Simple Thought

It is not only our life in its practical expressions, but also the realm of our ideas that needs clearing. Anarchy reigns in human thought; we are walking through thick undergrowth, lost in endless detail, with no bearings and no direction.

As soon as man has recognized that he has a purpose, and that this purpose is to be human, he orders his thought accordingly. Any way of thinking, understanding or judging that does not make him better and stronger, he rejects as unhealthy.

First of all, he shuns the all too common failing of amusing himself with his own thought. Thought is a serious tool with its own function in the whole: it is not a toy. Let us take an example. Here is a painter's studio. The tools are in their places. Everything shows that this array of means has been arranged with a purpose to be achieved. Now open the door to some monkeys. They will climb onto the workbenches, swing from the cords, drape themselves in the fabrics, put slippers on their heads, juggle with the brushes, taste the paints, and poke holes in the canvases to see what the portraits have in their bellies. I do not doubt their pleasure; they must certainly find this kind of exercise most interesting. But a studio is not made for letting monkeys loose in it. In the same way, thought is not a ground for acrobatic stunts. A man worthy of the name thinks as he is and as he loves; he goes into it with his whole heart, and not with that detached and barren curiosity which, on the pretext of seeing everything and knowing everything, runs the risk of never feeling a healthy, deep emotion and never producing a genuine act.

Another habit we urgently need to correct, the usual companion of an artificial life, is the mania for examining and analyzing ourselves at every turn. I am not urging anyone to lose interest in inner observation and the examination of conscience. Trying to see clearly into one's own mind and the motives of one's conduct is an essential part of the good life. But vigilance is one thing; quite another is this ceaseless effort to watch ourselves live and think, to take ourselves apart like a piece of machinery. That is a waste of time and a way of throwing oneself out of order. A man who, to prepare himself better for walking, first insisted on a minute anatomical examination of his means of locomotion would risk coming apart at the joints before taking a single step. "You have what you need to walk, so forward! Take care not to fall, and use your strength with discernment." Hair-splitters and dealers in scruples reduce themselves to inaction. A glimmer of common sense is enough to see that man was not made to contemplate his own navel.

Common sense: don't you find that what this word refers to is becoming as rare as the good customs of the past? Common sense is old-fashioned. Something else is needed, and so people go looking for complications where there are none. For that is a refinement the common crowd could never afford, and it is so pleasant to stand out! Instead of behaving like a natural person who uses the obvious means at hand, we arrive, by sheer force of genius, at the most astonishing oddities. Better to jump the rails than keep to the simple line! All the curvatures and bodily deformities that orthopedics treats give only a faint idea of the humps, the twists and the lopsided gaits we have inflicted on ourselves in order to get away from plain, straight common sense. And we learn at our own expense that no one deforms himself with impunity. Novelty, after all, is short-lived. Nothing lasts but the immortal commonplaces, and whoever strays from them sets out on the most perilous adventures. Happy is the one who comes back from them and knows how to become simple again. Plain common sense is not, as many may imagine, the inborn property of just anybody, a cheap and ordinary piece of baggage that has cost no one any trouble. I compare it to those old folk songs, anonymous and imperishable, that seem to have sprung from the very heart of the multitude. Common sense is capital, slowly and painfully accumulated by the labor of centuries. It is a pure treasure whose value is understood only by the person who has lost it, or who watches how people live once they have none left. For my part, I think no effort is too great to acquire and keep common sense, to keep one's eyes clear-sighted and one's judgment straight. People take good care of their swords, for fear of bending them or letting rust eat into them. How much more must we take care of our thought.

But this must be clearly understood. An appeal to common sense is not an appeal to earthbound thinking, to a narrow positivism that denies everything it can neither see nor touch. For it is also a lack of common sense to try to swallow man up in his physical sensations and forget the high realities of the inner world. Here we touch a painful point, around which the greatest problems of humanity swirl. We are struggling, indeed, to reach a conception of life; we seek it through a thousand darknesses and a thousand sorrows; and everything that touches on spiritual realities grows more agonizing day by day. Amid the grave perplexities and the passing disorder that accompany the great crises of thought, it seems harder than ever to manage with a few simple principles. And yet necessity itself comes to our aid, as it has for people in every age. The program of life is terribly simple, after all; and by the very fact that existence is so pressing and so imperative, it warns us that it comes before any idea we may form of it, and that no one can wait to live until he has first understood. With our philosophies, our explanations and our beliefs, we everywhere stand before the accomplished fact; and it is this accomplished fact, prodigious and irrefutable, that calls us to order when we try to deduce life from our reasoning and to put off acting until we have finished philosophizing. That is the happy necessity that keeps the world from standing still when man is unsure of his way. Travelers of a day, we are carried along in a vast movement to which we are called to contribute, but which we have neither foreseen, nor taken in as a whole, nor fathomed in its final ends. Our part is to fill faithfully the role of private soldier that has fallen to us, and our thought must adapt itself to this situation. Let us not say that the times are harder for us than for our forebears; for what is seen from afar is often seen badly, and besides, there is something ungracious in complaining that one was not born in one's grandfather's day. The least disputable thing one can think on this subject is this: ever since the world began, it has been hard to see clearly in it. Everywhere and always, thinking rightly has been difficult. The ancients have no privilege over the moderns in this. And we may add that there is no difference between people when we come to consider them from this point of view. Whether a man obeys or commands, teaches or learns, holds a pen or a hammer, discerning the truth costs him the same effort. The few lights that humanity gains as it advances are no doubt extremely useful to it; but they also enlarge the number and the reach of its problems. The difficulty is never lifted; the mind always runs into an obstacle. The unknown towers over us and presses in on us from every side. But just as we need not drain all the water from the springs to quench our thirst, we need not know everything in order to live. Humanity lives, and has always lived, on a few elementary provisions.

We will try to point them out. First of all, humanity lives by trust. In this it only reflects, to the measure of its conscious thought, what lies in the dark depths of all beings. An unshakable faith in the solidity of the universe and in its intelligent order slumbers in everything that exists. Flowers, trees and animals live with a powerful calm and a complete security. There is trust in the falling rain, in the waking morning, in the brook running to the sea. Everything that is seems to say: "I am, therefore I must be; there are good reasons for it; let us rest easy."

And so humanity, too, lives on trust. By the very fact that it exists, it carries within itself the sufficient reason for its being, a pledge of assurance. It rests in the will that willed it to be. The first effort of our thought must be directed to keeping this trust and letting nothing unsettle it; on the contrary, to cultivating it and making it more personal and more evident. Everything that increases trust in us is good. For from it are born quiet energy, unhurried action, the love of life and of fruitful labor. This fundamental trust is the mysterious spring that sets in motion every force within us. It nourishes us. It is by trust that man lives, far more than by the bread he eats. And so everything that shakes this trust is bad: it is poison, not food.

Every system of thought that attacks the very fact of life in order to declare it bad is unhealthy. In this century people have too often thought ill of life. Is it any wonder that the tree withers when you water its roots with corrosive substances? Yet there is a very simple reflection to set against this whole philosophy of nothingness. You declare life bad? Very well. What remedy will you offer us against it? Can you fight it, abolish it? I am not asking you to do away with your own life, to kill yourself - what good would that do us? - but to do away with life itself: not only human life, but its dark and lower foundation, this whole surge of existence that rises toward the light and, according to you, rushes headlong toward misery. I am asking you to abolish the will to live that quivers through all immensity; in short, to abolish the very source of life. Can you? No. Then leave us in peace. Since no one can rein life in, isn't it better to learn to value it and use it well than to fill people with disgust for it? When we know that a dish is bad for our health, we do not eat it. And when a certain way of thinking robs us of trust, joy and strength, we must reject it, certain not only that it is wretched food for the mind, but that it is false. For human beings, only human thoughts are true, and pessimism is inhuman. Besides, it lacks modesty as much as logic. To take the liberty of finding bad this prodigious thing called life, one would have to have seen to the bottom of it, and almost to have made it oneself. What a strange attitude some of the great thinkers of our time adopt! Truly, they behave as if they had created the world in their youth, a very long time ago, but have long since thought better of it: it was decidedly a mistake.

Let us feed on other dishes and strengthen our souls with heartening thoughts. For human beings, what is truest is what strengthens them best.

If humanity lives on trust, it also lives on hope. Hope is that form of trust which turns toward the future. All life is both an outcome and an aspiration. Everything that exists presupposes a point of departure and tends toward a point of arrival. To live is to become; to become is to aspire. The immense becoming is infinite hope. There is hope at the heart of things, and this hope must be reflected in the human heart. Without hope, there is no life. The same power that makes us exist urges us to climb higher. What is the meaning of this stubborn instinct that drives us to progress? Its true meaning is that something must come of life; that a good greater than life itself is being wrought within it, toward which it slowly moves; and that this sorrowful sower called man needs, like every sower, to count on the morrow. The history of humanity is the history of invincible hope. Otherwise everything would have ended long ago. To walk beneath its burdens, to find its way in the night, to rise again from its falls and its ruins, never to give up even in death itself, humanity has needed to hope always, and sometimes against all hope. That is the cordial that sustains it. If we had only logic, we would long ago have drawn this conclusion: everywhere, death has the last word; and we would have died of that thought. But we have hope, and that is why we live and believe in life.

Suso, the great mystic monk, one of the simplest and best men who ever lived, had a touching habit. Whenever he met a woman, even the poorest and oldest, he would step respectfully out of her way, though it might mean putting his feet among thorns or into a muddy rut. "I do this," he said, "to pay homage to our holy Lady, the Virgin Mary." Let us pay hope a similar homage. When we meet her in the form of a blade of wheat breaking through the furrow, of a bird brooding and feeding its young, of a poor wounded animal that gathers itself, gets up and goes on its way, of a peasant plowing and sowing a field laid waste by flood or hail, of a nation slowly making good its losses and binding its wounds, under any outward guise, however humble and frail, let us salute her! When we meet her in legends, in artless songs, in simple beliefs, let us salute her again! For she is always the same, the indestructible one, the immortal daughter of God.

We dare to hope too little. The people of our time have acquired strange timidities. The fear that the sky might fall, which our Gaulish ancestors held to be the height of absurdity in fear, has entered our hearts. Does the drop of water doubt the ocean? Does the ray doubt the sun? Our senile wisdom has worked this wonder. It is like those grumbling old schoolmasters whose chief office is to rebuff the merry pranks and youthful enthusiasms of their young pupils. It is time to become children again, to learn once more to fold our hands and to open wide our eyes before the mystery that surrounds us, to remember that for all our knowledge we know very little, that the world is bigger than our brain, and that this is fortunate; for if it is so prodigious, it must hold unknown resources, and we can extend it some credit without being accused of improvidence. Let us not treat it as creditors treat an insolvent debtor. We must revive our courage and rekindle the holy flame of hope. Since the sun still rises, since the earth flowers again, since the bird builds its nest, since the mother smiles at her child, let us have the courage to be human and entrust the rest to the One who has numbered the stars. As for me, I wish I could find burning words for anyone whose heart sinks in this disillusioned age: take courage, hope again; the person surest to err least is the one who dares to hope most. The most naive hope is closer to truth than the most reasoned despair.

Another source of light on humanity's path is goodness. I am not one of those who believe in the natural perfection of man and teach that society corrupts him. On the contrary, of all the forms of evil, the one that frightens me most is the hereditary form. But I have sometimes wondered how it is that this old poisoned virus of base instincts, of vices inoculated into the blood, the whole heap of servitudes bequeathed to us by the past, has not got the better of us. No doubt it is because there is something else. That something else is goodness.

Given the unknown that hovers over our heads, our limited reason, the agonizing and contradictory riddle of human destinies, falsehood, hatred, corruption, suffering and death, what are we to think? What are we to do? To all these questions together a great and mysterious voice has answered: be good. Goodness must indeed be divine, like trust and like hope, since it cannot die, though so many powers are set against it. It has against it the native ferocity of what might be called the beast in man; it has against it cunning, force, self-interest, and above all ingratitude. Why does it pass white and unharmed through the midst of these dark enemies, like the prophet of the sacred story among the roaring beasts?

It is because its enemies are things from below, and goodness is a thing from above. Horns, teeth, claws, eyes full of murderous fire can do nothing against the swift wing that darts toward the heights and escapes them. So goodness slips away from the assaults of its enemies. It does better still: it has sometimes known the fine triumph of winning over its persecutors. It has seen the wild beasts grow calm, lie down at its feet and obey its law.

At the very heart of the Christian faith, the most sublime doctrine, and for anyone able to enter its deeper meaning, the most human, is this: to save a lost humanity, the invisible God came to dwell among us in human form and wished to be known by this one sign alone: goodness.

Restoring, consoling, gentle to the unfortunate and even to the wicked, goodness releases light wherever it walks. It clarifies and simplifies. It has chosen the humblest part: binding wounds, wiping away tears, easing distress, soothing aching hearts, forgiving, reconciling. Yet it is what we need most. And so, as we consider the best way to make thought fruitful, simple, and truly suited to our human destiny, we will sum up the method in these words: trust, hope, and be good.

I do not wish to discourage anyone from lofty reflection, or dissuade anyone from bending over the problems of the unknown, the vast depths of philosophy or science. But from these distant journeys we must always return to the point where we are, and often to the very place where we tread without apparent result. There are conditions of life and social complications in which the scholar, the thinker, and the uneducated see no more clearly than one another. Our age has often brought us face to face with such situations, and I assure anyone willing to follow our method that they will soon recognize some good in it.

Since these reflections have brought me alongside religion, at least in its general foundations, I may be asked to say in a few simple words which religion is best. I gladly explain myself on this subject. Yet perhaps we should not ask the usual question: which religion is best? Religions undoubtedly have certain definite characteristics, and qualities or defects belonging to each. Strictly speaking, they can therefore be compared. But such comparisons always contain preconceptions or unconscious partiality. It is better to put the question differently: is my religion good, and how can I recognize that it is good? Here is the answer. Your religion is good if it is alive and active; if it nourishes in you a sense of the infinite value of existence, trust, hope, and goodness; if it allies the better part of yourself against the worse and constantly reveals the need to become a new person; if it helps you understand that suffering can be a liberator; if it increases your respect for the conscience of others; if it makes forgiveness easier, happiness less proud, duty dearer, and the life beyond less obscure. If so, your religion is good, whatever its name. However elementary it may be, when it performs this work it comes from the authentic source and joins you to humanity and to God.

But if it should happen to make you believe yourself better than others, quibble over texts, darken your expression, rule another's conscience or surrender your own to slavery, lull your scruples, practice worship for fashion or advantage, or do good in calculation of a reward beyond the grave, then, whether you appeal to Buddha, Moses, Muhammad, or Christ himself, your religion is worthless. It separates you from humanity and from God.

Perhaps I do not have sufficient authority to speak this way. But others, greater than I, have spoken so before me, particularly the one who told the questioning scribe the parable of the Good Samaritan. I shelter behind his authority.

Translator's notes

The fear that the sky might fall: an allusion to the old tradition that the ancient Gauls feared nothing except that the sky might fall on their heads.