Ennui

[Terrance]

Mere restlessness forces action. 
So passes the whole of life. We combat obstacles in order
to get repose, and, when got, the repose 
is insupportable; for we think either of the
troubles we have, or of those that threaten us; 
and even if we felt safe on every
side, ennui would of its
own accord spring up from the depths of the heart where it
is rooted by nature, and
would fill the mind with its venom."

"If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to My breast."

Ennui, like Natural Selection, accounted for change, but
failed to account for direction of change. 
For that, an attractive force was
essential; a force from outside;
a shaping influence. Pascal and all the old philosophies
called this outside force God
or Gods. Caring but little for the name, and fixed only on
tracing the Force, Adams
had gone straight to the Virgin at Chartres, and asked her
to show him God, face to
face, as she did for St. Bernard. She replied, kindly as
ever, as though she were still
the young mother of to-day, with a sort of patient pity for
masculine dullness: "My
dear outcast, what is it you seek? This is the Church of
Christ! If you seek him
through me, you are welcome, sinner or saint; but he and I
are one. We are Love!
We have little or nothing to do with God's other energies
which are infinite, and
concern us the less because our interest is only in man, and
the infinite is not
knowable to man. Yet if you are troubled by your ignorance,
you see how I am
surrounded by the masters of the schools! Ask them!"

The answer sounded singularly like the usual answer of
British science which had
repeated since Bacon that one must not try to know the
unknowable, though one
was quite powerless to ignore it; but the Virgin carried
more conviction, for her
feminine lack of interest in all perfections except her own
was honester than the
formal phrase of science; since nothing was easier than to
follow her advice, and
turn to Thomas Aquinas, who, unlike modern physicists,
answered at once and
plainly: "To me," said St. Thomas, "Christ and the Mother
are one Force -- Love --
simple, single, and sufficient for all human wants; but Love
is a human interest
which acts even on man so partially that you and I, as
philosophers, need expect no
share in it. Therefore we turn to Christ and the Schools who
represent all other
Force. We deal with Multiplicity and call it God. After the
Virgin has redeemed by
her personal Force as Love all that is redeemable in man,
the Schools embrace the
rest, and give it Form, Unity, and Motive."

This chart of Force was more easily studied than any other
possible scheme, for one
had but to do what the Church was always promising to do --
abolish in one flash of
lightning not only man, but also the Church itself, the
earth, the other planets, and
the sun, in order to clear the air; without affecting
mediæval science. The student
felt warranted in doing what the Church threatened --
abolishing his solar system
altogether -- in order to look at God as actual; continuous
movement, universal
cause, and interchangeable force. This was pantheism, but
the Schools were
pantheist; at least as pantheistic as the Energetik of the
Germans; and their deity
was the ultimate energy, whose thought and act were one.

Rid of man and his mind, the universe of Thomas Aquinas
seemed rather more
scientific than that of Haeckel or Ernst Mach. Contradiction
for contradiction,
Attraction for attraction, Energy for energy, St. Thomas's
idea of God had merits.
Modern science offered not a vestige of proof, or a theory
of connection between
its forces, or any scheme of reconciliation between thought
and mechanics; while
St. Thomas at least linked together the joints of his
machine. As far as a superficial
student could follow, the thirteenth century supposed mind
to be a mode of force
directly derived from the intelligent prime motor, and the
cause of all form and
sequence in the universe -- therefore the only proof of
unity. Without thought in the
unit, there could be no unity; without unity no orderly
sequence or ordered society.
Thought alone was Form. Mind and Unity flourished or
perished together.

This education startled even a man who had dabbled in fifty
educations all over the
world; for, if he were obliged to insist on a Universe, he
seemed driven to the
Church. Modern science guaranteed no unity. The student
seemed to feel himself,
like all his predecessors, caught, trapped, meshed in this
eternal drag-net of religion.

In practice the student escapes this dilemma in two ways:
the first is that of ignoring
it, as one escapes most dilemmas; the second is that the
Church rejects pantheism
as worse than atheism, and will have nothing to do with the
pantheist at any price.


		--Henry Adams