I
All the investigations of contemporary intelligence on the world crisis lead to this unanimous conclusion: bourgeois civilization suffers from lack of a myth, of a faith, of a hope. This lack is the expression of its material bankruptcy. The rationalist experience has had this paradoxical efficacy of leading humanity to the disconsolate conviction that Reason cannot give it any path. Rationalism has only served to discredit reason. The idea of Freedom, Mussolini has said, has been killed by demagogues. More exactly, no doubt, is that the rationalists have killed the idea of Reason. Reason has extirpated from the soul of bourgeois civilization the remnants of its ancient myths. Western man has, for some time, placed Reason and Science on the altarpiece of dead gods. But neither Reason nor Science can be a myth. Neither Reason nor Science can satisfy all the need for infinity that there is in man. Reason itself has taken it upon itself to prove to men that it is not enough for them. That only Myth possesses the precious virtue of filling its deep ego.
Reason and Science have corroded and dissolved the prestige of the ancient religions.
Eucken in his book on the meaning and value of life, clearly and certainly explains the mechanism of this solvent work. The creations of science have given man a new sense of his potency. Man, who was previously overwhelmed before the supernatural, has suddenly discovered an exorbitant power to correct and rectify Nature. This feeling has dislodged from his soul the roots of the old metaphysics.
But man, as philosophy defines him, is a metaphysical animal. One cannot live fruitfully without a metaphysical conception of life. Myth moves man in history. Without a myth, man’s existence has no historical meaning. History is made by men possessed and enlightened by a higher belief, by a superhuman hope; the other men are the anonymous chorus of the drama. The crisis of bourgeois civilization appeared evident from the moment this civilization realized its lack of a myth. In a time of proud positivism, Renán gloomily remarked on the decline of religion and worried about the future of European civilization. “Religious people” — he wrote — “live by a shadow. What will those after us live on?” The desolate interrogation is still awaiting an answer.
Bourgeois civilization has fallen into skepticism. The war seemed to revive the myths of the liberal revolution: Freedom, Democracy, Peace. But the allied bourgeoisie, immediately, sacrificed them to their interests and their grudges at the Versailles conference. The rejuvenation of these myths served, however, for the liberal revolution to finish fulfilling itself in Europe. Its invocation condemned to death the remnants of feudalism and absolutism still surviving in Central Europe, in Russia and in Turkey. And, above all, the war proved once again, reliably and tragically, the value of myth. The peoples capable of victory were the peoples capable of a multitudinous myth.
II
Contemporary man feels the peremptory necessity for a myth. Skepticism is fruitless and man is not satisfied with fruitlessness. An exasperated and sometimes impotent “will to believe,” so acute in post-war man was already intense and categorical in pre-war man. A poem by Henri Franck, “The Dance in Front of the Ark,” is the document that I have closest to hand regarding the mood of literature of the last pre-war years. There is great and deep emotion in this poem. For this, above all, I want to quote him. Henri Franck tells us of his profound “will to believe.” An Israelite, he tries, first, to kindle in his soul faith in the god of Israel. The attempt is in vain. The words of the God of his parents sound strange in this epoch. The poet does not comprehend them. He declares himself deaf to his sentiment. Modern man, the word of Sinai cannot grasp him. Dead faith is not capable of resurrection. Twenty centuries weigh on her. “Israel has died from having given a God to the world.” The voice of the modern world proposes its fictitious and precarious myth: Reason. But Henri Franck can’t accept it. “Reason” — he says — “reason is not the universe.”
“La raison sans Dieu c’est la chambre sans lampe [Reason without God is a room without a lamp].”
The poet sets out in search of God. He urgently needs to satisfy his thirst for infinity and eternity. But the pilgrimage is fruitless. The pilgrim would like to be content with everyday illusion. “Ah! sache franchement saisir de tout moment — la fuyante fumée et le suc éphémére [Ah! know how to frankly seize any moment — the leaky smoke and the ephemeral juice].” Finally, he thinks that “truth is hopeless enthusiasm.” Man carries his truth in himself.
“Si l’Arche est vide oú tu pensais trouver la loi, rien n’est réel que ta danse [If the Ark is empty where you thought you would find the law, nothing is real but your dance].”
III
Philosophers give us a truth analogous to that of the poets. Contemporary philosophy has swept away the mediocre positivist edifice. It has clarified and demarcated the modest confines of reason. And it has formulated the present theories of Myth and Action. It is useless, according to these theories, to search for an absolute truth. The truth of today will not be the truth of tomorrow. A truth is valid only for one epoch. Let us content ourselves with a relative truth.
But this relativistic language is not accessible, it is not intelligible to the vulgar. The common people don’t use such subtlety. Man refuses to follow a truth as long as he does not believe it to be absolute and supreme. It is in vain to recommend to him the excellence of faith, of myth, of action. We must propose a faith, a myth, an action. Where can we find the myth that is capable of spiritually reviving the order it faces?
The question exasperates intellectual anarchy, the spiritual anarchy of bourgeois civilization. Some souls strive to restore the Middle Ages and the Catholic ideal. Others are working for a return to the Renaissance and the classical ideal. Fascism, through the mouth of its theorists, attributes itself to a medieval and Catholic mentality; it believes itself to represent the spirit of the Counter-Reformation; although on the other hand, it pretends to embody the idea of the Nation, a typically liberal idea. The theorization seems to take pleasure in the invention of the most convoluted sophisms. But all attempts to resurrect past myths are immediately destined to fail. Every epoch wants to have its own intuition of the world. There is nothing more sterile than trying to revive an extinct myth. Jean R. Bloch, in an article published in the magazine Europe, writes in this regard words of profound truth. In the cathedral of Chartres he felt the marvelously believing voice of the distant Middle Ages. But he warns how much and how that voice is foreign to the concerns of this epoch.
“It would be madness” — he writes — “to think that the same faith would repeat the same miracle. Look around you, somewhere, for a new mysticism, active, capable of miracles, capable of filling the unfortunate with hope, of raising martyrs and of transforming the world with promises of goodness and virtue. When you have found it, designated it, appointed it, you will not be absolutely the same man.”
Ortega y Gasset speaks of the “disenchanted soul”. Romain Rolland talks about the “enchanted soul”. Which of the two is right? Both souls coexist. The “disenchanted soul” of Ortega y Gasset is the soul of the decadent bourgeois civilization: The “enchanted soul” of Romain Rolland is the soul of the foragers of the new civilization. Ortega y Gasset sees only the sunset, the passing, der Untergang [the Decline]. Romain Rolland sees the sunrise, the dawn, der Aurgang [the Rise]. What most distinctly and clearly differentiates the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in this epoch is myth. The bourgeoisie no longer has any myth. It has become incredulous, skeptical, nihilistic. The Renaissance liberal myth, it has aged too much. The proletariat has a myth: the social revolution. Towards that myth it moves with a vehement and active faith. The bourgeoisie denies; the proletariat affirms. Bourgeois intelligence engages in a rationalist critique of the method, theory, and technique of the revolutionaries. What a misunderstanding! The strength of revolutionaries is not in their science; it is in their faith, in their passion, in their will. It is a religious, mystical, spiritual force. This is the strength of Myth. Revolutionary emotion, as I wrote in an article about Gandhi, is a religious emotion. Religious motives have shifted from heaven to earth. They are not divine; they are human, they are social.
For some time the religious, mystical, metaphysical character of socialism has been noted. Georges Sorel, one of the highest representatives of French thought of the twentieth century, said in his Reflections on Violence; “An analogy has been found between religion and revolutionary socialism, which proposes the preparation and even the reconstruction of the individual for a gigantic work. But Bergson has taught us that not only religion can occupy the region of the deep ego; revolutionary myths can also occupy it with the same title.” Renán, as Sorel himself recalls, was aware of the religious faith of the socialists, noting their impregnability to all discouragement. “With every frustrated experience, they begin again. They have not found the solution: they will find it. They are never assailed by the idea that the solution does not exist. That is its strength.”
The same philosophy that teaches us the necessity of myth and faith is generally incapable of understanding the faith and myth of the new times. “The poverty of philosophy,” as Marx said. The professionals of intelligence will not find the way of faith; the multitudes will find it. It will be up to the philosophers, later, to codify the thought that emerges from the great multitudinous deed. Did the philosophers of Roman decadence understand the language of Christianity? The philosophy of bourgeois decadence could not have a better fate.
— — — — — — — — — —
*Published in Mundial: Lima, January 16, 1925. Transcribed in Amauta, Nº 31 (pp. 1–4), Lima, June-July 1930; Romance, Nº 6, Mexico, April 15, 1940 (with the exception of some paragraphs); Jornada, Lima, January 1, 1946. And included in the anthology by José Carlos Mariátegui, which the National University of Mexico published, in 1937, as the second volume of its series of “Thinkers of America” (pp. 119–124). Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/el%20mito%20y%20el%20hombre.htm#2>.
