Give me chastity and continence, but not yet. ~ Augustine of Hippo
Below is a representative excerpt from The Time of the Assassins, the notorious Henry Miller’s excellent, highly personal, and almost brutally insightful sketch of the meteorically brief, brilliant career of French poet, Arthur Rimbaud:
One thing is certain, God does not want us to come to Him in innocence. We are to know sin and evil, we are to stray from the path, to get lost, to become defiant and desperate; we are to resist as long as we have the strength to resist, in order that the surrender be complete and abject. It is our privilege as free spirits to elect for God with eyes wide-open, with hearts brimming over, with a desire that outweighs all desires. …In destroying man’s innocence God converted man into a potential ally. Through reason and will He gave him the power of choice. And man in his wisdom always chooses God.
While what Miller has to say here undoubtedly constitutes a scandal to the kind of Sunday school orthodoxy that prevails in our world today, unadulterated honesty would compel one to admit that he makes a plausible argument. Can one truly said to be free if one has never tested the moral limits of that freedom? And can one have true knowledge of the Good, without an equivalent knowledge of that which opposes it? It can be argued that one can know Evil without actually committing evil acts oneself. But there is a counter-argument to be made, that this would be like claiming to have obtained a knowledge of engineering through the casual observation of the construction of a bridge from a promontory overlooking the river.
However one chooses to evaluate this particular issue, this little book is a mighty good read, and I strongly recommend it to any person who is in the market for such a thing.
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