Goethe’s Promise

Although I am now in old age and perhaps at its last moments, I accept life as it is for worse as for better—accept it, love it, rejoice in it. I feel no anticipated regret, let alone present rebellion at leaving it. Is it because I feel, deep down, that I am not destined to leave it, that nothing of me will remain that has not already been joyously offered to everybody and everything that survives me?

Subjectively, one never dies. It is only objectively that we expect to depart this life. Believers in immortality are, therefore, justified in practice—they will never know that they have died. For during the very last flickers of consciousness, they were alive. We have got no further—we can get no further—with the brain we have than the Saxon thane, someone to discuss in the king’s hall whether they should become Christians. The hall was brilliantly lit, and a bird flew in one window and flew out of another. The thane said, “Like this bird, out of the dark, back to the dark, we flutter for a moment in the light.” And he advised accepting Christianity.

My faith consists in the certainty that life is worth living. Life on its own terms. I know it is limited, a tiny spec, as even is the earth in the infinite. But there is the infinitely little, and reality pervades it as completely. And it is a reality I can live by. What is that but faith? Confidence in life is worthwhile. Confidence in humanity, despite all its devilish propensities. Zest for suitable exercise of function. Enjoyment of the individual human being as a work of art.

I regard myself as a Christianity graduate in the sense in which I am a college graduate. We Americans return to our alma mater on class days and pretend that we’re boys again, not yet graduated but about to do so. We do not think of returning to undergraduate life, despite all its sweet, alluring memories. And I feel toward the church, as I do toward the university, the same gratitude, the same affection, the same admiration.

But the church, even as an institution, is measurelessly more wonderful than any university—more than all universities put together. Taken as an historical entity, manmade though I hold it to be—indeed, because manmade—and subject to the frailties, greeds, and lusts of the individuals who through the ages have composed it—there is no other creation of mankind to compare with it. It is humanity’s grandest, completest, and most beautiful achievement.

But my having graduated from Christian creeds and dogmas does not mean that I retain no beliefs to guide and comfort me. I am still the religious person I always have been. I should be glad of heart to join in any worship, to partake of any sacrament—whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, or Shintoist—if I did not fear that, thereby, I was supposed to accept, literally, everything each religion accepted.

By graduating from myths, no matter how sublime, and dogmas, architectured no matter how marvelously—as marvelously as the most majestically and subtly thought-out of gothic cathedrals—I seem, to myself, to have concentrated and intensified my faith.