The work of charity, of the love of God, is to endeavour to liberate God from brute matter, to endeavour to give consciousness to everything, to spiritualize or universalize everything; it is to dream that the very rocks may find a voice and work in accordance with the spirit of this dream; it is to dream that everything that exists may become conscious, that the Word may become life.

We have but to look at the eucharistic symbol to see an instance of it.  The Word has been imprisoned in a piece of material bread, and it has been imprisoned therein to the end that we may eat it, and in eating it make it our own, part and parcel of our body in which the spirit dwells, and that it may beat in our heart and think in our brain and be consciousness.  It has been imprisoned in this bread in order that, after being buried in our body, it may come to life again in our spirit.

And we must spiritualize everything.  And this we shall accomplish by giving our spirit, which grows the more the more it is distributed, to all men and to all things.  And we give our spirit when we invade other spirits and make ourselves the master of them.

All this is to be believed with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us.

* * * * *

And now we are about to see what practical consequences all these more or less fantastical doctrines may have in regard to logic, to esthetics, and, above all, to ethics—­their religious concretion, in a word.  And perhaps then they will gain more justification in the eyes of the reader who, in spite of my warnings, has hitherto been looking for the scientific or even philosophic development of an irrational system.

I think it may not be superfluous to recall to the reader once again what I said at the conclusion of the sixth chapter, that entitled “In the Depths of the Abyss”; but we now approach the practical or pragmatical part of this treatise.  First, however, we must see how the religious sense may become concrete in the hopeful vision of another life.

FOOTNOTES: 

[44] Reinold Seeberg, Christliche-protestantische Ethik in Systematische christliche Religion, in Die Kultur der Gegenwart series.

[45] Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa, secunda secundae, quaestio iv., art. 2.

[46] “Que es Verdad?” ("What is truth?"), published in La Espana Moderna, March, 1906, vol. 207 (reprinted in the edition of collected Ensayos, vol. vi., Madrid, 1918).

X

RELIGION, THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE BEYOND AND THE APOCATASTASIS

Kai gar isos kai malista prepei mellonta echeise apodemein diaskopein te kai muthologein peri tes apodemias tes echei, poian tina auten oiometha einai.—­PLATO:  Phaedo.