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Outspoken Essays by William Ralph Inge

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The second objection, which, as I have said, is closely connected with
the first, is that idealism offers us a merely impersonal immortality.
But what is personality? The notion of a world of spiritual atoms,
'_solida pollentia simplicitate_,' as Lucretius says, seems to be
attractive to some minds. There are thinkers of repute who even picture
the Deity as the constitutional President of a _collegium_ of souls.
This kind of pluralism is of course fundamentally incompatible with the
presuppositions of my paper. The idea of the 'self' seems to me to be an
arbitrary fixation of our average state of mind, a half-way house which
belongs to no order of real existence. The conception of an abstract ego
seems to involve three assumptions, none of which is true. The first is
that there is a sharp line separating subject from object and from other
subjects. The second is that the subject, thus sundered from the object,
remains identical through time. The third is that this indiscerptible
entity is in some mysterious way both myself and my property. In
opposition to the first, I maintain that the foci of consciousness flow
freely into each other even on the psychical plane, while in the eternal
world there are probably no barriers at all. In opposition to the
second, it is certain that the empirical self is by no means identical
throughout, and that the spiritual life, in which we may be said to
attain real personality for the first time, is only 'ours' potentially.
In opposition to the third, I repeat that the question whether it is
'my' soul that will live in the eternal world seems to have no meaning
at all. In philosophy as in religion, we had better follow the advice of
the Theologia Germanica and banish, as far as possible, the words 'me
and mine' from our vocabulary. For personality is not something given to
start with. It does not belong to the world of claims and counter-claims
in which we chiefly live. We must be willing to lose our soul on this
level of experience, before we can find it unto life eternal.
Personality is a teleological fact; it is here in the making, elsewhere
in fact and power. So in the case of our friends. The man whom we love
is not the changing psycho-physical organism; it is the Christ in him
that we love, the perfect man who is struggling into existence in his
life and growth. If we ask what a man is, the answer may be either, 'He
is what he loves,' or 'He is what he is worth.' The two are not very
different. Thus I cannot agree with Keyserling, who in criticising this
type of thought (with which, none the less, he has great sympathy) says
that 'mysticism, whether it likes it or not, ends in an impersonal
immortality.' For impersonality is a purely negative conception, like
timelessness. What is negated in 'timelessness' is not the reality of
the present, but the unreality of the past and future. So the
'impersonality' which is here (not without warrant from the mystics
themselves) said to belong to eternal life is really the liberation of
the idea of personality. Personality is allowed to expand as far as it
can, and only so can it come into its own. When Keyserling adds, 'The
instinct of immortality really affirms that the individual is not
ultimate,' I entirely agree with him.

The question, however, is not whether in heaven the circumference of the
soul's life is indefinitely enlarged, but whether the centre remains.
These centres are centres of consciousness; and consciousness apparently
belongs to the world of will. It comes into existence when the will has
some work to do. It is not conterminous with life; there is a life which
is below consciousness, and there may be a life above consciousness, or
what we mean by consciousness. We must remind ourselves that we are
using a spatial metaphor when we speak of a centre of consciousness, and
a temporal one when we ask about a continuing state of consciousness;
and space and time do not belong to the eternal world. The question
therefore needs to be transformed before any answer can be given to it.
Spiritual life, we are justified in saying, must have a richness of
content; it is, potentially at least, all embracing. But this
enhancement of life is exhibited not only in extension but in intensity.
Eternal life is no diffusion or dilution of personality, but its
consummation. It seems certain that in such a state of existence
individuality must be maintained. If every life in this world represents
an unique purpose in the Divine mind, and if the end or meaning of
soul-life, though striven for in time, has both its source and its
achievement in eternity, this, the value and reality of the individual
life, must remain as a distinct fact in the spiritual world.

We are sometimes inclined to think, with a natural regret, that the
conditions of life in the eternal world are so utterly unlike those of
the world which we know, that we must either leave our mental picture of
that life in the barest outline, or fill it in with the colours which we
know on earth, but which, as we are well aware, cannot portray truly the
life of blessed spirits. To some extent this is true; and whereas a bare
and colourless sketch of the richest of all facts is as far from the
truth as possible, we may allow ourselves to fill in the picture as best
we can, if we remember the risks which we run in doing so. There are,
it seems to me, two chief risks in allowing our imagination to create
images of the bliss of heaven. One is that the eternal world, thus drawn
and painted with the forms and colours of earth, takes substance in our
minds as a second physical world, either supposed to exist somewhere in
space, or expected to come into existence somewhen in time. This is the
heaven of popular religion; and being a geographical or historical
expression, it is open to attacks which cannot be met. Hence in the
minds of many persons the whole fact of human immortality seems to
belong to dreamland. The other danger is that, since a geographical and
historical heaven is found to have no actuality, the hope of eternal
life, with all that the spiritual world contains, should be relegated to
the sphere of the 'ideal.' This seems to be the position of Hoeffding,
and is quite clearly the view of thinkers like Santayana. They accept
the dualism of value and existence, and place the highest hopes of
humanity in a world which has value only and no existence. This seems to
me to be offering mankind a stone for bread. Martineau's protest against
this philosophy is surely justified:

'Amid all the sickly talk about "ideals," it is well to
remember that as long as they are a mere self-painting of
the yearning spirit, they have no more solidity than
floating air-bubbles, gay in the sunshine and broken by the
passing wind. You do not so much as touch the threshold of
religion, so long as you are detained by the phantoms of
your thought; the very gate of entrance to religion, the
moment of its new birth, is the discovery that your gleaming
ideal is the everlasting real.'[94]

But though our knowledge of the eternal world is much less than we could
desire, it is much greater than many thinkers allow. We are by no means
shut off from realisation and possession of the eternal values while we
live here. We are not confined to local and temporal experience. We know
what Truth and Beauty mean, not only for ourselves but for all souls
throughout the universe, and for God Himself. Above all, we know what
Love means. Now Love, which is the realisation in experience of
spiritual existence, has an unique value as a hierophant of the highest
mysteries. And Love guarantees personality, for it needs what has been
called _otherness_. In all love there must be a subject and an object,
and a bond between them which transcends without annulling their
separateness. What this means for personal immortality has been seen by
many great minds. As an example I will quote from Plotinus' picture of
life in the spiritual world. This writer is certainly not inclined to
overestimate the claims of separate individuality, and he is under no
obligation to make his doctrine conform to the dogmas of any creed.

'Spirits yonder see themselves in others. For there all
things are transparent, and there is nothing dark or
resisting, but everyone is manifest to everyone internally,
and all things are manifest; for light is manifest to light.
For everyone has all things in himself and sees all things
in another, so that all things are everywhere and all is all
and each is all, and infinite the glory.'[95]

This eternal world is about us and within us while we live here. 'Heaven
is nearer to our souls than the earth is to our bodies.' The world which
we ordinarily think of as real is an arbitrary selection from
experience, corresponding roughly to the average reaction of life upon
the average man. Some values, such as existence, persistence, and
rationality, are assumed to be 'real'; others are relegated to the
'ideal' Under the influence of natural science, special emphasis is laid
on those values with which that science is engaged. But our world
changes with us. It rises as we rise, and falls as we fall. It puts on
immortality as we do. 'Such as men themselves are, such will God appear
to them to be.'[96] Spinoza rightly says that all true knowledge takes
place _sub specie aeternitatis_. For the pneymatikost the whole of life
is spiritual, and, as Eucken says, he recognises the whole of the
spiritual life as his own life-being. He learns, as Plotinus declares in
a profound sentence, that 'all things that are Yonder are also Here
below.'

Is it then the conclusion of the whole matter that eternal life is
merely the true reading of temporal life? Is earth, when seen with
purged vision, not merely the shadow of heaven, but heaven itself? If we
could fuse past, present, and future into a _totum simul_, an 'Eternal
Now,' would that be eternity? This I do not believe. A full
understanding of the values of our life in time would indeed give us a
good _picture_ of the eternal world; but that world itself, the abode of
God and of blessed spirits, is a state higher and purer than can be
fully expressed in the order of nature. The _perpetuity_ of natural laws
as they operate through endless ages is only a Platonic 'image' of
eternity. That all values are perpetual is true; but they are something
more than perpetual: they are eternal. These laws are the creative
forces which shape our lives from within; but all the creatures, as St.
Augustine says in a well-known passage, declare their inferiority to
their Creator. 'We are lower than He, for He made us.' Scholastic
theologians interposed an intermediary which they called _aevum_ between
time and eternity. _AEvum_ is perpetuity, which they rightly
distinguished from true eternity. Christianity is philosophically right
in insisting that our true home, our _patria_, is 'not here.' Nor is it
in any place: it is with God,'whose centre is everywhere and His
circumference nowhere.' There remaineth a rest for the people of God,
when their warfare on earth is accomplished.

A Christian must feel that the absence of any clear revelation about a
_future_ state is an indication that we are not meant to make it a
principal subject of our thoughts. On the other hand, the more we think
about the eternal values the happier we shall be. As Spinoza says, 'Love
directed towards the eternal and infinite fills the mind with pure joy,
and is free from all sadness. Wherefore it is greatly to be desired, and
sought after with our whole might.' But he also says, and I think
wisely, that there are few subjects on which the 'free' man will ponder
less often, than on death. The end of life is as right and natural as
its beginning; we must not rebel against the common lot, either for
ourselves or for our friends. We are to live in the present though not
for the present. The two lines of Goethe which Lewis Nettleship was so
fond of quoting convey a valuable lesson:

'Nur we du bist, sei alles, immer kindlich:
So bist du alles, bist unueberwindlich.'

'Death does not count,' as Nettleship used to say; and he met his own
fate on the Alps with a cheerfulness which showed that he believed it.
The craving for mere survival, no matter under what conditions, is
natural to some persons, and those who have it not must not claim any
superiority over those who shudder at the idea of resigning this
'pleasing, anxious being.' Some brave and loyal men, like Samuel
Johnson, have feared death all their lives long; while others, even when
fortune smiles upon them, 'have a desire to depart and to be with
Christ, which is far better.' But the longing for survival, and the
anxious search for evidence which may satisfy it, have undoubtedly the
effect of binding us to earth and earthly conditions; they come between
us and faith in true immortality. They cannot restore to us what death
takes away. They cannot lay the spectre which made Claudio a craven.

'Ay, but to die and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts
Imagine howling! 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed earthly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death.'

We know now, if we did not know it three years ago, that the average man
can face death, and does face it in the majority of cases, with a
serenity which would be incomprehensible if he did not know in his
heart of hearts that it does not matter much. He may have no articulated
faith in immortality, but, like Spinoza, he has 'felt and experienced
that he is eternal.' Perhaps he only says to himself, 'Who dies if
England lives?' But the England that lives is his own larger self, the
life that is more his own life than the beating of his heart, which a
bullet may still for ever. And if the exaltation of noble patriotism can
'abolish death, and bring life and immortality to light' for almost any
unthinking lad from our factories and hedgerows, should not religion be
able to do as much for us all? And may it not be that some touch of
heroic self-abnegation is necessary before we can have a soul which
death cannot touch? When Christ said that those who are willing to lose
their souls shall save them, is not this what He meant? We must accustom
ourselves to breathe the air of the eternal values, if we desire to live
for ever. And a strong faith is not curious about details. 'Beloved, now
are we sons of God; and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. But we
know that when He is made manifest we shall be like Him, for we shall
see Him as He is.'

FOOTNOTES:

[93] Quoted by Professor Pringle-Pattison from an article by
me in the _Times_ Literary Supplement.

[94] _Study of Religion_, vol. i. 12.

[95] _Ennead_, v. 8, 4.

[96] From John Smith, the Cambridge Platonist.


THE END

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We do not know the women's names, but their voices are quite distinct. All are pregnant. But while the first woman awaits the birth of her baby with a moon-like serenity, the other two are not so lucky. One, whose previous pregnancies have failed to go to term, is experiencing a heartbreaking late miscarriage; the other is a young student whose accidental pregnancy will end in her child being put up for adoption.

Sylvia Plath's only play was never intended for the stage, being broadcast instead on BBC radio in August 1962. Less than six months later, Plath killed herself, but not before the burst of astonishing creative energy that produced her extraordinary, terrifying Ariel poems.

Anyone who knows Plath's poetry will see the connection between Three Women and Plath's subsequent poems, particularly in the way she talks about the agony of childbirth, the rush of love for this tiny alien being, and both the wonder and wounded rawness of motherhood. It is a beautiful piece, full of startling imagery that draws you in through the sheer intensity of its femaleness, and because it so precisely articulates the emotions that are often thought but seldom voiced by women - certainly not in the early 1960s - about men, motherhood and our relationship to our bodies.

It's been 20 years since there has been an attempt at a professional stage version and - in a theatre world that happily accepts the poetic offerings of Sarah Kane and Debbie Tucker Green, or the staged possibilities of The Waves, one of Plath's own inspirations for the piece, I see no reason why it shouldn't be brought to life. Sadly, it doesn't breathe here, in a production by Robert Shaw that is clearly a labour of love, but which never finds a way to give the internal a physical reality. Plath's poetry, like most babies, is more robust than it appears - and won't break if treated with a little less reverence and considerably more grit.

Instead, what we are offered is tinkling piano music, mournful mood lighting, an innocuous pale setting, as well as three perfectly good but indisputably ladylike performances that capture none of the wounded redness of Plath's poetry, and do her the disservice of making her sound bleached and somewhat prissy. It's a pity. What might have been a wonder ends up a mere curiosity.

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