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The moment of joy longs for eternity
Peter Kopa, Prague, 15.5.2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvWMX6XVI_o
Nietzsche has something to say to us
With the emergence of rationalist secularism, which trusts neither immediate evidence nor reason, among other concepts, eternity has also been relativized. Little by little, from the university chairs, men have begun to receive the influence of a distorted eternity, not as it has been revealed by God himself. Those who have not been willing or able to reaffirm themselves in their correct understanding have fallen like flies, by the thousands and millions, into the swamp of ‘carpe diem’, into the trap of the lure of an earthly happiness. It is a miserable life, because it never fulfilled its promises. Today, the great nostalgia for that lost paradise of eternity and sure hope, which also had a rational foundation much better than the rationalist option, is present in all cultural manifestations.
To illustrate this, it is worth telling the following anecdote, which portrays well the thinking of today’s rationalist man: a few years ago, on a tourist tour in the middle of the Sahara desert, a group of Spaniards and Italians found ten human skeletons in the sand, only a hundred steps away from an oasis. They immediately asked the guide for an explanation and he answered them: about ten years ago a group of German and English philosophers and theologians arrived here, who had lost their way in the burning desert because their guide had collapsed. The story is told that, already almost dead of thirst, on seeing the oasis so near, an English philosopher pronounced for all the sentence of death by shouting: ‘Beware, it is a mirage’. The others gave up believing their eyes and fell prostrate with thirst on the hot sand. There they remain to this day as testimony to the absurdity of denying evidence and truth.
And this sad drama is repeated today in millions of lives that have fallen into the sticky nets of materialistic ideologies. They are those who are determined to snatch for themselves the greatest possible amount of instantaneous joys and pleasures that blind the sight to see the oasis of eternity promised to those who enjoy the peace of a pure conscience. https://thinktanklatam.org/identidad-verdad-y-sentido/
Nietzsche is the highest exponent of such vital anguish when he exclaims in the last three versus in ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’: ˇPain implores: go away from me, for all joy cries out for eternity, it wants a deep, very deep eternity’. Reading his poems in German I realized that Nietzsche was in life a very sensitive soul who sincerely searched for God, even going mad in the attempt, perhaps because no one helped him. In his poem ‘To the Unknown God’ Nietzsche reveals his longing to know God:
‘ I want to know you, unknown – Deeply in my soul rooted – My life is like a raging storm – You ineffable God and at the same time related to me! – I want to know you in order to serve and love you’.
The secular and religious meanings of eternity
Before the birth of Christ, Horace recommends ‘carpe diem’ or living only in the present. Wittgenstein tells us something analogous: he sees eternity as a permanent present. Both meanings are the choice offered to man today, and only he can and must choose: to die without hope or with it, because he has lived for God. The great German poet Rainer M. Rilke points out that the past continues to manifest itself in the present with other profiles.
It is especially in poetry that the theme of eternity continually surfaces, as a counterpoint to the fact that, during human life, even holy joy fades like mist under the first spring sun.
