Our greatest endeavour must be to make ourselves irreplaceable; to make
the theoretical fact--if this expression does not involve a
contradiction in terms--the fact that each one of us is unique and
irreplaceable, that no one else can fill the gap that will be left when
we die, a practical truth.
For in fact each man is unique and irreplaceable; there cannot be any
other I; each one of us--our soul, that is, not our life--is worth the
whole Universe. I say the spirit and not the life, for the ridiculously
exaggerated value which those attach to human life who, not really
believing in the spirit--that is to say, in their personal
immortality--tirade against war and the death penalty, for example, is a
value which they attach to it precisely because they do not really
believe in the spirit of which life is the servant. For life is of use
only in so far as it serves its lord and master, spirit, and if the
master perishes with the servant, neither the one nor the other is of
any great value.
And to act in such a way as to make our annihilation an injustice, in
such a way as to make our brothers, our sons, and our brothers' sons,
and their sons' sons, feel that we ought not to have died, is something
that is within the reach of all.
The essence of the doctrine of the Christian redemption is in the fact
that he who suffered agony and death was the unique man--that is, Man,
the Son of Man, or the Son of God; that he, because he was sinless, did
not deserve to have died; and that this propitiatory divine victim died
in order that he might rise again and that he might raise us up from the
dead, in order that he might deliver us from death by applying his
merits to us and showing us the way of life.
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