Part II

THE LABYRINTH

     By a strange whim of fate the first fragment of the writings of the ancient Greek philosophers that has come down to us reads as follows: The origin of all things is the boundless (apeiron) "and this very thing that gives birth to them is necessarily also the cause of their destruction, for at an ordained time they must undergo punishment and retribution by each other for their impiety" (didonai gar auta dikên kai tisin allêlois tês adikias kata tên toû chronou taksin). Thus spoke Anaximander twenty-five hundred years ago; such is the thought that came to the mind of men at the dawn of the history of philosophy. And these, as I have said, are the only authentic words of the ancestors of European philosophy that time has preserved for us. Certainly Anaximander reflected on many other things, and some of his ideas have come down to us in the exposition of other philosophers. We even know certain things about the doctrine of his predecessor and teacher, Thales. But of all that he himself said and wrote, this fragment is the only original text we have. What is striking is the fact that the thought it contains has determined in large measure the character and direction of the searchings of all later philosophy, not only Greek but European. Apparently Providence, which decided to destroy all that Anaximander accomplished, did not believe it possible to hide from the tribunal of history the name of the man who first suggested to European man this audacious thought about the essence of things. Why did Providence not decide to wipe out his words? Did they not contain a certain adikia, a certain impiety, which for twenty-five hundred years has awaited its dikê and tisis, its punishment and retribution? Anaximander's thought deeply permeated the philosophy of his successors. Neither Plato nor Aristotle nor the Stoics nor Plotinus could have conceived anything without it. If, then, the thought of Anaximander was impious, all philosophy has also been impious and, together with philosophy, the religion of European man and also perhaps of Asiatic man. And a new and terrible dikê awaits all of us precisely for that for which we expect to receive a great and merited reward. The responsibility falls first of all on Anaximander. It is probably for this reason that Providence preserved for us the authentic text of his words: it wished the future judge to have the corpus delicti in order to avoid all possibility of dispute.

     But what is the deeper meaning of that single thought of Anaximander's that Providence has preserved for us with such care for so many centuries? Anaximander believes that "things," by being born, i.e., by detaching themselves from the original "universal" and "divine" unity in order to attain their present particular being, have committed an act that is impious to the highest degree, an act for which they must in all justice undergo the supreme punishment - death and destruction. Things means all visible objects: stones, trees, animals, men. Neither the stone nor the camel, neither the eagle nor man, has any right to aspire to the freedom of individual existence. From the fragment that has been preserved for us we do not know under what form, according to Anaximander, the camel or man should have existed - whether under the form, for example, of Platonic ideas or in some other way. It may be that, according to Anaximander, the ideas also have no right to particular existence and that their independent being, perfectly permissible from Plato's point of view, also seemed an audacious impiety to the forefather of Greek wisdom. Perhaps he thought that the One alone rightfully existed and that every being which affirmed its freedom, limited as this may have been, which detached itself from the One and manifested itself as existing independently, was already something that had a beginning and consequently carried in itself the threat of a terrible punishment - destruction, death. If it is permissible in such cases to trust one's "instincts" and admit conjectures, I should say that I personally am inclined to the latter conjecture. Plato who, in general, adopts Anaximander's point of view nevertheless permits himself a certain deviation by manifesting an indulgence, which theoretically is not to be justified, toward the ideas.

     But Plotinus no longer shared this weakness: even though he paid proper tribute to his great teacher and to the already solidly established tradition of Platonism, he hated every manifestation of individual being with all his soul. The One, for him, was origin as well as ideal and God. He was ashamed, it seems, not only of his body, as Porphyry tells us, but also of his soul. His life was entirely motivated by the idea, and the impatient expectation, of union with the One. In the transports of ecstasy he tasted the beatitude of super-individual life. And in his ordinary, normal state - in the state of a "free thing" - he experienced the unbearable bitterness of independent existence detached from the One, the feeling which perhaps found its strongest expression in the famous phrase of Pascal: Le moi est haïssable [the ego is hateful]. It seems that Goethe was also inspired by Anaximander's thought when he put into the mouth of his Mephistopheles these words that are as well known as Pascal's phrase: Denn alles, was entsteht, ist wert, dass es zu Grunde geht [For it is appropriate that everything that comes into being should also come to ruin]. All human wisdom - I say wisdom expressly - has carried on since the most ancient times an obdurate struggle, a struggle to the bitter end, against individual being. Outside this struggle against the hateful "I," the great teachers of humanity see no salvation and find no solution to the contradictions and horrors of existence. The history of philosophy, of art, of morality, and even of religion clearly reveals this to us. The story of the fall of the first man, as it is reported to us by the Bible, was explained by the Christian theologians in a sense that agrees with Anaximander's philosophic thought. Already the first Christian thinkers, when they reflected on the mystery of the Incarnation and the death of God on the cross, did not seek any other answer than that which Greek philosophy whispered to them, the Greek philosophy which had already arrived at its full maturity by this time.

     Cur Deus homo? All the answers to this question - even the most primitive - finally came down to the idea that God had to become human in order that man should become godly. Let us take as an example the thoughts of Gregory the Great. The famous pope reasoned thus: when the first man disobeyed God, God drove him out of paradise and handed him over to the devil who subjected him to all the torments of terrestrial existence, up to and including death. But later God took pity on His creature and wished to deliver him from his bondage. How could He do this? He Himself, in a fit of rage, had handed man over to Satan and had done so forever. God may not break his word. So God had recourse to a trick. He commanded His Son to clothe Himself in human form. The devil saw in Christ a man but did not understand that He was God and, like a fish that sees the bait but does not notice the hook hidden under it, threw himself on Christ as on one of his ordinary victims and subjected him to outrage and death. And so it was that the devil found himself caught. He had the right to torture and kill men but could not attack God. It was the devil who violated the contract, and God was thus able not to execute His word. So the death of the Savior of men, which is so mysterious for the believer, "explains itself." In order that men should not die it was necessary that God die. Adam transgressed the commandment of God and detached himself from the divine being; to return to divine life - the only worthwhile life, according to Gregory the Great - the expiatory sacrifice of the Son was necessary.

     A vulgar reasoning that is repugnant to us. And especially so is the comparison which, according to its author, made his thought all the more convincing and clear: the human nature of Christ served as a bait and His divine nature was the hook on which the father of lies was caught. But if we disregard the form of this reasoning and take cognizance of the fact that Gregory the Great, who lived at the beginning of the Middle Ages, could and had to use the language of his time, it appears that his reasoning is quite in agreement with Anaximander's thought. The Biblical account of Adam's sin means, according to him, that in tasting the fruit of the tree of knowledge, man detached himself from God, no longer lived in a common life with God, and began to "be" by himself. This thought was expressed in various ways by all the Fathers of the Church who examined the question Cur Deus homo? St. Augustine also believed that the beginning of sin was pride: initium peccati superbia. Humilitas is, above everything else, the renunciation by man of his own will and independent being in order to return to that paradisiacal life of which the Bible speaks. Superbia in St. Augustine does not at all mean pride in the sense that the Psalmist uses the word, but rather the affirmation by man of his right to particular, independent existence. Evidently the Middle Ages fought so relentlessly against physical love because they considered it the expression of superbia, of amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei [self-love even to the contempt of God], in contrast to amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui [love of God even to contempt of self], to use the language of St. Augustine. It was also from this point of view that the Gospel was explained: a man's enemies are the members of his family; if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, etc. The asceticism of monks - and not only Christian but also Buddhist and Moslem - set for its goal the destruction in this life of the "hateful I" which had rashly escaped from the lap of universal, supreme being in order to reach the realm of incomprehensible, painful, terrible and, consequently, unacceptable freedom.

     The struggle against the "I," against individual existence, can and must be considered one of the most remarkable and exciting episodes in the history of the human spirit. Like all that we observe in life, this struggle is filled with contradictions. The rigorous ascetic who devised refined tortures for himself and others often manifested such a powerful personality that it entirely excluded any assumption that his soul could ever be united with some supreme principle. The popes of the Middle Ages - Gregory VII, for example - pitiless toward themselves and toward others, despite "the gifts of tears" which heaven had bestowed upon them, appear to us finally as the most powerful personalities of their time. It is not for nothing that his contemporaries called Gregory VII "holy Satan." Men are so constituted that it very rarely happens that their ideals are the adequate expression of their spiritual aspirations. But this in no way changes the situation. The historical fact remains that for thousands of years men acknowledged Anaximander's idea that individual existence is an impiety, that every particular being offends God or nature and is therefore condemned to annihilation. Nature itself has established this law, and the best, the highest thing man can do is to help nature by obeying its commandments. These philosophers who wished to be "wise men," i.e., those who taught men how they should live, taught that the chief and essential task of man consisted in destroying in himself his individual "I."

     "Spiritual" goods, indeed, have always been mainly defined in negative terms. Amor intellectualis Dei was elaborated by Spinoza in the same way as the ataraksia [tranquillity, imperturbability] of the ancients. It is not for nothing that Schopenhauer expressed such enthusiasm for the small treatise that Spinoza never finished, De intellectus emendatione. Furthermore, Schopenhauer valued in Christianity only its scorn for worldly gifts, for the individual. To be sure, one could say of Schopenhauer what has been said of the monks and the inquisitors: he who stormed against the individual was himself an extremely prominent and strong individuality. Indeed, he was so interesting and attractive a personality that I should not have been surprised if nature, at the sight of Schopenhauer, had forgotten its first decision, declared itself prepared to yield and, in order not to destroy him, agreed to make an exception and not punish him for his sin of individual existence.

     Here now arises a question of capital importance. If nature is not at all as faithful to its eternal purposes as we think; if it can repent and renounce decisions that it has already taken, like the Biblical God who regretted having driven Adam out of paradise; if it took pity on Schopenhauer, preserved him from death and, in order not to reveal its secrets to us, only subjected him to the common fate - for he lived and died like all men; if it was not only for Schopenhauer that nature made an exception but if it also somewhere in its immense domains preserves Alexander of Macedon, Mozart and still others - one can then ask oneself whether the people who follow Anaximander in their philosophy are really right. Was not the Greek sage a little too hasty in his conclusions when he conferred on the first principle that immutability which we on earth are accustomed to venerate?

     As experience shows, all things on earth perish, all living beings die; consequently, all things deserve destruction, all living things, death. For a theoretical mind such a general law appears extremely alluring and seductive. But it is natural to express some doubts on the matter. Are we not too much inclined to cultivate in ourselves the need for theorizing? Do we not sacrifice everything, and even the truth in whose name theory proclaims its rights, for illusory goals? If we would speak of impiety, would it not be more correct to suspect not all of human nature of impiety, but only one of its elements? We wish immediately and definitively to understand and explain everything, and it is because of this that we always and everywhere theorize. And, imagining that theory is identical with truth, we have so much confidence in it that the suspicion never even arises in us that it is precisely theory itself that has seized the right to judge what is pious and impious, that it is theory, with its pretensions to judging, that shows itself impious.

     Indeed, assume that my supposition is correct - that nature can really modify its decisions and laws; that there are, to use the language of the Scholastics, two powers, potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata; that nature not only spared Alexander the Great and Mozart but protected them and continues still to protect them, loving and admiring in them precisely their independence, their pride, their daring aspirations, and the faculty they possessed of living and existing not in "the lap of nature" but in freedom. How would we then evaluate Anaximander's maxim and that European wisdom which for so many centuries has been nourished on it?

     Let us further admit - for it is no longer inadmissible - that philosophy is not limited to reasonings but that words are transformed into acts, that those who believed in Anaximander killed in themselves their individuality and the power to be themselves and, being henceforth only neutral things, atoms easily replaceable by other atoms, showed themselves completely superfluous in this life as well as in the other and were therefore condemned to destruction. What will you then say of the centuries-old human wisdom? It may, indeed, be that he who believed that le moi est haïssable will end by making of his ego a thing so feeble, pitiable and shabby that it will henceforth deserve nothing but scorn and disgust. It is still only a half-evil if nature is inexhaustibly rich and fears no sacrifice; yet the contrary supposition would contain nothing incredible. But what if nature is poor in "the individual" and what if the very goal of its creative work consists in creating individualities - not those of which Byron speaks: "To feel me in the solitude of Kings / Without the power that makes them bear a crown" - but those who, like eagles, do not fear but love solitude, for they have the power necessary to support the burden of the crown, i.e., exist independently and not in others? It may then be that we have committed a terrible crime in following the teaching of Anaximander, Plato, the Stoics, Plotinus and the Christian philosophers, and in trying to overcome our individuality, to kill our ego. Nature is silent and does not reveal its mysteries to mortals. Why? I do not know. Perhaps it does not wish to do so, perhaps it cannot do so. If it cannot do so, what must be its despair, what must be its hatred for the professors of wisdom who, in teaching that le moi est haïssable, kill in the germ all its efforts to attain independent and self-active being? They paralyze its loftiest, noblest and holiest attempts. It tries to make man a substance, causa sui, independent of anything whatsoever, even of itself that created him. But man, like a crayfish, crawls back into the bosom of nature from which he went forth. And this is what people call wisdom! Our teachers inculcate in us a struggle against nature; they have set as their aim to prevent by every means our mother nature from realizing her grand designs.

     And why? Exclusively for theoretical goals! Man can understand the universe only if he assumes that everything which has a beginning has an end, only if he derives multiplicity from unity.

     Now it seems to me that the Biblical story of the fall of man has a quite different meaning than that which the theologians, educated on Greek thought, confer on it. It is clearly said in the Bible that it was forbidden man to taste of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and of evil while no ban was placed on all the other trees. But the theologians in their reasonings proceed from exactly the opposite assumption, as if God had permitted man to taste only the fruits of the tree of knowledge and forbidden him to touch all the other trees.

     Recall the classic arguments of Anselm of Canterbury on this very subject, cur Deus homo? and you will become convinced to what a degree he was certain that the goal of man is not to live and, by living, escape from nothingness, but to reason and, by reasoning, arrive at the "understanding" of being. Later, of course, the reasonings of Anselm of Canterbury appeared as little acceptable as those of Gregory the Great. But both attained by means of their reasonings a certain goal which they called knowledge or understanding and which gave them the highest satisfaction. To put it differently, they fed on the fruits of the forbidden tree and, with the Greek philosophers, venerated only these by setting them as "spiritual goods" over against the other fruits which they forever branded by calling them material goods. How did it happen that those who saw in the Bible a revelation could, through courtesy to their pagan teachers, deform so greatly the clear and simple story of this remarkable book? Or was it the fault of the tempter, of the ancient serpent, the father of all lies?

     I certainly do not know who the tempter was and how the great philosophers were led into temptation, and it would be vain to express conjectures on the matter. I know only one thing: there have always been on earth men who did not succumb to temptations and who, if not always, at least from time to time, felt disgust for the fruits of the tree of knowledge and were not afraid openly to express their feelings. Tertullian, for example, in the fragment of his reflections de Carne Christi that is generally cited as an example of the absurdities into which one who claims to renounce the compass of rational ideas in his earthly wanderings can fall, was such a man. I have already quoted this fragment several times, but I think that the more we recall it to others and to ourselves the more quickly we shall succeed in attaining our most essential and dearest goals. Mankind, which is haunted by the idée fixe of rational comprehension, on rising every morning should repeat the words of Tertullian: Crucifixus est Dei filius; non pudet, quia pudendum est. Et mortuus est Dei filius; prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est. Et sepultus ressurexit; certum est quia impossibile est [The Son of God was crucified; it does not cause shame because it must shame us. And the Son of God died; again, it is credible because it is absurd. And having been buried, he rose again; it is certain because it is impossible].

     Tertullian wishes to know, and that is why he does not wish to understand, feeling clearly at that moment (but at that moment only) that understanding is hostile to knowledge and that this hostility will never end; that it is enough to "understand," i.e., to pluck the fruit of the tree of knowledge and taste it, immediately to lose all possibility of access to the other marvelous trees which grew so abundantly in the garden of Eden. The knowledge of good and evil has no positive value, as we have always been taught, but rather a negative one. And it is not eternal but temporary and transitory, not divine but human, all too human. God forbade plucking the fruits of this tree not out of fear that man would obtain more than what had been granted to him and not out of jealousy. The accursed serpent deceived Eve, deceived Adam, deceived Anaximander, and blinds all of us to this day. The tree of knowledge does not increase our powers but, on the contrary, diminishes them. We must choose between the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life. But we believe that light comes to us from the first and that the second plunges us into darkness. And we boast of our perceptiveness, of our profundity, and of many other things besides.

     I should like to quote a fragment of a work of the last of the great Scholastics, William of Occam, again on the same subject, cur Deus homo? Occam, like Tertullian, does not wish to understand why God became man, as if he felt that there is a certain limit beyond which we must cease to understand if we wish to go further. The attempts of Anselm and the other theologians to explain God or even His works appear to Occam impious. Understandable and reasonable are the works of men and everything that is limited, near, close at hand. Occam accepts everything the Church teaches about the incarnation of Christ, but he flees from explanations. He says: est articulus fidei quod Deus assumpsit naturam humanam. Non includit contradictionem, Deum assumere naturam asininam; pari ratione potest assumere lapidem vel lignum [It is an article of faith that God assumed human nature. It does not include any contradiction that God should assume the nature of a donkey; with equal reason he can assume the nature of stone or of wood]. If one recalls the customary reasonings of the theologians on this matter, if one recalls that Occam lived a short time after St. Thomas Aquinas who became the normative theologian of Catholicism, his audacity - which would have been astonishing even on the part of a modern mind alien to the Church - appears stupendous. To be sure, Occam's predecessor, Duns Scotus, was the first to establish the doctrine that God is not subject to any law, that absolute arbitrariness is the very essence of the divine will. Duns Scotus said: Sicut omne aliud a Deo ideo est bonum, quia a Deo volitum, non e converso; sic meritum illud (the voluntary sacrifice of Christ) tantum bonum erat, pro quanto acceptabatur et ideo meritum, quia acceptatum, non autem e converso, quia meritum est et bonum, ideo acceptatum [For God everything is good insofar as it corresponds to his will and not vice versa; that is why the sacrifice of Christ was good insofar as it was accepted by God and meritorious insofar as God recognized it and not vice versa]. But it was in Occam alone that this thought led to the audacious and challenging declaration that the principle of the divine essence is an arbitrariness which nothing limits and which is, consequently, unexplainable and cannot be deduced from anything whatsoever. Deus assumpsit naturam asininam; pari ratione potest assumere lapidem aut lignum [God assumed the nature of a donkey; with equal reason he can assume the nature of stone or of wood]. Occam's non includit contradictionem and pari ratione are the same as Tertullian's quia which defies all our rational usages. For, translated into ordinary language, the expressions "it does not include any contradiction" and "on the same grounds" mean that contradictions exist only for us who everywhere seek "reasons" and who without reason not only cannot think but cannot even live.

     As far as God is concerned, however, contradiction is a word devoid of all content, and "reasons" have simply no connection with God. He is beyond contradiction and reasons as He is beyond good and evil, to express it in modern language, to which Duns Scotus was already very close. "For God everything is good insofar as it corresponds to his will and not vice versa; that is why the sacrifice of Christ was good insofar as it was accepted by God and meritorious insofar as God recognized it." If Duns Scotus was not afraid to say that God is "beyond good and evil," Occam's audacity went even further. He felt that God was beyond truth - that truth which Aristotle, the praecursor Christi in naturalibus, and his followers up to the normative theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the normative philosophers of our time, have considered above perfect as well as imperfect being. We now repeat calmly Deus assumpsit naturam asininam. But, no, not calmly. I quote this phrase in a language that is strange, dead and abstract; I do not dare to translate it into my mother tongue. But Occam, a monk of the Middle Ages, dared to pronounce it in a language that was close to him, closer even perhaps than his mother tongue. It sometimes happens that "reason," "light," and all those things by which we let ourselves be seduced to such a degree that we can represent God Himself only as reasonable and luminous - it sometimes happens, I say, that all this appears unbearably banal and empty. I shall not employ stronger expressions only out of a sense of literary propriety. And just as ordinarily man aspires from the depths of darkness to "light," in certain extraordinary moments he feels himself invincibly drawn away from "light."

     The history of philosophy tells us at length how wise men - following Plato, Aristotle, and their common inspirer Anaximander - fled transitory and changing reality to the immutable, the eternal, that which is always equal to itself. The opposite also sometimes happened, but the history of philosophy is silent about this. It happens that a man, with all the power of which he is capable only in moments of great despair or passion, overthrows the millennial walls of philosophic and other prejudices and flies toward that divine freedom where the last of the Scholastics were not afraid to discover the arbitrariness that is so shameful to all. Man is sometimes ready joyously to exchange all the eternal truths and all the eternal essences for the temporary and the transitory, for the "thing" that no one values and no one needs, for that "thing" which in its audacious impiety dared "to be" even though it ought not "to be." It is this "thing" that man wishes to obtain, and - who knows? - perhaps those who know how not to surrender and to "will" in their way are powerful enough to preserve "their own," even though universal reason condemned every "their own," everything that has a beginning, to death and destruction.

     The great saints - St. Theresa, for example, or her disciple, St. John of the Cross - have told us at length of their immense despair and terror at the thought that they were the vilest and most worthless of all persons who had ever lived on earth. Why the vilest? Put this question to a man of common sense and he will tell you without hesitation that neither St. Theresa nor St. John was at all the vilest of persons and that there have been many at least as vile as they. But how does it happen that ordinary people know this simple truth while from the saints it was hidden? Or were the saints right and is it common-sense minds that are in error? Were St. Theresa and St. John really the vilest of all beings? And was Don Quixote's Dulcinea, contrary to all the evidences, a princess and not a keeper of swine? And the fool who first saw that he alone existed in the world and that the entire universe was only his "representation" - did he see what was, did he discover in his solipsism a great truth? Is self-evidence not "beyond time," and are there epochs when self-evidence no longer is? When non pudet quia pudendum, when certum est quia impossibile, when God decides assumere naturam asininam, lignum aut lapidem? When the whole universe begins to laugh aloud at human reason and its immutability? When we find ourselves beyond not only good and evil but also beyond truth and error?

     We shall be told that truth is a limit that it is impossible to surpass. In antiquity people were persuaded that entry into the kingdom of shades was forbidden to living men. But the infinite longing of Orpheus and his marvelous song conquered invincible Hades and led him to Eurydice. When Orpheus began to sing, says the poet who relates the ancient myth, everything in hell was immobilized: Tantalus ceased to pursue the water that escaped him, the wheel of Ixion stopped, the Danaides forgot their bottomless casks, and Sisyphus himself sat down on his rock. Through his great love and his inspiration Orpheus succeeded in overcoming the laws of hell. Like St. Theresa, surely he imagined that he was the most miserable of men, that he alone was miserable, and that in general there was nothing in the world other than his Eurydice and his love. Obviously he was wrong: Anaximander would have seen it clearly, and Aristotle could have demonstrated it to him with a self-evidence that would have left nothing to be desired. But the gods decided otherwise. By their supreme will, by the will of that potentia absoluta which differs in virtually nothing from arbitrariness, they transformed his error into truth, into a great truth which did not exist before, which did not exist anywhere, neither in heaven nor on earth, and which could never have been born. Truths also have a beginning. The eternal truths have a beginning and perhaps have no end. What is the way that leads to them? If you follow Don Quixote, St. Theresa, or even Orpheus, you will never arrive anywhere; or if you do arrive somewhere, it will not be where your guides are found. When you lose the road, when the road loses you, then...

     But I began by speaking of the labyrinth. Yet what can one say of the labyrinth except that it is a labyrinth? Deus non est bonus, non est melior, non est optimus. Ita male dico quamdumque voco Deum bonum, ac sic ego album vocarem nigrum [God is not good, is not better, is not best. Thus I speak erroneously whenever I call God good, for thus I might call white black]. This was said by a man who had seen and heard much in his life. But then, where is the truth? To whom shall one listen? Whom to believe? Anaximander and Plato, or Tertullian and Occam? Did Greek philosophy, in the person of its Adam, enter upon the right way? Or did this Adam, like the Adam of the Bible, allow himself to be seduced by the brilliant aspect of the tree of knowledge of good and of evil? And did mankind in following his example and feeding on the fruits of this tree, not approach its dearest goal but, on the contrary, remove itself from it? Or, what is still worse - for this introduces a still greater confusion into a question that is already sufficiently confused: are piety and impiety perhaps not such "general," forever unchanging concepts as our "intellectual" vision supposes? It may be that what appeared and was really impious in the eyes of Anaximander appeared and also truly was for Tertullian and Occam eminently pious; so that in general the question who is right does not allow itself to be raised. Still another possibility: it may be that impiety is simply an invention of a man who tasted the fruits of the tree of knowledge and thereby became limited and at the same time sure of himself in his limitation. Nature - before the fall of man - knew nothing either of good or of evil.

     And yet each of us is obliged to choose his way. Some follow Anaximander and Plato, others enter on a different direction, and the third, the fourth, travel on still different levels, so that their roads never come together and never cross. Who will resolve this great enigma? And how resolve it? What solution will not be fictitious? Does not the very essence of mystery impose upon us the renunciation of every solution? Who will answer these questions? Who will feel a desire to think about them?