Paganism - Christianity - Judaism: A Confession of Faith

5. The Incompatibility of the Correlated

5 THE INCOMPATIBILITY OF THE CORRELATED The Situation IT IS A BASIC HUMAN FACT THAT THE DEMANDS MADE UPON US BY ignoble misfortUne differ from those we encounter in noble misfortune . These two kinds of misfortune do not run side by side without friction. On the contrary, they must again and again disturb, injure, poison, and cancel each other. Both are necessary, and yet they are incompatible with each other. Ignoble misfortune requires active intervention, noble misfortune -except for the lowest level-humble waiting. These attitudes exclude each other. He who is eager to interfere soon acquires the wild charge of a Theodore Roosevelt, a sound eagerness for hunting, laughing cheeks tanned by the air of the sea, and rhe facts of noble misfortune are disregarded. He who in solitude spends his time waiting , neither stoops any longer to affairs of this world nor understands them, sees the entire complex of avoidable misfortune grow pale and vanish in the light of the larger and unavoidable one, just as the light of the stars disappears in the blue sky at noon. Thus the two approaches-intervention and waiting-exclude one another. This might lead to difficulties, but one can resolve them. What confusion would arise if each of the two attitudes made the opposite one necessary and would become meaningless without it! But they cannot commingle without weakening and cancelling each other, and this transcends human understanding. This is not just a fact. It is the central fact in this world. The foundation on which we live is of such a nature. This is perhaps the 78 PAGANISM-CHRISTIANITY-JUDAISM only certain and ultimately provable reality, the ultimate bound of experience, short of the metaphysical. A constant waiting for grace undoubtedly leads to inactivity, which in turn tends toward a loss of sensitivity to human needs, so that people become concerned only about themselves. And yet the truly lonely man longs for human beings. Only in the caricature of the contemplative life does one turn a cold shoulder to others. Such an attitude should be attacked with the dying wo~ds of Kierkegaard: "Salute all men. I have loved them all, and tell them that my life has been one great suffering, unknown and incomprehensible to others. Everything looked like pride and conceit, but it was not so ..." So speaks the true loneliness of the passionate heart. It does not speak with the flippant and precise satire of our small individualists, to whom it is so easy to be naughty, unsocial, unpolitical, and even very proud of being so. An introvert feels the danger of a lack of love in his inactivity. And he who lives only toward others is menaced by the drying up of the stuff his soul is made of. For this reason Rubiner (in Der Kampf mit dem Engel) called out with enthusiasm , "No secrets any more. No solitariness. No private life ... The soul is akilling excess ..." And yet, true activity can come only from ~he soul. Without this foundation on action, everything goes astray, becomes a torture and a technically well-organized nonsense. Thus willingness to act, as it emerges from the province of ignoble misfortune , thrusts itself again and again against the profundity of noble misfortune. The two types of misfortune need each other, or they would both dry up, and yet they cannot exist side by side. And everywhere in life we encounter that impossibility-two attitudes incompatible with each other and yet dependent on one another. This is the pattern: solitariness in a waiting attitude (the attitude of noble misfortune) cannot coexist with active interference (the attitude of ignoble misfortune). But nevertheless solitariness and waiting , hoping for grace, without actively interfering, is self-derision, and activity without waiting in humility is empty noise. But waiting spoils the elan of the deed, and the deed destroys the fruit of contemplation . Thus two things exist that exclude each other and yet cannot be without one another. This is indeed a mystery and a visible one at that. This mystery is the law of life of all living things. For this INcoMPATmILITY OF THE CORRELATED 79 "incompatibility of the correlated" is found not only in the mutual relation of ~he two categories "being active" and "waiting humbly," but exists also in the following groups, which indicate the domains of noble and ignoble misfortune: irrationality-reason; feeling-intellect ; self-redemption-redemption of the world; experience...