I had occasion to observe something recently, which is that religious faith is not much help in supporting the trials of life. I heard a woman, a sincere Catholic, speak of a relation she had lost as if nothing at all remained.
Of course I didn’t expect her to be full of joy. And yet a sincere believer should, it seems to me, thank her god when those she loves are delivered from the evils of this life; but this is exactly what we don’t see, except among monks, whose way of life has made them almost indifferent to everything. And I don’t even see that faith, apart from these exceptional cases, brings any softening to the sufferings that result from illness and death. I know that believers, after the explosion of despair, fall into a stupor that comes from fatigue and, almost always, start living again; but non-believers do the same and, as far as I can see, from the same causes; for fatigue and habit together end in putting the sharpest mental sufferings to sleep.
We think that our reasoning consoles us; in reality it’s the opposite that happens; consolation comes first; and principally, if I may say so, from the stomach; for the principal cause of joy is health; reasoning consoles us afterwards, gives things a decent turn, and allows us to provide our friends with honourable reasons for the change. One of us will say that he wants to live for his children, another that she wants to learn and teach others; another that he wants to help the poor, another that she submits to the will of god, another that he is confident he will find the person he has lost in paradise; all these reasons have the same value, in the sense that they have no value against real sadness and they all manage equally well the passage from sadness to resignation. But to pretend that fine words console us is to take the effect for the cause. We are not consoled by a piece of reasoning any more than we can argue ourselves to sleep; it only needs the fine words to go on for long enough.
May 27, 1907
English translation copyright © Michel Petheram
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