Louis Lambert — Honoré de Balzac, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley

“Tf we now conceive of God face to face with this stupendous whole, we find only two conditions of relationship possible: Hither God and Matter were contemporaneous, or God was alone and pre-existent. If all the wisdom that has enlightened the human race from the first day ofp. 118 its existence could be collected in one vast brain, that monstrous brain could invent no third mode of being, short of denying both God and Matter. Human philosophers may pile up mountains of words and ideas, Religions may accumulate emblems and beliefs, revelations and mysteries, still we are forced on to this terrible dilemma, and must choose one of the two propositions it offers. However, you have not much choice, for each leads the human mind to scepticism.

‘‘The problem being thus stated, what signifies Spirit or Matter? What does it signify which way the worlds are moving if once the Being who guides them is proved to be absurd? Of what use is it to inquire whether man is advancing toward heaven or coming back from it, whether Creation is tending upward toward the spirit, or downward toward matter, if the worlds we question can give no answer? Of what consequence are theogonies and their armies, theologies and their dogmas, when, whichever alternative man chooses in answer to the problem, his God is no more?

‘‘Let us examine the first: Suppose God and matter to have been coexistent from the beginning. Can He be God who suffers the action and coexistence of a substance that is not Himself? On this theory God is but a secondary agent constrained to organize matter. Who constrained Him? And as between that coarser other half and Him, who was to decide? Who paid the Great Workman for the six days’ labor attributed to Him? If there were, indeed, some coercing force which was neither God nor matter, if God were compelled to make the machinery of the universe, it would be no less absurd to call Him God than to call a slave set to turn a mill a Roman citizen.

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And, in fact, the difficulty is just as insoluble in the case of that Supreme Intelligence as in that of God Himself. It only carries the problem a step further back; and is not this like the Indian philosophers, who place the world on a tortoise, and the tortoise on an elephant, but cannot say on what their elephant’s feet rest? Can we conceive that this Supreme Will, evolved from the conflict of God with matter —this God greater than God—should have existed during eternity without Willing what He Willed, granting that eternity can be divided into two periods? Wherever God may be, if He knew not what His future Will would be, what becomes of His intuitive perceptions? And of these two eternities, which is the superior—uncreated eternity or created eternity ?

“Tf God from all eternity willed that the world should be what it is, this fresh view of necessity, which is in harmony no doubt with the notion of a Sovereign Intelligence, implies the coeternity of matter. Whether matter be coeternal by the Divine Will, which must at all times be at. one with itself, or whether it be independently coeternal, since the power of God must be absolute, it perishes if He has not His free-will. He would always have found within Himself a supreme reason which would have ruled Him. Is God God if He cannot separate Himself from the works of His creation in subsequent as well as in anterior eternity?

‘This aspect of the problem is then insoluble so far as cause is concerned. Let us examine it in its effects.

“If God the Creator, under compulsion to create the universe from all eternity, is inconceivable, He is no less so as perpetually one with His work. God, eternally constrained to exist in His creatures, is no less dishonored than in His former position asa workmen. Can you conceive of a God

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