The Inferno - August Strindberg (best book club books for discussion .txt) 📗

to hover about one’s face; their place is above the back, whence they make themselves felt to the extremities.” (These flickering flames or sparks have appeared to me twice, and both times on occasions when I resisted my better self, and rejected all apparitions as idle dreams.)

“These spirits of contradiction tell men not to believe what the instructing spirits have been commissioned by the angels to say, and not to rule their lives accordingly, but to live in all licence and wantonness as they choose. Usually the former come as soon as the latter have gone. Men know what to expect from them, and do not trouble much about them, but they learn through their assaults to distinguish between good and evil. For the knowledge of good is first gained through that of its opposite, just as every perception or idea of a matter is obtained by carefully observing what distinguishes it from its contrary.” The reader may remember the faces like antique sculptures which I saw formed by the white cover of my pillow in the Hôtel Orfila. Swedenborg speaks regarding them as follows:

“Two signs show that they (the spirits) dwell with a man; one is an old man with a white face. This sign will signify to him that he is always to speak the truth, and to act justly.⁠ ⁠… I myself have seen such an antique human face. There are faces of pure whiteness and great beauty, from which uprightness and modesty beam.”

(In order not to alarm the reader, I have purposely concealed the fact, that all the above relates to the inhabitants of the planet Jupiter. My surprise may be imagined when one spring morning they bring me a French review containing a picture of Swedenborg’s house in the planet Jupiter, drawn by Victorien Sardou. Why on Jupiter? What a remarkable coincidence! And has the master and doyen of the Théâtre Français observed that the left façade of the building seen from a sufficient distance forms an antique human face? This face is the same as that which was formed by my cushion-cover. But in Sardou’s drawing there are more of such silhouettes formed by the lines of the building. Has the master’s hand been guided by another hand, so that he produced more than he knew?)

Where has Swedenborg seen his heaven and hell? Are they visions, intuitions, inspirations? I hardly know, but the correspondence of his hell to that of Dante, and of the Greek, Roman, and German mythologies, leads to the idea that the powers have generally used similar means to realise their purposes. And what are these purposes? The completion of the human type; the production of the higher Man⁠—the Superman, as Nietzsche, that rod of chastisement prematurely used and cast into the fire, has announced him. So the problem of good and evil is again set up for us to solve, and Taine’s moral indifference seems insipid before these new demands.

The belief in spirits follows as a natural consequence. What are spirits? As soon as we admit the immortality of the soul, we see that the dead are still alive and continue their relationships with the living. “Evil spirits,” then, are not evil, for their object is good, and it would be better to call them, with Swedenborg, “corrective spirits,” than to abandon oneself to fear and to despair. Accordingly, there exists no Satan, as an autonomous personality opposed to God, and the undeniable apparitions of the Evil One in his traditional form must be regarded as a scarecrow conjured up by Providence⁠—Providence the Supreme and Good, which carries on its government by means of an enormous comprehensive staff, consisting of departed souls.

Be comforted, and be proud of the grace bestowed upon you, all ye who suffer from sleeplessness, nightmares, apparitions, palpitations, and fears of death! Numen adest! God is seeking for you!

XIV Tribulations

Interned in this little university town, without hope of getting out of it, I engage in the terrible fight against my worst enemy⁠—myself. Every morning, when I go for a walk on the wall under the plane trees, the large red lunatic asylum reminds me of the danger I have escaped, and of that which still awaits me, if I relapse. Swedenborg, by explaining to me the true character of my terrors during the last year, has delivered me from the fear of electricians, “black” magicians, wizards, the ambition of the gold-maker, and from madness. He has pointed out the only way to salvation: to seek out the demons in their dens within myself, and there to slay them by⁠—repentance. Balzac, the Prophet’s assistant, has taught me in Séraphita that “Pain of conscience is a weakness which does not put an end to sin; repentance is the only power which makes a decisive end of all.” Very well, let us repent! But is not that equivalent to criticising Providence, which has chosen me for its scourge? and to saying to the powers: “You have guided my destiny ill; you have made me and commissioned me to chastise, to overthrow idols, to stir up revolt, and then you withdraw your protection from me and disown me in an absurd way, telling me to creep to the cross and repent!”

Strange circulus vitiosus, which I already foresaw in my twentieth year, when I wrote my drama Meister Olaf, and which has constituted the tragedy of my life. Why be tormented during thirty years in order to be taught by experience what one had already foreboded? When young I was sincerely pious, and you have made me a freethinker. Out of the freethinker you have made an atheist, and out of the atheist a religious man. Inspired by humanitarian ideas, I have been a herald of socialism. Five years later, you have shown me the absurdity of socialism; you have made all my prophecies futile. And supposing I become again religious, I am sure that, in another