Chapter 48 - On the Doctrine of the Negation of the Will to Life

Summary

Someone has his existence and essence either with his will, i.e. his consent, or without it; in the latter case, such an existence, embittered through inevitable sufferings of all kinds, would be a glaring injustice. – The ancients, for example the Stoics, but also the Peripatetics and the Academics, tried in vain to prove that virtue was sufficient to make life happy: experience cried out loudly against this. These philosophers’ efforts were, if unconsciously, guided by the assumption that there was justice in the matter: someone innocent should also be free of suffering, and therefore happy. The only serious and profound solution to the problem lies in the Christian doctrine that works do not justify; and so even someone who has exhibited every justice and loving kindness, and thus the good, virtue, is not for thatmatter, as Cicero claims, ‘free of all guilt’ (Tusculan Disputations V, 1): rather, el delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido (man's greatest guilt is that he was born), as Calderón, a poet enlightened by Christianity, expresses it, on the basis of a much more profound cognition than the aforementioned sages. The fact that this implies that human beings come into the world in a state of guilty indebtedness can seem absurd only to those who claim that we come to be from nothing and are the work of another. As a result of this guilt, which 693 must therefore stem from his will, the human being remains abandoned, rightly, to physical and mental suffering, even if he has practised all those virtues, and so is not happy. This follows from the notion of eternal justice, which I discussed in § 63 of the First Volume. But, as St Paul (Romans 3:21ff.), Augustine and Luther teach, the fact that works cannot justify us, since we all essentially are and remain sinners, is ultimately based on the fact that, because works follow from essence, if we acted as we should, we must also be what we should.