And they keep on wearying our ears with this chorus of Pride! stinking
Pride! Pride, to wish to leave an ineffaceable name? Pride? It is like
calling the thirst for riches a thirst for pleasure. No, it is not so
much the longing for pleasure that drives us poor folk to seek money as
the terror of poverty, just as it was not the desire for glory but the
terror of hell that drove men in the Middle Ages to the cloister with
its _acedia_. Neither is this wish to leave a name pride, but terror of
extinction. We aim at being all because in that we see the only means of
escaping from being nothing. We wish to save our memory--at any rate,
our memory. How long will it last? At most as long as the human race
lasts. And what if we shall save our memory in God?
Unhappy, I know well, are these confessions; but from the depth of
unhappiness springs new life, and only by draining the lees of spiritual
sorrow can we at last taste the honey that lies at the bottom of the cup
of life. Anguish leads us to consolation.
This thirst for eternal life is appeased by many, especially by the
simple, at the fountain of religious faith; but to drink of this is not
given to all. The institution whose primordial end is to protect this
faith in the personal immortality of the soul is Catholicism; but
Catholicism has sought to rationalize this faith by converting religion
into theology, by offering a philosophy, and a philosophy of the
thirteenth century, as a basis for vital belief.
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