not to be realised here and now, yet possesses intrinsically exactly the same aptitude or claim to existence.  Nor are these claims and aptitudes merely imaginary and practically contemptible.  The flux of existence is continually repenting of its choices, and giving everything actual the lie, by continually substituting something else, no less specific and no less nugatory. This world, any world, exists only by an unmerited privilege.  Its glory is offensive to the spirit, like the self-sufficiency of some obstreperous nobody, who happens to have drawn the big prize in a lottery.  “The world”, M. Benda writes, “inspires me with a double sentiment.  I feel it to be full of grandeur, because it has succeeded in asserting itself and coming to exist; and I feel it to be pitiful, when I consider how it hung on a mere nothing that this particular world should never have existed.”  And though this so accidental world, by its manifold beauties and excitements, may arouse our romantic enthusiasm, it is fundamentally an unholy world.  Its creation, he adds in italics, “is something which reason would wish had never taken place”.

For we must not suppose that God, when God is defined as infinite Being, can be the creator of the world.  Such a notion would hopelessly destroy that coherence in thought to which M. Benda aspires.  The infinite cannot be selective; it cannot possess a particular structure (such, for instance, as the Trinity) nor a particular quality (such as goodness).  It cannot exert power or give direction.  Nothing can be responsible for the world except the world itself.  It has created, or is creating, itself perpetually by its own arbitrary act, by a groundless self-assertion which may be called (somewhat metaphorically) will, or even original sin:  the original sin of existence, particularity, selfishness, or separation from God.  Existence, being absolutely contingent and ungrounded, is perfectly free:  and if it ties itself up in its own habits or laws, and becomes a terrible nightmare to itself by its automatic monotony, that still is only its own work and, figuratively speaking, its own fault.  Nothing save its own arbitrary and needless pressure keeps it going in that round.  This fatality is impressive, and popular religion has symbolised it in the person of a deity far more often recognised and worshipped than infinite Being.  This popular deity, a symbol for the forces of nature and history, the patron of human welfare and morality, M. Benda calls the imperial God.

“It is clear that these two Gods ... have nothing to do with one another.  The God whom Marshal de Villars, rising in his stirrups and pointing his drawn sword heavenwards, thanks on the evening of Denain, is one God:  quite another is the God within whose bosom the author of the Imitation, in a corner of his cell, feels the nothingness of all human victories.”

It follows from this, if we are coherent, that any