — never! To create in his turn
ex nihilo, man must first of all reestablish everywhere the
void.

It is too soon yet to create, but one can begin to
destroy. Man is thus occupied on all sides with that
intoxicating joy which Neitzche has just told us is as great
as his power of destruction. Perhaps that is the answer to
the poignant question which so many of us are asking
ourselves: what does man want? Has he gone mad? Yes, in a
sense, but only with the supremely lucid madness of a
creature who would annihilate the obstacle which being
places in the way of his creative ambitions. Such is the
profound sense of our solemn and tragic adventure.
Antichrist is not among us, he is in us. It is man himself,
usurping unlimited creative power and proceeding to the
certain annihilation of that which is, in order to clear the
way for the problematic creation of what will be.

We are then in the decisive moment of a cosmic
drama. Quis ut Dens? It is I, says man. When we no longer
want to be the image of God, we still can be his caricature!
The explosion of Hiroshima did not only silence that
atrocious clamour which swelled towards us from the
camps of slow death and the charnel pits of Germany, it
will resound for a long time, as a solemn assertion with a
definite meaning. We have at last seen through the secret
of matter! We know exactly how it is made, since we are
able to destroy it. How will the world end? We used to
think we knew; then science accustomed us to consider
these answers as myths, and behold it now produces its
own answer. On the threshold of a new millenium, man
has the proud conviction that the day is perhaps not far off
when he himself will be able to explode the planet. Let us
admit that the adventure is enticing. You press a button,
and the earth bursts like a gigantic bomb whose
pulverized fragments are lost in a shower of stars which

Page Eleven

the startled eyes of the Martians — if there be any — will
see shooting through the night into space. As a child who
amuses himself by breaking his toy for no reason at all, just
to see what it is like inside, so man will have smashed the
world. It is possible that another will then be born, but that
is not certain; in the meantime, what is certain is that ours
will be ended.

At least, it will be said, man is free! One can
henceforth attempt all things, and especially in the realm
of the mind. So wrote Stephane Mallarme, whose whole
work attests what has been called "the obsession to
abolish", but who would abolish everything only that he
himself might perform a pure act of creation and thus, as it
has been said, "became equal to God". Is not that precisely
the sacrilegious effort whose meaning we would like to
decipher? The terms which a critic of Mallarme used to
describe his poetic enterprise fit exactly the mad
ambitions of modern man: "to construct a poetry which
would have the value of a preternatural creation and which
would be able to enter into rivalry with the world of
created things to the point of supplanting it totally".

To abolish existing creation in order to create
another: that is also the ambition of authentic surrealism,
by which I mean the one which Andre Breton defined a
short while ago as: "something dictated by thought,
released from all control of reason, divorced from all
aesthetic or moral preoccupation". We will then be able to
say everything as well as to do everything. If we start by
annihilating everything, what limits can stop us? None
whatever. Everything is possible, provided only that this
creative spark which surrealism seeks to disclose deep in
our being be preceded by a devastating flame. "The most
simple surrealist act consists in this: to go down into the
streets, pistol in hand, and shoot at random, for all you are
worth, into the crowd." Why not? This massacre of values is

Page Twelve

necessary to create values that are really new. "Everything
is still to be done", affirms Andre Breton, "every means
becomes good when employed to destroy the ideas of
family, native land, religion." Now that is not only
necessary: since God is dead, it has become possible. The
eternal obstructor who has encumbered the heavens ever
since the beginning of the world has suddenly disap-
peared. The terrible interlocutor to whom, during ages
without number, man gave only trembling reply — behold
he has suddenly vanished, leaving for the first time man,
face to face with himself, alone in a world empty of God,
and at last master of his destiny. "But, Smerdiakof ', says
old Karamazov, "if God does not exist, then everything is
permitted." What a prodigious liberation! Man knows
henceforward that he can do anything without the echo in
his ear of the redoubtable summons of the sovereign
judge, Adam, where art thou?" There is no longer any
judge, save Adam himself, who, since he alone makes the
law, alone applies it, without knowing yet that man is for
himself the hardest of masters and that, by a comparison
with the yoke which he lays on his own shoulders, that of
the Lord was light to bear.

To learn this, he needs a bit of time. Long after the
amazing discovery that all is henceforth permitted, man
still continues to act as if that which had formerly been
forbidden still remained so. The ancient law of good and
evil continues to rule his actions, but instead of being
called the divine law it is called the voice of conscience.
Nothing has then been gained, and man has merely
changed the name of his master; until the inevitable day
when conscience, finding herself but the lees of long use,
doubts in her turn that even she has authority- to impose
law. It is only then that all becomes actually permissible,
and to the question: what must we do?, there is no longer
an answer, but from the moment when there is indeed no

Page Wirteen

longer anything that man must do, he no longer knows
what he will do. As the soldier, on leave, knows the
desolation of twenty-four hours passed with nothing to do,
man knows today that infinitely more tragic desolation of a
life which is all spent in the idleness of a liberty7 he is
powerless to use.

It is this nausea that has engendered contemporary
existentialism and, we must admit, its courageous decision
to dispel it. "Existentialism", says Sartre, "is nothing other
than an effort to draw all the consequences from a
coherently atheistic position." That is true, and these
consequences are terrible. Everything is permissible if
God does not exist, but also, as a consequence, man is
abandoned, for he finds neither within nor without
himself anything on which to rely. Then begins for him the
stern martyrdom of the paths of liberty. "We have neither
behind us nor before us, in the bright domain of values,
any justification or excuse. We are alone, without excuse.
That is what I would express in saying that man is
condemned to be free . . . man, without any support and
without any help, is condemned at each moment to invent
man." A truly exhausting task, that of a perpetual invention
of self, without model, without purpose, without rule. The
father of existentialism is not Prometheus bound, nor even
unbound, but rather Sisyphus, "the hero of the absurd".
Tragic hero, because he knows, and by that very fact is
superior to his destiny. Is he not stronger than his rock,
asks Albert Camus, since he rolls it eternally? "To live is to
make the absurd live. To make it live is above all to
contemplate it."

That the absurd creates itself out of nothing is not
astonishing, nor that it nauseates him. But these are the
sports of the princes of the mind. For unless we welcome
the eerie invitation to suicide, our problem is to live. A
half-dozen intellectuals may find a meaning for the absurd

Page Fourteen

in the literary success they gain by it. but such a justification
has no value for the masses of ordinary men, liberated by
atheism and who, having become gods without asking for
it, do not know what to do with their divinity. The latter
make no pretence to save themselves, they eagerly beg to
be saved. Then there appear other men who undertake to
exploit atheism in their turn, and who organize the cult of
the new god. It is not without a profound philosophical
reason that Marxism required atheism as one of its
necessary principles.

"Aragon and I", Andre Breton used to write. Let us not
be surprised that Aragon, a Marxist writer, made his debut
under the chief of the surrealists. Their paths have since
parted, but all the creative ambitions of the man who
makes himself god at least find a harmony in the will to
destroy which they presuppose. How could Marxism be
able truly to free man, if it did not first free him of God?
Since Feuerbach, we know exactly what is the essence of
Christianity and how man, who believed himself the
creature of God, is on the contrary His creator. Since there
is no longer anything between man and himself, there is
no longer anything between man and other men. Once
again, he is free, but is he truly free? Once he is free of God,
he is no longer free of other men, between whom and
himself there never existed any other protection but God
and the law of God. It is a very old story. We read in die
Book of Judges (xxi, 24): "In those days there was no king
in Israel: but even- one did that which seemed right to
himself.1' The day came, however, when this free people
grew tired of its liberty, and as the prophet Samuel was
growing old, they went to him and said: "Make us a king, to
judge us, as all nations have." At these words, Samuel
experienced a great sadness, for he thought he had always
judged according to the law of God, but he feared he had
committed some fault and by it had turned men from that
law.

Page Fifteen

The Lord knew his thoughts, and said to him:
"Hearken to the voice of the people in all that they say to
thee. For they have not rejected thee, but me, that I should
not reign over them." However, before granting the Jewish
people the king that they asked, God made known to them
the rights that their future masters would not fail to claim:
"He will take your sons and put them in his chariots, and
will make them his horsemen, and his running footmen to
run before his chariots. And he will appoint of them to
plough his fields, and to reap his corn, and to make him
arms and chariots. Moreover, he will take the tenth of your
corn to give to his servants.'1 We have seen these things and
worse still, for if governments today were satisfied with an
income tax of ten percent, what a sigh of relief would we
hear in the world! Since men have refused to serve God,
there is no longer an arbiter between them and the State
which dominates them. It is no longer God, it is the State
which judges them. But who, then, will judge the State?

To know the answer to this, it is enough to glance at
what is going on round about us. To judge the State, there
is no one left. In every land and in all countries, the people
wait with fear and trembling for the powerful of this world
to decide their lot for them. They hesitate, uncertain,
among the various forms of slavery which are being
prepared for them. Listening with bated breath to the
sounds of those countries which fall one after the other
with a crash followed by a long silence, they wonder in
anguish how long will last this little liberty they still
possess. The waiting is so tense that many feel a vague
consent to slavery secretly germinating within themselves.
With growing impatience, they await the arrival of the
master who will impose on them all forms of slavery,
starting with the worst and most degrading of all — that of
the mind. Blessed be he who will deliver us from
ourselves! Alone under a heaven henceforth empty, man

Page Sixteen

offers to whoever is willing to take it, this futile liberty
which he does not know how to use. He is ready for all the
dictators, leaders of these human herds who follow them
as guides and who are all finally conducted by them to the
same place — the abbatoir.

What, then, is to be done? To this question permit me
to reply by another: In this year of grace, 1948, how much
grace is there still left? And this would be the whole
question if there did not remain a second one: Is man
willing to receive what still remains of grace today? For it is
not by wallowing in the evil but in turning our backs on its
cause that the remedy can be found. Let us not say: it is too
late, and there is nothing left to do; but let us have the
courage to look for the evil and the remedy where they
exist. It is in losing God that man has lost his reason: he will
not find it again without having first found God again.

There was in the thirteenth century a philosopher to
whom the sight of the world did not give nausea, but a joy
ever new, because he saw in it only order and beauty. Man
did not seem to him a Sisyphus hopelessly condemned to
the liberty of the absurd, for he read in his own heart the
clear law of practical reason. On all sides, within as well as
without, a single and self-same light enlightens the
understanding and regulates things, for the spirit which is
found in them reconstructs them in the mind according to
the order of the same creative intelligibility. This harmony
of thought and reality which in our time Einstein describes
as the most incomprehensible of mysteries, does not
astonish our philosopher, for he knows its source — that
same God Whose pure existence is at the origin of all
reality as well as of all knowledge. And what is liberty for
created man, unless it be to accept himself lovingly, even
as his Creator wants and loves him? What is it to act as a free
man unless it be to regulate the will according to reason,
and reason itself according to the divine law? The vastest

Page Seventeen

community is the universe. God, Who created it, governs it
according to the eternal law, of which the natural law, the
human and the moral law are only so many particular
expressions. Not a sin, not a moral fault is there which is
not first of all an error made to the detriment of intelligible
light, in violation of the laws of the supreme reason.

Eminently habitable, because it is Christian, is this
universe of St. Thomas Aquinas still ours? I am afraid not. It
is, however, the only one in which man can live without
having to create himself in the permanent anguish of his
own nothingness, without having eternally to push up
again and again the rock of Sisyphus or to yield to the
fascination of a slavery which will deliver him even from
the memory of liberty. This world is that of the divine
wisdom which penetrates everything with its power and
orders all with sweetness. Raoul Glaber reports that after
so many misfortunes and fateful presages, a sort of peace
came into the heavens and the earth was covered with a
white robe of churches. Thus disappeared the fears of the
year One Thousand. Salvation is the same today. There still
remains only God to protect man against man. Either we
will serve Him in spirit and in truth, or we shall enslave
ourselves ceaselessly, more and more, to the monstrous
idol which we have made with our own hands to our own
image and likeness. The cause of so many miseries is
indeed the ignorance which men have of an important
message: they no longer know that a Saviour is born to us.
This is not the message of Zarathustra, it is the promise of
peace which rang out, nearly two thousand years ago, in
the skies of Bethlehem.

Page Eighteen

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