by George Sand
“I hear you. You want me to give you a formula of man analogous to that of God. The divine Trinity must be rediscovered in all the works of God; each one of God’s works must reflect God’s nature, but in a special way; each one, in short, according to its species.”
“Most certainly. The formula of man, here it is. It will still be a long time before the philosophers, now divided in their ways of seeing, come together to understand it. Yet there is one who came to understand it already quite some time ago. This one is greater than the others, even though he is infinitely less well known to the common man. While the school of Descartes is lost in pure reason, making man a machine of reasoning and syllogisms, an instrument of logic; while Locke and his school are lost in sensation, making man a sensitive plant; while others, like some that I could cite in Germany, are absorbed in feeling, making man a double-personed egotism if it’s question of love, a three- or four-personed egotism or more if it’s question of the family; he, the greatest of all, began to understand that man was all that in one, all that indivisibly. This philosopher is Leibniz. He’s the one who understood the main things; he didn’t share the absurd scorn that our ignorant century feels for antiquity and Christianity. He dared to say that there were pearls in the dung of the Middle Ages. Pearls! Yes, indeed! Truth is eternal, and all the prophets have received it. So I say to you with him, and with an affirmation stronger than his, that man is a trinity, like God. And this trinity is called, in human language: sensation, feeling, knowledge. And the unity of these three things constitutes the human Tetrad, corresponding to the divine Tetrad. From there proceeds all history, from there proceeds all politics, and it’s from this source that you must draw, as from an ever living spring.”
“You’re leaping over abysses, and my wits, less nimble than yours, can’t keep up,” said Spartacus. “How do a sure method and a rule of certainty follow from the psychological definition you’ve just given me? That’s my first question to you.”
“The method follows from it easily,” Rudolstadt replied. “Human nature being known, it’s a matter of cultivating it in accord with its essence. If you understood the unrivaled book from which the Gospel itself is derived, if you understood Genesis, attributed to Moses, and which, if it really comes from this prophet, was carried off by him from the temples at Memphis, you would know that human dissolution, or what Genesis calls the flood, has no cause other than the separation of these three faculties of human nature, no longer unified, and thereby isolated from the divine unity, where intelligence, love, and action remain eternally associated. You would then understand how each and every organizer must imitate Noah, the regenerator, what Scripture calls the generations of Noah as well as the order in which it arranges them, and the harmony that it establishes among them would act as your guide. Thus you would at the same time find in metaphysical truth a sure method for cultivating human nature in a dignified manner in each and every person and a beacon to enlighten you about true social organization. Yet I’ll tell you again, I don’t believe that the present time is made for organizing. There is too much to destroy. So it’s above all as a method that I recommend that you adhere to the doctrine. The time of dissolution is drawing hear, or rather it’s already here. Yes, the time has come when the three faculties of human nature will once again break apart, when their separation will be the death of the social, religious, and political body. What will happen? Sensation will bring forth its false prophets, and they will champion sensation. Feeling will bring forth its false prophets, and they will champion feeling. Knowledge will bring forth its false prophets, and they will champion knowledge. The last ones will be arrogant sorts resembling Satan. The second ones will be fanatics as ready to fall into evil as to march toward the good, without any criterion of certainty or rules. The others will be what Homer said became of Odysseus’s companions under Circe’s wand. Do not follow any one of these three paths which, taken separately, will lead to an abyss; the first to materialism, the second to mysticism, the third to atheism. There is but one sure path to the truth, the one that responds to human nature in its wholeness, to human nature developed in all its aspects. Do not leave this path; meditate, therefore, without cease the doctrine and its sublime formula.”
“There you are teaching me things that I had already glimpsed. But tomorrow I won’t have you any longer. Who’ll guide me to the theoretical knowledge of the truth, and thereby to its practice?”
“You’ll have other reliable guides. Above all, read Genesis, and strive to grasp its meaning. Don’t take it for a history book, a monument of chronology. There is nothing so insane as that opinion, which is nonetheless generally accepted, by scholars and pupils, and in all the Christian communions. Read the Gospel in parallel with Genesis and understand it through Genesis, after having tasted it with your heart. How strange that the Gospel, like Genesis, is adored and misunderstood! These are the main things. But there are still others. Meditate piously what we still have of Pythagoras. Read as well the writings conserved under the name of the divine theosophist whose name I bore in the Temple. Don’t think, my friends, that I would have dared to take the revered name of Trismegistus on my own authority. It was the Invisibles who ordered me to do so. These writings of Hermes, nowadays disdained by pedants, who foolishly believe them to be an invention of some Christian of the second or third century, hold the ancient knowledge of Egypt. The day will come when they, explicated and brought to light, will appear to be what they are, monuments more precious than those of Plato, for it is from there that Plato drew his knowledge, and one must add that he strangely misunderstood and distorted the truth in his Republic. So read Trismegistus and Plato, and those who in their wake meditated on the great mystery. Among this number I recommend to you the noble monk Campanella, who suffered dreadful torture for having dreamed what you are dreaming, human organization founded on truth and knowledge.”
We were listening in silence.
“When I speak to you about books,” Trismegistus continued, “don’t think that, like Catholics, I incarnate life in tombs in idolatrous fashion. I’ll say about books what I said to you yesterday about other monuments of the past. Books and monuments are remains of life on which life can and must feed. But life is always present, and the eternal Trinity is better inscribed in us and on the brows of the stars than in the books of Plato and Hermes.”
Without meaning to do so, I gave the conversation a bit of a random turn.
“Master,” I said, “you’ve just said, ‘The Trinity is better inscribed on the brows of the stars. . . .’ What do you mean by that? I certainly see, as the Bible says, the glory of God shining in the bright stars, but I don’t see them as proof of the general law of life that you call the Trinity.”
“That’s because,” he replied, “the physical sciences are still insufficiently developed, or rather because you haven’t kept up with their advances. Have you heard about the discoveries in the domain of electricity? No doubt, for they have occupied the attention of all educated men. Well, haven’t you noticed that the scholars who were so incredulous, so mocking with regard to the divine Trinity have come to recognize the Trinity in these phenomena? For they themselves say that there is no electricity without heat and without light, and vice versa; in a word, there they see three in one, which they don’t want to acknowledge in God!”
He then began to talk to us about nature and the necessity of relating all these phenomena to a general law.
“Life,” he said, “is one; there is but one act of life. It’s just a matter of understanding how all particular beings live by the grace and intervention of the Universal Being without however being absorbed in him.”
For my part, I would have been delighted to hear him develop this grand topic. But for some time Spartacus had seemed less attentive to his words, not because he didn’t take interest in them, but the old man’s concentration wouldn’t last forever, and he wanted to take advantage of that by bringing him back to his favorite subject.
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p; Rudolstadt noticed a sort of impatience.
“You’re not following me any longer,” he said to him. “Does it seem to you impossible to gain knowledge of nature according to my way of thinking? If that’s the case, you’re wrong. I appreciate as much as you the current work of scientists, turned to nothing but experimentation. Yet, by continuing in that vein, one won’t be creating knowledge, but only nomenclatures. Moreover, I’m not the only one to hold that belief. In France, I met a philosopher of whom I was very fond, Diderot, who often exclaimed about the heaps of scientific material lacking any general idea, ‘This, at the very most, is the work of a stonecutter, but I don’t see either a building or an architect in it.’ Just know that sooner or later the doctrine will deal with the natural sciences; one will have to build with these stones. And then, do you think that physicists today can really comprehend nature? Having stripped nature of the living God that fills it, can they feel it, can they know it? They take light, for example, for matter, sound for matter, when it’s light and sound. . . .”
“Ah!” Spartacus exclaimed, interrupting him, “don’t think I reject your intuitions about nature. No, I feel that there will only be true science through knowledge of divine unity and the perfect similitude of all phenomena. But you’re opening all the paths to us, and I shudder to think that you’ll soon stop talking. I’d like you to walk me a few steps down one of these paths.”
“Which one?”
“It’s humanity’s future that concerns me.”
“I see. You’d like me to tell you my utopia,” said the old man, with a smile.
“That’s what I came here to ask of you,” said Spartacus, “your utopia, the new society that you’re carrying in your brain and your guts. We know that the Society of the Invisibles sought and dreamed its foundations. All this work has ripened in you. Let us profit from it. Give us your republic. We’ll try it out, insofar as it seems to us feasible, and the sparks from your fire will begin stirring up the world.”
“Children, you’re asking me for my dreams?” replied the philosopher. “Yes, I’ll try and lift the corners of the veil that so often conceals the future from my very own eyes! This may be for the last time, but I must try again today; for I’ve got faith that with you all will not be lost in the golden dreams of my poetry!”
Then Trismegistus went into a sort of divine transport; his eyes shone like stars, and his voice bowed us over like a hurricane. For more than four hours he spoke, and his words were pure and beautiful as a hymn. He composed, out of the religious, political, and artistic work of all the centuries, the most magnificent poem that can ever be conceived. He interpreted all the religions of the past, all the mysteries of the temples, poems, and laws; all the efforts, all the tendencies, all the labors of humanity in earlier times. In the things that had always seemed to us dead or doomed, he rediscovered elements of life, and even out of the obscure tales of Greek gods and heroes he brought forth flashes of truth. He explained the myths of antiquity; he set forth, in his lucid and ingenious demonstration, all the connections, all the points of contact among the various religions. He showed us the true needs of humanity more or less understood by the legislators, more or less fulfilled by the peoples. He reconstituted before our eyes the unity of life in humanity and the unity of dogma in religion, and out of all the materials scattered throughout the ancient world and the new, he formed the basis of his future world. In short, he made the discontinuities that had held us up so long in our studies disappear. He filled up the abysses of history that we had found so terrifying. In a single infinite spiral he unwound the thousands of sacred bandages from around the mummy of science. And when we had understood quick as lightning what he was teaching us at lightning speed; when we had grasped the whole of his vision, and the past, the father of the present, rose up before us like the luminous man of the Apocalypse, he stopped and said to us with a smile,
“Now you understand the past and the present; need I show you the future? Is the Holy Spirit not shining before your eyes? Do you not see that everything sublime that man has dreamed and desired is possible and certain in the future, for the simple reason that the truth is eternal and absolute, despite the weakness of our organs to conceive and possess it? And yet we all possess it by hope and desire. It lives in us, it has forever existed in humanity as a seed awaiting the supreme fecundation. Verily I say unto you, we are gravitating toward the ideal, and this gravitation is infinite as is the ideal itself.”
He went on speaking, and his poem about the future was as magnificent as the one about the past. I won’t try to translate it here for you. I’d spoil it, and one must be oneself fired by inspiration to impart what inspiration has uttered. I may need two or three years of meditation before I’ll be able to write a worthy account of what Trismegistus told us in two or three hours. Writing the life of Socrates was Plato’s lifework, and writing the life of Jesus has been the work of seventeen centuries. You can see that I, unworthy wretch that I am, must be shuddering at the idea of my task. Yet I’m not giving up. The master isn’t troubled by the transcription such as I have in mind to do. He’s a man of action, and he’s already drawn up a code that in his view summarizes Trismegistus’s entire doctrine as clearly and precisely as though he had spent his whole life doing an in-depth commentary on it. He assimilated, as though by electrical contact, the philosopher’s whole mind and soul. It is his, he has mastered it; he’ll make use of it as a man of politics. He’ll be the living and immediate translation, instead of the belated, dead letter that I’m meditating. And before I’ve produced my work, he will have transmitted the doctrine to his school. Yes, perhaps within two years, the strange and mysterious words that have just risen up in this wilderness will have thrown roots among numerous disciples; and we’ll see this vast underground world of secret societies that is today stirring in the shadows unite under one doctrine, receive new laws, and rediscover their means of action by initiating themselves into the word of life. We are bringing it to you, this much desired monument, that confirms the predictions made by Spartacus, that sanctions the truths that he has already conquered and expands his horizon with all the power of inspired faith. While Trismegistus was speaking and I was listening, avid and trembling that I might miss a single sound of these words that were to me like sacred music, Spartacus, who remained in control of himself in his intense excitement, his eyes on fire, but his hand firm and his mind even more open than his ears, was quickly tracing signs and figures on his tablets, as though the metaphysical conception of this doctrine had come to him in the form of geometry. When, that same evening, he consulted these bizarre notes which made no sense to me, I was surprised to see him use them to write out and organize, with incredible precision, the deductions of the philosopher’s poetic logic. Everything had been simplified and summarized as though by magic in this mysterious alembic which is our master’s practical intelligence.6
Yet he still wasn’t satisfied. Inspiration seemed to be abandoning Trismegistus. His eyes were dimming, his body seemed to be collapsing, and the Zingara gestured to us not to ask him any more questions. But, ardent in his pursuit of the truth, Spartacus would no longer listen to her and pressed him with imperious questions.
“You’ve painted for me the kingdom of God on earth,” he said, shaking the old man’s chilly hand, “but Jesus said, ‘My kingdom is not yet of this time,’ and for seventeen centuries humanity has been waiting in vain for his promises to be fulfilled. I haven’t lifted myself up as high as you have in the contemplation of eternity. Time shows you, as it does to God himself, the spectacle or the idea of permanent activity, whose every phase responds at every moment to your lofty sentiment. As for me, I live closer to earth. I count the centuries and the years. I want to read my own life. Tell me, prophet, what I am to do in this phase where you see me, tell me what your words have brought forth in me, and what they will bring forth through me in the century rising up before us. I don’t want to have passed through it in vain.”
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�What does it matter to you what I may know about that?” replied the poet. “Nothing lives in vain; nothing is lost. None of us is useless. Let me turn my eyes from this detail, which saddens the heart and withers the spirit. Giving it a moment’s thought has utterly worn me out.”
“Revealer, you have no right to give into that exhaustion,” Spartacus said with energy, striving to communicate the fire of his gaze to the vague, already dreamy gaze of the poet. “If you turn your eyes away from the spectacle of human misery, you are not the true man, the complete man of whom an ancient said, “Homo sum et nihil humani a me alienum puto.” No, you don’t love men, you aren’t their brother if you don’t take an interest in the troubles they suffer throughout every hour of eternity, if you don’t hasten to seek the remedy to these in the application of your ideal. Oh wretched the artist who doesn’t feel a devouring fever consuming him in that terrifying and delicious quest!”
“So what are you asking of me?” replied the poet, moved and almost irritated in his turn. “Are you so proud as to think yourself the sole laborer, and do you think I grant myself the honor of being the sole giver of inspiration? I’m no seer; I scorn false prophets; I struggled against them quite long enough. My predictions, on the other hand, are reasonings; my visions are perceptions elevated to their highest power. The poet is not the same as a sorcerer. He does indeed dream, while the other one randomly devises. I believe in your action because I feel the contact of your power; I believe in the sublimity of my dreams because I feel myself capable of bringing them forth and because humanity is grand enough and generous enough to accomplish a hundred times over and as one body what one of its members managed to conceive alone.”