November 10,
1852.—How much have we not to learn from the Greeks, those immortal
ancestors of ours!
And how much better they solved their problem
than we have solved ours. Their ideal man is not ours, but
they
understood infinitely better than we how to reverence, cultivate and
ennoble the man whom they knew.
In a thousand respects we are still
barbarians beside them, as Beranger said to me with a sigh in 1843:
barbarians in education, in eloquence, in public life, in poetry, in
matters of art, etc. We must have millions of
men in order to
produce a few elect spirits: a thousand was enough in Greece. If the
measure of a civilization
is to be the number of perfected men that
it produces, we are still far from this model people. The slaves are
no longer below us, but they are among us. Barbarism is no longer at
our frontiers; it lives side by side with
us. We carry within us
much greater things than they, but we ourselves are smaller. It is a
strange result.
Objective civilization produced great men while
making no conscious effort toward such a result; subjective
civilization produces a miserable and imperfect race, contrary to its
mission and its earnest desire. The world
grows more majestic but
man diminishes. Why is this?
We have too much
barbarian blood in our veins, and we lack measure, harmony and grace.
Christianity, in
breaking man up into outer and inner, the world
into earth and heaven, hell and paradise, has decomposed the
human
unity, in order, it is true, to reconstruct it more profoundly and
more truly. But Christianity has not yet
digested this powerful
leaven. She has not yet conquered the true humanity; she is still
living under the
antimony of sin and grace, of here below and there
above. She has not penetrated into the whole heart of
Jesus. She is
still in the narthex of penitence; she is not reconciled, and even
the churches still wear the livery
of service, and have none of the
joy of the daughters of God, baptized of the Holy Spirit.
Then, again, there
is our excessive division of labor; our bad and foolish education
which does not develop the
whole man; and the problem of poverty. We
have abolished slavery, but without having solved the question of
labor. In law there are no more slaves, in fact, there are many. And
while the majority of men are not free, the
free man, in the true
sense of the term can neither be conceived nor realized. Here are
enough causes for our
inferiority.
Amiel's Journal
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