death the test of love and the condition of liberty：死亡考验的爱情和自由的条件

death the test of love and the condition of liberty：死亡考验的爱情和自由的条件 I. DEATH, THE TEST OF LOVE AND THE CONDITION OF LIBERTY – Roger Troisfontaines a. The temporal circumstances of my birth have greatly influenced the whole course of my destiny i. It was entirely independent of me ii. My birth took place and I could not shape its pattern iii. My liberty, which could not intervene in my birth, can now exercise itself 1. I may bring my own death, any moment, if I so wish. 2. Suicide is a permanent possibility with man, and it often suggests itself when life turns sour. iv. Man gradually acquires his autonomy by a series of weanings, of crises and he chooses the attitude which will define him v. The preservation of life can be regarded as the result of a progressive acceptance. vi. Passage from the ‘imposed’ to the ‘personal’ 1. Is also evident in puberty: in full crisis, an individual calls everything in question 2. At the age of vocation and choice of career, he himself more or less decides the orientation of his life 3. Man actively participates in the creation of his being 4. To be really ‘the son of his work’, the son of his will and his liberty, to posit himself – a man would need to be able to give to himself a body fitted to himself and so formed as to determine the relations he will enter into with others exactly according to his wishes. vii. Doning of the received body would therefore be an indispensable condition of auto-position in being, of full liberty. 1. When we reach the definitive stage of our being, we leave aside the body which was the first and indispensable condition of our growth to spiritual maturity a. This body which I have not chosen, and which I cannot dispense with during my period of becoming, will disappear to give a place to my being. 2. Without changing in any way the seity of other beings, it depends on me whether God for me is real or inexistent. a. It rests with me whether I shall construct a sincere, affectionate, creative personality or whether I shall become desiccated in barren ‘enlightenment’ and wanton destruction – according to which attitude I shall return to my beginnings in fruitful meditation or I shall disperse myself in introspection and dissipation. 3. Experience, in its many positive and negative forms, educates our liberty. a. Sin – which always coincides with an egoistic or conceited centering on self 4. In acceding to the final plane of being, it is absolutely possible for a soul to be completely converted a. But this volte-face will be all the more difficult – because of ingrained habits – as the egoism is more inveterate b. The completed and egoistic person remains obstinate in refusing charity, and elects to be separated for eternity in hell. viii. In his prenatal existence, the child learns practically all the acts which will be indispensable to him on the day of his birth 1. We are here on earth as embryos of the spirit 2. In the course of our earthly becoming, we exercise ourselves to posit the definitive act of our human existence 3. The capital act of our earthly existence is indeed that which ends it – that in which becoming ceases in order to give place to being. Such is the act of dying. a. The person who watches a death agony would be inclined to consider death rather as passivity, a decay. b. This is so because he sees only the end of becoming, the failure of a transitory body which, its role completed, effectively weakens into decay. b. Rather than consent to life or refuse it, many attach themselves to it with a frenzy that is full of anguish and willful blindness i. We fear death, and we use all our strength to forget it 1. Avoiding what reminds us of it, we cultivate the habit of thinking always of death as something that concerns others, only others, and we live more or less as the fools of our own blind faith. 2. The world at large sees us people immensely sure of ourselves, for that is the face we show; a. But secretly we are ceaselessly measuring how near the abyss has come towards us b. We find ourselves – sometimes less-aghast at the thought of it. ii. On a foundation of existence which my liberty can neither annihilate nor create, it rests with me to create their reality (the reality of others) for me, my being with them or without them, communion or isolation, friendship or hatred. 1. Happiness is measured by union, suffering by rupture 2. The highest degree of heaven will be that in which the being wills itself wholly with others, in a communion of love with all reality. a. The lowest depth of hell will be that in which the being centered himself on isolation, will wholly exclude the others and wish himself without them 3. A choice between these two attitudes is at the heart of all our free actions, and the attitudes gives the action its character a. The limited being will always have to choose between that in which he participates with all the others, and the limit to which it is lawful to shut himself within himself iii. At the moment of dying, the being takes his measure. He chooses his degree of intimacy with the others or on the contrary his centring on self which seems preferable to him. 1 1. He adopts for eternity the attitude which pleases him. iv. All men are equal when faced with death. c. My death is absolutely certain, but its modalities are wrapped in uncertainty and it has this unique character of being completely inexperienceable. i. Whoever is willing to ‘contemplate’ death, in order to discover its significance, can do so only by integrating it in a metaphysical or religious world-outlook. ii. If we wished to introduce a hierarchy into this diversity, it would be necessary, in theological terms, to admit an infinity of degrees between the highest in heaven and the lowest in hell iii. Eternity has nothing in common with time; it cannot be thought of as a very long time nor as an instant 1. To temporality; apprehending only in part things in themselves particular. 2. Eternity would no longer be immediate participation in the totality of the real, but a simple prolongation of the inconstancy of becoming, a period of experiences and renewals. d. Fear which comes alive in us every time we see a dear one depart from us, is the fear of separation. i. Death remains a rupture of a certain mode of union with the world 1. For this reason, it will always be painful. 2. The keeping of communion with the departed now rests with the one who survives a. If I say that he no longer exists, or at least that I can have no further intimacy with him, he no longer holds anything for me b. Since I have ,in effect, freely consummated his death, so that for me he is now annihilated ii. It is complete annihilation 1. I identified myself with my riches, with my possessions, with my having, and I shall have nothing any more 2. Hypothesis: I shall be nothing any more iii. Death comes as an absolute end, as a thing evil in itself iv. Imminence of danger frees us from our attachments, and occasions at the same time a strong release of affectivity. 1. One of two phenomena is noticed in the person thus roused: a. Either a conversion from mediocrity to a better life, or on the contrary an exacerbation of wanton egoism. v. The thought of death alone acts like a catalysis and forces us to take a position. 1. Meditation on death is always imposed in ascetics 2. It will always find its normal place in the conduct of a retreat 3. Death calls forth liberty, and reveals the depths of hearts. e. Death is at once the test of love and condition of liberty i. Because liberty has no other deep significance than that it permits love ii. Every man is born into a community which imposes itself on him as a fact anterior to his free will. 1. But the more he becomes aware of his personal autonomy, the more it rests with him either to sever the relations which would unite him with others or to accept and deepen them. 2. According to his choice, he will either imprison himself in the isolation of egoism or pride, he will live without others, or he will open himself to communion iii. Liberty alone permits the passage from community to communion, but implies the risks of individualist isolation which tears from the community without introducing into the communion. 1. Whoever wishes his life to be a success will aspire simultaneously to the highest liberty and will orientate firmly that liberty in the direction of charity 2. Primitive or the little child accepts death with much greater ease than do the majority of civilized adults a. The strictly personal problem of their destiny and their survival troubles them very little. 3. Those who have chosen isolation, death must seem to him the worst of catastrophes, because it seems to threaten the annihilation of that ego, to which alone he grapples his being. iv. Without a care for other or for superior interests at stake in the conflict, he thinks only of his own well-being 1. It is he who unable to endure the wounds of life, will commit suicide when the disillusionment becomes too raw, when life – from his individual point of view – is no longer worth the trouble of being lived. 2