Katharsis

“ Notwithstanding the bold assertion of the Hellenic spirit in this and in the greater part of his poems, that, nevertheless, Carducci has not been able to restore his fair god of light and beauty, the Phœbus Apollo, to the undisputed sway he held in the ancient mind is evident from the shadows of doubt, of fear, and anxious questioning which still darken here and there the poet's lines, as in the sonnet Innanzi, Innanzi! [XV] It is here that the stern element of tragedy, the real tragedy of humanity, makes itself felt in this rhapsodist of joy and of love. ”

“ These organs but to praise His name!
O mighty Lord of boundless space
Here canst Thou be both sought and found.
For here in everything around [364]
Thy presence and Thy power I trace;
With faith my guide and my defence,
I burn to serve in love and fear;
If as a slave, oh! leave me here,
If not, O Lord, remove me hence!
M’ Carthy, from the Spanish of Calderon.
The Lord of all, Himself through all diffused,
Sustains, and is the life of all that lives.
Nature is but a name for an effect,
Whose cause is God. He feeds the secret fire
By which the mighty process is maintained ”

“ Catharine's fanaticism had become wilder by the sundering of all human ties; and wherever a scourge was lifted, there was she to receive the blow; and whenever a dungeon was unbarred, thither she came, to cast herself upon the floor. But in process of time, a more Christian spirit—a spirit of forbearance, though not of cordiality or approbation—began to pervade the land in regard to the persecuted sect. And then, when the rigid old Pilgrims eyed her rather in pity than in wrath ”

“ With no more than the appliances of primitive life, existence was felt to be a burden in a climate and a country which overpowered human powers and neutralized human energies. What had appeared to the theologian as the vengeful action of offended divinities appeared to the philosopher as the omnipotent but natural causes of human misery. Hence in philosophy the sense of Suffering took the place of the sense of Sin. These two notions, the sense of suffering and the sense of sin, run side by side throughout Hindu Philosophy and Hindu Mythology respectively. ”

“ Energetic only in evil, when its powers might have been used on the side of virtue, it held its hand and gave the people to understand that the only sins demanding repression were doubt as to the accuracy of the Church’s knowledge of the unknown, and attendance on the Sabbat. In its long career of blood and fire, the only credit which it can claim is the suppression of the pernicious dogmas of the Cathari, and in this its agency may be regarded as superfluous, for those dogmas carried in themselves the seeds of self-destruction, and higher wisdom might have trusted to their self-extinction. ”

“ If the body was exposed to the flame, there was no more reason, according to this theory, why the soul should be conscious of pain than of pleasure, except that God had so ordained. Such a supposition was shocking to our philosopher, who could tolerate no arbitrariness in God and no gap or discrepancy in nature, and who, therefore, sought to explain, by the nature of the soul itself and its kindred monads, the correspondence for which so violent an hypothesis was embraced by the Cartesians. ”

“ The eye is burning, all the senses are burning, thoughts are burning. They are burning with the fire of lust. There is anger, there is ignorance, there is hatred, and as long as the fire finds inflammable things upon which it can feed, so long will it burn, and there will be birth and death, decay, grief, lamentation, suffering, despair, and sorrow. Considering this, a disciple of the Dharma will see the four noble truths and walk in the eightfold path of holiness. ”

“ And, in addition to these, there were the white-robed Carthusians, those very holy, pure, and silent meditators who fled from the world into quiet cells and cloisters, those despairing and consoled ones whose numbers may decrease but whose Order will live for ever, even as grief and desire for solitude will live. ”

“ Here are the causes of sin: greed, wrath, infatuation, with their effects, ignorance and pain. The causes are to be cured by better wisdom, by a truer understanding of the Self, of Life. For greed cannot endure before the realization that the whole world belongs to the Self, which Self we are; nor can we hold wrath against one who is one with the Self, and therefore with ourselves; nor can infatuation, which is the seeking for the happiness of the All in some limited part of it, survive the knowledge that we are heirs of the All. ”

“ Within each one ached and ate the canker of a wretchedness they tried to hide from happier souls who passed them by.
Cartice read their misery by the light of past suffering, and yearned to say to them: “Awake! You are in a dark dream. The conditions that [Pg 292] trouble you are unreal—mere illusions, and touch not your true life at all. You are gods every one, but unaware of your divinity. One day the dream shall pass and you shall know this.”
But the etiquette of civilization forbade it. We see our fellow beings suffer and perish from some wound in the soul, yet approach them not. ”

“ Lilla was one of them—Lilla of the light heart and rippling laugh in days gone by; and of the sturdy soul and dauntless faith in sorrow and misfortune.
Now Cartice saw that her own people all became acquainted with suffering, sooner or later, and that this was the greatest of teachers to the human race. Without suffering nothing is born, nothing grows. ”

“ This is all that we have got by reassembling here.' Do we not often feel that the drought of Kadesh is more real than the grapes of Eshcol? Are we not sometimes tempted to bitter comparisons of the fair promises with the gloomy realities? Does our courage never flag, nor our faith falter, nor swirling clouds of doubt hide the inheritance from our weary and tear-filled eyes? He that is without sin may cast the first stone at these men; but whoever knows his own weak heart will confess that, if he had been among that thirsty crowd, he would, most likely, have made one of the murmurers. ”

“ Everywhere the philosopher labours under an overwhelming sense of human misery and directs all his efforts against it. The vast field over which these two leading notions, the notion of sin and the notion of suffering, have spread, giving rise to asceticism, to fatalism, to apathy in politics and to sensuality in poetry, is one of the most interesting subjects of study with which the Hindu can occupy himself. ”

“ There is a permanent bond between mercy and misery——without misery how can mercy he? He who is full of infinite mercy, must feel everlasting sorrow for the immeasurable misery of this boundless universe, otherwise he is not all-merciful. If you ask, that God is beyond all passion-how can He feel sorrow? The answer will be, that if God is beyond passion, if He is unconcerned in the creation, its preservation, and its destruction, He cannot be called the Creator and Ruler. If there be a creator and ruler, he cannot be without passion—he must be full of sorrow. ”

“ Yet more remarkable than the sanction of suicide was another consequence of the Manichæan creed—the condemnation of matrimony.35 The connection of thought was logical and the conclusion perhaps logically inevitable. If it be accepted that the carnal body is the invention of the Devil and the propagation of the species his device for prolonging his power, the love of the sexes original sin, then it is clear that marriage is service of Satan. So the Cathari enjoined the severest possible chastity.36 As usual they found evidence of their belief in the Bible. ”

“ Should not the heart, then, leap and melt for joy when going to work and doing what is commanded, saying: Lo, this is better than all holiness of the Carthusians, even though they kill themselves fasting and praying upon their knees without ceasing? For here you have a sure text and a divine testimony that He has enjoined this, but concerning the other He did not command a word. But this is the plight and miserable blindness of the world that no one believes these things; to such an extent the devil has deceived us with false holiness and the glamour of our own works. ”

“ Yet this will not account for the fact that the Manichæism of the Cathari, Patarins, or Albigenses, was not a mere speculative dogma of the schools, but a faith which aroused fanaticism so enthusiastic that its devotees shrank from no sacrifices in its propagation and mounted the blazing pyre with steadfast joy. A profound conviction of the emptiness of sacerdotal Christianity, of its failure and approaching extinction, and of the speedy triumph of their own faith may partially explain the unselfish fervor which it excited among the poor and illiterate. ”

“ Kathie used to think me too mild, but I don’t know! The consequences of sin are so terrible in themselves, that I always long to throw in a lot of help with the blame. The people about here seem to know this by instinct, for they come to me in their troubles and anxieties and—shames, poor souls! and open their hearts as they do to nobody else. ”

“ Thus creation felt the blow to its utmost verge, and has groaned in pain for deliverance until now. From all these declarations of holy writ, and from many other proofs which might easily be adduced, we feel ourselves safe in saying that Sin is the sole cause of decay, or death. If there had been no sin, there would have been no death, no dissolution, no disorganization, no decay, no sorrow and groaning, tears or weeping; neither would there have been any pain, but creation would have continued in the same state to an endless duration. O sin, what hast thou done! ”

“ And finally, Chapter Fifteen (Vita, p. 181b, c) is headed now: “Reproofs addressed by the souls in Purgatory to worldly persons.” But the text still begins with “a desire comes over me (Catherine) to cry out so as to strike fear into every man on earth,” and deals throughout with her this-life fears for such persons, not with respect to Purgatory, but with regard to Hell.
(3) Even the first seven Dicchiarazione Chapters we shall find to contain short theological glosses. ”

“ The head becomes dizzy; the heart palpitates; the hands tremble, and the sight grows double. Then comes the fear of illness, and death in a strange land. Associates of the 'row' are avoided; several chapters in the Bible are read; repentance is promised; sleep settles [Pg 85] the nervous system; and next morning they arise gay and happy. This continues until the scene is repeated, and so on, until one half forswear brandy and the other half become confirmed sots.
"Here is a coherent epistle for you. ”

“ No, there is none; but then if everyone should try to remove one another’s misery, certainly it could be alleviated. You see Providence Himself is active day and night in removing the sufferings of His creatures. With the alleviation of the misery of this Universe is the alleviation of the Divine Sorrow. The gods are busy in removing the sufferings of the created beings and therein is their only godly happiness, else the gods who are beyond all passion and sensuous feelings would have no other happiness. ”

“ Neither the mouth nor the pen can express it, but the eyes drowned in a flood of tears were raised on high as though to seek among the angels of God the ones who with tender wings came down to us, who were sad and wept bitterly upon earth, to comfort, and fill us with heavenly joy.
Every heart beat, every pulse beat, and each indrawing of the breath was a prayer of thanksgiving.
We are only ordinary human beings, a mixture of evil and of good like millions of others. Can it be that at first glance there is more of good than evil in us? ”

“ The races dead, of war-like men and wise,
With joy saluted the great soul's returning.
The antagonism between the pagan and the Christian religious instincts comes to light in all that Carducci writes of his revered master. Half in anger he chides the awful singer who
Comes down from heaven bringing the Hymn Supreme,
while upon his brow shines
a radiance divine
Like his who spake with God in Sinai,—
because he cared not for
His poor country and the endless strife that rent its cities. ”

“ We would not fast and do other things which seemed senseless to us. Every one was in despair; we were in despair, no one could explain the things which were incomprehensible to us. Our God was our conscience, our Hell and our Heaven too was our own conscience; if we did wrong our conscience punished us; if we did good, our conscience rewarded us.
The years came and went; we were called Mahommedans because we had inherited that faith, and we were Mahommedans in name^ no more. God—Allah—was for us a nam—a word—a sound without meaning. ”

“ The pagan smile that once hovered about his lips was gone, and he was one with sorrow. Religion heals a hundred hearts for one that it embitters, but when it destroys, its work is quick and deadly, and where the agony of the cross has been, joy will not come again. ”

“ The Cathari who were hanged at Goslar in 1052 refused to kill a pullet, even with the gallows before their eyes, and in the thirteenth century this test was regarded as a ready means of identifying them. [6]
There were a few philosophic spirits in the sect, moreover, who emerged from these vain speculations and curiously anticipated the theories of modern Kationalism. With these Nature took the place of Satan; God, after forming the universe, abandoned its conduct to Nature, which has the power of creating all things and regulating them. ”

“ Human souls are similarly all fallen spirits passing through probation, and this was very generally the belief of all the sects of Cathari, leading to a theory of transmigration very similar to that of Buddhism, though modified by the belief that Christ’s earthly mission was the redemption of these fallen spirits.{99} Until the perfected soul could return to its Creator, as in the moksha or absorption in Brahma of the Hindu, it was forced to undergo repeated existence. ”