Sufro yo a tu costa,
    Dios no existiente, pues si tu existieras
    existieria yo tambien de veras.[35]

Yes, if God the guarantor of our personal immortality existed, then should we ourselves really exist.  And if He exists not, neither do we exist.

That terrible secret, that hidden will of God which, translated into the language of theology, is known as predestination, that idea which dictated to Luther his servum arbitrium, and which gives to Calvinism its tragic sense, that doubt of our own salvation, is in its essence nothing but uncertainty, and this uncertainty, allied with despair, forms the basis of faith.  Faith, some say, consists in not thinking about it, in surrendering ourselves trustingly to the arms of God, the secrets of whose providence are inscrutable.  Yes, but infidelity also consists in not thinking about it.  This absurd faith, this faith that knows no shadow of uncertainty, this faith of the stupid coalheaver, joins hands with an absurd incredulity, the incredulity that knows no shadow of uncertainty, the incredulity of the intellectuals who are afflicted with affective stupidity in order that they may not think about it.

And what but uncertainty, doubt, the voice of reason, was that abyss, that terrible gouffre, before which Pascal trembled?  And it was that which led him to pronounce his terrible sentence, il faut s’abetir—­need is that we become fools!

All Jansenism, the Catholic adaptation of Calvinism, bears the same impress.  Port-Royal, which owed its existence to a Basque, the Abbe de Saint-Cyran, a man of the same race as Inigo de Loyola and as he who writes these lines, always preserved deep down a sediment of religious despair, of the suicide of reason.  Loyola also slew his reason in obedience.

Our affirmation is despair, our negation is despair, and from despair we abstain from affirming and denying.  Note the greater part of our atheists and you will see that they are atheists from a kind of rage, rage at not being able to believe that there is a God.  They are the personal enemies of God.  They have invested Nothingness with substance and personality, and their No-God is an Anti-God.

And concerning that abject and ignoble saying, “If there were not a God it would be necessary to invent Him,” we shall say nothing.  It is the expression of the unclean scepticism of those conservatives who look upon religion merely as a means of government and whose interest it is that in the other life there shall be a hell for those who oppose their worldly interests in this life.  This repugnant and Sadducean phrase is worthy of the time-serving sceptic to whom it is attributed.

No, with all this the deep vital sense has nothing to do.  It has nothing to do with a transcendental police regimen, or with securing order—­and what an order!—­upon earth by means of promises and threats of eternal rewards and punishments after death.  All this belongs to a lower plane—­that is to say, it is merely politics, or if you like, ethics.  The vital sense has to do with living.