"DEATH AND LIFE": Saint-Martin's Theosophick Hymns - Chant 5

"Death and Life"
by Louis Claude de Saint-Martin

            Thou hast not produced any being, O Wisdom profound, without giving it a measure of desire and strength with which to preserve itself.

            Thou hast established all the beings upon this foundation, because they are all a reflection of Thy power, and because Thou lovest to produce Thyself in all Thy works.

            Thou hast given to man the most abundant measure of this power.

            Ah! From whence would come to him this art of multiplying his pleasures, this ingenuity in repelling evils from himself, and in curing them,

            If this was not a supreme measure of that preservative desire and of that instinct which Thou hast allotted to all beings?

            Yet he alone doth join, to the supreme measure of this preservative desire, the supreme measure of the opposite power!

            And he alone can combat and suppress this perennial instinct, more imperious in him than in any other being!

            Finally, he alone can kill himself! He alone can combine and choose the means to end his life! . . . .

            Doctrine of falsehood, applaud thyself for thy triumph—thou hast completely blinded mankind!

            Thou hast made them see, in these two extremes, only one and the same principle:

            Thou makest them to wish that one and the same agent doth preserve and destroy himself:

            Thou makest them believe that death and life, production and destruction doth appertain to the same seed.

            In vain thou seekest wherewith to justify thyself in the examples of animals; thou findest nothing there which doth diminish to the eyes of thought this horrifying contradiction!

--Chant 5 from THE MAN OF DESIRE (L'HOMME DE DESIR) (1790)

translated by Seth Edwards, 2016

title by Robert Amadou