And the soul, my soul at least, longs for something else, not absorption, not quietude, not peace, not appeasement, it longs ever to approach and never to arrive, it longs for a never-ending longing, for an eternal hope which is eternally renewed but never wholly fulfilled.  And together with all this, it longs for an eternal lack of something and an eternal suffering.  A suffering, a pain, thanks to which it grows without ceasing in consciousness and in longing.  Do not write upon the gate of heaven that sentence which Dante placed over the threshold of hell, Lasciate ogni speranza! Do not destroy time!  Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.  Give us leave to live!  The eternity that is like an eternal present, without memory and without hope, is death.  Thus do ideas exist, but not thus do men live.  Thus do ideas exist in the God-Idea, but not thus can men live in the living God, in the God-Man.

An eternal purgatory, then, rather than a heaven of glory; an eternal ascent.  If there is an end of all suffering, however pure and spiritualized we may suppose it to be, if there is an end of all desire, what is it that makes the blessed in paradise go on living?  If in paradise they do not suffer for want of God, how shall they love Him?  And if even there, in the heaven of glory, while they behold God little by little and closer and closer, yet without ever wholly attaining to Him, there does not always remain something more for them to know and desire, if there does not always remain a substratum of doubt, how shall they not fall asleep?

Or, to sum up, if in heaven there does not remain something of this innermost tragedy of the soul, what sort of a life is that?  Is there perhaps any greater joy than that of remembering misery—­and to remember it is to feel it—­in time of felicity?  Does not the prison haunt the freed prisoner?  Does he not miss his former dreams of liberty?

* * * * *

Mythological dreams! it will be said.  And I have not pretended that they are anything else.  But has not the mythological dream its content of truth?  Are not dream and myth perhaps revelations of an inexpressible truth, of an irrational truth, of a truth that cannot be proven?

Mythology!  Perhaps; but, as in the days of Plato, we must needs mythologize when we come to deal with the other life.  But we have just seen that whenever we seek to give a form that is concrete, conceivable, or in other words, rational, to our primary, primordial, and fundamental longing for an eternal life conscious of itself and of its personal individuality, esthetic, logical, and ethical absurdities are multiplied and there is no way of conceiving the beatific vision and the apocatastasis that is free from contradictions and inconsistencies.

And nevertheless!...