A conversation based on “A Free Man’s Worship” by Bertrand Russell for 5 readers.

Reader 1. I read “A Free Man’s Worship.” It’s a beautiful piece of writing. Not only beautiful but intellectually stimulating.

Reader 2. I read it also. I agree it’s a powerful essay. I love the way it begins. Russell makes believe he can read the mind of an all-powerful God. (read dramatically) “The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow wearisome; for, after all, did he not deserve their praise? Had he not given them endless joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain undeserved praise, to be worshipped by beings whom he tortured? He smiled inwardly, and resolved that the great drama should be performed.
“For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At length it began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed, from black masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the ocean, and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest trees, huge ferns springing from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing away. And from the monsters, as the play unfolded itself, man was born.”

Reader 1. (also dramatically) “Man was born, with the power of thought, the knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship.
And Man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few brief moments of life before Death’s inexorable decree. And Man said: ‘There is a hidden purpose, could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must reverence something, and in the visible world there is nothing worthy of reverence.’ And Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. And when he followed the instincts which God had transmitted to him from his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive him.
But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until he invented a Divine Plan by which God’s wrath was to have been appeased. And seeing the present was bad, he made it yet worse, that thereby the future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the strength that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible.”

Reader 2. And God smiled — and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man’s sun; and all returned again to nebula.
“ ‘Yes, he murmured, ‘it was a good play; I will have it performed again.’ ”

Reader 3. The essay was written in 1918. The science of Russell’s day outlined that kind of world. It was a world devoid of meaning, dominated by the concept of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics — that says, in effect, everything in the universe tends to breakdown, decay, level out. In Russell’s time it was believed, and some today believe, that at the end of time the universe and everything in it will have spread out and there will be nothing left but black emptiness.

Reader 1. At any rate, Russell says that humans are the product of causes which had no end in sight; that man’s origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are only the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system. He sees that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Reader 4. How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished?

Reader 5. It’s strange that Nature, omnipotent but blind, has brought forth a child gifted with the knowledge of good and evil and with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. (pause, then slowly with emphasis) In spite of Death, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone this freedom belongs; and in this lays his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.

Reader 2. The savage, like ourselves, feels his impotence before the powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing that he respects more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before his gods or God, without inquiring whether they are worthy of worship.

Reader 1. It’s pathetic and terrible that the long history of cruelty, torture and human sacrifice has been endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods. This kind of religion is, in essence, the cringing submission of the slave, who dares not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves no adulation.

Reader 3. Like God’s answer to Job out of the whirlwind: the divine power and knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness, there is no hint.

Reader 4. The first opposition to a world dominated by divine power is a spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of God. It seems necessary to the assertion of freedom. To defy with Promethean constancy a hostile universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated, to refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, appears to be the duty of all who will not bow down before the inevitable.

Reader 5. But that way of thinking is still bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world. It leads to resignation — but from freedom of thought springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the vision of beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant world. The vision of beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by the load of eager wishes; and thus Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of Time.

Reader 4. For the young, there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a passionate will seems to be obtainable to them, though, in truth, it may be impossible.

Reader 5. As we grow older we learn. We learn by death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty that the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave, fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission to Power is not only just and right: it is the very gate of wisdom.

Reader 2. But passive submission is not the whole of wisdom. We need to build a temple for the worship of our own ideals. Foreshadowings of that temple appear in the realm of imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics. This is where beauty shines and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world.

Reader 1. For most of us there is a cavern of darkness to be traversed before that temple of the mind can be entered. The gate of the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the gravestones of abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of Fate. But out of the cavern leads to the daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim’s heart.

Reader 2. When we have learned to resign ourselves to the outward rule of fate and also to recognize that the supernatural world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible, at last, to transform the unconscious universe. To transmute it in the crucible of our imaginations using the insights of creative idealism. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Nature.

Reader 3. Of all the arts, tragedy is the proudest, the most triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the very center of the enemy’s country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; within its walls the free life continues.Happy those sacred ramparts, thrice happy the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence. Honour to those brave warriors who, through countless ages of warfare, have preserved for us the priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled by sacrilegious invaders the home of the unsubdued.

Reader 4. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, renunciation, wisdom, and charity are born; and with their birth a new life begins. To accept the irresistible forces—Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of man before the blind hurry of the universe—to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.

Reader 5. The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself.

Reader 3. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly is greater still. And such thought makes us free people; we no longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things—this is emancipation, and this is the free man’s worship.

Reader 1. United with his fellowmen by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love.

Reader 2. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death.

Reader 1. Very brief is the time in which we can help them. Be it ours to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to strengthen failing courage.

Reader 2. (almost pleading) Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need—of the sorrows, the difficulties perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their day is over be it ours to feel that, where they suffered no deed of ours was the cause.

Reader 1. (concluding) Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day —

Reader 2. disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built —

Reader 1. undismayed by the empire of chance —

Reader 2. to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life —

Reader 1. proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation

Reader 2. to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious Power.